Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
|
Your cart is empty |
|||
Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies > From 1900
This classic novel of colonial Ceylon (Sri Lanka), was first published in 1913 and is written by a prominent member of the Bloomsbury group, husband of Virginia Woolf. It reads as if Thomas Hardy had been born among the heat, scent, sensuality and pungent mystery of the tropics. Translated into both Tamil and Sinhalese, it is one of the best-loved and best-known stories in Sri Lanka. It includes a new biographical afterword by Sir Christopher Ondaatje, author of "Woolf in Ceylon", and a short story, "Pearls before Swine", which vividly draws on Woolf's experience as a young District Commissioner. This book reeks of first-hand knowledge of the colonial experience, and of its profound, malign disregard for the psychology and culture of its subject peoples.
Finalist for the 2022 Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Myth and Fantasy Studies From the time of Charles Dickens, the imaginative power of the city of London has frequently inspired writers to their most creative flights of fantasy. Charting a new history of London fantasy writing from the Victorian era to the 21st century, Fairy Tales of London explores a powerful tradition of urban fantasy distinct from the rural tales of writers such as J.R.R. Tolkien. Hadas Elber-Aviram traces this urban tradition from Dickens, through the scientific romances of H.G. Wells, the anti-fantasies of George Orwell and Mervyn Peake to contemporary science fiction and fantasy writers such as Michael Moorcock, Neil Gaiman and China Mieville.
Key Features: Study methods Introduction to the text Summaries with critical notes Themes and techniques Textual analysis of key passages Author biography Historical and literary background Modern and historical critical approaches Chronology Glossary of literary terms
Key Features: Study methods Introduction to the text Summaries with critical notes Themes and techniques Textual analysis of key passages Author biography Historical and literary background Modern and historical critical approaches Chronology Glossary of literary terms
The "Bidun" ("without nationality") are a stateless community based across the Arab Gulf. There are an estimated 100,000 or so Bidun in Kuwait, a heterogeneous group made up of tribes people who failed to register for citizenship between 1959 and 1963, former residents of Iraq, Saudi and other Arab countries who joined the Kuwait security services in '60s and '70s and the children of Kuwaiti women and Bidun men. They are considered illegal residents by the Kuwaiti government and as such denied access to many services of the oil-rich state, often living in slums on the outskirts of Kuwait's cities. There are few existing works on the Bidun community and what little research there is is grounded in an Area Studies/Social Sciences approach. This book is the first to explore the Bidun from a literary/cultural perspective, offering both the first study of the literature of the Bidun in Kuwait, and in the process a corrective to some of the pitfalls of a descriptive, approach to research on the Bidun and the region. The author explores the historical and political context of the Bidun, their position in Kuwaiti and Arabic literary history, comparisons between the Bidun and other stateless writers and analysis of the key themes in Bidun literature and their relationship to the Bidun struggle for recognition and citizenship.
Authorship's Wake examines the aftermath of the 1960s critique of the author, epitomized by Roland Barthes's essay, "The Death of the Author." This critique has given rise to a body of writing that confounds generic distinctions separating the literary and the theoretical. Its archive consists of texts by writers who either directly participated in this critique, as Barthes did, or whose intellectual formation took place in its immediate aftermath. These writers include some who are known primarily as theorists (Judith Butler), others known primarily as novelists (Zadie Smith, David Foster Wallace), and yet others whose texts are difficult to categorize (the autofiction of Chris Kraus, Sheila Heti, and Ben Lerner; the autotheory of Maggie Nelson). These writers share not only a central motivating question - how to move beyond the critique of the author-subject - but also a way of answering it: by writing texts that merge theoretical concerns with literary discourse. Authorship's Wake traces the responses their work offers in relation to four themes: communication, intention, agency, and labor.
This work analyzes 21st-century realistic speculations of human extinction: fictions that imagine future worlds without interventions of as-yet uninvented technology, interplanetary travel, or other science fiction elements that provide hope for rescue or long-term survival. Climate change fiction as a genre of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic writing usually resists facing the potentiality of human species extinction, following instead traditional generic conventions that imagine primitivist communities of human survivors with the means of escaping the consequences of global climate change. Yet amidst the ongoing sixth great extinction, works that problematize survival, provide no opportunities for social rebirth, and speculate humanity's final end may address the problem of how to reject the impulse of human exceptionalism that pervades climate change discourse and post-apocalyptic fiction. Rather than following the preferences of the genre, the ecocollapse fictions examined here manifest apocalypse where the means for a happy ending no longer exists. In these texts, diminished ecosystems, specters of cannibalism, and disintegrations of difference and othering render human self-identity as radically malleable within their confrontations with the stark materiality of all life. This book is the first in-depth exploration of contemporary fictions that imagine the imbrication of human and nonhuman within global species extinctions. It closely interrogates novels from authors like Peter Heller, Cormac McCarthy and Yann Martel that reject the impulse of human exceptionalism to demonstrate what it might be like to go extinct.
Winner of the DHLSNA Biennial Award for a Book by a Newly Published Scholar Exploring draft manuscripts, alternative texts and publishers' typescripts, The Many Drafts of D. H. Lawrence reveals new insights into the writings and writing practices of one of the most important writers of the 20th century. Focusing on the most productive years of Lawrence's writing life, between 1909 and 1926 - a time that saw the writing of major novels such as Women in Love and the controversial The Plumed Serpent, as well as his first major short story collection - this book is the first to apply analytical methods from the field of genetic criticism to the archives of this canonical modernist author. The book unearths and re-evaluates a variety of themes including the body, death, love, trauma, depression, memory, the sublime, selfhood, and endings, and includes original transcriptions as well as reproductions from the manuscripts themselves. By charting Lawrence's writing processes, the book also highlights how the very distinction between 'process' and 'product' became a central theme in his work.
Humphrey Jennings was one of Britain's greatest documentary film-makers, described by Lindsay Anderson in 1954 as 'the only real poet the British cinema has yet produced'. A member of the GPO Film Unit and director of wartime canonical classics such as Listen to Britain (1942) and A Diary for Timothy (1945), he was also an acclaimed writer, painter, photographer and poet. This seminal collection of critical essays, first published in 1982 and here reissued with a new introduction, traces Jennings's fascinating career in all its aspects with the aid of documents from the Jennings family archive. Situating Jennings's work in the world of his contemporaries, and illuminating the qualities by which his films are now recognised, Humphrey Jennings: Film-Maker, Painter, Poet explores the many insights and cultural contributions of this truly remarkable artist.
Exploring the controversial history of an aesthetic - realism - this book examines the role that realism plays in the negotiation of social, political, and material realities from the mid-19th century to the present day. Examining a broad range of literary texts from French, English, Italian, German, and Russian writers, this book provides new insights into how realism engages with themes including capital, social decorum, the law and its politicisation, modern science as a determining factor concerning truth, and the politics of identity. Considering works from Gustave Flaubert, Charles Baudelaire, Emile Zola, Henry James, Charles Dickens, and George Orwell, Docherty proposes a new philosophical conception of the politics of realism in an age where politics feels increasingly erratic and fantastical.
Hope and future are not the terms with which James Joyce has usually been read, but this book paints a picture of Joyce's fiction in which hope and future assume the primary colours. Rando explores how Joyce's texts, as early as Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, delineate a complex hope that is oriented toward the future with restlessness, dissatisfaction, and invention. He examines how Joyce envisions alternatives to the prevailing conventions of hope throughout his works and, in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, develops formal techniques of spatializing hope to contemplate it from all sides. Casting fresh light on the ways in which hope animates key aspects of Joyce's approach to literary content and form, Rando moves beyond the limitations of negative critique and literary historicism to present a Joyce who thinks agilely about the future, politics, and possibility.
This book is committed to women as writers and storytellers; all the selected novels are female-centric in that the main characters are women. The authors, also women, are from three diverse American ethnic groups from both the North and South. Through a close reading of several novels, Babakhani shows how the reinvention of cultural traditions serves these women writers as a political, decolonial, and feminist tool. Babakhani situates her readings in a critique of the concepts of realism and magical realism. Because magical realism sets realism against magic and implies binary oppositions, Babakhani proposes "cultural realism" as a revisionary concept that takes the cultural importance of rituals and beliefs seriously, without simply dismissing them as superstition.
The Politics of Speech in Later Twentieth-Century Poetry: Local Tongues in Heaney, Brooks, Harrison, and Clifton argues that local speech became a central facet of English-language poetry in the second half of the twentieth century. It is based on a key observation about four major poets from both sides of the Atlantic: Seamus Heaney, Gwendolyn Brooks, Tony Harrison, and Lucille Clifton all respond to societal crises by arranging, reproducing, and reconceiving their particular versions of local speech in poetic form. The book's overarching claim is that "local tongues" in poetry have the capacity to bridge aesthetic and sociopolitical realms because nonstandard local speech declares its distinction from the status quo and binds people who have been subordinated by hierarchical social conditions, while harnessing those versions of speech into poetic structures can actively counter the very hierarchies that would degrade those languages. The diverse local tongues of these four poets marshaled into the forms of poetry situate them at once in literary tradition, in local contexts, and in prevailing social constructs.
Contributions by Zoe Bursztajn-Illingworth, Marc DiPaolo, Emine Akkulah Do?fan, Caroline Eades, Noelle Hedgcock, Tina Olsin Lent, Rashmila Maiti, Jack Ryan, Larry T. Shillock, Richard Vela, and Geoffrey Wilson In Next Generation Adaptation: Spectatorship and Process, editor Allen H. Redmon brings together eleven essays from a range of voices in adaptation studies. This anthology explores the political and ethical contexts of specific adaptations and, by extension, the act of adaptation itself. Grounded in questions of gender, genre, and race, these investigations focus on the ways attention to these categories renegotiates the rules of power, privilege, and principle that shape the contexts that seemingly produce and reproduce them. Contributors to the volume examine such adaptations as Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof, Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past, Taylor Sheridan's Sicario and Sicario: Day of the Soldado, Jean-Jacques Annaud's Wolf Totem, Spike Lee's He's Got Game, and Jim Jarmusch's Paterson. Each chapter considers the expansive dialogue adaptations accelerate when they realize their capacity to bring together two or more texts, two or more peoples, two or more ideologies without allowing one expression to erase another. Building on the growing trends in adaptation studies, these essays explore the ways filmic texts experienced as adaptations highlight ethical or political concerns and argue that spectators are empowered to explore implications being raised by the adaptations.
Samuel Beckett's private writings and public work show his deep interest in the workings of the human mind. Samuel Beckett and Psychology is an innovative study of the author's engagement with key concepts in early experimental psychology and rapidly developing scientific ideas about perception, attention and mental imagery. Through innovative new readings of Beckett's later dramatic and prose works, the book reveals the links between his aesthetic method and the methodologies of experimental psychology through the 20th century. Covering important later works including Happy Days, Not I and Footfalls, Samuel Beckett and Psychology sheds important new light on Beckett's depictions of the workings of the embodied mind.
The New Zealand-born writer Katherine Mansfield associated intimately with many members of the Bloomsbury group, but her literary aesthetics placed her at a distance from the artistic works of the group. With chapters written by leading international scholars, Katherine Mansfield and the Bloomsbury Group explores this conflicted relationship. Bringing together biographical and critical studies, the book examines Mansfield's relationships - personal and literary - with such major Modernist figures as Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley and Walter de la Mare as well as the ways in which her work engaged with and reacted against Bloomsbury. In this way the book reveals the true extent of Mansfield's wider influence on 20th-century modernist writing.
The concept of the game illustrates a collectively recognized representation of existence in American literature. This investigation explores the concealment of the function of division beneath the function of communication. The philosophical cornerstones of this investigation are Marshall McLuhan, Guy Debord, and Michel Pecheux. Inspired by Henry Miller, an innovative methodology is established that focuses on patterns of experience (symbol/sign), patterns of structure (myth), and patterns of language (metaphor). The concept of the game renders an essential social relation tangible (interpellation), and it epitomizes a commitment to the restoration of American spiritual values. It is a rejection of "a mistaken idea of freedom" and an advocate of "true freedom."
In 1936, Samuel Beckett wrote a letter to the Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein expressing a desire to work in the lost tradition of silent film. The production of Beckett's Film in 1964, on the cusp of his work as a director for stage and screen, coincides with a widespread revival of silent film in the period of cinema's modernist second wave. Drawing on recently published letters, archival material and production notebooks, Samuel Beckett and Cinema is the first book to examine comprehensively the full extent of Beckett's engagement with cinema and its influence on his work for stage and screen. The book situates Beckett within the context of first and second wave modernist filmmaking, including the work of figures such as Vertov, Keaton, Lang, Epstein, Flaherty, Dreyer, Godard, Bresson, Resnais, Duras, Rogosin and Hitchcock. By examining the parallels between Beckett's methods, as a writer-director, and particular techniques, such as the embodied presence of the camera, the use of asynchronous sound, and the cross-pollination of theatricality and cinema, as well as the connections between his collaborators and the nouvelle vague, the book reveals how Beckett's aesthetic is fundamentally altered by his work for the screen, and his formative encounters with modernist film culture.
Conversations with Colum McCann brings together eighteen interviews with a world-renowned fiction writer. Ranging from his 1994 literary debut, Fishing the Sloe-Black River, to a new and unpublished interview conducted in 2016, these interviews represent the development as well as the continuation of McCann's interests. The number and length of the later conversations attest to his star-power. Let the Great World Spin earned him the National Book Award and promises to become a major motion picture. His most recent novel, TransAtlantic, has awed readers with its dynamic yoking of the 1845-46 visit of Frederick Douglass to Ireland, the 1919 first nonstop transatlantic flight of Alcock and Brown, and Senator George Mitchell's 1998 efforts to achieve a peace accord inNorthern Ireland. An extensive interview by scholar Cecile Maudet is included here, as is an interview by John Cusatis, who wrote Understanding Colum McCann, the first extensive critical analysisof McCann's work. An author who actually enjoys talking about his work, McCann (b. 1965) offers insights into his method of writing, what he hopes to achieve, as well the challenge of writing each novel to go beyond his accomplishments in the novel before. Readers will note how many of his responses include stories in which hehimself is the object of the humor and how often his remarks reveal insights into his character as a man who sees the grittiness of the urban landscape but never loses faith in the strength of ordinary people and their capacity to prevail.
An exploration of the burgeoning field of Anglophone Asian diaspora poetry, this book draws on the thematic concerns of Hong Kong, Asian-American and British Asian poets from the wider Chinese or East Asian diasporic culture to offer a transnational understanding of the complex notions of home, displacement and race in a globalised world. Located within current discourse surrounding Asian poetry, postcolonial and migrant writing, and bridging the fields of literary and cultural criticism with author interviews, this book provides close readings on established and emerging Chinese diasporic poets' work by incorporating the writers' own reflections on their craft through interviews with some of those featured. In doing so, Jennifer Wong explores the usefulness and limitations of existing labels and categories in reading the works of selected poets from specific racial, socio-cultural, linguistic environments and gender backgrounds, including Bei Dao, Li-Young Lee, Marilyn Chin, Hannah Lowe and Sarah Howe, Nina Mingya Powles and Mary Jean Chan. Incorporating scholarship from both the East and the West, Wong demonstrates how these poets' experimentation with poetic language and forms serve to challenge the changing notions of homeland, family, history and identity, offering new evaluations of contemporary diasporic voices. |
You may like...
Ties that bind - Race and the politics…
Shannon Walsh, Jon Soske
Paperback
The Great Gatsby: York Notes for A-level
Julian Cowley, F. Fitzgerald
Paperback
(1)
Kafka's Last Trial - The Strange Case of…
Benjamin Balint
Paperback
(1)
|