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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies > From 1900
The National Endowment for the Humanities has funded two Summer
Institutes titled "Reconsidering Flannery O'Connor", which invited
scholars to rethink approaches to Flannery O'Connor's work. Drawing
largely on research that started as part of the 2014 NEH Institute,
this collection shares its title and its mission. Featuring
fourteen new essays, Reconsidering Flannery O'Connor disrupts a few
commonplace assumptions of O'Connor studies while also circling
back to some old questions that are due for new attention. The
volume opens with "New Methodologies", which features theoretical
approaches not typically associated with O'Connor's fiction in
order to gain new insights into her work. The second section, "New
Contexts", stretches expectations on literary genre, on popular
archetypes in her stories, and on how we should interpret her work.
The third section, lovingly called "Strange Bedfellows", puts
O'Connor in dialogue with overlooked or neglected conversation
partners, while the final section, "O'Connor's Legacy", reconsiders
her personal views on creative writing and her wishes regarding the
handling of her estate upon death. With these final essays, the
collection comes full circle, attesting to the hazards that come
from overly relying on O'Connor's interpretation of her own work
but also from ignoring her views and desires. Through these
reconsiderations, some of which draw on previously unpublished
archival material, the collection attests to and promotes the
vitality of scholarship on Flannery O'Connor.
With chapters written by leading scholars such as Steven Gould
Axelrod, Cary Nelson, Aldon Lynn Nielsen and Marjorie Perloff, this
comprehensive Handbook explores the full range and diversity of
poetry and criticism in 21st-century America. The Bloomsbury
Handbook of Contemporary American Poetry covers such topics as: *
Major histories and genealogies of post-war poetry - from the
language poets and the Black Arts Movement to New York school and
the Beats * Poetry, identity and community - from African American,
Chicana/o and Native American poetry to Queer verse and the poetics
of disability * Key genres and forms - including digital, visual,
documentary and children's poetry * Central critical themes -
economics, publishing, popular culture, ecopoetics, translation and
biography The book also includes an interview section in which
major contemporary poets such as Rae Armantrout, Charles Bernstein
and Claudia Rankine reflect on the craft and value of poetry today.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which
commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out
and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and
impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes
high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using
print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in
1973.
Bringing Jean Genet and Jacques Lacan into dialogue, James Penney
examines the overlooked similarities between Genet's literary
oeuvre and Lacanian psychoanalysis, uncovering in particular their
shared ontology of fragility and incompletion. This book exposes
the two thinkers' joint and unwavering ontological conviction that
the representations that make up the world of appearances are
inherently enigmatic: inscrutable, not only on the level of their
problematic link to knowledge and meaning, but also, more
fundamentally, as concerns the reliability of their existence.
According to Genet and Lacan, the signification of words and images
will forever remain unfulfilled, just like the whole of reality, as
if prematurely removed from the oven, under-baked. Genet, Lacan and
the Ontology of Incompletion reveals how, in the same manner as
Lacan's psychoanalytic act, Genet's acts of poetry further seek to
expose the fragile prop that holds our reality together, baring the
fissures in being for which fantasy normally compensates. Moving
away from scholarship that considers Genet's plays, novels,
sexuality and politics in isolation, Penney explores the whole span
of Genet's work, from his early novels to the
posthumously-published Prisoner of Love and, combining this with
psychoanalysis, opens up new avenues for thinking about Genet,
Lacan and our wanting being.
Poet, columnist, artist, and fiction writer Gwendolyn Bennett is
considered by many to have been one of the youngest leaders of the
Harlem Renaissance and a strong advocate for racial pride and the
rights of African American women. Heroine of the Harlem Renaissance
and Beyond presents key selections of her published and unpublished
writings and artwork in one volume. From poems, short stories, and
reviews to letters, journal entries, and art, this collection
showcases Bennett's diverse and insightful body of work and
rightfully places her alongside her contemporaries in the Harlem
Renaissance-figures such as Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes,
and Countee Cullen. It includes selections from her monthly column
"The Ebony Flute," published in Opportunity, the magazine of the
National Urban League, as well as newly uncovered post-1928 work
that proves definitively that Bennett continued writing throughout
the following two decades. Bennett's correspondence with canonical
figures from the period, her influence on Harlem arts institutions,
and her political writings, reviews, and articles show her deep
connection to and lasting influence on the movement that shaped her
early career. An indispensable introduction to one of the era's
most prolific and passionate minds, this reevaluation of Bennett's
life and work deepens our understanding of the Harlem Renaissance
and enriches the world of American letters. It will be of special
value to scholars and readers interested in African American
literature and art and American history and cultural studies.
An enhanced exam section: expert guidance on approaching exam
questions, writing high-quality responses and using critical
interpretations, plus practice tasks and annotated sample answer
extracts. Key skills covered: focused tasks to develop your
analysis and understanding, plus regular study tips, revision
questions and progress checks to track your learning. The most
in-depth analysis: detailed text summaries and extract analysis to
in-depth discussion of characters, themes, language, contexts and
criticism, all helping you to succeed.
Contributions by Christina M. Chica, Kathryn Coto, Sarah Park
Dahlen, Preethi Gorecki, Tolonda Henderson, Marcia Hernandez,
Jackie C. Horne, Susan E. Howard, Peter C. Kunze, Florence Maatita,
Sridevi Rao, Kallie Schell, Jennifer Patrice Sims, Paul Spickard,
Lily Anne Welty Tamai, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, Jasmine Wade, Karin
E. Westman, and Charles D. Wilson Race matters in the fictional
Wizarding World of the Harry Potter series as much as it does in
the real world. As J. K. Rowling continues to reveal details about
the world she created, a growing number of fans, scholars, readers,
and publics are conflicted and concerned about how the original
Wizarding World-quintessentially white and British-depicts diverse
and multicultural identities, social subjectivities, and
communities. Harry Potter and the Other: Race, Justice, and
Difference in the Wizarding World is a timely anthology that
examines, interrogates, and critiques representations of race and
difference across various Harry Potter media, including books,
films, and official websites, as well as online forums and the
classroom. As the contributors to this volume demonstrate, a deeper
reading of the series reveals multiple ruptures in popular
understandings of the liberatory potential of the Potter series.
Young people who are progressive, liberal, and empowered to
question authority may have believed they were reading something
radical as children and young teens, but increasingly they have
raised alarms about the series' depiction of peoples of color,
cultural appropriation in worldbuilding, and the author's antitrans
statements in the media. Included essays examine the failed
wizarding justice system, the counterproductive portrayal of Nagini
as an Asian woman, the liberation of Dobby the elf, and more,
adding meaningful contributions to existing scholarship on the
Harry Potter series. As we approach the twenty-fifth anniversary of
the publication of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Harry
Potter and the Other provides a smorgasbord of insights into the
way that race and difference have shaped this story, its world, its
author, and the generations who have come of age during the era of
the Wizarding World.
Metaphysics of Children's Literature is the first sustained study
of ways in which children's literature confronts metaphysical
questions about reality and the nature of what there is in the
world. In its exploration of something and nothing, this book
identifies a number of metaphysical structures in texts for young
people-such as the ontological exchange or nowhere in
extremis-demonstrating that their entanglement with the workings of
reality is unique to the conditions of children's literature.
Drawing on contemporary children's literature discourse and
metaphysicians from Heidegger and Levinas, to Bachelard, Sartre and
Haraway, Lisa Sainsbury reveals the metaphysical groundwork of
children's literature. Authors and illustrators covered include:
Allan and Janet Ahlberg, Mac Barnett, Ron Brooks, Peter Brown,
Lewis Carroll, Eoin Colfer, Gary Crew, Roald Dahl, Roddy Doyle,
Imme Dros, Sarah Ellis, Mem Fox, Zana Fraillon, Libby Gleeson,
Kenneth Grahame, Armin Greder, Sonya Hartnett, Tana Hoban, Judy
Horacek, Tove Jansson, Oliver Jeffers, Jon Klassen, Elaine
Konigsburg, Norman Lindsay, Geraldine McCaughrean, Robert
Macfarlane, Jackie Morris, Edith Nesbit, Mary Norton, Jill Paton
Walsh, Philippa Pearce, Ivan Southall, William Steig, Shaun Tan,
Tarjei Vesaas, David Wiesner, Margaret Wild, Jacqueline Woodson and
many others.
Daniele Pitavy-Souques was a European powerhouse of Welty studies.
In this collection of essays, Pitavy-Souques pours new light on
Welty's view of the world and her international literary import,
challenging previous readings of Welty's fiction, memoir, and
photographs in illuminating ways. The nine essays collected here
offer scholars, critics, and avid readers a new understanding and
enjoyment of Welty's work. The volume explores beloved stories in
Welty's masterpiece The Golden Apples, as well as "A Curtain of
Green," "Flowers for Marjorie," "Old Mr. Marblehall," "A Still
Moment," "Livvie," "Circe," "Kin," and The Optimist's Daughter, One
Writer's Beginnings, and One Time, One Place. Essays include
"Technique as Myth: The Structure of The Golden Apples" (1979), "A
Blazing Butterfly: The Modernity of Eudora Welty" (1987), and
others written between 2000 and 2018. Together, they reveal and
explain Welty's brilliance for employing the particular to discover
the universal. Pitavy-Souques, who briefly lived in and often
revisited the South, met with Welty several times in her Jackson,
Mississippi, home. Her readings draw on the visual arts, European
theorists, and styles of modernism, postmodernism, surrealism, as
well as the baroque and the gothic. The included essays reflect
Pitavy-Souques's European education, her sophisticated
understanding of intellectual theories and artistic movements
abroad, and her passion for the literary achievement of women of
genius. The Eye That Is Language: A Transatlantic View of Eudora
Welty reveals the way in which Welty's narrative techniques broaden
her work beyond southern myths and mysteries into a global
perspective of humanity.
When Joseph Conrad died in 1924, Ford Madox Ford immediately
published a memoir of his involvement with Conrad at which Conrad's
widow took offense. The ensuing "controversy" left Ford with a
lasting reputation for "unreliability" which Morey examines in
detail, uncovering evidence that substantiates most of Ford's
claims. Morey's judicious assessment of the literary friendship and
interdependence between two remarkable writers is a much-needed
addition to studies of Conrad and Ford.
Destination for artists and convalescents, playground of the rich,
site of foreign allure, the French Riviera has long attracted
visitors to its shores. Ranging through the late nineteenth
century, the Belle Epoque, the 'roaring twenties', and the
emancipatory post-war years, Rosemary Lancaster highlights the
contributions of nine remarkable women to the cultural identity of
the Riviera in its seminal rise to fame. Embracing an array of
genres, she gives new focus to feminine writings never previously
brought together, nor as richly critically explored. Fiction,
memoir, diary, letters, even cookbooks and choreographies provide
compelling evidence of the innovativeness of women who seized the
challenges and opportunities of their travels in a century of
radical social and artistic change.
Teenager Alan, fought over by a religious mother and an atheist
father, finds release in horses, until he is driven to blind them
with a spike. Why? While treating the boy, a psychiatrist discovers
his own life is paradoxically in the witness box.
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.
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.
Rewrites our understanding of the last 50 years of Chicana/o
cultural production. Chicana/o Remix casts new light not only on
artists-such as Sandra de la Loza, Judy Baca, and David Botello,
among others-but on the exhibitions that feature their work, and
the collectors, curators, critics, and advocates who engage it.
Combining feminist theory, critical ethnic studies, art historical
analysis, and extensive archival and field research, Karen Mary
Davalos argues that narrow notions of identity, politics, and
aesthetics limit our ability to understand the full capacities of
Chicana/o art. She employs fresh vernacular concepts such as the
"errata exhibit," or the staging of exhibits that critically
question mainstream art museums, and the "remix," or the act of
bringing new narratives and forgotten histories from the background
and into the foreground. These concepts, which emerge out of art
practice itself, drive her analysis and reinforce the rejection of
familiar narratives that evaluate Chicana/o art in simplistic,
traditional terms, such as political versus commercial, or realist
versus conceptual. Throughout Chicana/o Remix, Davalos explores
undocumented or previously ignored information about artists, their
cultural production, and the exhibitions and collections that
feature their work. Each chapter exposes and challenges conventions
in art history and Chicana/o studies, documenting how Chicana
artists were the first to critically challenge exhibitions of
Chicana/o art, tracing the origins of the first Chicano arts
organizations, and highlighting the influence of Europe and Asia on
Chicana/o artists who traveled abroad. As a leading scholar in the
study of Chicana/o artists, art spaces, and exhibition practices,
Davalos presents her most ambitious project to date in this
re-examination of fifty years of Chicana/o art production.
In Spanish Modernism and the Poetics of Youth: From Miguel de
Unamuno to La Joven Literatura, Leslie J. Harkema analyzes the
literature of the modernist period in Spain in light of the
emergence of youth culture in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century. Harkema argues for the prominent role played by
Miguel de Unamuno-as a poet, essayist, and public figure-in Spanish
writers' response to this phenomenon. She demonstrates how early
twentieth-century Spanish literature participated in the
glorification of adolescence and questioning of Bildung seen
elsewhere in European modernism, in ways that were not only
aesthetic but also political. Harkema critically re-examines the
relationship between Unamuno and several Spanish writers associated
with the so-called Generation of 1927 (known as at the time as "la
joven literatura" or "the young literature"). By situating this
period within the wider framework of European modernism, Spanish
Modernism and the Poetics of Youth brings to light the central role
that the early twentieth century's re-imagining of adolescence and
youth played in the development of literary modernism in Spain.
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.
Author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude,
Jonathan Lethem is one of the most celebrated and significant
American writers working today. This new scholarly study draws on a
deep knowledge of all Lethem's work to explore the range of his
writing, from his award-winning fiction to his work in comics and
criticism. Reading Lethem in relation to five themes crucial to his
work, Joseph Brooker considers influence and intertextuality; the
role of genres such as crime, science fiction and the Western; the
imaginative production of worlds; superheroes and comic book
traditions; and the representation of New York City. Close readings
of Lethem's fiction are contextualized by reference to broader
conceptual and comparative frames, as well as to Lethem's own
voluminous non-fictional writing and his adaptation of precursors
from Franz Kafka to Raymond Chandler. Rich in critical insight,
Jonathan Lethem and the Galaxy of Writing demonstrates how an
understanding of this author illuminates contemporary literature
and culture at large.
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.
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.
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