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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: texts > General
As time has proven, Theory of Prose still remains one of the
twentieth century's most significant works of literary theory. It
not only anticipates structuralism and poststructuralism, but poses
questions about the nature of fiction that are as provocative today
as they were in the 1920s. Founded on the concept of "making
strange," it lays bare the inner workings of fiction-especially the
works of Cervantes, Tolstoy, Sterne, Dickens, Bely and Rozanov-and
imparts a new way of seeing, of reading, and of interacting with
the world.
This volume aims to address kinship in the context of global
mobility, while studying the effects of technological developments
throughout the 20th century on how individuals and communities
engage in real or imagined relationships. Using literary
representations as a spectrum to examine kinship practices, Lamia
Tayeb explores how transnational mobility, bi-culturalism and
cosmopolitanism honed, to some extent, the relevant authors'
concerns with the family and wider kinship relations: in these
literatures, kinship and the family lose their familiar,
taken-for-granted aspect, and yet are still conceived as
'essential' spheres of relatedness for uprooted individuals and
communities. Tayeb here studies writings by Hanif Kureishi, Zadie
Smith, Monica Ali, Jhumpa Lahiri, Khaled Housseini and Nadia
Hashimi, working to understand how transnational kinship dynamics
operate when moved beyond the traditional notions of the blood
relationship, relationship to place and identification with
community.
"I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man," the irascible voice of a nameless narrator cries out. And so, from underground, emerge the passionate confessions of a suffering man; the brutal self-examination of a tormented soul; the bristling scorn and iconoclasm of alienated individual who has become one of the greatest antiheroes in all literature. Notes From Underground, published in 1864, marks a tuming point in Dostoevsky's writing: it announces the moral political, and social ideas he will treat on a monumental scale in Crime And Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov
"A fine example of everyone's favourite genre: the genre-defying
book, inspired by history, filtered through imagination and
finished with a jeweller's eye for detail" JOHN SELF, Guardian "As
we deal with the consequences, emotional and material, of a
pandemic, it is hard to imagine a better guide to the resources of
hope than Schalansky's deeply engaging inventory" MICHAEL CRONIN,
Irish Times "Weaving fiction, autobiography and history, this
sumptuous collection of texts offers meditations on the diverse
phenomena of decomposition and destruction" Financial Times "Books
of the Year" Following the conventions of a different genre, each
of the pieces in Schalansky's Inventory considers something that is
irretrievably lost to the world, from the paradisal island of
Tuanaki, the Caspian Tiger or the Villa Sacchetti in Rome, to
Sappho's love poems, Greta Garbo's fading beauty or a painting by
Caspar David Friedrich. As a child of the former East Germany, it's
not surprising that "loss" and its aftermath should haunt
Schalansky's writing, but what is extraordinary and exhilarating is
the engaging mixture of intellectual curiosity, ironic humour,
stylistic elegance, intensity of feeling and grasp of life's
pitiless vitality, that combine to make this one of the most
original literary works of recent times. Translated from the German
by Jackie Smith
The shift in temporal modalities of Romantic Theatre was the
consequence of internal as well as external developments:
internally, the playwright was liberated from the old imperative of
"Unity of Time" and the expectation that the events of the play
must not exceed the hours of a single day; externally, the new
social and cultural conformance to the time-keeping schedules of
labour and business that had become more urgent with the industrial
revolution. In reviewing the theatre of the Romantic era, this
monograph draws attention to the ways in which theatre reflected
the pervasive impact of increased temporal urgency in social and
cultural behaviour. The contribution this book makes to the study
of drama in the early nineteenth century is a renewed emphasis on
time as a prominent element in Romantic dramaturgy, and a
reappraisal of the extensive experimentation on how time
functioned.
This book begins with a reflection on dichotomies in comparative
studies of Chinese and Western literature and aesthetics.
Critiquing an oppositional paradigm, Ming Dong Gu argues that
despite linguistic and cultural differences, the two traditions
share much common ground in critical theory, aesthetic thought,
metaphysical conception, and reasoning. Focusing on issues of
language, writing, and linguistics; metaphor, metonymy, and
poetics; mimesis and representation; and lyricism, expressionism,
creativity, and aesthetics, Gu demonstrates that though ways of
conception and modes of expression may differ, the two traditions
have cultivated similar aesthetic feelings and critical ideas
capable of fusing critical and aesthetic horizons. With a two-way
dialogue, this book covers a broad spectrum of critical discourses
and uncovers fascinating connections among a wide range of
thinkers, theorists, scholars, and aestheticians, thereby making a
significant contribution to bridging the aesthetic divide and
envisioning world theory and global aesthetics.
This book offers an examination of Jeff Noon's iconoclastic debut
novel, Vurt (1993). In this first book-length study of the novel,
which includes an extended interview with Noon, Wenaus considers
how Vurt complicates the process of literary canonization, its
constructivist relationship to genre, its violent and oneiric
setting of Manchester, its use of the Orphic myth as an archetype
for the practice of literary collage and musical remix, and how the
structural paradoxes of chaos and fractal geometry inform the
novel's content, form, and theme. Finally, Wenaus makes the case
for Vurt's ongoing relevance in the 21st century, an era
increasingly characterized by neuro-totalitarianism,
psychopolitics, and digital surveillance. With Vurt, Noon begins
his project of rupturing feedback loops of control by breaking
narrative habits and embracing the contingent and unpredictable. An
inventive, energetic, and heartbreaking novel, Vurt is also an
optimistic and heartfelt call for artists to actively create open
futures.
This book analyzes the impact of abusive regimes of power on
women's lives and on their self-expression through close readings
of life writing by women in communist Romania. In particular, it
examines the forms of agency and privacy available to women under
totalitarianism and the modes of relationships in which their lives
were embedded. The self-expression and self-reflexive processes
that are to be found in the body of Romanian women's
autobiographical writings this study presents create complex
private narratives that underpin the creative development of
inclusive memories of the past through shared responsibility and
shared agency. At the same time, however, the way these private,
personal narratives intertwined with collective and official
historical narratives exemplifies the multidimensional nature of
privacy as well as the radical redefinition of agency in this
period. This book argues for a broader understanding of the
narratives of the communist past, one that reflects the complexity
of individual and social interactions and allows a deep exploration
of the interconnected relations between memory, trauma, nostalgia,
agency, and privacy.
This collection opens the geospatiality of "Asia" into an
environmental framework called "Oceania" and pushes this complex
regional multiplicity towards modes of trans-local solidarity,
planetary consciousness, multi-sited decentering, and world
belonging. At the transdisciplinary core of this "worlding" process
lies the multiple spatial and temporal dynamics of an environmental
eco-poetics, articulated via thinking and creating both with and
beyond the Pacific and Asia imaginary.
This book critically analyses Eminem's studio album releases from
his first commercial album release The Slim Shady LP in 1999, to
2020's Music To Be Murdered By, through the lens of storytelling,
truth and rhetoric, narrative structure, rhyme scheme and type,
perspective, and celebrity culture. In terms of lyrical content, no
area has been off-limits to Eminem, and he has written about
domestic violence, murder, rape, child abuse, incest, drug
addiction, and torture during his career. But whilst he will always
be associated with these dark subjects, Mathers has also explored
fatherhood, bereavement, mental illness, poverty, friendship, and
love within his lyrics, and the juxtaposition between these very
different themes (sometimes within the same song), make his lyrics
complex, deep, and deserving of proper critical discussion. The
first full-length monograph concerning Eminem's lyrics, this book
affords the same rigorous analysis to a hip-hop artist as would be
applied to any great writer's body of work; such analysis of
'popular' music is often overlooked. In addition to his rich
exploration of Eminem's lyrics, Fosbraey furthermore delves into a
variety of different aspects within popular music including
extra-verbal elements, image, video, and surrounding culture. This
critical study of his work will be an invaluable resource to
academics working in the fields of Popular Music, English
Literature, or Cultural Studies.
This book explores the history of women's engagement with writing
experimentally. Women writers have long used different narratives
and modes of writing as a way of critiquing worlds and stories that
they find themselves at odds with, but at the same time, as a way
to participate in such spaces. Experimentation-of style, mode,
voice, genre and language-has enabled women writers to be
simultaneously creative and critical, engaged in and yet apart from
stories and cultures that have so often seen them as 'other'. This
collection shows that women writers in English over the past 400
years have challenged those ideas not only through explicit polemic
and alternative representations but through disrupting the very
modes of representation and story itself.
Translocality in Contemporary City Novels responds to the fact that
twenty-first-century Anglophone novels are increasingly
characterised by translocality-the layering and blending of two or
more distant settings. Considering translocal and transcultural
writing as a global phenomenon, this book draws on
multidisciplinary research, from globalisation theory to the study
of narratives to urban studies, to explore a corpus of thirty-two
novels-by authors such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dionne Brand,
Kiran Desai, and Xiaolu Guo-set in a total of ninety-seven cities.
Lena Mattheis examines six of the most common strategies used in
contemporary urban fiction to make translocal experiences of the
world narratable and turn them into relatable stories:
simultaneity, palimpsests, mapping, scaling, non-places, and
haunting. Combining and developing further theories, approaches,
and techniques from a variety of research fields-including
narratology, human geography, transculturality, diaspora spaces,
and postcolonial perspectives-Mattheis develops a set of
cross-disciplinary techniques in literary urban studies.
This book examines the nature, sources, and implications of
fallacies in philosophical reasoning. In doing so, it illustrates
and evaluates various historical instances of this phenomenon.
There is widespread interest in the practice and products of
philosophizing, yet the important issue of fallacious reasoning in
these matters has been effectively untouched. Nicholas Rescher
fills this gap by presenting a systematic account of the principal
ways in which philosophizing can go astray.
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