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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies > General
This study charts a history of weakness in a selection of canonical
works in literature and philosophy. Examining the nature of
weakness has inspired some of the most influential aesthetic and
philosophical portraits of the human condition. By reading a
selection of canonical literary and philosophical texts, Michael
O'Sullivan charts a history of responses to the experience and
exploration of weakness. Beginning with Plato and Aristotle, this
first book-length study of the concept explores weakness as it
interpreted by Lao Tzu, Nietzsche, the Romantics, Dickens and the
Modernists. It examines what feminist critics Elaine Showalter and
Luce Irigaray make of the figure of the "weaker vessel" and
considers philosophical notions such as radical passivity, a
"syntax of weakness" and human vulnerability in the work of Derrida
and Beckett and Coetzee. Through analysis of these differing
versions of weakness, O'Sullivan's study challenges the popular
myth that aligns masculine identity with strength and force and
presents a humane weakness as a guiding motif for debates in
ethics.
Steve Ditko (1927-2018) is one of the most important contributors
to American comic books. As the cocreator of Spider-Man and sole
creator of Doctor Strange, Ditko made an indelible mark on American
popular culture. Mysterious Travelers: Steve Ditko and the Search
for a New Liberal Identity resets the conversation about his heady
and powerful work. Always inward facing, Ditko's narratives
employed superhero and supernatural fantasy in the service of
self-examination, and with characters like the Question, Mr. A, and
Static, Ditko turned ordinary superhero comics into philosophic
treatises. Many of Ditko's philosophy-driven comics show a clear
debt to ideas found in Ayn Rand's Objectivism. Unfortunately,
readers often reduce Ditko's work to a mouthpiece for Rand's
vision. Mysterious Travelers unsettles this notion. In this book,
Zack Kruse argues that Ditko's philosophy draws on a complicated
network of ideas that is best understood as mystic liberalism.
Although Ditko is not the originator of mystic liberalism, his
comics provide a unique window into how such an ideology operates
in popular media. Examining selections of Ditko's output from 1953
to 1986, Kruse demonstrates how Ditko's comics provide insight into
a unique strand of American thought that has had a lasting impact.
Fictions written between 1939 and 2005 by indigenous and white
(post)colonial women writers emerging from an African-European
cultural experience form the focus of this study. Their voyages
into the European diasporic space in Africa are important for
conveying how African women's literature is situated in relation to
colonialism. Notwithstanding the centrality of African literature
in the new postcolonial literatures in English, the accomplishments
of the indigenous writer Grace Ogot have been eclipsed by the
critical attention given to her male counterparts, while Elspeth
Huxley, Barbara Kimenye, and Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye, who are of
Western cultural provenance but adopt an African perspective, are
not accommodated by the genre of 'expatriate literature'. The
present study of both indigenous and white (post)colonial women's
narratives that are common to both categories fills this gap.
Focused on the representation of gender, identity, culture, and the
'Other', the texts selected are set in Kenya and Uganda, and a main
concern is with the extent to which they are influenced by setting
and intercultural influences. The 'African' woman's creation of
textuality is at once the expression of female individualities and
a transgression of boundaries. The particular category of fiction
for children as written by Kimenye and Macgoye reveals the
configuration of a voice and identity for the female 'Other' and
writer which enables a subversive renegotiation of identity in the
face of patriarchal traditions.
Peculiar Whiteness: Racial Anxiety and Poor Whites in Southern
Literature, 1900-1965 argues for deeper consideration of the
complexities surrounding the disparate treatment of poor whites
throughout southern literature and attests to how broad such
experiences have been. While the history of prejudice against this
group is not the same as the legacy of violence perpetrated against
people of color in America, individuals regarded as ""white trash""
have suffered a dehumanizing process in the writings of various
white authors. Poor white characters are frequently maligned as
grotesque and anxiety inducing, especially when they are aligned in
close proximity to blacks or to people with disabilities. Thus, as
a symbol, much has been asked of poor whites, and various
iterations of the label (e.g., ""white trash,"" tenant farmers, or
even people with a little less money than average) have been
subject to a broad spectrum of judgment, pity, compassion, fear,
and anxiety. Peculiar Whiteness engages key issues in contemporary
critical race studies, whiteness studies, and southern studies,
both literary and historical. Through discussions of authors
including Charles Chesnutt, Thomas Dixon, Sutton Griggs, Erskine
Caldwell, Lillian Smith, William Faulkner, and Flannery O'Connor,
we see how whites in a position of power work to maintain their
status, often by finding ways to recategorize and marginalize
people who might not otherwise have seemed to fall under the
auspices or boundaries of ""white trash.
Scottish Medicine and Literary Culture, 1726-1832 examines the
ramifications of Scottish medicine for literary culture within
Scotland, throughout Britain, and across the transatlantic world.
The contributors take an informed historicist approach in examining
the cultural, geographical, political, and other circumstances
enabling the dissemination of distinctively Scottish
medico-literary discourses.
Spaces of Madness examines the role of the insane asylum in
Argentine prose works published between 1889 and 2011. From a place
of existential exile at the turn of the twentieth century to a
symbolic representation of Argentine society during and immediately
subsequent to the Dirty War, the figure of the asylum in Argentine
literature has evolved along with the institution itself. The
authors studied in Spaces of Madness include Manuel T. Podesta,
Roberto Arlt, Leopoldo Marechal, Julio Cortazar, Adolfo Bioy
Casares, Juan Jose Saer, Abelardo Castillo, Ricardo Piglia, and
Luisa Valenzuela.
Pacific Literatures as World Literature is a conjuration of
trans-Pacific poets and writers whose work enacts forces of
"becoming oceanic" and suggests a different mode of understanding,
viewing, and belonging to the world. The Pacific, past and present,
remains uneasily amenable to territorial demarcations of national
or marine sovereignty. At the same time, as a planetary element
necessary to sustaining life and well-being, the Pacific could
become the means to envisioning ecological solidarity, if
compellingly framed in terms that elicit consent and inspire an
imagination of co-belonging and care. The Pacific can signify a
bioregional site of coalitional promise as much as a danger zone of
antagonistic peril. With ground-breaking writings from authors
based in North America, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Hawaii, and Guam and
new modes of research - including multispecies ethnography and
practice, ecopoetics, and indigenous cosmopolitics - authors
explore the socio-political significance of the Pacific and
contribute to the development of a collective effort of comparative
Pacific studies covering a refreshingly broad, ethnographically
grounded range of research themes. This volume aims to decenter
continental/land poetics as such via long-standing transnational
Pacific ties, re-worlding Pacific literature as world literature.
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The Holy War
(Hardcover)
John Bunyan; Edited by Daniel V Runyon
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R1,435
Discovery Miles 14 350
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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