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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Novels, other prose & writers > General
Working at the intersections of feminist literary criticism, new historicism, and narratology, Chastity and Transgression in Women's Writing, 1792-1897 revises current understandings of 19th Century representations of prostitution, female sexuality, and the "rights of women" debate. Eberle's project explores the connections and disjunctures between women writing during the Romantic period and those working throughout the Victorian era. Roxanne Eberle considers a wide range of authors including Mary Wollstonecraft, Amelia Opie, Mary Hays, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Sarah Grand.
What do fictional representations of older women add to our understanding of a group of individuals often marginalized in our youth-oriented society? Starting from an overview of 19th-century women's fiction, this book explores this and other questions through close readings of the work of major 20th-century women novelists, considered in relation to these non-fictional perceptions.
This book examines three examples of late nineteenth-century Japanese adaptations of Western literature: a biography of Ulysses S. Grant recasting him as a Japanese warrior, a Victorian novel reset as oral performance, and an American melodrama redone as a serialized novel promoting the reform of Japanese theater. Miller argues that adaptation (hon’an ) was a valid form of contemporary Japanese translation that fostered creative appropriation across genres and among a diverse group of writers and artists.
The brand new novel from top 5 bestseller Louise Douglas.A notebook full of secrets, two untimely deaths - something sinister is stirring in the perfect seaside town of Morranez...It's summer and holidaymakers are flocking to the idyllic Brittany coast. But when first an old traveller woman dies in suspicious circumstances, and then a campaign of hate seemingly drives another victim to take his own life, events take a very dark turn. Mila Shepherd has come to France to look after her niece, Ani, following the accident in which both Ani's parents were lost at sea. Mila has moved into their family holiday home, as well as taken her sister Sophie's place in an agency which specialises in tracking down missing people, until new recruit Carter Jackson starts. It's clear that malevolent forces are at work in Morranez, but the local police are choosing to look the other way. Only Mila and Carter can uncover the truth about what's really going on in this beautiful, but mysterious place before anyone else suffers. But someone is desperate to protect a terrible truth, at any cost... Praise for Louise Douglas: 'I loved The Lost Notebook so much! From the opening lines, I was drawn in to a gripping story, beautifully written and so cleverly orchestrated. I rooted for the main character, I held my breath at the denouement and as for the climax of the book - just wow. Highly recommended.' Judy Leigh 'Louise Douglas achieves the impossible and gets better with every book.' Milly Johnson 'A brilliantly written, gripping, clever, compelling story, that I struggled to put down. The vivid descriptions, the evocative plot and the intrigue that Louise created, which had me constantly asking questions, made it a highly enjoyable, absolute treasure of a read.' Kim Nash on The Scarlet Dress 'Another stunning read from the exceptionally talented Louise Douglas! I love the way in which Louise creates such an atmospheric mystery, building the intrigue and suspense brick by brick. Her writing is always beautiful and multi-layered, her characters warm and relatable and the intriguing nature of the mystery makes this unputdownable.' Nicola Cornick on The Scarlet Dress 'A tender, heart-breaking, page-turning read'Rachel Hore on The House by the Sea 'The perfect combination of page-turning thriller and deeply emotional family story. Superb' Nicola Cornick on The House by the Sea 'Kept me guessing until the last few pages and the explosive ending took my breath away.' C.L. Taylor, author of The Accident on Your Beautiful Lies 'Beautifully written, chillingly atmospheric and utterly compelling, The Secret by the Lake is Louise Douglas at her brilliant best' Tammy Cohen, author of The Broken 'A master of her craft, Louise Douglas ratchets up the tension in this haunting and exquisitely written tale of buried secrets and past tragedy.' Amanda Jennings, author of Sworn Secret 'A clammy, atmospheric and suspenseful novel, it builds in tension all the way through to the startling final pages.' Sunday Express, S Magazine 'A chilling, unputdownable new novel from the bestselling author of The House By The Sea. 'A brilliantly written, gripping, clever, compelling story, that I struggled to put down.'
In a constantly changing world, individuals are forever growing to meet the challenges and developments that emerge around them. In contemporary society, technology is at the heart of change. Literature, too, reflects the evolution of culture and increasingly represents and considers technology. And as children become young adults, their reading helps shape their understanding of the world. This book examines representative works of science fiction, children's literature, and popular culture to show how these works reflect the process of growing up in a technological world. The volume looks at the simple picture books and comic books that appeal to small children; the formulaic adventures that fascinate older children; the films and television programs that are watched by children and young adolescents; the music videos and programming that appeal to young adults; and the popular novels that interest older readers. Included are discussions of Superman, the Hardy Boys, Star Trek, science fiction films, and music videos. The book points to similarities among popular culture, science fiction, and children's literature and demonstrates the relevance of these works to contemporary society.
Providing an access to the main facts of Edgar Allan Poe's life and career, this work should be of service to the student, scholar or general reader who wishes to check a point quickly without referring to the detailed narratives offered by the standard biographies. The chronology includes details of Poe's works, both of those published in his lifetime and those which appeared posthumously. There is a full index of persons, places and works referred to. In this work, the author offers a chronology of Poe which takes into account the latest research into his life and times, and provides an insight into the background, life and work of this literary figure.
This book fills a gap in both literary and feminist scholarship by offering the first major study of femme fatales in hardboiled crime fiction. Maysaa Jaber shows that the criminal literary figures in the genre open up powerful spaces for imagining female agency in direct opposition to the constraining forces of patriarchy and misogyny.
One of America's greatest writers, William Faulkner wrote fiction that combined spellbinding Southern storytelling with modernist formal experimentation to shape an enduring body of work. In his fictional Yoknapatawpha County--based on the region around his hometown of Oxford, Mississippi--he created an entire world peopled with unforgettable characters linked into an intricate historical and social web. An introduction to the Nobel-Prize-winning author's life and work, this book devotes opening chapters to his biography and literary heritage and subsequent chapters to each of his major works. The analytical chapters start with his most accessible book, The Unvanquished, a Civil-War-era account of a boy's coming of age. The following chapters orient readers to elements of plot, character, and theme in Faulkner's masterpieces: The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom! Also analyzed and discussed are some of Faulkner's most often anthologized short stories, including "A Rose For Emily" and "Barn Burning," and the longer stories "The Bear," "Spotted Horses," and "The Old Man" that were incorporated in the novels Go Down, Moses, The Hamlet, and If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem. Clear, insightful analyses of the elements of Faulkner's fiction are supplemented with alternative readings from a variety of critical approaches including gender, rhetorical, performance, and cultural studies perspectives.
Aristocratic women flourished in the Victorian literary world, their combination of class privilege and gendered exclusion generating distinctively socialized modes of participation in cultural and political activity. Their writing offers an important trope through which to consider the nature of political, private and public spheres. This book is an examination of the literary, social, and political significance of the lives and writings of aristocratic women in the mid-Victorian period.
Each of Thomas Hardy's novels is filled with striking visual images -- characters, interior settings, buildings, village scenes, and open tracts of land. These images are all rendered with a vitality and energy immediately recognizable as Hardy's own. In fact, Hardy, whose style owed much to his abilities as a draughtsman, once remarked that he saw his narratives as a series of images. J. B. Bullen explores this fascinating link between the image and the idea in the fiction of Thomas Hardy, and demonstrates how Hardy approached his work from a particular "point of view" which not only determined the lighting, composition, and structure of his literary visual effects, but which also allowed him to express emotions and ideas in the direct, "vividly visible" fashion that is the hallmark of his greatest fiction.
Evil Children in Religion, Literature and Art explores the genesis, development, and religious significance of a literary and iconographic motif, involving a gang of urchins, usually male, who mock or assault a holy or eccentric person, typically an adult. Originating in the biblical tale of Elisha's mockery ( Kings 2.23-24), this motif recurs in literature, hagiography, and art, from antiquity up to our own time, strikingly defying the conventional Judeo-Christian and Romantic image of the child as a symbol of innocence.
This first book-length study of fictional suicides in East German literature provides insight into the complex and dynamic rhetoric of the GDR and the literariness of its literature. The many fictional suicides in the literature of the German Democratic Republic have been greatly misunderstood. The common assumption is that authoritarian oppression in East Germany led to an anomalous abundance of real suicides, so that fictional suicides in GDR literature constitute a simple, realistic reflection of East German society. Robert Blankenship challenges this assumption by providing both a history of suicide in GDR literature and close readings of individual texts, revealing that suicides in GDR literature, rather than simply reflecting historical suicides, contain rich literary attributes such as intertextuality, haunting, epistolarity, and unorthodox narrative strategies. Such literariness offered subversive potential beyond suggesting that real people killed themselves in a communist country. This first book-length study of fictional suicides in East German literature provides insight into the complex and dynamic rhetoric of the GDR. Blankenship's underlying claim is that GDR literature ought to be read as literature, with literary methodology, not despite the country's politically and rhetorically charged nature,but precisely because of it. Suicide in East German Literature will be of interest to scholars of GDR literature, humanities-oriented scholars of suicide, and those who are interested in the complex relationship between literature and history. Robert Blankenship is Assistant Professor of German at California State University, Long Beach.
""Trespassing Boundaries is an excellent collection of insightful and significant essays. Edited by the distinguished scholar-critics Kathryn N. Benzel and Ruth Hoberman--who themselves have contributed invaluable essays--this splendid volume will point the way to a reconsideration of Woolf's work in the genre of short fiction."--Daniel R. Schwarz, Professor of English and Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow, Cornell University
Neo-Victorian Villains is the first edited collection to examine the afterlives of such Victorian villains as Dracula, Svengali, Dorian Gray and Jekyll and Hyde, exploring their representation in neo-Victorian drama and fiction. In addition, Neo-Victorian Villains examines a number of supposedly villainous types, from the spirit medium and the femme fatale to the imperial 'native' and the ventriloquist, and traces their development from Victorian times today. Chapters analyse recent theatre, films and television - from Ripper Street to Marvel superhero movies - as well as classic Hollywood depictions of Victorian villains. In a wide-ranging opening chapter, Benjamin Poore assesses the legacy of nineteenth-century ideas of villains and villainy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Contributors are: Sarah Artt, Guy Barefoot, Jonathan Buckmaster, David Bullen, Helen Davies, Robert Dean, Marion Gibson, Richard Hand, Emma James, Mark Jones, Emma V. Miller, Claire O'Callaghan, Christina Parker-Flynn, Frances Pheasant-Kelly, Natalie Russell, Gillian Piggott, Benjamin Poore and Rob Welch.
This authoritative textual edition presents Tobias Smollett's translation of Cervantes's Don Quixote in the form most faithful to Smollett's own intentions. It includes Francis Hayman's twenty-eight illustrations engraved for the original edition, Smollett's explanatory notes, and his prefatory "Life of Cervantes." Smollett's Don Quixote first appeared in 1755 and was for many years the most popular English-language version of Cervantes's masterpiece. However, soon after the start of the nineteenth century, its reputation began to suffer. Rival translators, literary hucksters, and careless scholars initiated or fed a variety of charges against Smollett -- even plagiarism. For almost 130 years no publisher risked reprinting it. Redemption began in 1986, when the distinguished Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes, in his foreword to a new (albeit flawed) edition of Smollett's translation, declared it to be "the authentic vernacular version" of Don Quixote in English. Fuentes's opinion was in accord with that of the preeminent Cervantist, Francisco Rodriguez Marin, who decades earlier had declared Smollett's Don Quixote to be his preferred English version. Martin C. Battestin's introduction discusses the composition, publication, and controversial reception of Smollett's Don Quixote. Battestin's notes identify Smollett's sources in his "Life of Cervantes" and in his commentary, provide cross-references to his other works, and illustrate Smollett's originality or dependence on previous translations. Also included is a complete textual apparatus, a glossary of unfamiliar terms, and an appendix comparing a selection of Francis Hayman's original illustrations with the engraved renderings usedin the book.
This study examines James Herriot's five major books as carefully crafted volumes of autobiography based on the building block of the short story. In each of these works Herriot explores the fundamental choice of values underlying a happy and successful life. In his vision the bonds of affection and mutual dependence between all creatures, human and animal, form an enduring theme that lies at the heart of the choices he makes in his personal and professional life. This study will help the reader to understand the relationship between Herriot's stories and each book as a whole and to appreciate Herriot's work in the context of twentieth-century anxieties about identity and meaning. Following a biographical chapter that describes the relationship between Herriot's life and literary work, Rossi discusses the genre of autobiography, the relationship between truth and fiction in modern autobiography, and Herriot's use of the genre. A separate chapter is then devoted to each of Herriot's works in turn: "All Creatures Great and Small," "All Things Bright and Beautiful," "All Things Wise and Wonderful," "The Lord God Made Them All," and DEGREES"Every Living Thing." The discussion of each work includes sections on plot development and narrative structure, character development, thematic issues, and alternative critical approaches that may be fruitfully applied to the book. Helpful appendices contain identifications of minor characters in the works. A complete bibliography of all of James Herriot's works, critical sources, and a listing of reviews of all of his works completes the volume. Because of the popularity of Herriot's work among adults and young adults this companion will be a key purchase for school and public libraries.
Writers in Brazil and Mexico discovered early on that speculative fiction provides an ideal platform for addressing the complex issues of modernity, yet the study of speculative fictions rarely strays from the United States and England. Cyborgs, Sexuality, and the Undead: The Body in Mexican and Brazilian Speculative Fiction expands the traditional purview of speculative fiction in all its incarnations (science fiction, fantasy, horror) beyond the traditional Anglo-American context to focus on work produced in Mexico and Brazil across a historical overview from 1870 to the present. The book portrays the effects-and ravages-of modernity in these two nations, addressing its technological, cultural, and social consequences and their implications for the human body. In Cyborgs, Sexuality, and the Undead, M. Elizabeth Ginway examines all these issues from a number of theoretical perspectives, most importantly through the lens of BolIvar EcheverrIa's "baroque ethos," which emphasizes the strategies that subaltern populations may adopt in order to survive and prosper in the face of massive historical and structural disadvantages. Foucault's concept of biopolitics is developed in discussion with Roberto Esposito's concept of immunity and Giorgio Agamben's distinction between 'political life' and 'bare life.' This book will be of interest to scholars of speculative fiction, as well as Mexicanists and Brazilianists in history, literary studies, and critical theory.
This collection of essay by leading scholars in the field reveals
the major contribution of puritan women to the intellectual culture
of the early modern period, showing that women's roles with puritan
and broader communities encompassed translating and disseminating
key texts and producing an impressive body of original
writing.
For Henry Fielding, 'storytelling', whether in the form of a play, essay or novel, was a means of transmuting the dross of his own experiences. In this important new critical biography, Ronald Paulson brilliantly demonstrates how Fielding's life and writings evolved according to his experiments with different professions. It is not sufficient to say that he moved from one literary genre to the next, from drama to essay, from satire to novel. As a playwright and theater manager he thematized the theater and its workings in his writings, moving on to do the same as a journalist, barrister, and finally magistrate. Tom Jones, for example, can be interpreted as a self-projection, seen from the perspective of a barrister, an advocate for the defense; or Billy Booth as a conflation of the author and his father, seen now from the perspective of a grim but just magistrate. Each chapter in this intriguing book begins with an annotated chronology of the known facts, followed by analyses of the important issues. Paulson's account will be essential reading for all admirers of Fielding as well as serious students of his work.
Using a cognitive approach to literature, Self-Consciousness in Modern British Fiction uncovers representations of self-consciousness in selected modern British novels, exposing it as complicating character development. This innovative study offers new readings of works by Conrad, Joyce, Lawrence, Woolf, and Lessing to demonstrate the emergence of a self who feels split from the world. Readings of individual novels are informed by early twentieth century British psychology and philosophy, and by contemporary scholarship in embodied cognition and narrative identity. The models of self-consciousness rendered visible by this analysis improve our understanding of modernist technical experiment with stream-of-consciousness and free indirect discourse.
Product information not available.
In recent years, much Spanish literary criticism has been characterized by debates about collective and historical memory, stemming from a national obsession with the past that has seen an explosion of novels and films about the Spanish Civil War and Franco dictatorship. This growth of so-called memory studies in literary scholarship has focused on the representation of memory and trauma in contemporary narratives dealing with the Civil War and ensuing dictatorship. In contrast, the novel of the postwar period has received relatively little critical attention of late, despite the fact that memory and trauma also feature, in different ways and to varying degrees, in many works written during the Franco years. The essays in this study argue that such novels merit a fresh critical approach, and that contemporary scholarship relating to the representation of memory and trauma in literature can enhance our understanding of the postwar Spanish novel. The volume opens with essays that engage with aspects of contemporary theoretical approaches to memory in order to reveal the ways in which these are pertinent to Spanish novels written in the first postwar decades, with studies on novels by Camilo Jose Cela, Carmen Laforet, Arturo Barea and Ana Maria Matute. Its second section focuses on the representation of trauma in specific postwar novels, drawing on elements from trauma studies scholarship to discuss neglected works by Mercedes Salisachs, Dolores Medio and Ignacio Aldecoa. The final essays continue the focus on the theme of trauma and revisit works by women writers, namely Carmen Laforet, Rosa Chacel, Ana Maria Matute and Maria Zambrano, that foreground the experiences of female protagonists who are seeking to deal with a traumatic past. The essays in this volume thus propose a new direction for the study of Spanish literature of 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s, enhancing existing approaches to the postwar Spanish novel through an engagement with contemporary scholarship on memory and trauma in literature."
Literature and Photography in Transition, 1850-1915 examines how British and American writers used early photography and film as illustrations and metaphors. It concentrates on five figures in particular: Henry Mayhew, Robert Louis Stevenson, Amy Levy, William Dean Howells, and Jack London.
The position of spy fiction is largely synonymous in popular culture with ideas of patriotism and national security, with the spy himself indicative of the defence of British interests and the preservation of British power around the globe. This book reveals a more complicated side to these assumptions than typically perceived, arguing that the representation of space and power within spy fiction is more complex than commonly assumed. Instead of the British spy tirelessly maintaining the integrity of Empire, this volume illustrates how spy fiction contains disunities and disjunctions in its representation of space, and the relationship between the individual and the state in an era of declining British power. Focusing primarily on the work of Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, Len Deighton, and John le Carre, the volume brings a fresh methodological approach to the study of spy fiction and Cold War culture. It presents close textual analysis within a framework of spatial and sovereign theory as a means of examining the cultural impact of decolonization and the shifting geopolitics of the Cold War. Adopting a thematic approach to the analysis of space in spy fiction, the text explores the reciprocal process by which contextual history intersects with literature throughout the period in question, arguing that spy fiction is responsible for reflecting, strengthening and, in some cases, precipitating cultural anxieties over decolonization and the end of Empire. This study promises to be a welcome addition to the developing field of spy fiction criticism and popular culture studies. Both engaging and original in its approach, it will be important reading for students and academics engaged in the study of Cold War culture, popular literature, and the changing state of British identity over the course of the latter twentieth century. |
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