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Books > Language & Literature > Literary & linguistic reference works > Literary reference works
Reading lists, course syllabi, and prizes include the phrase
'21st-century American literature,' but no critical consensus
exists regarding when the period began, which works typify it, how
to conceptualize its aesthetic priorities, and where its
geographical boundaries lie. Considerable criticism has been
published on this extraordinary era, but little programmatic
analysis has assessed comprehensively the literary and
critical/theoretical output to help readers navigate the labyrinth
of critical pathways. In addition to ensuring broad coverage of
many essential texts, The Cambridge Companion to 21st Century
American Fiction offers state-of-the field analyses of contemporary
narrative studies that set the terms of current and future research
and teaching. Individual chapters illuminate critical engagements
with emergent genres and concepts, including flash fiction,
speculative fiction, digital fiction, alternative temporalities,
Afro-futurism, ecocriticism, transgender/queer studies,
anti-carceral fiction, precarity, and post-9/11 fiction.
Relying on an edition of Novalis' notebooks which includes much of
the author's scientific and philosophical musings, Neubauer's study
evaluates Novalis' outline for a creative science and philosophical
background of the eighteenth century. Concentrating on his study of
physiology and medicine, this work illuminates Novalis' changing
perspectives on the relationship between the imagination and the
material world, and whether a synthesis between the two is
possible.
La Pasion Esclava addresses the masochist discursivity of La
Regenta (1884-1885) by Leopoldo Alas, Clarin, as a subversive
strategy of dominance and submission through which the foundations
of liberal thinking on education, agency, and freedom of the modern
subject are refuted. Differing from studies that prioritize the
Freudian psychoanalytic focus and link masochism with perverse and
passive behaviors, this book offers a pluralist approach, where
cultural, clinical-historical, and literary perspectives are
essential to relocate masochism to the area of passions, while
emphasizing the agency and creativity upon which the discursive
meaning of transgressive masochism in fin-de-siecle narrative is
articulated. Nuria Godon shows how La Regenta challenges the models
of partnership in modern society by displaying a reformulation of
the masochist contract that parodies the marital contract,
satirizes Rousseau's social contract, and places the wheels of
Krause's educational machine under scrutiny. Likewise, she explores
Catholicism's impact on the masochist dynamic in other contemporary
texts by authors such as Emilia Pardo Bazan and Armando Palacio
Valdes, without excluding Leopold von Sacher-Masoch-the Austrian
writer from whom the term masochism was coined-to further disclose
how religion's influence shapes the dialectic of female and filial
masochism in the Spanish context represented in Alas's masterpiece.
In this sense, La Pasion Esclava invites one to reconsider
masochism as a tool that tears apart the mechanisms of gender
subjection, which are observable not only in the Spanish literary
texts analyzed in this book, but also in other cultural
productions. La Pasion Esclava aborda la discursividad masoquista
en La Regenta (1884-1885) de Leopoldo Alas, Clarin, como una
estrategia subversiva de dominio y sumision mediante la cual se
rebaten los fundamentos del pensamiento liberal sobre la educacion,
la agencia y la libertad del sujeto moderno. Frente a las
investigaciones que priman el enfoque psicoanalitico de tradicion
freudiana y vinculan el masoquismo a conductas perversas y pasivas,
este estudio brinda una aproximacion pluralista -donde destaca la
perspectiva cultural, historica-clinica y literaria- gracias a la
cual es posible reubicar el masoquismo en el amplio terreno de las
pasiones y subrayar la agencia y creatividad sobre las que se
conforma el sentido discursivo del masoquismo transgresor en la
narrativa finisecular. Nuria Godon muestra como la novela cumbre de
Alas problematiza las propuestas de companerismo en la sociedad
moderna presentando una reformulacion del contrato masoquista que
parodia el contrato matrimonial, satiriza el contrato social
rousseriano y cuestiona el engranaje del sistema educativo
krausista. Asimismo, explora el impacto del catolicismo en la
dinamica masoquista en otros textos de autores contemporaneos entre
los cuales figuran Emilia Pardo Bazan y Armando Palacio Valdes, sin
olvidar a Leopold von Sacher-Masoch-autor sobre el que se acuna el
termino de masoquismo-para explicar posteriormente como la
influencia religiosa da forma al despliegue de la dialectica del
masoquismo femenino y filial en el contexto espanol trazado en La
Regenta. En este sentido, La Pasion Esclava invita a una
reconsideracion del masoquismo como herramienta que hace saltar los
mecanismos de sujecion generica, susceptibles de ser observados no
solo en el ambito literario espanol que el libro presenta sino
tambien dentro de otras producciones culturales.
The decade of the 1960s has come to occupy a uniquely seductive
place in both the popular and the historical imagination. While few
might disagree that it was a transformative period, the United
States remains divided on the question of whether the changes that
occurred were for the better or for the worse. Some see it as a
decade when people became more free; others as a time when people
became more lost. American Literature in Transition, 1960-1970
provides the latest scholarship on this time of fateful turning as
seen through the eyes of writers as various as Toni Morrison, Gary
Snyder, Michael Herr, Amiri Baraka, Joan Didion, Louis Chu, John
Rechy, and Gwendolyn Brooks. This collection of essays by
twenty-five scholars offers analysis and explication of the culture
wars surrounding the period, and explores the enduring testimonies
left behind by its literature.
This inspiring collection of essays covers a broad range of topics:
the passing of Seamus Heaney, meeting William Trevor, the Bayno
(The history of the Iveagh Trust), being crowned Miss Mod in the
1970s in a dance hall in County Offaly, and travels in the Alps,
among a host of others.
`Probably the most compulsive text ever penned about what it means
to handle and possess a book' - Christopher de Hamel, author of
Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts; `A real treasure trove for
book lovers' - Alexander McCall Smith; We love books. We take them
to bed with us. They weigh down our suitcases when we go on
holiday. We display them on our bookshelves or store them in our
attics. We give them as gifts. We write our names in them. We take
them for granted. And all the time, our books are leading a double
life.; The Secret Life of Books is about everything that isn't just
the words. It's about how books transform us as individuals. It's
about how books - and readers - have evolved over time. And it's
about why, even with the arrival of other media, books still have
the power to change our lives.; In this illuminating account, Tom
Mole looks at everything from binding innovations to binding
errors, to books defaced by lovers, to those imprisoning professors
in their offices, to books in art, to burned books, to the books
that create nations, to those we'll leave behind.; It will change
how you think about books.
Celebrating the one-hundredth anniversary of Andrey Bely's
Petersburg, this volume offers a cross-section of essays that
address the most pertinent aspects of his 1916 masterpiece. The
plot is relatively a simple one: Nikolai Apollonovich is ordered by
a group of terrorists to assassinate his father, the prominent
senator, Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov. Nevertheless, Bely's
polyphonic, experimental prose invokes such diverse themes as:
Greek mythology, the apocalypse, family dynamics, psychology,
Russian history, theosophy, revolution, and European literary
influences. Considered by Vladimir Nabokov to be one of the
twentieth century's four greatest masterpieces, Petersburg is the
first novel in which the city is the hero. Frequently compared to
Joyce's Ulysses, no novel did more to help launch modernism in
turn-of-the century Russia.
Contemporary Latin American fiction establishes a unique connection
between masquerade, frequently motivated by stigma or trauma, and
social justice. Using an interdisciplinary approach that combines
philosophy, history, psychology, literature, and social justice
theory, this study delineates the synergistic connection between
these two themes. Weldt-Basson examines fourteen novels by twelve
different Latin American authors: Mario Vargas Llosa, Sergio
Galindo, Augusto Roa Bastos, Fernando del Paso, Mayra
Santos-Febres, Isabel Allende, Carmen Boullosa, Antonio
Benitez-Rojo, Marcela Serrano, Sara Sefchovich, Luisa Valenzuela,
and Ariel Dorfman. She elucidates the varieties of social justice
operating in the plots of contemporary Latin American novels:
distributive, postmodern/feminist, postcolonial, transitional, and
historical justices. The author further examines how masquerade and
disguise aid in articulating the theme of social justice, why this
is important, and how it relates to Latin American history and the
historical novel.
A landmark volume that explores the interconnected nature of
technologies and rhetorical practice. Rhetorical Machines addresses
new approaches to studying computational processes within the
growing field of digital rhetoric. While computational code is
often seen as value-neutral and mechanical, this volume explores
the underlying, and often unexamined, modes of persuasion this code
engages. In so doing, it argues that computation is in fact rife
with the values of those who create it and thus has powerful
ethical and moral implications. From Socrates's critique of writing
in Plato's Phaedrus to emerging new media and internet culture, the
scholars assembled here provide insight into how computation and
rhetoric work together to produce social and cultural effects. This
multidisciplinary volume features contributions from
scholar-practitioners across the fields of rhetoric, computer
science, and writing studies. It is divided into four main
sections: ""Emergent Machines"" examines how technologies and
algorithms are framed and entangled in rhetorical processes,
""Operational Codes"" explores how computational processes are used
to achieve rhetorical ends, ""Ethical Decisions and Moral
Protocols"" considers the ethical implications involved in
designing software and that software's impact on computational
culture, and the final section includes two scholars' responses to
the preceding chapters. Three of the sections are prefaced by brief
conversations with chatbots (autonomous computational agents)
addressing some of the primary questions raised in each section. At
the heart of these essays is a call for emerging and established
scholars in a vast array of fields to reach interdisciplinary
understandings of human-machine interactions. This innovative work
will be valuable to scholars and students in a variety of
disciplines, including but not limited to rhetoric, computer
science, writing studies, and the digital humanities.
Between the invention of photography in 1839 and the end of the
nineteenth century, portraiture became one of the most popular and
common art forms in the United States. In The Portrait's Subject,
Sarah Blackwood tells a wide-ranging story about how images of
human surfaces became understood as expressions of human depth
during this era. Combining visual theory, literary close reading,
and in-depth archival research, Blackwood examines portraiture's
changing symbolic and aesthetic practices, from daguerreotype to
X-ray. Considering painting, photography, illustration, and other
visual forms alongside literary and cultural representations of
portrait making and viewing, Blackwood argues that portraiture was
a provocative art form used by writers, artists, and early
psychologists to imagine selfhood as hidden, deep, and in need of
revelation, ideas that were then taken up by the developing
discipline of psychology. Blackwood reveals the underappreciated
connections between portraiture's representations of the material
human body and developing modern ideas about the human mind. It
encouraged figures like Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne,
Thomas Eakins, Harriet Jacobs, and Henry James to reimagine how we
might see inner life, offering a rich array of metaphors and
aesthetic approaches that ultimately reconfigured the relationship
between body and mind, exterior and interior. In the end, Blackwood
shows how nineteenth-century psychological discourse developed as
much through aesthetic fabulation as through scientific
experimentation.
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Iulia-Emilia Dorobantu, Jacob Klingner, Ludger Lieb
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Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: these words have long
represented the promise of America, a ""shimmering vision of a
fruitful country open to all who come, learn, work, save, invest,
and play by the rules."" In 2004, Cal Jillson took stock of this
vision and showed how the nation's politicians deployed the
American Dream, both in campaigns and governance, to hold the
American people to their program. ""Full of startling ideas that
make sense,"" NPR's senior correspondent Juan Williams remarked,
Jillson's book offered the fullest exploration yet of the origins
and evolution of the ideal that serves as the foundation of our
national ethos and collective self-image. Nonetheless, in the dozen
years since Pursuing the American Dream was published, the American
Dream has fared poorly. The decline of social mobility and the rise
of income inequality-to say nothing of the extraordinary social,
political, and economic developments of the Bush and Obama
presidencies-have convinced many that the American Dream is no
more. This is the concern that Jillson addresses in his new book,
The American Dream: In History, Politics, and Fiction, which
juxtaposes the claims of political, social, and economic elite
against the view of American life consistently offered in our
national literature. Our great novelists, from Nathaniel Hawthorne
and Herman Melville to John Updike, Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, and
beyond highlight the limits and challenges of life-the difficulty
if not impossibility of the dream-especially for racial, ethnic,
and religious minorities as well as women. His book takes us
through the changing meaning and reality of the American Dream,
from the seventeenth century to the present day, revealing a
distinct, sustained separation between literary and political
elite. The American Dream, Jillson suggests, took shape early in
our national experience and defined the nation throughout its
growth and development, yet it has always been challenged, even
rejected, in our most celebrated literature. This is no different
in our day, when what we believe about the American Dream reveals
as much about its limits as its possibilities.
Even in the decades before Mark Twain enthralled the world with his
evocative representations of the Mississippi, the river played an
essential role in American culture and consciousness. Throughout
the antebellum era, the Mississippi acted as a powerful symbol of
America's conception of itself -- and the world's conception of
America. As Twain understood, The Mississippi is well worth reading
about. Thomas Ruys Smith's River of Dreams is an examination of the
Mississippi's role in the antebellum imagination, exploring its
cultural position in literature, art, thought, and national life.
Presidents, politicians, authors, poets, painters, and
international celebrities of every variety experienced the
Mississippi in its Golden Age. They left an extraordinary
collection of representations of the river in their wake, images
that evolved as America itself changed. From Thomas Jefferson's
vision for the Mississippi to Andrew Jackson and the rowdy river
culture of the early nineteenth century, Smith charts the
Mississippi's shifting importance in the making of the nation. He
examines the accounts of European travelers, including Frances
Trollope, Charles Dickens, and William Makepeace Thackeray, whose
views of the river were heavily influenced by the world of the
steamboat and plantation slavery. Smith discusses the growing
importance of visual representations of the Mississippi as the
antebellum period progressed, exploring the ways in which views of
the river, particularly giant moving panoramas that toured the
world, echoed notions of manifest destiny and the westward
movement. He evokes the river in the late antebellum years as a
place of crime and mystery, especially in popular writing, and most
notably in Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man. An epilogue
discusses the Mississippi during the Civil War, when possession of
the river became vital, symbolically as well as militarily. The
epilogue also provides an introduction to Mark Twain, a product of
the antebellum river world who was to resurrect its imaginative
potential for a post-war nation and produce an iconic Mississippi
that still flows through a wide and fertile floodplain in American
literature. From empire building in the Louisiana Purchase to the
trauma of the Civil War, the Mississippi's dominant symbolic
meanings tracked the essential forces operating within the nation.
As Smith shows in this groundbreaking work, the story of the
imagined Mississippi River is the story of antebellum America
itself.
An ideal introduction into the complex and compelling dramas of the
acclaimed playwright Now available in a paperback edition and
featuring a new preface, Understanding Sam Shepard investigates the
notoriously complex dramatic world of Sam Shepard, one of America's
most prolific, thoughtful, and challenging contemporary
playwrights. During his nearly fifty-year career as a writer,
actor, director, and producer, Shepard (1943-2017) consistently
focused his work on the ever-changing American cultural landscape.
James A. Crank's thorough study offers scholars and students of the
dramatist a means of understanding Shephard's frequent
experimentation with language, setting, character, and theme. The
new preface examines Shepard's legacy and his final work of
fiction, Spy of the First Person.
A History of Irish Modernism examines a wide variety of artworks
(from the 1890s to the 1970s), including examples from literature,
film, painting, music, radio, and architecture. Each chapter
considers a particular aspect of Irish culture and reflects on its
contribution to modernism at large. In addition to new research on
the Irish Revival and cultural nationalism, which places them
squarely in the modernist arena, chapters offer transnational and
transdisciplinary perspectives that place Irish cultural production
in new contexts. At the same time, the historical standpoint
adopted in each chapter enables the contributors to examine how
modernist practices developed across geographical and temporal
distances. A History of Irish Modernism thus attests to the unique
development of modernism in Ireland - driven by political as well
as artistic concerns - even as it embodies aesthetic principles
that are the hallmark of modernism in Europe, the Americas and
beyond.
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