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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary theory
1) Awakening is a unique book because it looks at the freedom movement and its key landmarks through the prism of Urdu literature. 2) This English translation It is originally written in Urdu by Gopi Chand Narang, author of numerous pathbreaking scholarly books. 3) This book will be of interest to departments of English Literature, Modern Indian history and South Asian Studies across UK.
The volume: * the cross-cultural perspective on trauma theory. * connects Western Trauma Theory and South Asian Literature * will be of interest to scholars and researchers of literature, history, politics and South Asian studies
This volume is a collection of ten essays that direct their gaze to the unfolding of contagions in the non-classical contexts of Asia and Africa. Or, to borrow from the title of one of Partha Chatterjee's books, they are reflections on the pandemic in most of the world. Featuring many scholars (of the humanities and social sciences) in the Global South, these chapters take as their intellectual focus the political-social as well as the ethical challenges posed by the contagions in the "East." Through analyses of literary narratives/films/video games, this Contagion Narratives traces the manufactured narratives of victimization by majority-communities and the lethal divides consequently being drawn between a reconstituted "authentic majority" and the more vulnerable minority 'other' in these societies. The essays in this collection are animated by imaginations of liveable alternatives on a planet on the brink. This volume traces lineages to Buchi Emecheta and Rabindranath Tagore rather than Albert Camus, to Satyajit Ray and the indie traditions rather than Hollywood, and to Buddhism rather than Christianity, to track the historic journeys of "modernity." Using an eclectic set of analytical tools and strategies of textual criticism, this volume argues that ideas of "democracy," even while they carry echoes of other societies, are markedly different as they travel from Gaddafi's Libya to Wuhan under lockdown to colonial Bengal.
Proposing an elaborate interdisciplinary approach to literary reading of any provenance based on "experimental cosmopolitanism," that is de- and recontextualizing the texts from the points of view of multiple cultural formations and historical moments, this book will help innovative teachers and students to rediscover dialogically and creatively the potential of literature as a life experiment. Comparative, Postcolonial and World Literature programs as well as programs in Cultural Anthropology will find abundant food for seminar discussion and essay topics in the wide range of theories and philosophies covered by the book and its extensive and up to date bibliography. Supported by a thorough critique of local and overarching theories, this novel method will profit from the singularity of each professional or apprentice reader without giving in to cultural essentialism or relativism. Learning to recognize the fundamental plurilingualism of the literary experience through translations and versions of literary texts is enlightening at all levels of a humanist literary education. Theory, here, is not an abstract and rigid superimposition but the dynamic condition of emergence of unforeseen meanings.
This book engages with the writings of W.G. Sebald, mediated by perspectives drawn from curriculum and architecture, to explore the theme of unsettling complacency and confront difficult knowledge around trauma, discrimination and destruction. Moving beyond overly instrumentalist and reductive approaches, the authors combine disciplines in a scholarly fashion to encourage readers to stretch their understandings of currere. The chapters exemplify important, timely and complicated conversations centred on ethical response and responsibility, in order to imagine a more just and aesthetically experienced world. In the analysis of BILDUNG as human formation, the book illuminates the pertinent lessons to be learned from the works of Sebald and provokes further investigations into the questions of memory, grief, and limits of language. Through its juxtaposition of curriculum and architecture, and using the prose of Sebald as a prism, the book revitalizes questions about education and ethics, probes the unsettling of complacency, and enables conversation around difficult knowledge and ethical responsibility, as well as offering hope and resolve. An important intervention in standard approaches to understanding currere, this book provides essential context for scholars and educators with interests in the history of education, curriculum architectural education and practice studies, memory studies, narrative research, Sebaldian studies, and educational philosophy.
Elizabeth Gaskell's writings abound in references to a cultural materiality encompassing different types of fabric, stuffs, calicoes, chintzes and fine-point lace. These are not merely the motifs of the Realist genre but reveal a complex polysemy. Utilizing a metonymic examination of these tropes, this volume exposes the dramatic structural and socio-economic upheaval generated by industrialization, urbanization and the widening sphere of empire. The material evidence testifies to the technological and production innovations evolving diachronically for the period, and the evolution of Manchester as the industrial 'Cottonpolis' that clothed the world by the 1840s. This volume analyses Gaskell's manipulation of the materiality, arguing its firm roots lie in the quotidian of women's domestic and provincial life within the growing ranks of the middle classes. Exploring Gaskell's tactile imagination, an embodied relationship with fabrics and sewing, a function of her daily life from an early age, this volume provides insight into the sensory aspects of cloth and its ability to stir affective responses, emotions and memories, whereby worn fabrics and even the absence of previous textile treasures, is poignant, recreating layers of recollection. This book aims to restore the pulsating, dynamic context of ordinary women's dressed lives and presents innovative interpretations of Gaskell's texts.
Tombs in Shakespearean Drama explores the rhetorical deployment of tombs and monuments on the early modern stage, demonstrating their historiographic power and mythmaking potential. By analyzing references to tombs in plays by Shakespeare and others in conjunction with extant monuments, this volume demonstrates how these references function in two overlapping ways in period drama: monuments act as repositories of information about the past, and they allow the living to construct and preserve fictive narratives. The stage exposes the flimsy materiality of paper, placing less value on the written word than period poetry. In this way, critics have perhaps oversold as universal Shakespeare's poetic praise of stone. Tombs within plays act as a powerful historical and narrative medium, raising the stakes to provide the stage with the illusion of permanency. Playwrights use tombs to anchor the stage action, giving a sense of lasting importance to dramatic events and combatting the ephemeral nature of the playhouse. In drama, Shakespeare and others drew on the persona preserved on tombs; this volume widens our view of how these representations interacted in the commemorative economy of early modern England. Within the playhouse, it was the tomb, not the tome, that stood as a symbol of permanence.
The Insectile and the Deconstruction of the Non/Human demonstrates the foundational but occluded role of the insectile in subject formation, tracking entomological events-such as buzzing, hatching, moulting, etc.-across the archives of psychoanalysis, seventeenth century still life painting, novels from the nineteenth century to the present day, and post-1970s film. The book analyses a phenomenon called entomological fascination, which it defines as the constellation between subjectivity, fascination and the insectile, and is driven by the central dynamic between form and formlessness: entomological fascination comprehends both a resistance to and a fantasy of total form. The investigation turns to Lacanian psychoanalysis-fascination and the insectile are key to Lacan's work-to argue its case, whose ultimate intent is to undertake a broader deconstruction of the so-called human by insisting on its implications in the insectile. Lacan is usually eschewed in posthumanities debates, thereby missing an important resource: the Lacanian archive can be opened up to follow the dimensions of the posthuman in its insectile 'forms'.
This book advances an understanding of artworks as temporal experiments that explore different ways of thinking, experiencing, and living time. Temporal Experiments brings together aesthetics and time in innovative ways. The book's seven chapters offer a critical investigation of seven tactile figures in which time is embodied: event, habit, idleness, kairos, rhythm, ritual, and transit. The book connects the specific temporal strategies of individual artworks to pressing questions regarding temporality and timing in contemporary society. Temporal Experiments offers an interdisciplinary approach to temporality and engages with various artistic mediums: modern novels, contemporary cinema, dub reggae, tomb statuary, and early modern and modern poetry.
This book addresses the narrative construction of Russian cultural memory in the work of Julian Barnes. It investigates how Barnes's texts tend to display a memory process as a transcultural mode of the creation of English and Russian national identities. Examining a need to revisit Russian canonical works, the detailed discursive analysis of the selected English texts exposes an intertextual remembering by duplication, thus contributing to the prevention of forgetting through the recuperation of still misrecollected cultural meanings. By creatively incorporating Russian intertextual elements into his work as a novelist, the author seems to insist on sweeping across and beyond national boundaries, revealing how frail the invention of tradition is when leading to the illusion of a solid collective memory and its political legitimation. The book considers not only a constructive dialogue between Barnes's fiction and Russian classical literature, but also this writer's interpretative, mostly imaginative, integration of Russian literature and culture into his work as a novelist. Exploring the double meaning of a literary metaphor as a mnemonic image of memory and a product of imagination, it offers a comprehensive analysis of Barnes's texts which play with intertextuality as an efficient tool of displacement of official memory, providing a deeper understanding of historical and cultural processes related to the constantly moving architecture of transcultural memory.
First published in 1973 Critics on George Eliot brings together a selection of the best critical essays and discussions on the novels of George Eliot, including many that are not easily available outside well established and comprehensive libraries. The selection covers the whole range of George Eliot's work, and by setting different critical points of view side by side helps the student to find a position of her own. The intention is not to limit the student's critical reading to one small volume, but to stimulate to explore the critics more widely for herself and to read the novels again with greater understanding, and pleasure. This is a must read for students of English literature.
- This is the first book of its kind to review a series of contemporary novels in English through the prism of the critical and theoretical categories of grievability and ungrievability. In the wake of Judith Butler's work on (un-)grievable groups, it addresses the ways in which fiction in English since the 1990s operates in its singularity to delve into the socio-cultural construction of grievability, thereby refining and displacing the more traditional categories of subalternity, inaudibility and invisibility associated with the poetics of postmodernism. - It also considers these categories in relation with the neighbouring issues of visibility and invisibility, ultimately providing a welcome prism though which to envisage such secular forms as the obituary and the elegy. Such genres provide means to perform mourning or, conversely, postulate an ethics of melancholia through continuing attachment to the departed. - Central to the objectives of this volume is the idea of providing an analysis of how Butler's influential categories may be of specific use to literary scholars all the more so as, in our post-trauma age, this traditional function of literature has brought to the fore such aspects of grievability as the influence of race, class, gender and/or sexual orientation in the determination of the grievability or ungrievability of the human beings exposed to individual or collective violence. - More concretely, this book uses the prism of (un-)grievability to contribute to the study of the ethics and politics of literature, taking on board the ethics and politics of form. It shows how some fictions delve into the lives of those considered ungrievable and are submitted to invisibility and/or illicit dead, while, in perpetrator trauma fictions, it is the perpetrators themselves whose refusal or impossibility to acknowledge the harm done to others under warfare conditions, foster a relation of spectrality that transforms the unfairly killed into ghosts who cannot be laid down to rest. - The essays collected in this volume relate the relevance of the above-mentioned critical and theoretical categories to various cultural areas of the English-speaking world, charting the singularities and common concerns of an array of contemporary texts and themes relating to various grounds of relegation and invisibilisation.
The volume: * the cross-cultural perspective on trauma theory. * connects Western Trauma Theory and South Asian Literature * will be of interest to scholars and researchers of literature, history, politics and South Asian studies
In the mid-1990s, Ireland was experiencing the "best of times". The Celtic Tiger seemed to instil in the national consciousness that poverty was a problem of the past. The impressive economic performance ensured that the Republic occupied one of the top positions among the world's economic powers. During the boom, dissident voices continuously criticised what they considered to be a mirage, identifying the precariousness of its structures and foretelling its eventual crash. The 2008 recession proved them right. Throughout this time, the Irish contemporary short story expressed distrust. Enabled by its capacity to reflect change with immediacy and dexterity, the short story saw through the smokescreen created by the Celtic Tiger discourse of well-being. It reinterpreted and captured the worst and the best of the country and became a bridge connecting tradition and modernity. The major objective of this book is to analyse the interactions between fiction and reality during this period in Ireland by studying the short stories written by old and emergent voices published between the birth of the Celtic Tiger in 1995 up to its immediate aftermath in 2013.
The Insectile and the Deconstruction of the Non/Human demonstrates the foundational but occluded role of the insectile in subject formation, tracking entomological events-such as buzzing, hatching, moulting, etc.-across the archives of psychoanalysis, seventeenth century still life painting, novels from the nineteenth century to the present day, and post-1970s film. The book analyses a phenomenon called entomological fascination, which it defines as the constellation between subjectivity, fascination and the insectile, and is driven by the central dynamic between form and formlessness: entomological fascination comprehends both a resistance to and a fantasy of total form. The investigation turns to Lacanian psychoanalysis-fascination and the insectile are key to Lacan's work-to argue its case, whose ultimate intent is to undertake a broader deconstruction of the so-called human by insisting on its implications in the insectile. Lacan is usually eschewed in posthumanities debates, thereby missing an important resource: the Lacanian archive can be opened up to follow the dimensions of the posthuman in its insectile 'forms'.
A systematic theoretical account of dual narrative dynamics previously neglected In contrast with other books that are concerned with how readers respond to the text, this book is concerned with how readers (are invited to) respond differently to contrastive or incompatible parallel narrative movements in the same text. Brings to light the many ways that authors have used dual dynamics to increase the power of their narratives
Gold-guarding griffins, Cyclopes, killer lakes, man-eating birds, and "fire devils" from the sky-such wonders have long been dismissed as fictional. Now, thanks to the richly interdisciplinary field of geomythology, researchers are taking a second look. It turns out that these and similar tales, which originated in pre-literate societies, contain surprisingly accurate, pre-scientific intuitions about startling or catastrophic earth-based phenomena such as volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, and the unearthing of bizarre animal bones. Geomythology: How Common Stories Reflect Earth Events provides an accessible, engaging overview of this hybrid discipline. The introductory chapter surveys geomythology's remarkable history and its core concepts, while the second and third chapters analyze the geomythical resonances of universal earth tales about dragons and giants. Chapter 4 narrows the focus to regional stories and discusses the ways these and other myths have influenced legends about griffins, Cyclopes, and other iconic creatures. The final chapter considers future avenues of research in geomythology, including geohazard management, geomythology databases, geomythical "cold cases," and ways the discipline might eventually set, rather than merely support, research agendas in science. Thus, the book constitutes a valuable asset for scientists and lay readers alike, particularly in a time of growing interest in monsters, massive climate change, and natural disasters.
The book is a biographical study establishing Ernie McClintock as a leading figure of the Black Theatre Movement In this contemporary moment in education and political consciousness, McClintock's biography and the impact on the Black Arts Movement will resonate with undergraduate students and serve as a powerful case study for theatre professors to integrate into their course curriculum. Contributes to the growing discourse of Black Arts Movement scholarship, Black acting theory, and queer studies.
This book explores the idea that while we see the vampire as a hero of romance, or as a member of an oppressed minority struggling to fit in and acquire legal recognition, the vampire has in many ways changed beyond recognition over recent decades due to radically shifting formations of the sacred in contemporary culture. The figure of the vampire has captured the popular imagination to an unprecedented extent since the turn of the millennium. The philosopher Rene Girard associates the sacred with a communal violence that sacred ritual controls and contains. As traditional formations of the sacred fragment, the vampire comes to embody and enact this 'sacred violence' through complex blood bonds that relate the vampire to the human in wholly new ways in the new millennium.
Life writing, in its various forms, does work that other forms of expression do not; it bears on the world in a way distinct from imaginative genres like fiction, drama, and poetry; it acts in and on history in significant ways. Memoirs of illness and disability often seek to depathologize the conditions that they recount. Memoirs of parents by their children extend or alter relations forged initially face to face in the home. At a time when memoir and other forms of life writing are being produced and consumed in unprecedented numbers, this book reminds readers that memoir is not mainly a "literary" genre or mere entertainment. Similarly, letters are not merely epiphenomena of our "real lives." Correspondence does not just serve to communicate; it enacts and sustains human relationships. Memoir matters, and there's life in letters. All life writing arises of our daily lives and has distinctive impacts on them and the culture in which we live.
Expanding outward from previous scholarship on gender, queerness, and heteronormativity in children's literature, this book offers fresh insights into representations of sex and sexuality in texts for young people. In this collection, new and established scholars examine how fiction and non-fiction writing, picture books, film and television and graphic novels position young people in relation to ideologies around sexuality, sexual identity, and embodiment. This book questions how such texts communicate a sense of what is possible, impossible, taboo, or encouraged in terms of being sexual and sexual being. Each chapter is motivated by a set of important questions: How are representations of sex and sexuality depicted in texts for young people? How do these representations affect and shape the kinds of sexualities offered as models to young readers? And to what extent is sexual diversity acknowledged and represented across different narrative and aesthetic modes? This work brings together a diverse range of conceptual and theoretical approaches that are framed by the idea of sexual becoming: the manner in which texts for young people invite their readers to assess and potentially adopt ways of thinking and being in terms of sex and sexuality.
Nuclear Cultures: Irradiated Subjects, Aesthetics and Planetary Precarity aims to develop the field of nuclear humanities and the powerful ability of literary and cultural representations of science and catastrophe to shape the meaning of historic events. Examining multiple discourses and textual materials, including fiction, poetry, biographies, comics, paintings, documentary and photography, this volume will illuminate the cultural, ecological and social impact of nuclearization narratives. Furthermore, this text explores themes such as the cultures of atomic scientists, the making of the bomb, nuclear bombings and disasters, nuclear aesthetics and art, and the global mobilization against nuclearization. Nuclear Cultures breaks new ground in the debates on "the nuclear" to foster the development of nuclear humanities, its vocabulary and methodology.
Autofiction and Cultural Memory breaks new ground in autofiction research by showing how it gives postcolonial writers a means of bearing witness to past cultural or political struggles, and hence of contributing to new forms of cultural memory. Most discussion of autofiction has treated it as an individualistic form, dealing with the personal growth of its authors. In doing so, it privileges narratives of private development over those of social commitment and accords with Western concepts of ownership and authorship. By contrast, Hywel Dix shows how a variety of writers outside the Western world have used the techniques of autofiction in a different way, placing themselves on the side lines of their own stories to show solidarity with struggles against imperialism and tyranny. Drawing on examples from Algeria, Ethiopia, the Caribbean, the Americas, India and Turkey, Dix presents autofiction as a form which combines the life stories of authors with the collective struggles of their societies to restore to view historical injustices that have been marginalised and forgotten. By contributing to new forms of cultural memory, autofiction raises important questions about what we choose to remember and what we value in the present. This book will be of interest to anyone working in postcolonial studies, world literature, trauma studies, autobiography, life writing or social justice.
Overlap between psychoanalysis and the arts is a perennially hot topic * Uses literature to inform psychoanalytic theory and practice * Fresh take on understanding key psychoanalytic topic of unconscious processes
1) This book offers a comprehensive understanding of Amrita Pritam's work. 2) It includes representative selections from her creative writings; her life and times in English translations; her nonfictional writings and also demonstrate her editing acumen as editor for over thirty years. 3) This book will be of interest to departments of South Asian Literature and Cultural studies across UK. |
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