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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary theory
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.
A comprehensive collection which contains eight original chapters from a team of leading international interpretive philosophers. Freshly engages with the methodology of hermeneutics by applying the framework to contemporary sociopolitical topics. An outstanding reference source for researchers working in critical social science, social philosophy, ethical theory, environmental philosophy, philosophy of work, philosophy of testimony, philosophy of measurement, and philosophical hermeneutics itself.
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
The Routledge Introduction to Gender and Sexuality in Literature in Canada charts the evolution of gender and sexuality, as they have been represented and performed in the literatures of Canada for more than three centuries. From early colonial texts by Frances Brooke, to settler texts by Susanna Moodie and Catherine Parr Traill, to more contemporary texts by Jane Rule, Alice Munro, Joshua Whitehead, Ivan Coyote, and others, this volume will introduce readers to how gender and sexuality have been variably conceived in Canada and the work they perform across multiple genres. Calling upon recent currents of gender theory and examining the composition, structure, and history of selected literary texts-that is, the "literary sediments" that have accumulated over centuries-readers of this book will explore how those representations shift over time. By examining literature in Canada in relation to crucial cultural, political, and historical contexts, readers will better apprehend why that literature has significantly transformed and broadened to address racialized and fluid identities that continue to challenge and disrupt any stable notion of gendered and sexualized identity today.
Erotic medievalisms expose modern apparatuses of oppression, reclaim histories for marginalized people, and promote more inclusive representations in popular culture. Modern representations of the Middle Ages-including Santiago Garcia and David Rubin's graphic novel, Beowulf; Lil Nas X's music video for "Montero (Call Me By Your Name);" Patience Agbabi's retelling of Chaucer's The Miller's Tale, entitled "The Kiss;" and some BDSM (Bondage and Discipline, Dominance and Submission, Sadism and Masochism) practices-challenge pervasive power structures that privilege heterosexual male dominance commonly associated with medieval origins in popular culture. This comparative study between medieval and modern texts foregrounds the sexual gratification of people who are typically excluded from representations of the Middle Ages, specifically women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ individuals. Erotic displays of marginalized people in medieval contexts disrupt prevalent forms of oppression rooted in institutions that censor human experiences and they direct sexual desires towards social justice.
This book examines cultural imaginations post 9/11. It explores the idea of a religious community and its multifaceted representations in literature and popular culture. The essays in the volume focus on the role of literature, film, music, television shows and other cultural forms in opening up spaces for complex reflections on identities and cultures, and how they enable us to rethink the 'trauma of familiarity', post-traumatic heterotopias, religious extremism and the idea of the 'neighbour' in post-9/11 literary and cultural imagination. The volume also probes the intersections of religion, popular media, televised simulacrum and digital martyrdom in the wake of 9/11. It also probes the simulation of new- age media images with reference to the creation and dissemination of 'martyrs', the languages of grief, religionisation of terrorism, islamophobia, religious stereotypes and the reading of comics in writing the terror. An essential read, the book reclaims and reinterprets the alternative to a Eurocentric/Americentric understanding of cultural and geopolitical structures of global designs. It will be of great interest to researchers of literature and cultural studies, media studies, politics, film studies and South Asian studies.
This volume studies the manifestations of female trauma through the exploration of multiple wounds, inflicted on both body and mind (Caruth 1996, 3) and the soul of Irish women from Northern Ireland and the Republic within a contemporary context, and in literary works written at the turn of the twenty-first century and beyond. These artistic manifestations connect tradition and modernity, debunk myths, break the silence with the exposure of uncomfortable realities, dismantle stereotypes and reflect reality with precision. Women's issues and female experiences depicted in contemporary fiction may provide an explanation for past and present gender dynamics, revealing a pathway for further renegotiation of gender roles and the achievement of equilibrium and equality between sexes. These works might help to seal and heal wounds both old and new and offer solutions to the quandaries of tomorrow.
Joyce as Theory is the first study to argue James Joyce can be read as a theorist. Joyce is not just a favourite case study of literary theory; he wrote about how we make meaning, and to what effect. The present volume traces his hermeneutics in those narratives in Finnegans Wake which deal with textual production and interpretation, showing that the Wake's difficulty exemplifies Joyce's theoretical stance. All reading involves responding to problems we cannot quite fathom. This preoccupation places Joyce alongside Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan. Joyce as Theory revives debates on theory with a linguistic focus, laying open misconceptions that have muddled attempts to be over and done with this kind of thought. It demonstrates that Derrida and Lacan, almost exclusively presented as rivals, converge on a common position. It opposes the myth of linguistic theory as a formalist approach, instead showing that Joyce, Derrida, and Lacan give us a hermeneutic ethics alert to how meaning-making impacts our lived experience. And it challenges the notion that theory imposes matters alien to Joyce, demonstrating that it is an appreciation of Joyce's arguments in Finnegans Wake that generates a theoretical perspective. Joyce as Theory is essential reading for researchers and students in Joyce studies, continental philosophy, literary theory, and modernist literature.
Essays covering a broad range of genres and ranging from the late Ottoman era to contemporary literature open the debate on the place of Turkish literature in the globalized literary world. Explorations of the multilingual cosmopolitanism of the Ottoman literary scene are complemented by examples of cross-generational intertextual encounters. The renowned poet Nazim Hikmet is studied from a variety of angles, while contemporary and popular writers such as Orhan Pamuk and Elif Safak are contextualized. Turkish Literature as World Literature not only fills a significant lacuna in world literary studies but also draws a composite historical, political, and cultural portrait of Turkey in its relations with the broader world.
With Reading Alcoholisms, Jane Lilienfeld has produced a ground-breaking cross-disciplinary study using the social, psychological, and scientific literature on alcoholism and family alcoholism to examine the novels of Hardy, Joyce, and Woolf. Each of these authors was directly affected by the alcoholism of a family member or mentor, and Lilienfeld shows how the effects of alcoholism organized their texts: through the portrayal of a protagonist in The Mayor of Casterbridge, through the denial of parental alcoholism and its silent presence in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and through codependent reactive patterns of Mrs. and Mr. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse. With the remarkable empathy Lilienfeld has for human dimensions of alcoholism, she demonstrates that "the narrative strategies in each of these novels at times mimic the behaviors and feeling states often arising from alcoholism." Without an understanding of the multidimensional nature of alcoholism and the transmission of its effects across generations, any analysis of the work of these three literary giants is incomplete.
This stimulating volume brings together an international team of emerging, mid-career, and senior scholars to investigate the relations between philosophical approaches to language and the language of literature. It has proven easy for philosophers of language to leave literary language to one side, just as it has proven easy for literary scholars to discuss questions of meaning separately from relevant issues in the philosophy of language. This volume brings the two together in mutually enlightening ways: considerations of literary meaning are deepened by adding philosophical approaches, just as philosophical issues are enriched by bringing them into contact or interweaving them with literary cases in all their subtlety.
Modernity theory approaches modern experience as it incorporates a sense of itself as 'modern' (modernity), along with the possibilities and limitations of representing this in the arts and culture generally (modernism). The book interrogates modernity in the name of a fluid, unsettled, unsettling modernism. As the offspring of the Enlightenment and the Age of Sensibility, modernity is framed here through a cultural aesthetics that highlights not just an instrumental, exploitative approach to the world but the distinctive configuration of embodiment, feeling, and imagination, that we refer to as 'civilization', in turn both explored and subverted through modernist experimentalism and reflexive thinking in culture and the arts. This discloses the rationalizing pretensions that underlie the modern project and have resulted in the sensationalist, melodramatic conflicts of good and evil that traverse our contemporary world of politics and popular culture alike. This innovative approach permits modernity theory to link otherwise fragmented insights of separate humanities disciplines, aspects of sociology, and cultural studies, by identifying and contributing to a central strand of modern thought running from Kant through Benjamin to the present. One aspect of modernity theory that results is that it cannot escape the paradoxes inherent in reflexive involvement in its own history.
While scholars have been studying the short story cycle for some time now, this book discusses a form that has never before been identified and named, let alone analyzed: the mini-cycle. A mini-cycle is a short story cycle made up, in most cases, of only two or three stories. This study looks at mini-cycles spanning the period from Anton Chekhov's "little trilogy" (1898) to the "Alphinland" stories in Margaret Atwood's Stone Mattress (2014), including texts by such authors as Stephen Leacock, Alice Munro, Robert Olen Butler, and Clark Blaise. Consideration is also given to marginal examples, like Sherwood Anderson's "Godliness-A Tale in Four Parts" (1919), which can be seen as one story or four distinct texts unified under one title, and to what is called the "exploded" mini-cycle: one whose component stories are published with intervening stories between them rather than consecutively. For each mini-cycle, the analysis is based on close reading of both the linking elements-character, imagery, symbolism, and so forth-and the rhetorical and aesthetic effects of the mini-cycle's being made up of distinct stories rather than constructed as one long narrative.
During the eighteenth century, British critics applied terms of gender to literature according to the belief that masculine values represented the best literature and feminine terms signified less important works or authors. Laura Runge contends however that the meaning of gendered terms like 'manly' or 'effeminate' changes over time, and that the language of eighteenth-century criticism cannot be fully understood without careful analysis of the gendered language of the era. She examines conventions in various fields of critical language - Dryden's prose, the early novel, criticism by women, and the developing aesthetic - to show how gendered epistemology shaped critical 'truths'. Her exploration of critical commonplaces, such as regarding the heroic and the sublime as masculine modes and the novel as a feminine genre, addresses issues central to eighteenth-century studies.
The book examines prominent literary works from the past two decades by Russian women writers dealing with the Soviet past. It explores works such as Daniel Stein, Interpreter by Ludmilla Ulitskaya, The Time of Women by Elena Chizhova, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich, and In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova, and uncovers connecting thematic structures and features. Focusing on the concepts of displacement and postmemory, the book shows how these works have given voice to those on the margins of society and of 'great history' whose resistance was often silent. In doing so, these women writers portray the everyday experiences and trauma of displaced women and girls during the second half of the twentieth century. This study offers new insights into the importance of these women writers' work in creating and preserving cultural memory in post-Soviet Russia.
This open access book offers innovative and wide-ranging responses to the continuously flourishing literary phenomenon of autofiction. The book shows the insights that are gained in the shift from the genre descriptor to the adjective, and from a broad application of "the autofictional" as a theoretical lens and aesthetic strategy. In three sections on "Approaches," "Affordances," and "Forms," the volume proposes new theoretical approaches for the study of autofiction and the autofictional, offers fresh perspectives on many of the prominent authors in the discussion, draws them into a dialogue with autofictional practice from across the globe, and brings into view texts, forms, and media that have not traditionally been considered for their autofictional dimensions. The book, in sum, expands the parameters of research on autofiction to date to allow new voices and viewpoints to emerge.
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'.
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'.
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.
The concept of intertextuality - namely, the meaning generated by interrelations between different texts - was coined in the 1960s among literary theorists and has been widely applied since then to many other disciplines, including music. Intertextuality in Music: Dialogic Composition provides a systematic investigation of musical intertextuality not only as a general principle of musical creativity but also as a diverse set of devices and techniques that have been consciously developed and applied by many composers in the pursuit of various artistic and aesthetic goals. Intertextual techniques, as this collection reveals, have borne a wide range of results, such as parody, paraphrase, collage and dialogues with and between the past and present. In the age of sampling and remix culture, the very notion of intertextuality seems to have gained increased momentum and visibility, even though the principle of creating new music on the basis of pre-existing music has a long history both inside and outside the Western tradition. The book provides a general survey of musical intertextuality, with a special focus on music from the second half of the twentieth century, but also including examples ranging from the nineteenth century to the second decade of the twenty-first century. The volume is intended to inspire and stimulate new work in intertextual studies in music.
As the scholarly world attunes itself once again to the specifically political, this book rethinks the political significance of literary realism within a postcolonial context. Generally, postcolonial studies has either ignored realism or criticized it as being naive, anachronistic, deceptive, or complicit with colonial discourse; in other words-incongruous with the postcolonial. This book argues that postcolonial realism is intimately connected to the specifically political in the sense that realist form is premised on the idea of a collective reality. Discussing a range of literary and theoretical works, Dr. Sorensen exemplifies that many postcolonial writers were often faced with the realities of an unstable state, a divided community inhabiting a contested social space, the challenges of constructing a notion of 'the people,' often out of a myriad of local communities with different traditions and languages brought together arbitrarily through colonization. The book demonstrates that the political context of realism is the sphere or possibility of civil war, divided societies, and unstable communities. Postcolonial realism is prompted by disturbing political circumstances, and it gestures toward a commonly imagined world, precisely because such a notion is under pressure or absent.
This collection of original essays discusses the relationship between Hegel and the Frankfurt School Critical Theory tradition. The book's aim is to take stock of this fascinating, complex, and complicated relationship. The volume is divided into five parts: Part I focuses on dialectics and antagonisms. Part II is concerned with ethical life and intersubjectivity. Part III is devoted to the logico-metaphysical discourse surrounding emancipation. Part IV analyses social freedom in relation to emancipation. Part V discusses classical and contemporary political philosophy in relation to Hegel and the Frankfurt School, as well as radical-democratic models and the outline and functions of economic institutions.
Ecofeminist Science Fiction: International Perspectives on Gender, Ecology, and Literature provides guidance in navigating some of the most pressing dangers we face today. Science fiction helps us face problems that threaten the very existence of humankind by giving us the emotional distance to see our current situation from afar, separated in our imaginations through time, space, or circumstance. Extrapolating from contemporary science, science fiction allows a critique of modern society, imagining more life-affirming alternatives. In this collection, ecocritics from five continents scrutinize science fiction for insights into the fundamental changes we need to make to survive and thrive as a species. Contributors examine ecofeminist themes in films, such as Avatar, Star Wars, and The Stepford Wives, as well as television series including Doctor Who and Westworld. Other scholars explore an internationally diverse group of both canonical and lesser-known science fiction writers including Oreet Ashery, Iraj Fazel Bakhsheshi, Liu Cixin, Louise Erdrich, Hanns Heinz Ewers, Larissa Lai, Ursula K. Le Guin, Chen Qiufan, Mary Doria Russell, Larissa Sansour, Karen Traviss, and Jeanette Winterson. Ecofeminist Science Fiction explores the origins of human-caused environmental change in the twin oppressions of women and of nature, driven by patriarchal power and ideologies. Female embodiment is examined through diverse natural and artificial forms, and queer ecologies challenge heteronormativity. The links between war and environmental destruction are analyzed, and the capitalist motivations and means for exploiting nature are critiqued through postcolonial perspectives.
Narratives, in the context of urban planning, matter profoundly. Planning theory and practice have taken an increasing interest in the role and power of narrative, and yet there is no comprehensive study of how narrative, and concepts from narrative and literary theory more broadly, can enrich planning and policy. The Narrative Turn in Urban Planning addresses this gap by defining key concepts such as story, narrative, and plot against a planning backdrop, and by drawing up a functional typology of different planning narratives. In two extended case studies from the planning of the Helsinki waterfront, it applies the narrative concepts and theories to a broad range of texts and practices, considering ways toward a more conscious and contextualized future urban planning. Questioning what is meant when we speak of narratives in urban planning, and what typologies we can draw up, it presents a threefold taxonomy of narratives within a planning framework. This book will serve as an important reference text for upper-level students and researchers interested in urban planning.
Doctrine and Difference: Readings in Classic American Literature aims to expand and deepen the inquiry begun in the volume from 2007. Beginning with an essay on the avowedly Puritan poetry of Anne Bradstreet and ending with two not-quite-secular novels from late in the 19th century, this volume seeks to uncover the religious and philosophical meanings deeply embedded in so much of 19th century American literature, and then, importantly, to identify and analyze the techniques by which the "doctrines" are differentiated into imaginative literature. Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville-and yes, even Howells and James-are driven by powerful thematic intentions. But they do not preach: they dramatize. And, as they talk their way through their existential issues, they often talk to one another: yes, no, maybe, ok but not so fast. Stressing the idea of a shared, poet-Puritan inheritance, the new Doctrine and Difference means to re-confirm the vitality of literary history and, in particular, the importance of reading the classic texts of American literature in context and in relation. |
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