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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Novels, other prose & writers
This volume seeks to understand more about the lives and histories of the general population of the Republic of Turkey during the years 1928 and 1945. During this period, concepts of Turkish nationalism were expounded in a top-down effort to rally the population to be united as Turks. Being a top-down effort, there needed to be mechanisms through which to transmit these concepts to the general population. This work assesses the level to which authors of indigenous Turkish detective fiction written between 1928 and 1945 attempted to aid in this process of transmission. Five series of this period are carefully analysed; the clear conclusion is that there was authorial intent to spread ideas of "Turkism" in each and every series.
Addressed to all readers of Dostoevsky, as well as to teachers, students, and specialists, this lucidly-written study approaches the underground man, Raskolnikov, and Ivan and Alyosha Karamazov as imagined human beings whose feelings, behaviors, and ideas are expressions of their personalities and experience. While asserting the autonomy of Dostoevsky's characters, Paris shows that there is a tension between them and the author's rhetoric and demonstrates that the characters often escape their illustrative roles. By paying close attention to mimetic detail, this book seeks to recover Dostoevsky's psychological intuitions and fully to appreciate his brilliance in characterization.
As the first essay collection dedicated to Philip K. Dick in two decades, this volume breaks new ground in science fiction scholarship and brings innovative critical perspectives to the study of one of the twentieth century's most influential authors.
German sociology--indeed sociology as a discipline--belongs to modern times. This unusual anthology includes works by Theodor W. Adorno, Uta Gerhardt, Jnrgen Habermas, Max Horkheimer, Karl Ulrich Mayer, Georg Simmel, Roberto Michels, Max Weber, Hans Gerth, Hans Speier, Alfred Schutz, Alfred Weber, Karl Mannheim, Theodor Geiger, Ralf Dehrendorf, Rene Konig, Renate Mayntz, Reinhard Bendix, Claus Offe, and Stephan Leibfried. A substantive introductioni by Uta Gerhardt and detailed biographical sketches of the contributors will aid the general reader, student, and scholar alike.
Marcel Proust's novel Remembrance of Things Past has been compared with the plays of Shakespeare in its wonderful range of characters, its penetrating insights into human nature, and its brilliant comedy. It is one of the most memorable books ever written. But it is long and richly structured, and a guide to its themes can be helpful. This is what Derwent May has provided in this book. He writes lucidly and entertainingly, both bringing out Proust's important ideas about art, and showing how they are embedded in a story based on seven large, glamorous and comic parties. This is a slightly revised edition of the book which was first published in the Oxford Past Masters series, and which was hailed at once as a valuable introduction to Proust.
This revised and expanded handbook concisely introduces narrative form to advanced students of fiction and creative writing, with refreshed references and new discussions of cognitive approaches to narrative, nonfiction, and narrative emotions.
The book traces the changing relation and intense debates between law and literature in U.S. American culture, using examples from the 18th to the 20th century (including novels by Charles Brockden Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, Harper Lee, and William Gaddis). Since the early American republic, the critical representation of legal matters in literary fictions and cultural narratives about the law served an important function for the cultural imagination and legitimation of law and justice in the United States. One of the most essential questions that literary representations of the law are concerned with, the study argues, is the unstable relation between language and truth, or, more specifically, between rhetoric and evidence. In examining the truth claims of legal language and rhetoric and the evidentiary procedures and protocols which are meant to stabilize these claims, literary fictions about the law aim to provide an alternative public discourse that translates the law's abstractions into exemplary stories of individual experience. Yet while literature may thus strive to institute itself as an ethical counter narrative to the law, in order to become, in Shelley's famous phrase "the legislator of the world", it has to face the instability of its own relation to truth. The critical investigation of legal rhetoric in literary fiction thus also and inevitably entails a negotiation of the intrinsic value of literary evidence.
The "invisible hand," Adam Smith's metaphor for the morality of capitalism, is explored in this text as being far more subtle and intricate than is usually understood, with many British realist fiction writers (Austen, Dickens, Gaskell, Eliot) having absorbed his model of ironic causality in complex societies and turned it to their own purposes.
Most critics of southern novelist Eudora Welty have analyzed her work with a primary focus on her southern background. In Serious Daring from Within, Franziska Gygax instead uses a gender-specific approach to analyze Welty's novels, illustrating how Welty's narrative techniques establish female authority and frequently undermine patriarchal values. From this unique perspective, Gygax examines Delta Wedding, The Golden Apples, Losing Battles and The Optimist's Daughter, and argues that Eudora Welty indirectly and subtly created a radical vision of a female world. The study applies feminist literary theory when considering the various narrative structures of each novel. Scholars of literary criticism, southern literary studies and/or women's studies will find Serious Daring from Within enlightening and rewarding.
Science Fiction, Alien Encounters, and the Ethics of Posthumanism offers a typology of alien encounters and addresses a range of texts including classic novels of alien encounter by H.G. Wells and Robert Heinlein; recent blockbusters by Greg Bear, Octavia Butler and Sheri Tepper; and experimental science fiction by Peter Watts and Housuke Nojiri.
An insightful work providing state-of-the-art critical guidance and informative commentary on the major novels of Don DeLillo in terms of how they respond to current social and ethical issues. Unlike the majority of American academic critics, author Paul Giaimo contends that Don DeLillo's award-winning novels are fully defined by neither postmodernism nor modernism. To demonstrate this thesis, Appreciating Don DeLillo: The Moral Force of a Writer's Work traces DeLillo's style through his novels, showing how it evolved from a recognizably postmodern mode into a realistic treatment of contemporary, postmodern conditions. In this original and nuanced examination, Giaimo discusses themes that range from the devastating portrayals of evil in Mao II, Libra and Cosmopolis, to the good and inspiring confrontation of media stereotypes and urban missionary work in Underworld. The powerful vision of language in The Names and White Noise is examined as a potent moral force of the novels. Equally important is discussion of the cultural background Giaimo believes should inform any reading of DeLillo's work, especially his Italian-American ethnic heritage and the American Catholic church of the 1950s.
This comprehensive introduction places the work of Julian Barnes
into historical and theoretical context. Including a timeline of
key dates, this guide explores his characteristic literary
techniques, offers extensive readings of all ten novels and
provides an overview of the varied critical reception his work has
provoked.
This comprehensive and sophisticated feminist analysis contradicts the negative evaluations of earlier feminist critics to define Oates' feminist accomplishments. Wesley presents Oates' fiction as a dynamic structure that grew out of her obsessive concern with the American family and shows her literary patterns of resistance to the gender ideology that shapes it. She illustrates how Oates' disturbing portrayals of troubled families can and do address complex issues of power in contemporary society--economic dislocation, gender inequity, and violence--as they are experienced in intimate relationships. The author defines and exemplifies the central concepts of family, power, and resistance in Oates' work with reference to her own literary criticism and the theoretical principles of Frederic Jameson. She begins by examining the presentation of the mother and the father in Oates' earliest works and then charts mother and daughter, brother and sister, and other family relationships. Wesley contends that the power dynamics of Oates' families relegate daughters to a position of impotence and sons to one of isolation and shows that the evolution of the children's refusal to identify themselves with their male or female models is a major focus in Oates' fiction.
Analyses literary representations of the American experience in selected works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. Reveals the ambivalence that underlay the cultural and political development of the United States as a former colony.
How does affective madness influence the social understanding of writers and other artists, or shape the creative act itself? In a 15-year longitudinal study at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, a study little known outside of psychiatry, 80 per cent of the writers reported either living with, or having had a lifetime incidence of, an affective disorder (depression or manic depression), as opposed to only 30 per cent of non-writer controls. Affective Disorder and the Writing Life interrogates the age-old mythos of the 'mad writer' through lived experience, literary analysis, writerly reflection, and contemporary neuroscience. These essays explore how affective disorders colour, drive and sometimes silence the writing mind a " and how affective difference has always informed the literary imagination.
Richard Wright is widely recognized as one of the most important African-American writers and as a significant 20th-century author. With the publication of Native Son in 1940, Wright established his enduring reputation as a man of letters. With the immense critical success of Native Son, Wright went on to author Black Boy, The Outsider, and Eight Men. His writings reflect his experiences growing up in the poverty and racial strife of the South, and his thoughts on major social issues. This volume traces the critical reception of Wright's major works, from the publication of Native Son to the present day. An introductory chapter overviews the critical response to his writings, while two biographical chapters discuss his writings in relation to his life. Sections are then devoted to Native Son, Black Boy, and The Outsider. Each of these sections presents reviews and articles reflecting the best criticism of Wright's works. A final section, "Richard Wright Today," offers contemporary assessments of Wright's reputation, as well as fascinating discussions of the recent Library of America editions of his works.
This book is a comparative study of 12 works of fiction broadly representative of the Western canon. Its aim is to discover what gives these 12 works their lasting appeal and vitality over and beyond their formal qualities. It focuses on the interplay of text and subtext within each work after defining these terms at the outset. It then compares its 12 sample classics systematically in a conclusion that argues from the works themselves to classics in general. Binion's key finding is that for a piece of fiction to feel deep, whole, and great, as classics do, its text must be underpinned from start to finish by a subtext, or alternative reading, which calls that text itself into question. A book for scholar, student and educated public alike, no serious reader will be able to consider what makes a classic without reference to this work.
This collection demonstrates how late-Victorian and Edwardian neurology and fiction shared common philosophical concerns and rhetorical strategies. Between 1860 and 1920 witnessed unprecedented interdisciplinary collaboration between scientists and artists, finding common ground in the prevailing intellectual climate of biological determinism.
Fiction writers and critics engage the aesthetic, political, philosophical, and cultural dimensions of contemporary fiction.
The financial crisis of 2008 quickly gave rise to a growing body of fiction: "crunch lit". Populated by a host of unsympathetic characters and centred around banking institutions, these 'recession writings' take the financial crisis as their central narrative concern to produce a new wave of literary and popular writings that satirise the origins and effects of modern life, consumer culture and the credit boom. Examining a range of texts from such writers as John Lanchester, Jonathan Franzen, Don DeLillo, Sebastian Faulks and Bret Easton Ellis, this book offers the first wide-ranging guide to this new genre. Exploring the key themes of the genre and its antecedents in fictional representations of finance by the likes of Dickens, Conrad, Zola and Trollope, Crunch Lit also includes a timeline of key historical events, guides to further and online resources and biographies of key authors. Supported by online resources, the book is an essential read for students of 21st century literature and culture.
This book stages a series of interventions and inventions of urban space between 1880 and 1930 in key literary texts of the period. Making sharp distinctions between modernity and modernism, the volume reassesses the city as a series of singular sites irreducible to stable identities, concluding with an extended reading of The Waste Land .
Jews and Jewishness loom large in the contemporary South Asian cultural imaginary, both on the subcontinent, and in the diaspora. Along with less canonical authors, Writing Indians and Jews examines many of South Asia's most celebrated and best known contemporary writers working in English - Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Anita Desai, Amitav Ghosh - who have placed Jewish characters and themes at the center of recent works. Anna Guttman argues that the work of Indian Jewish writers complicates the fields of postcolonial studies and her investigations make an important contribution to the study of contemporary South Asian and diasporic literature, and understandings of anti-Semitism, religious fundamentalism, and globalization.
The decade after 1815 was a period of cultural instability, in which literature was redefined in response to a mass readership. Magazines were a product of and response to a culture that was metropolitan in size and heterogeneity. This book analyses a literary genre that made creative use of a cultural confusion which elsewhere provoked anxiety. |
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