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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Novels, other prose & writers
The second of three volumes charting the history of the Modernist
Magazine in Britain, North America, and Europe, this collection
offers the first comprehensive study of the wide and varied range
of 'little magazines' which were so instrumental in introducing the
new writing and ideas that came to constitute literary and cultural
modernism.
Ideographic Modernism offers a critical account of the ideograph
(Chinese writing as imagined in the West) as a modernist invention.
Rather than focusing on the accuracy of this ideograph as a kind of
representation of China (a focus that would yield predictable
results), Christopher Bush reconstructs the specific history of the
ideograph in order to explore the question of representation in
more fundamental ways, ways that reflect the diversity and
complexity of literary modernism itself.
This books provides students with an introduction to the work of Ian McEwan that places his fiction in historical and theoretical context. It explores his biography and his hallmark literary techniques, and it looks at the issues of ethics and representation, focusing particularly on his most recent fiction. Including a timeline of key dates and an interview with the author, this guide offers an accessible reading of McEwan's work and an overview of the varied critical reception this has provoked.
Literature and Complaint in England 1272-1553 gives an entirely new and original perspective on the relations between early judicial process and the development of literature in England. Wendy Scase argues that texts ranging from political libels and pamphlets to laments of the unrequited lover constitute a literature shaped by the new and crucial role of complaint in the law courts. She describes how complaint took on central importance in the development of institutions such as Parliament and the common law in later medieval England, and argues that these developments shaped a literature of complaint within and beyond the judicial process. She traces the story of the literature of complaint from the earliest written bills and their links with early complaint poems in English, French, and Latin, through writings associated with political crises of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, to the libels and petitionary pamphlets of Reformation England. A final chapter, which includes analyses of works by Chaucer, Hoccleve, and related writers, proposes far-reaching revisions to current histories of the arts of composition in medieval England. Throughout, close attention is paid to the forms and language of complaint writing and to the emergence of an infrastructure for the production of plaint texts, and many images of plaints and petitions are included. The texts discussed include works by well-known authors as well as little-known libels and pamphlets from across the period.
Family Money explores the histories of formerly enslaved women who tried to claim inheritances left to them by deceased owners, the household traumas of mixed-race slaves, post-Emancipation calls for reparations, and the economic fallout from anti-miscegenation marriage laws. Authors ranging from Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frank Webb, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Chesnutt, to Lydia Maria Child recognized that intimate interracial relationships took myriad forms, often simultaneously-sexual, marital, coercive, familial, pleasurable, and painful. Their fiction confirms that the consequences of these relationships for nineteenth-century Americans meant thinking about more than the legal structure of racial identity. Who could count as family (and when), who could own property (and when), and how racial difference was imagined (and why) were emphatically bound together. Demonstrating that notions of race were entwined with economics well beyond the direct issue of slavery, Family Money reveals interracial sexuality to be a volatile mixture of emotion, economics, and law that had dramatic, long-term financial consequences.
John Edgar Tidwell and Steven C. Tracy have brought together for the first time a book-length collection of critical and theoretical writings about Sterling A. Brown that recovers and reasserts his continuing importance for a contemporary audience. Exploring new directions in the study of Brown's life and work, After Winter is structured around the following three features: (1) new and previously published essays that sum up contemporary approaches to the multifaceted works that Brown created in a variety of genres; (2) interviews with Brown's acquaitances and contemporaries that articulate his unique aesthetic vision and communicate his importance as a scholar, creative writer, and teacher; and (3) a discography of source material that innovatively extends the study and teaching of Brown's acclaimed poetry, especially his Southern Road, focusing on recordings of folk materials relevant to the subject matter, style, and meaning of individual poems from his oeuvre.
A series of introductory books, the Genre Series offers students, writers and academics a window into some of the most popular topics, styles and periods in literature. Designed to be user-friendly, each volume shares the same structure, including: A broad definition of the genre and its essential elements; A timeline of historical developments; Critical concerns to bear in mind while reading; Detailed readings of several key texts; In-depth analysis of major themes and issues; Signposts for further study; A summary of the most important criticism in the field; A glossary of terms; An annotated, critical reading list.
This collection seeks to illustrate the ways in which Thomas Mann's 1924 novel, The Magic Mountain, has been newly construed by some of today's most astute readers in the field of Mann studies. The essays, many of which were written expressly for this volume, comment on some of the familiar and inescapable topics of Magic Mountain scholarship, including the questions of genre and ideology, the philosophy of time, and the ominous subjects of disease and medical practice. Moreover, this volume offers fresh approaches to the novel's underlying notions of masculinity, to its embodiment of the cultural code of anti-Semitism, and to its precarious relationship to the rival media of photography, cinema, and recorded sound.
The writings and life of Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) have enjoyed considerable attention both from admirers of her work and from scholars. In this distinctive book, Susan Srigley charts new ground in revealing how O'Connor's ethics are inextricably linked to her role as a storyteller, and how her moral vision is expressed through the dramatic narrative of her fiction. Srigley elucidates O'Connor's sacramental vision by showing how it is embodied morally within her fiction as an ethic of responsibility. In developing this argument Srigley offers a detailed analysis of the Thomistic sources for O'Connor's understanding of theology and art. Srigley contends that O'Connor's ethical vision of responsibility opens a fruitful path for understanding her religious ideas as they are expressed in the lives and loves of her fictional characters. O'Connor's characters show that responsibility is a living moral action not an abstract code of behavior. For O'Connor, ethical choices are not dictated by religious doctrine, but rather are an engagement with and response to reality. Srigley further argues that O'Connor's ethics are not systematic, formulaic, or prescriptive. As a storyteller, she explores the moral complexities of life in their most concrete and dramatic form. Behaviors that appear in her fiction such as racism, sexism, or nihilism are exposed as inherently irresponsible. Approaching O'Connor's fiction from a moral perspective often better illuminates the dramatic struggle of a story, not because it offers a religious solution to a particular issue, but because the choices each character makes reveal a vision of reality that is either meaningful and sustainable or narrow and destructive. Flannery O'Connor's Sacramental Art reveals O'Connor's role as a prophetic novelist whose moral questions speak to the modern world with rare force. It will be welcomed by anyone who appreciates the moral or religious dimensions of her writing.
Jane Austen is one of the most extensively read writers in English literature, renowned around the world for her much-loved romantic novels. Little is often known about this brilliant author, yet in this absorbing collection of stories and trivia readers will find answers to the amazing and extraordinary aspects of Austen's life, work and legacy. From her development as a world-class author from unassuming origins and the secrets of her own life and loves, through insights into her novels and their characters along with the changing reception to them over the years, to intriguing stories behind the screen and stage adaptations of her works and her continued legacy, there is something for every enthusiast to relish. This authoritative and absorbing book is published to coincide with the 200th Anniversary of Austen's death in 2017.
Cicero's speech on behalf of L. Lucinius Murena, newly elected to the consulship of 62 BCE but immediately prosecuted for electoral bribery, is especially famous for its digressions and valuable for its insights into the complex political wrangles of the late 60s. It is, however, a speech more commonly excerpted and cited than read in its entirety, though whether the absence of an English-language commentary is a cause or effect of that situation remains uncertain. In short, a pedagogical commentary on this important and strange speech is long overdue. Distinguished Latinist Elaine Fantham's commentary is noteworthy for its ability to elucidate not only the rhetorical structure of this speech but the rationale behind Cicero's strategic decisions in creating that structure. It also calls attention to the stylistic features like word choice, rhetorical figures, and rhythmic effects that make the speech so effective, and explains with care and precision the political, social, and historical considerations that shaped the prosecution and defense of the somewhat hapless defendant. This commentary includes the kind of grammatical explication required to make its riches accessible to undergraduate students of Latin.
This book examines the profound effect, on a major critic and novelist of the twentieth century, of the period of English literature's greatest glory, the Renaissance. Beginning in the sixteenth century with the poems and plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and with prose writings such as Hakluyt's Voyages, and continuing through the great lyric poets of the seventeenth century, the Renaissance influenced every aspect of Virginia Woolf's work. All her available writing - letters, diaries, reading-notes, drafts of essays, and novels, and feminist polemic - are explored in this illuminating study of Virginia Woolf's varied reactions to the period and its impact on her fiction and criticism. Each of the novels, in particular, is shown to integrate some element of Renaissance literature in its language, characterization, and often structure, enriching the fiction; thus this study deepens our understanding of Woolf's creative process, and our enjoyment of the works.
Repetition and Race explores the literary forms and critical frameworks occasioned by the widespread institutionalization of liberal multiculturalism by turning to the exemplary case of Asian American literature. Whether beheld as "model minorities" or objects of "racist love," Asian Americans have long inhabited the uneasy terrain of institutional embrace that characterizes the official antiracism of our contemporary moment. Repetition and Race argues that Asian American literature registers and responds to this historical context through formal structures of repetition. Forwarding a new, dialectical conception of repetition that draws together progress and return, motion and stasis, agency and subjection, creativity and compulsion, this book reinterprets the political grammar of four forms of repetition central to minority discourse: trauma, pastiche, intertextuality, and self-reflexivity. Working against narratives of multicultural triumph, the book shows how texts by Theresa Cha, Susan Choi, Karen Tei Yamashita, Chang-rae Lee, and Maxine Hong Kingston use structures of repetition to foreground moments of social and aesthetic impasse, suspension, or hesitation rather than instances of reversal or resolution. Reading Asian American texts for the way they allegorize and negotiate, rather than resolve, key tensions animating Asian American culture, Repetition and Race maps both the penetrating reach of liberal multiculturalism's disciplinary formations and an expanded field of cultural politics for minority literature.
For all its concern with change in the present and future, science fiction is deeply rooted in the past and, surprisingly, engages especially deeply with the ancient world. Indeed, both as an area in which the meaning of "classics" is actively transformed and as an open-ended set of texts whose own 'classic' status is a matter of ongoing debate, science fiction reveals much about the roles played by ancient classics in modern times. Classical Traditions in Science Fiction is the first collection dedicated to the rich study of science fiction's classical heritage, offering a much-needed mapping of its cultural and intellectual terrain. This volume discusses a wide variety of representative examples from both classical antiquity and the past four hundred years of science fiction, beginning with science fiction's "rosy-fingered dawn" and moving toward the other-worldly literature of the present day. As it makes its way through the eras of science fiction, Classical Traditions in Science Fiction exposes the many levels on which science fiction engages the ideas of the ancient world, from minute matters of language and structure to the larger thematic and philosophical concerns.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, many in Britain believed their nation to be a dominant world power that its former colony, the United States, could only hope to emulate. Yet by the interwar years, the United States seemed to some to embody a different type of global eminence, one based not only on political and economic stature but also on new forms of mass culture like jazz and the Hollywood film. Britain's fraught transition from formidable empire to victim of Americanization is rarely discussed by literary scholars. However, the dawn of the "American century " is the period of literary modernism and, this book argues, the signs of Americanization-from jazz records to Ford motorcars to Hollywood films-helped to establish the categories of elite and mass culture that still inspire debate in modernist studies. This book thus brings together two major areas of modernist scholarship, the study of nation and empire and the study of mass culture, by suggesting that Britain was reacting to a new type of empire, the American entertainment empire, in its struggles to redefine its national culture between the wars. At the same time, British anxieties about American influence contributed to conceptions of Britain's imperial scope, and what it meant to have or be an empire. Through its treatment of a wide range of authors and cultural phenomena, the book explores how Britain reinvented itself in relation to its ideas of America, and how Britain's literary modernism developed and changed through this reinvention.
This volume in the 21st Century Oxford Authors series offers students and readers an authoritative, comprehensive selection of the work of Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682). Accompanied by full scholarly apparatus, the edition demonstrates the breadth of the author of some of the most brilliant and delirious prose in English Literature. Lauded by writers ranging from Coleridge to Virginia Woolf, from Borges to W.G. Sebald, Browne's distinct style and the musicality of his phrasing have long been seen as a pinnacle of early modern prose. However, it is Browne's range of subject matter that makes him truly distinct. His writings include the hauntingly meditative Urn-Burial, and the elaborate The Garden of Cyrus, a work that borders on a madness of infinite pattern. Religio Medici, probably Browne's most famous work, is at once autobiography, intricate religious-scientific paradox, and a monument of tolerance in the era of the English civil war. This volume also includes his Pseudodoxia Epidemica, an encyclopaedia of error which contains within its vast remit the entire intellectual landscape of the seventeenth centuryits science, its natural history, its painting, its history, its geography and its biblical oddities. The volume enables students to experience the ways in which Browne brings his lucid, baroque and stylish prose to bear across this range of diverse material, together with a carefully poised wit. This volume contains almost all of the author's work that was published in his lifetime, as well as a selection of writings published after his death. Explanatory notes and commentary are included, to enhance the study, understanding, and enjoyment of these works, and the edition includes an Introduction to the life and works of Browne.
Eliot is the rare case of a great poet who was also an academic
philosopher. Donald Childs' study examines the relationship between
Elliot's writing of poetry and his philosophical pursuits, in
particular his lifelong occupation with the work of F.H. Bradley,
Henri Bergson, and William James. This account also considers the
reception of Eliot's writing in philosophy and argues that the
study of this work has significantly entered recent Eliot
criticism. Overall, this volume provides a new reading of Eliot's
famous poems, his literary criticism, and social commentary.
This book is a study of writing processes of six modernist authors:
Hopkins, Yeats, Conrad, Forster, Joyce, and Woolf, from the 'golden
age of manuscripts'. Finn Fordham examines how these processes
relate to selfhood and subjectivity, both of which are generally
considered to have come under an intense examination and
reformulation during the modernist period. The study addresses
several questions: what are the relations between writing and
subjectivity? To what extent is a 'self' considered as a completed
product like a book? Or how are selves, if considered as things 'in
process' or 'constructs', reflections of the processes of writing?
How do the experiences of writing inform thematic concerns within
texts about identity?
This edition of the papyrus containing Didymos' comments on some of
Demosthenes' speeches aims to provide the student with a new
reading of the text, a facing translation that is carefully edited
for those who cannot use the Greek to show what is extant and what
is restored, and a detailed
Walking Naboth's Vineyard brings together nine prominent scholars to present new and valuable perspectives on the work of Jonathan Swift. In recent years Swift has been increasingly reconsidered and recast as a distinctly Irish writer, and there is little doubt that his artistic career was shaped by Ireland's troubled political life. Literary critics and scholars, as well as scholars of Irish literature, will find this collection unique in that it explores Swift's life and writing in a distinctively Irish context and considers how Swift was influenced as a member of a population that was divided against itself, colonized by a neighboring kingdom, and politically and culturally marginalized. These essays demonstrate how, despite Swift's ambivalence about his Irish nationality, he found Ireland's worldly position a close parallel to his own complex position in the political and cultural worlds in which he lived.
Arising in the 1800s and soon drawing a million readers a day, the commercial press profoundly influenced the work of Bronte, Braddon, Dickens, Conrad, James, Trollope, and others who mined print journalism for fictional techniques. Five of the most important of these narrative conventions--the shipping intelligence, personal advertisement, leading article, interview, and foreign correspondence--show how the Victorian novel is best understood alongside the simultaneous development of newspapers. In highly original analyses of Victorian fiction, this study also captures the surprising ways in which public media enabled the expression of private feeling among ordinary readers: from the trauma caused by a lover's reported suicide to the vicarious gratification felt during a celebrity interview; from the distress at finding one's behavior the subject of unflattering editorial commentary to the apprehension of distant cultures through the foreign correspondence. Combining a wealth of historical research with a series of astute close readings, The Novelty of Newspapers breaks down the assumed divide between the epoch's literature and journalism and demonstrates that newsprint was integral to the development of the novel."
Demosthenes' Philippic I, delivered between 351 B.C. - 350 B.C., was the first speech by a prominent politician against the growing power of Philip II of Macedon. Along with the other Philippics of Demosthenes', it is arguably one of the finest deliberative speeches from antiquity. The present volume provides the first commentary in English on the Philippics since 1907 and promises to encourage more study of this essential Greek orator. Aiming his commentary at advanced undergraduates and first-year graduate students, Cecil Wooten addresses rhetorical and stylistic matters, historical background, and grammatical problems. In addition to a full commentary on Philippic I, this volume includes essays that outline Philippics II and III, set them in their historical context, and emphasize the differences between these later speeches and the first.
Jane Eyre ranks as one of the greatest and most perennially popular works of English fiction. Although the poor but plucky heroine is outwardly of plain appearance, she possesses an indomitable spirit, a sharp wit and great courage. She is forced to battle against the exigencies of a cruel guardian, a harsh employer and a rigid social order. All of which circumscribe her life and position when she becomes governess to the daughter of the mysterious, sardonic and attractive Mr Rochester. However, there is great kindness and warmth in this epic love story, which is set against the magnificent backdrop of the Yorkshire moors. Ultimately the grand passion of Jane and Rochester is called upon to survive cruel revelation, loss and reunion, only to be confronted with tragedy. |
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