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With Mathilde Blind: Late-Victorian Culture and the Woman of
Letters, James Diedrick offers a groundbreaking critical biography
of the German-born British poet Mathilde Blind (1841-1896)-a
freethinking radical feminist. Born to politically radical parents,
by the time she was thirty Blind had become a pioneering female
aesthete in a mostly male community of writers, painters, and
critics, including Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Morris, Ford
Madox Brown, William Michael Rossetti, and Richard Garnett. By the
1880s she was widely recognized for a body of writing that engaged
contemporary issues (such as the Woman Question, the forced
eviction of Scottish tenant farmers in the Highland Clearances, and
Darwin's evolutionary theory), and she subsequently emerged as a
prominent voice and indeed a leader among New Woman writers at the
end of the century, including Mona Caird, Rosamund Marriott Watson,
and Katharine Tynan. She also developed important associations with
leading male decadent writers of the fin de siecle, most notably
Oscar Wilde and Arthur Symons. Despite her extensive contributions
to Victorian debates on aesthetics, religion, nationhood,
imperialism, gender, and sexuality, however, Blind has yet to
receive the prominence she deserves in studies of the period. As
the first full-length biography of this trailblazing woman of
letters, Mathilde Blind underscores the importance of her poetry
and her critical writings (her work on Shelley, biographies of
George Eliot and Madame Roland, and her translations of Feuerbach
and Bashkirtseff) for the literature and culture of the fin de
siecle.
Understanding Martin Amis is a comprehensive guide to the novels,
short stories and non-fiction by one of Britain's most highly
acclaimed and controversial authors. Building on the first edition,
of 1995, James Diedrick draws on personal interviews, reviews and
criticism to map the distinctive features of Martin Amis's
imaginative landscape - the sociosexual satire of ""Money"" and
""Yellow Dog"", the bold experimentation of ""Time's Arrow"" and
""Night Train"", and the provocative blend of autobiography and
cultural analysis in ""Experience"" and ""Koba the Dread"".
Diedrick illustrates how Amis has reshaped the British literary
landscape, expanding its stylistic and thematic range while
creating forms adequate to the experience of postmodernity.
Diedrick analyzes an increasing cultural conservatism in Amis's
work, rooted in Amis's relationship with his father, the novelist
Kingsley Amis. During his early career, the younger Amis opposed
his father's political and aesthetic conservatism. But his
opposition has given way to frequent expressions of political and
literary solidarity. Diedrick shows how this filial relationship
continues to shape the son's outlook and writing. Diedrick also
identifies two complementary impulses in Amis's work. The first is
journalistic and satirical, expressed in an incisive wit aimed at
contemporary social realities. The second is aesthetic, manifesting
a Nabokovian love of verbal play and formal experimentation.
Besides analyzing the ways Amis's fiction forges the topical into
the literary, Diedrick argues for the importance of Amis's
considerable journalistic oeuvre and provides close readings of his
non-fiction collection and his uncollected essays and reviews.
Director of some of the most controversial films of the twentieth
century, Stanley Kubrick created a reputation as a Hollywood
outsider as well as a cinematic genius. His diverse yet relatively
small oeuvre--he directed only thirteen films during a career that
spanned more than four decades--covers a broad range of the themes
that shaped his century and continues to shape the twenty-first:
war and crime, gender relations and class conflict, racism, and the
fate of individual agency in a world of increasing social
surveillance and control.
In "Depth of Field," leading screenwriters and scholars analyze
Kubrick's films from a variety of perspectives. They examine such
groundbreaking classics as "Dr. Strangelove" and "2001: A Space
Odyssey" and later films whose critical reputations are still in
flux. "Depth of Field "ends with three viewpoints on Kubrick's
final film, "Eyes Wide Shut," placing it in the contexts of film
history, the history and theory of psychoanalysis, and the
sociology of sex and power. Probing Kubrick's whole body of work,
"Depth of Field" is the first truly multidisciplinary study of one
of the most innovative and controversial filmmakers of the
twentieth century.
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