|
Showing 1 - 3 of
3 matches in All Departments
This book explores how, far from being limited to deviation from
known pathways or desirable plans of action, wandering is an
abundant source of meaning, as intimately involved in the history
of our universe as it will be in the future of our planet. In
ancient Australian Aboriginal cosmology, in works about the origins
of democracy and surviving disasters in ancient Greece, in Eurasian
steppe nomadic culture, in the lifeways of the Rom, in the
movements of today’s refugees and in our attempts to preserve
spaces of untracked online freedom, wandering is the means by which
creativity and skills of adaptation are preserved in the interests
of ongoing life. Astray is an enthralling look at belonging, and at
notions of alienation and hope.
Essays illustrating the range and diversity of post-1970 British
women writers. Despite the enduring popularity of contemporary
women's writing, British women writers have received scant critical
attention. They tend to be overshadowed by their American
counterparts in the media and have come to be represented within
the academy almost exclusively by Angela Carter and Jeanette
Winterson. This collection celebrates the range and diversity of
contemporary (post-1970) British women writers. It challenges
misconceptions about the natureand scope of fiction by women
writers working in Britain - commonly dismissed as parochial,
insular, dreary and domestic - and seeks to expand conventional
definitions of "British" by exploring how issues of nationality
intersectwith gender, class, race and sexuality. Writers covered
include Pat Barker, A.L. Kennedy, Maggie Gee, Rukhsana Ahmad, Joan
Riley, Jennifer Johnston, Ellen Galford, Susan Hill, Fay Weldon,
Emma Tennant, and Helen Fielding. Contributors: DAVID ELLIS, CLARE
HANSON, MAROULA JOANNOU, PAULINA PALMER, EMMA PARKER, FELICITY
ROSSLYN, CHRISTIANE SCHLOTE, JOHN SEARS, ELUNED SUMMERS-BREMNER,
IMELDA WHELEHAN, GINA WISKER.
Ian McEwan's works have always shown an interest in the question of
how fiction operates. This interest does not usually manifest on
the formal level. A few of the early stories aside, his fictions
are not formally experimental. McEwan tends to opt for those
reliable patternings of space, time and narrative progression that
enable readers to trust the authorial environment sufficiently to
identify with characters and become invested, to some extent, in
what happens to them. Despite McEwan's commitment, by and large, to
naturalistic means of telling a story, his later novels also
demonstrate a concern with opacity, as characters often pursue
courses of action for reasons that are unclear to them. Equally
often, these actions bear some relation to the intrinsic opacity or
enigma of one's sexual desires, one's relation to one's mortality,
or one's relation to the actions of those human beings who have
gone before one, as this book will show. It is this focus on enigma
in McEwan's work, whether sexual, mortal, or historical, that lends
it to a psychoanalytic reading such as the kind pursued in this
book, because for psychoanalysis there is no such thing as full
access to one's self or to one's feelings or motivations. Given
that one's relation to history is also opaque in the sense that one
grasps fully-or imagines one grasps fully-only those historical
events which predate or otherwise excludes one, this study seeks
historical reasons for why McEwan sometimes blocks readerly
identification with characters in the early fiction. For these
characters are also products of their environments, environments
which the characters' relative opacity and unlikeability seems to
offset and exaggerate or present in a manner showcased for one's
judgment. And in this way the characters' environment is
denaturalized, to say the least. This book reveals how all of these
works explore, to some extent, the human tendency to act and feel,
in particular situations, in profound contradistinction to how one
might prefer to think one would. This failure to coincide with
one's image of how one would have expected, or preferred, to
behave-The Innocent's Leonard Marnham is not the cool, experienced
lover of his imaginings, any more than Solar's Michael Beard is
going to revamp his lifestyle or career-produces instances of
affective or imaginative excess, troubling images or feelings that
can often only be allayed or dealt with by a further failure to
coincide with one's desires. In this book, author Eluned
Summers-Bremner shows that McEwan's interests in opacity not only
become clear in significance and import but that his interests in
human failure to coincide with one's views about the past and hopes
for the future also appear as what they are: an ongoing concern
with how one relates to the complex operation of human history.
|
|