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The bold careers of Henry James, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and
Samuel Beckett--writers with profoundly unsettled cultural
identities--spark Margery Sabin's investigation of values carried
through inherited forms of speech. The Dialect of the Tribe offers
fresh readings of such great novels as The Golden Bowl, Women in
Love, Ulysses, and the Beckett trilogy which illustrate how complex
attitudes toward the speech forms of language inform the most
varied social, psychological, and aesthetic structures in modern
fiction. Sabin explores the powerful tension in these writers
between appreciation for the resources of common speech in English
and contrary longings for a freedom associated with abstraction,
system, and foreign or private language. Her own critical
procedures transcend restrictive and reductive polarizations, as
she lucidly analyzes the biases of both the Anglo-American critical
tradition and the challenge to that tradition in French literary
theory and practice. Written in a jargon-free, accessible style,
The Dialect of the Tribe argues that the ambiguous cultural
positions of the great modern novelists in English emerge as a
major source of their strength--the rich traditions of the English
language give enlivening power to writers also remarkable for their
drive toward radical independence and skepticism.
Dissenters and Mavericks ambitiously reinstates attention to individual authors at the centre of its inquiry into the relationship between literature and history. Offering fresh and provocative interpretations of both well-known and unfamiliar texts, the book joins what is still a tentative movement to open postcolonial studies to the competing values traditionally associated with literary criticism, where the exceptional matters as much as the typical, and analysis seeks to identify the distinctive qualities of thought and language in particular writers. Dissenters and Mavericks reinvigorates the interdisciplinary study of literature, history, and politics through an approach to reading that allows the voices heard in writing a chance to talk back, to exert pressure on the presuppositions and preferences of a wide range of readers.
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