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This surprising study draws together the disparate fields of
postcolonial theory and book history in a challenging and
illuminating way. Robert Fraser proposes that we now look beyond
the traditional methods of the Anglo-European bibliographic
paradigm, and learn to appreciate instead the diversity of shapes
that verbal expression has assumed across different societies. This
change of attitude will encourage students and researchers to
question developmentally conceived models of communication, and
move instead to a re-formulation of just what is meant by a book,
an author, a text. Fraser illustrates his combined approach with
comparative case studies of print, script and speech cultures in
South Asia and Africa, before panning out to examine conflicts and
paradoxes arising in parallel contexts. The re-orientation of
approach and the freshness of view offered by this volume will
foster understanding and creative collaboration between scholars of
different outlooks, while offering a radical critique to those
identified in its concluding section as purveyors of global
literary power.
This second edition of Ian Gordon's A Preface to Pope places the
poet within the social, cultural and intellectual context of his
time. It throws new light on the theoretical and imaginative
structures of Pope's poetry focusing on the linguistic complexity
at its centre. It offers a critical survey of his work and also
contains introductory essays. The book concludes with a reference
section which includes indispensible information on places and
people in Pope's poetry, together with a glossary of technical
terms and a guide to further reading.
This second edition of Ian Gordon's A Preface to Pope places the
poet within the social, cultural and intellectual context of his
time. It throws new light on the theoretical and imaginative
structures of Pope's poetry focusing on the linguistic complexity
at its centre. It offers a critical survey of his work and also
contains introductory essays. The book concludes with a reference
section which includes indispensible information on places and
people in Pope's poetry, together with a glossary of technical
terms and a guide to further reading.
Marrying life-writing with classical reception, this book examines
ancient biography and its impact on subsequent ages. Close readings
of ancient texts are framed by an assessment of their influence on
the age of the French Revolution and Napoleon, and on the
nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, of responses to
ancient biography of modern critics, and of its visible legacy in
art and film. Crucially it asks what modern biographers can learn
from their ancient predecessors. Are the challenges involved in
life-writing still the same? Have working methods changed, and in
what ways? What in the context of biographical writing is truth,
and how are its interests best served? How is it possible, now as
then, honestly to convey a life?
Robert Fraser stresses the conciliating force of Ben Okri's writing
and his vision of an ideal community beyond the strife-ridden
present. This is the first ever full-length study of Ben Okri's
life and work based on twenty years of friendship and close
attention to his texts. It argues that his writing is best
appreciated against the background of his early exposure to the
Nigerian Civil War (1967-70) and his attempts since then to forge a
medium of conciliation through literature. We live by stories, Okri
once wrote, We also live in them. Following him from Lagos to
London and from obscurity to recognition, Fraser interprets Okri's
successive books as refashionings of this inner and outer narrative
space by strenuous imagining and generous exhortation. Okri's
fiction, essays and poems beckon us through the shabby but vibrant
streets of our strife-ridden metropolis towards a potential city of
justice, sincerity and peace.
This book focuses on the twin arts of literature and music,
supporting the notion that cosmopolitanism is the natural condition
of all the arts, and that all culture - without exception - is
migrant culture. It draws on examples ranging from the first to the
twenty-first centuries AD, on locations as remote as Alexandria and
Australia, on writers as different as Virgil and V.S.Naipaul,
Arnold and Achebe, and on musicians as diverse as Bach and Bartok,
Purcell and Steve Reich. Across thirteen chapters, the study
explores the interpenetration of all forms of human expression, the
fallacy of 'national' traditions and limiting conceptions of
regional character. The result is an exploration of artistic and
intellectual endeavour that is particularly welcome in the current
political climate, encouraging us to view history in ways informed
by our contemporary demographic and cultural concerns. Taken either
as a series of interrelated case studies, or else as an evolving
and sequential argument, this book is vital reading for scholars of
music, literature, and cultural and social history.
Where does the book belong? Does it enshrine the soul of a nation,
or is it a means by which nations talk to one another, sharing
ideas, technologies, texts? This book, the first in a two-volume
set of original essays, responds to these questions with
archive-based case studies of print culture in a number of
countries around the world.
Late Victorian quest romance has recently attracted renewed
attention from critics. Much of this interest has centred on its
politics of gender, and its vision of Empire. This book prefers to
view the genre in the light of debates within the then nascent
sciences of Anthropology and Archaeology. Starting with a
discussion of the nature of romance, it goes on to interpret the
encounters with lost or buried pasts. By describing encounters with
remote places and times, so it argues, these authors were asking
their readers disconcerting questions about humankind, and about
their own culture's institutions and beliefs. The book ends by
considering the implications of such a view for the whole colonial
enterprise.
In 1899 Marcel Proust read a translation of Ruskin's The Lamp of
Memory in a Belgian magazine. Fourteen years later he
back-projected the experience onto the narrator of Du cote de chez
Swann who describes himself as a boy reading the self-same piece in
the garden at Combray. In between lay a period of intermittent
enthusiasm for Victorian writing: a period which saw the
refurbishment of Proust's method and a fundamental rethinking of
his views. Much of this reassessment was achieved in relation to
English writers whom Proust adopted, absorbed and then as often as
not discarded. The end result was to enable him to pass from one
aesthetic to another. It is the contention of this book that the
clue to this process can be found not only in Proust's evolving
views on memory and time but also in his progression through a
three-fold typology of form: from 'mimetic form'
(art-imitating-the-real) through 'mnemonic form'
(art-imitating-memory) to 'abstract form' (art-imitating-itself).
The progress from one to another is illustrated through Proust's
reactions to Carlyle, Darwin, Emerson, Ruskin, George Eliot, Hardy,
Stevenson, Wells and Wilde. There is also a chapter on the
connection in Proust's mind between literary and art criticism and
his delayed response to the Ruskin-Whistler trial of 1878. A final
chapter relates these matters to the current debate as to the
parallel between the nineteenth century fin-de-siecle and our own.
Marrying life-writing with classical reception, this book examines
ancient biography and its impact on subsequent ages. Close readings
of ancient texts are framed by an assessment of their influence on
the age of the French Revolution and Napoleon, and on the
nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, of responses to
ancient biography of modern critics, and of its visible legacy in
art and film. Crucially it asks what modern biographers can learn
from their ancient predecessors. Are the challenges involved in
life-writing still the same? Have working methods changed, and in
what ways? What in the context of biographical writing is truth,
and how are its interests best served? How is it possible, now as
then, honestly to convey a life?
Examines West African poetry in English and French against the background of oral poetry in the vernacular. Surveys the transformation of the oral tradition to written form and the subsequent development of new movements negritude, nationalism and dissent.
Where does the book belong? Does it enshrine the soul of a nation,
or is it a means by which nations talk to one another, sharing
ideas, technologies, texts? This book, the first in a two-volume
set of original essays, responds to these questions with
archive-based case studies of print culture in a number of
countries around the world.
This surprising study draws together the disparate fields of
postcolonial theory and book history in a challenging and
illuminating way. Robert Fraser proposes that we now look beyond
the traditional methods of the Anglo-European bibliographic
paradigm, and learn to appreciate instead the diversity of shapes
that verbal expression has assumed across different societies. This
change of attitude will encourage students and researchers to
question developmentally conceived models of communication, and
move instead to a re-formulation of just what is meant by a book,
an author, a text. Fraser illustrates his combined approach with
comparative case studies of print, script and speech cultures in
South Asia and Africa, before panning out to examine conflicts and
paradoxes arising in parallel contexts. The re-orientation of
approach and the freshness of view offered by this volume will
foster understanding and creative collaboration between scholars of
different outlooks, while offering a radical critique to those
identified in its concluding section as purveyors of global
literary power.
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