Author: William R. Paulson
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400858585
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 271
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Book Description
Paulson examines literary, philosophical, and pedagogical writing on blindness in France from the Enlightenment, when philosophical speculation and surgical cures for cataracts demystified the difference between the blind and the sighted, to the nineteenth century, when the literary figure of the blind bard or seer linked blindness with genius, madness, and narrative art. A major theme of the book is the effect of blindness on the use of language and sign systems: the philosophes were concerned at first with understanding the doctrine of innate ideas, rather than with understanding blindness as such. Originally published in 1987. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Author: Hannah Thompson
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137435119
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200
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Book Description
This book argues that the most interesting depictions of blindness in French fiction are those which call into question and ultimately undermine the prevailing myths and stereotypes of blindness which dominate Western thought. Rather than seeing blindness as an affliction, a tragedy or even a fate worse than death, the authors examined in this study celebrate blindness for its own sake. For them it is a powerful artistic and creative force which offers new and surprising ways of describing, and relating to, reality. Canonical and lesser-known novels from a range of genres, including the roman noir, science fiction, auto-fiction and realism are analyzed in detail to show how the presence of blind characters invites the reader to abandon his or her traditional reliance on the sense of sight and engage with the world in sensual, and hitherto unexpected, ways. This book challenges everything we thought we knew about blindness and invites us to revel in the pleasures and perils of reading blind.
Author: David Feeney
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9780820486628
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 352
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Book Description
Blindness has always fascinated those who can see. Although modern imaginative portrayals of the sightless experience are increasingly positive, the affirmative elements of these renderings are inevitably tempered and problematized by the visual predilections of the artists undertaking them. This book explores a variety of the (dis)continuities between depictions of the sightless experience of beauty by sighted artists and the lived aesthetic experiences of blind people. It does so by pressing a radical interdisciplinary reinterpretation of celebrated dramatic portrayals of blindness into service as a tool with which to probe the boundaries of the capacities of the sighted imagination while exploring the sensory detriment of our visually fixated notions of beauty. Works by J. M. Synge, W. B. Yeats, and Brian Friel are explored as a means of crafting a workable and innovative medium of theoretical and experiential exchange between the disciplines of literature, aesthetics, and disability studies. In addition to appraising previously unexamined aspects of the work of three of Ireland's most celebrated modern dramatists, this book considers the consequences for blind people of the exclusionary and prohibitive elements of traditional aesthetic theory and art education. The insights yielded will be of value to those with an interest in modern literature, differential aesthetics, visual culture, perception, and the experience of blindness.
Author: Edward Larrissy
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748632018
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
In the first full-length literary-historical study of its subject, Edward Larrissy examines the philosophical and literary background to representations of blindness and the blind in the Romantic period. In detailed studies of literary works he goes on to show how the topic is central to an understanding of British and Irish Romantic literature. While he considers the influence of Milton and the 'Ossian' poems, as well as of philosophers, including Locke, Diderot, Berkeley and Thomas Reid, much of the book is taken up with new readings of writers of the period. These include canonical authors such as Blake, Wordsworth, Scott, Byron, Keats and Percy and Mary Shelley, as well as less well-known writers such as Charlotte Brooke and Ann Batten Cristall. There is also a chapter on the popular genre of improving tales for children by writers such as Barbara Hofland and Mary Sherwood. Larrissy finds that, despite the nostalgia for a bardic age of inward vision, the chief emphasis in the period is on the compensations of enhanced sensitivity to music and words. This compensation becomes associated with the loss and gain involved in the modernity of a post-bardic age. Representations of blindness and the blind are found to elucidate a tension at the heart of the Romantic period, between the desire for immediacy of vision on the one hand and, on the other, the historical self-consciousness which always attends it.
Author: Srinivas Aravamudan
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822323150
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 444
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Book Description
Exposes new relationships between literary representation and colonialism, focusing on the metaphorizing colonialist discourse of imperial power in the tropics.
Author: Constance Classen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134678193
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 254
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Book Description
The Colour of Angels uncovers the gender politics behind our attitude to the senses. Using a wide variety of examples, ranging from the sensuous religious visions of the middle ages through to nineteenth-century art movements, this book reveals a previously unexplored area of womens history.
Author: Martin O'Kane
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 9781841271484
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 384
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Book Description
This collection focuses on the interdisciplinary nature of current biblical studies, especially the interpretation of the Bible through the arts. Its aim is to illustrate how the crossing of boundaries enriches our understanding of the text itself. Contributors include Robert Carroll, Mary Douglas, Wendy Porter, Edward Kessler, Larry Kreitzer, John Hull and Martin O'Kane. The themes embrace literature (Kipling), music (Bach) and art (Holbein). The editor contributes an introduction and an illustrated essay on the Flight into Egypt as an icon of refuge.>
Author: John M. Hull
Publisher: SCM Press
ISBN: 0334049431
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 161
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Book Description
The Tactile Heart is a collection of theological essays on relating blindness and faith and developing a theology of blindness that makes a constructive contribution to the wider field of disability theology. John Hull looks at key texts in the Christian tradition, such as the Bible, written as a text for sighted people, and at hymns, which often use blindness as a metaphor for ignorance and explores how these can be read by blind people.
Author: Marchella Ward
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009372777
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313
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Book Description
Examines the role that spectators play in the reception and perpetuation of ableist stereotypes about blindness in the theatre.
Author: Fedwa Malti-Douglas
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691194653
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 219
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Book Description
Woman's voice and body are closely entwined in the Arabo-Islamic tradition, argues Fedwa Malti-Douglas in this pioneering book. Spanning the ninth through twentieth centuries and covering a wide range of texts—from courtly anectdote to mystical and philosophical treatises, from works of geography to autobiography—this study reveals how woman's access to literary speech has remained mediated through her body. Malti-Douglas first analyzes classical texts (both well-known works like The Thousand and One Nights and others still ignored in the West) in which the female voice, often associated with wit or trickery of a sexual nature, is subordinated to the male scriptor. Showing how early Arabo-Islamic discourse continues to influence contemporary Arabic writing, she maintains that today feminist writers of novels, short stories, and autobiography must work through this tradition, even if they subvert or reject it in the end. Whereas woman in the classical period speaks through the body, woman in the modern period often turns corporeality into a literary weapon to achieve power over discourse. Fedwa Malti-Douglas is Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at the University of Texas, Austin. Her books include Structures of Avarice: The Bukhala' in Medieval Arabic Literature (Leiden) and Blindness and Autobiography: Al-Ayyam of Taha Husayn (Princeton). Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
