Edward Lear

Edward Lear PDF Author: James Williams
Publisher:
ISBN: 0746312210
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
James Williams's account, the first book-length critical study of the poet since the 1980s, sets out to re-introduce Lear and to accord him his proper place: as a major Victorian figure of continuing appeal and relevance, and especially as a poet of beauty, comedy, and profound ingenuity.

Edward Lear

Edward Lear PDF Author: James Williams
Publisher:
ISBN: 0746312210
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
James Williams's account, the first book-length critical study of the poet since the 1980s, sets out to re-introduce Lear and to accord him his proper place: as a major Victorian figure of continuing appeal and relevance, and especially as a poet of beauty, comedy, and profound ingenuity.

Edward Lear and the Play of Poetry

Edward Lear and the Play of Poetry PDF Author: James Williams
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198708564
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
Of all the Victorian poets, Edward Lear has a good claim to the widest audience: admired and championed by critics and poets from John Ruskin to John Ashbery, he has also been read, heard, and loved by generations of children. As a central figure in the literature of nonsense, Lear has also shaped the evolution of modern literature and his work continues to influence and inspire writers and readers today. This collection of essays, the first ever devoted solely to Lear, builds on a recent resurgence of critical interest and asks how it is that the play of Lear's poetry continues to delight, and to challenge our sense of what poetry can be. These seventeen chapters, written by established and emerging critics of poetry, seek to explore and appreciate the playfulness embodied in the poems and to provide contexts in which it can be better understood and enjoyed. They consider how Lear's poems play off various inheritances (the literary fool, Romantic lyric, his religious upbringing), explore particular forms in which his playful genius took flight (his letters, his queer writings about love), and trace lines of Learical influence and inheritance by showing how other poets and thinkers across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries played off Lear in their turn (Stein, Eliot, Auden, Smith, Ashbery, and others).

Fantasy Fiction

Fantasy Fiction PDF Author: Lucie Armitt
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 9780826416858
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
This is a series of introductory books about different types of writing. One strand of the series will focus on genres such as Science Fiction, Horror, Romance, and Crime. The other strand will focus on movements or styles often associated with historical and cultural locations - Postcolonial, Native American, Scottish, Irish, American Gothic. These introductions all share the same nine-part structure: 1.A broad definition of the genre and its essential elements 2.A timeline of historical developments 3.Critical concerns to bear in mind while reading 4.Detailed readings of several key texts 5.In-depth analysis of major themes and issues 6.Signposts for further study 7.A summary of the most important criticism in the field 8.A glossary of terms 9.An annotated, critical reading list Writers covered in this book include: Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, George Orwell, J.R.R. Tolkien, Mary Shelley, J.K. Rowling, H.G. Wells, Thomas More, Jonathan Swift, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Yann Martel, Jeanette Winterson, and William Gibson.

Nonsense and Other Senses

Nonsense and Other Senses PDF Author: Elisabetta Tarantino with the collaboration of Carlo Caruso
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527557200
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 455

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Book Description
This book deals with a topic that is gaining increasing critical attention, the literature of nonsense and absurdity. The volume gathers together twenty-one essays on various aspects of literary nonsense, according to criteria that are deliberately inclusive and eclectic. Its purpose is to offer a gallery of “nonsense practices” in literature across periods and countries, in the conviction that important critical insights can be gained from these juxtapositions. Most of the cases presented here deal with linguistic nonsense, but in a few instances the nonsense operates at the higher level of the interpretation of reality on the part of the subject—or of the impossibility thereof. The contributors to the volume are established and younger scholars from various countries. Chronologically, the chapters range widely from Dante to Václav Havel, and offer a large span of national literatures (Czech, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese) and literary genres (poetry, prose, and drama), inviting the readers to trace their own pathway and draw their own lines of connection. One point that emerges with particular force is the notion that what distinguishes literary nonsense is its somehow “regulated” nature. Literary nonsense thus sounds like a deliberate, last-ditch attempt to snatch order from the jaws of chaos—the speech of the “Fool” as opposed to the tale told by an idiot. It is this kind of post-Derridean retrieval of choice as the defining element in semantic transactions which is perhaps the most significant insight bequeathed by the study of nonsense to the analysis of poetry and literature in general.

The Clash of Ireland

The Clash of Ireland PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900449040X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description


History and Violence in Anglo-Irish Literature

History and Violence in Anglo-Irish Literature PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004484175
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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Book Description


Comparative Criticism: Volume 12, Representations of the Self

Comparative Criticism: Volume 12, Representations of the Self PDF Author: E. S. Shaffer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521390026
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
This volume explores a theme that has become central in our time, as 'the death of God' is widely seen to be succeeded by 'the death of Man'. Our contributors set forth its urgency in a variety of contexts. Among these, Peter Stern gives the paradigmatic history of the bereft, damaged, and repudiated self in German philosophy and literature from Kleist to Ernst Jilnger. In 'Not I' Michael Edwards pursues the theological and psychological consequences of a self without substance. Peter France supplies a witty account of the marriage of self and commerce more at home in the eighteenth-century tradition of British empiricism, and the challenge of Rousseau's refusal of the terms of commerce. Raman Selden explores views of the self from the Romantics to the poststructuralists. Roger Cardinal probes the secret diary: is the genre a contradiction in terms? Stephen Bann explores the representations of Narcissus in recent psychoanalytic theory. Other contributors include Pierre Dupuy, David James, Julie Scott Meisami, Gregory Blue,Mark Ogden and A. D. Nuttall.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Contemporary American Poetry

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Contemporary American Poetry PDF Author: Craig Svonkin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350062510
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 549

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Book Description
With chapters written by leading scholars such as Steven Gould Axelrod, Cary Nelson, and Marjorie Perloff, this comprehensive Handbook explores the full range and diversity of poetry and criticism in 21st-century America. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Contemporary American Poetry covers such topics as: · Major histories and genealogies of post-war poetry – from the language poets and the Black Arts Movement to New York school and the Beats · Poetry, identity and community – from African American, Chicana/o and Native American poetry to Queer verse and the poetics of disability · Key genres and forms – including digital, visual, documentary and children's poetry · Central critical themes – economics, publishing, popular culture, ecopoetics, translation and biography The book also includes an interview section in which major contemporary poets such as Rae Armantrout, and Claudia Rankine reflect on the craft and value of poetry today.

The Limerick

The Limerick PDF Author: Bob Turvey
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476652805
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
For more than 200 years, the limerick has been loved for its mordant wit, breathtaking rhymes, swinging rhythm, groaning puns, and ability to paint outrageous mental pictures. This book analyzes the limerick's origin and evolution as the best-known humorous verse form in the English-speaking world. It also examines previous attempts to capture the history of the limerick, including those that used guesswork, presented flawed conclusions and even contradicted each other. Findings are laid out logically and chronologically, so readers can easily follow the thread of every claim.

Madness, Masks, and Laughter

Madness, Masks, and Laughter PDF Author: Rupert D. V. Glasgow
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 9780838635599
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
"Madness, Masks, and Laughter: An Essay on Comedy is an exploration of narrative and dramatic comedy as a laughter-inducing phenomenon. The theatrical metaphors of mask, appearance, and illusion are used as structural linchpins in an attempt to categorize the many and extremely varied manifestations of comedy and to find out what they may have in common with one another. As this reliance on metaphor suggests, the purpose is less to produce The Truth about comedy than to look at how it is related to our understanding of the world and to ways of understanding our understanding. Previous theories of comedy or laughter (such as those advanced by Hobbes, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Bergson, Freud, and Bakhtin) as well as more general philosophical considerations are discussed insofar as they shed light on this approach. The limitations of the metaphors themselves mean that sight is never lost of the deep-seated ambiguity that has made laughter so notoriously difficult to pin down in the past." "The first half of the volume focuses in particular on traditional comic masks and the pleasures of repetition and recognition, on the comedy of imposture, disguise, and deception, on dramatic and verbal irony, on social and theatrical role-playing and the comic possibilities of plays-within-plays and "metatheatre," as well as on the cliches, puns, witticisms, and torrents of gibberish which betray that language itself may be understood as a sort of mask. The second half of the book moves to the other side of the footlights to show how the spectators themselves, identifying with the comic spectacle, may be induced to "drop" their own roles and postures, laughter here operating as something akin to a ventilatory release from the pressures of social or cognitive performance. Here the essay examines the subversive madness inherent in comedy, its displaced anti-authoritarianism, as well as the violence, sexuality, and bodily grotesqueness it may bring to light. The structural tensions in this broadly Hobbesian or Freudian model of a social mask concealing an anti-social self are reflected in comedy's own ambivalences, and emerge especially in the ambiguous concepts of madness and folly, which may be either celebrated as festive fun or derided as sinfulness. The study concludes by considering the ways in which nonsense and the grotesque may infringe our cognitive limitations, here extending the distinction between appearance and reality to a metaphysical level which is nonetheless prey to unresolvable ambiguities." "The scope of the comic material ranges over time from Aristophanes to Martin Amis, from Boccaccio, Chaucer, Rabelais, and Shakespeare to Oscar Wilde, Joe Orton, John Barth, and Philip Roth. Alongside mainly Old Greek, Italian, French, Irish, English, and American examples, a number of relatively little-known German plays (by Grabbe, Tieck, Buchner, and others) are also taken into consideration."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved