Beyond Innocence, Or, The Altersroman in Modern Fiction

Beyond Innocence, Or, The Altersroman in Modern Fiction PDF Author: Linda A. Westervelt
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 9780826211378
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
In this groundbreaking work, Linda A. Westervelt defines an important yet previously unidentified and therefore unnamed type of novel, the altersroman, or age novel. Fictions focusing on a protagonist's confrontation with mortality toward the end of middle age are likely to become ever more prominent in a Western world in which the average age of the population increases and more people reach late middle age and old age. Working from a diverse sample of modern literature, Westervelt analyzes the variety of responses to the life evaluation. Some characters achieve a level of affirmation that allows renewal, redirection, or simply peace, while others confront feelings of disgust or despair that so little time is left them. Her altersromane are books about seeking wisdom, though not everyone of this age becomes wise. The use of the term altersroman highlights the fact that the altersroman is a classification comparable to but also clearly distinguishable from the bildungsroman, wherein characters make the transition from youth to adulthood. Westervelt contrasts her older protagonists' characteristics with the equivalent characteristics in the bildungsroman through an examination of Don Quixote, part 2, as well as six American novels: The Ambassadors, by Henry James; The Professor's House, by Willa Cather; The Mansion, by William Faulkner; The Angle of Repose, by Wallace Stegner; A Book of Common Prayer, by Joan Didion; and Jazz, by Toni Morrison. These seven works, though remarkably different, share the common features of the altersroman. Westervelt articulates the traits clearly, rests them on the psychological literature, and then shows in depth how the characteristics of the altersroman can enrich and more deeply inform our reading of a significant subset of modern literature that previously went unheralded. Readers can use Westervelt's analysis to identify altersromane in literature other than their own, and she begins this process by identifying exemplars written in other languages. Beyond Innocence, or the Altersroman in Modern Fiction introduces readers to the altersroman as a tool for classification and analysis and demonstrates the power and utility of that tool. It offers a meaningful and enriching complement to the more established category of the bildungsroman.

Beyond Innocence, Or, The Altersroman in Modern Fiction

Beyond Innocence, Or, The Altersroman in Modern Fiction PDF Author: Linda A. Westervelt
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 9780826211378
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 222

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this groundbreaking work, Linda A. Westervelt defines an important yet previously unidentified and therefore unnamed type of novel, the altersroman, or age novel. Fictions focusing on a protagonist's confrontation with mortality toward the end of middle age are likely to become ever more prominent in a Western world in which the average age of the population increases and more people reach late middle age and old age. Working from a diverse sample of modern literature, Westervelt analyzes the variety of responses to the life evaluation. Some characters achieve a level of affirmation that allows renewal, redirection, or simply peace, while others confront feelings of disgust or despair that so little time is left them. Her altersromane are books about seeking wisdom, though not everyone of this age becomes wise. The use of the term altersroman highlights the fact that the altersroman is a classification comparable to but also clearly distinguishable from the bildungsroman, wherein characters make the transition from youth to adulthood. Westervelt contrasts her older protagonists' characteristics with the equivalent characteristics in the bildungsroman through an examination of Don Quixote, part 2, as well as six American novels: The Ambassadors, by Henry James; The Professor's House, by Willa Cather; The Mansion, by William Faulkner; The Angle of Repose, by Wallace Stegner; A Book of Common Prayer, by Joan Didion; and Jazz, by Toni Morrison. These seven works, though remarkably different, share the common features of the altersroman. Westervelt articulates the traits clearly, rests them on the psychological literature, and then shows in depth how the characteristics of the altersroman can enrich and more deeply inform our reading of a significant subset of modern literature that previously went unheralded. Readers can use Westervelt's analysis to identify altersromane in literature other than their own, and she begins this process by identifying exemplars written in other languages. Beyond Innocence, or the Altersroman in Modern Fiction introduces readers to the altersroman as a tool for classification and analysis and demonstrates the power and utility of that tool. It offers a meaningful and enriching complement to the more established category of the bildungsroman.

From Old Woman to Older Women

From Old Woman to Older Women PDF Author: Sally Chivers
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
ISBN: 9780814209356
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
Drawing on the perspective of aging bodies in order to approach the study of contemporary Canadian women's fiction, the author seeks to understand body criticism in general because elderly physical experiences lay bare crucial assumptions of thinking through the body. It also investigates the mechanisms and effects of constructions of aging in order to combat the automatically negative reactions most readers have to the topic of old age.

Figuring Age

Figuring Age PDF Author: Kathleen Woodward
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253113849
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 398

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Book Description
Figuring Age engages the virtually invisible subject of older women in western culture. Like other markers of social difference, age is given meaning by a culture. Yet unlike gender and race, the subjects of age and aging have received little sustained attention. Central to Figuring Age is the crucial question of how women are aged by culture. How are older women represented in a visual culture that is dominated by images of youth in television, film, and life performance? How do psychoanalysis, rejuvenation therapy and hormone replacement therapy, the fashion system, cosmetic surgery, and midlife bodybuilding shape our views of aging as well as of the older body itself? What is the "timing" of aging? To what extent is aging a culturally-induced trauma?

Writing America into the Twenty-First Century

Writing America into the Twenty-First Century PDF Author: Elizabeth Boyle
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443821993
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 165

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Book Description
Writing America into the Twenty-First Century: Essays on the American Novel seeks to explore an exciting period in American literary scholarship. Concentrating on novels written after 1990 and through to the new millennium and to the present day, this collection presents a refreshing and much-needed analysis of recent American fiction. Representing the work of established scholars and emerging critical voices, the essays interrogate a range of fiction including works by Philip Roth, Jeffrey Eugenides, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon and Cormac McCarthy. Accessible to students, scholars and the interested reader, this invigorating collection navigates the works of several key male American authors of the last twenty years and, in so doing, offers a new way of examining the American novel. This volume’s strength lies in its careful academic focus on recent American fiction and seeks to re-acquaint the reader with well-known authors and introduce them to new literary voices such as Christopher John Farley, Anthony Giardina and Daniel Suarez. The collection is organised into four large topic areas: ‘Youth and Age,’ ‘War and Crime,’ ‘Culture’ and ‘Spaces and Patterns.’ Each essay deals with its own particular subject and author but the full impact of each section on the concept of writing the American novel into the present day can only really be understood when read in conjunction with the others. Writing America, a companion volume to Reading America: New Perspectives on the American Novel (2008) would be a valuable asset to any university or branch library. The volume will also attract strong interest from established academics, especially those researching the fields of literature, critical theory, cultural history and politics.

The Older Woman in Recent Fiction

The Older Woman in Recent Fiction PDF Author: Zoe Brennan
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786480289
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 197

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Book Description
This critical study explores late twentieth century novels by women writers--including Doris Lessing, May Sarton and Barbara Pym--that feature female protagonists over the age of sixty. These novels' discourses on aging contrast with those largely pejorative ones that dominate Western society. They break the silence that normally surrounds the lives of the aged, and this book investigates how older female protagonists are represented in relation to areas such as sexuality, dependence and everyday life. Beginning with an investigation of popular opinions about aging and a survey of hypotheses from disciplines including gerontology, psychology and feminism, the text reviews literary critical attitudes toward fictions of aging; analyzes representations of physically dependent characters, whose anger over their failing bodies is often eased by relationships with their female friends; discusses how paradigms of female sexuality exclude the possibility of older women being sexually desirable; examines characters that live a contented life, finding a more polemical side to them than is noted in more conventional literary critiques; and analyzes the aged sleuth in classical detective fiction.

The Open Road

The Open Road PDF Author: Clayton Holt Ernst
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 962

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Book Description


From the Hearth to the Open Road

From the Hearth to the Open Road PDF Author: Barbara F. Waxman
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
This literary critical book deals exclusively with contemporary fiction by women that focuses on aging of women. It discusses the emergence of a new fictional genre, the novel of ripening or Reifungsroman. This emerging genre about the aging heroine reconceptualizes middle and old age for women, taking it from a formerly stereotypical state of passivity and deterioration (by the hearthside) into one of adventure, growth, self-discovery, self-affirmation, and integration (on the open road). The book contains an extensive bibliography of twentieth-century popular periodical articles on aging (Canadian, American, and British); literary critical articles on aging in the fiction of Doris Lessing, Alice Adams, Paule Marshall, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Pym, May Sarton, and Margaret Laurence; as well as general literary critical works on these authors; and some general (non-literary) studies of aging, often from a feminist framework (such as Simone de Beavoir's The Coming of Age). Using a feminist theoretical approach, with some influence from social literary critics such as Lentricchia and Said, the book surveys, in the first chapter, selected popular magazine articles written over this century. The next chapter analyzes fiction on middle-aged women, in works by Doris Lessing and Alice Adams. Chapter Three analyzes young-old women, in works by Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Taylor, and Paule Marshall. The final chapter looks at frail, or dependent old women, in works by May Sarton and Margaret Laurence. This work should be well received by students and scholars engaged in the study of literary criticism, women's studies in literature, gerontology, the life-cycle in literature, and contemporary women in literature.

The Call of the Open Road: A Collection of Poems

The Call of the Open Road: A Collection of Poems PDF Author: Sarah Jane Gough Laughlin
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 1684718759
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 84

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Book Description
Photography by Jane F. Corbett. Compiled by Judith Gibson, this collection of poems by Sarah Jane Gough Laughlin illustrates that life is a journey, a pilgrimage which stretches "on through the sunshine" to a "land of pine and rain." It is the call of an open road which divides in many directions. Sarah Jane learned that each path she took led to a better one and, even though she endured much hardship through her journeys, she was willing to launch forward into the unknown, less traveled way. She believed her poetry to be "homespun" and simplistic; however, the words are a reflection of her inward beauty. This volume of poetry will inspire you to find your own quiet places and open roads.

The Quality of Life

The Quality of Life PDF Author: Richard Pine
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527570754
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 475

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Book Description
These essays represent a selection of 40 years’ commentary on the political dimensions of cultural life. They address the entire spectrum of culture, from theories of international communication to the provision of cultural and leisure facilities at local level. As a former consultant to the Council of Europe, the author has developed a penetrating insight into the decision-making process between local authorities and citizens’ groups, which is discussed in two seminal papers from the 1980s which pioneered the concept of Cultural Democracy. In addition, the book’s close readings of novels and plays by Irish and Greek writers explore the way that all writing and forms of self-expression have a political message and repercussions.

Policing the Open Road

Policing the Open Road PDF Author: Sarah A. Seo
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674240472
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
A Smithsonian Best History Book of the Year Winner of the Littleton-Griswold Prize Winner of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award Winner of the Order of the Coif Award Winner of the Sidney M. Edelstein Prize Winner of the David J. Langum Sr. Prize in American Legal History Winner of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize “From traffic stops to parking tickets, Seo traces the history of cars alongside the history of crime and discovers that the two are inextricably linked.” —Smithsonian When Americans think of freedom, they often picture the open road. Yet nowhere are we more likely to encounter the long arm of the law than in our cars. Sarah Seo reveals how the rise of the automobile led us to accept—and expect—pervasive police power, a radical transformation with far-reaching consequences. Before the twentieth century, most Americans rarely came into contact with police officers. But in a society dependent on cars, everyone—law-breaking and law-abiding alike—is subject to discretionary policing. Seo challenges prevailing interpretations of the Warren Court’s due process revolution and argues that the Supreme Court’s efforts to protect Americans did more to accommodate than limit police intervention. Policing the Open Road shows how the new procedures sanctioned discrimination by officers, and ultimately undermined the nation’s commitment to equal protection before the law. “With insights ranging from the joy of the open road to the indignities—and worse—of ‘driving while black,’ Sarah Seo makes the case that the ‘law of the car’ has eroded our rights to privacy and equal justice...Absorbing and so essential.” —Paul Butler, author of Chokehold “A fascinating examination of how the automobile reconfigured American life, not just in terms of suburbanization and infrastructure but with regard to deeply ingrained notions of freedom and personal identity.” —Hua Hsu, New Yorker