Joyce's Love Stories

Joyce's Love Stories PDF Author: Christopher DeVault
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351924761
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 412

Get Book Here

Book Description
In his comprehensive study of love in James Joyce's writings, Christopher DeVault suggests that a love ethic persists throughout Joyce's works. DeVault uses Martin Buber's distinction between the true love for others and the narcissistic desire for oneself to frame his discussion, showing that Joyce frequently ties his characters' personal and political pursuits to their ability to affirm both their loved ones and their fellow Dubliners. In his short stories and novels, DeVault argues, Joyce shows how personal love makes possible a broader social compassion that creates a more progressive body politic. While his early protagonists' narcissism limits them to detached engagements with Dublin that impede effective political action, Joyce demonstrates the viability of his love ethic through both the Blooms’ empathy in Ulysses and the polylogic dreamtext of Finnegan's Wake. In its revelation of Joyce's amorous alternative to the social and political paralysis he famously attributed to twentieth-century Dublin, Joyce's Love Stories allows for a better appreciation of the ethical and political significance underpinning the author's assessments of Ireland.

Joyce's Love Stories

Joyce's Love Stories PDF Author: Christopher DeVault
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351924761
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 412

Get Book Here

Book Description
In his comprehensive study of love in James Joyce's writings, Christopher DeVault suggests that a love ethic persists throughout Joyce's works. DeVault uses Martin Buber's distinction between the true love for others and the narcissistic desire for oneself to frame his discussion, showing that Joyce frequently ties his characters' personal and political pursuits to their ability to affirm both their loved ones and their fellow Dubliners. In his short stories and novels, DeVault argues, Joyce shows how personal love makes possible a broader social compassion that creates a more progressive body politic. While his early protagonists' narcissism limits them to detached engagements with Dublin that impede effective political action, Joyce demonstrates the viability of his love ethic through both the Blooms’ empathy in Ulysses and the polylogic dreamtext of Finnegan's Wake. In its revelation of Joyce's amorous alternative to the social and political paralysis he famously attributed to twentieth-century Dublin, Joyce's Love Stories allows for a better appreciation of the ethical and political significance underpinning the author's assessments of Ireland.

Whitman's Ecstatic Union

Whitman's Ecstatic Union PDF Author: Michael Sowder
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135470316
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 183

Get Book Here

Book Description
First Published in 2005. Whitman's Ecstatic Union rereads the first three editions of Leaves of Grass within the context of a nineteenth-century antebellum evangelical culture of conversion. Though Whitman intended to write a new American Bible and inaugurate a religion, contemporary scholarship has often ignored the religious element in his poetry. But just as evangelists sought the redemption of America through the reconstruction of individual subjects in conversion, Leaves of Grass sought to redeem the nation by inducing ecstatic, regenerating experiences in its readers. Whitman's Ecstatic Union explores the ecstasy of conversion as a liminal moment outside of language and culture, and-employing Althusser's model of ideological interpellation and anthropological models of religious ritual-shows how evangelicalism remade subjects by inducing ecstasy and instilling new narratives of identity. The book analyzes Whitman's historical relationship to preaching and conversion and reads the 1855 Song of Myself as a conversion narrative. A focus on the 1856 edition and the poem To You explores the sacred seductions at the heart of Whitman's poetry. Crossing Brooklyn Ferry and Whitman's vision of a world of perfect miracles are then connected to a conception of universal affection, uncannily paralleling Jonathan Edward's ideal of love to being in general. A conclusion looks toward the transformations of Whitman's vision in the 1860 edition.

Joyce and the Perverse Ideal

Joyce and the Perverse Ideal PDF Author: David Cotter
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113671149X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 259

Get Book Here

Book Description
Representations of masochism - both overt and oblique - permeate the work of James Joyce. While a number of critics have noted this, to date there has been no sustained and focused analysis of this trope in his writings. David Cotter argues that such an examination is key to understanding the meanings and messages of Joyce's work. Adding further dimensions to moral, political and aesthetic considerations in the novels and stories - particularly Ulysses - this book provides a comprehensive account of masochistic elements in James Joyce's work. Cotter draws upon psychoanalytic theory and social history to illustrate the subversive power of perversity in the literature of the modern period. This edition first Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Queer Impressions

Queer Impressions PDF Author: Elaine Pigeon
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135490120
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 195

Get Book Here

Book Description
Beginning with The Portrait of a Lady, this book shows how, in developing his unique form of realism, James highlights the tragic consequences of his American heroine's Romantic imagination, in particular, her Emersonian idealism. In order to expose Emerson's blind spot, a lacuna at the very centre of his New England Transcendentalism, James draws on the Gothic effects of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe, thereby producing an intensification of Isabel Archer's psychological state and precipitating her awakening to a fuller, heightened consciousness. Thus Romanticism takes an aesthetic turn, becoming distinctly Paterian and unleashing queer possibilities that are further developed in James's subsequent fiction. This book follows the Paterian thread, leading to The Author of Beltraffio and Théophile Gauthier, and thereby establishing an important connection with French culture. Drawing on James's famous analogy between the art of fiction and the art of the painter, the book explores a possible link to the Impressionist painters associated with the literary circle Émile Zola dominated. It then turns to A New England Winter, a tale about an American Impressionist painter, and finds traces leading back to James's initiation prèmiere. The book closes with an exploration of the possible sources of Kate Croy's unspeakable father in The Wings of the Dove and proposes a possible intertext, one that provides direct insight into the Victorian closet.

William Dean Howells and the Ends of Realism

William Dean Howells and the Ends of Realism PDF Author: Paul Abeln
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415970969
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 182

Get Book Here

Book Description
First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

A Singing Contest

A Singing Contest PDF Author: Meg Tyler
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135491526
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 229

Get Book Here

Book Description
A formal analysis A Singing Contest comprises close readings of Seamus Heaney's poetry. Tyler argues that in an era of fractured poetry and politics, Seamus Heaney stands out: his impulse is towards unity and regeneration. Her book considers the interplay between different kinds of literary tradition and community in his poetry. For Heaney, poetry represents a structure allowing imaginative mediation of conflicts that appear irreconcilable in the social, political and historical realms. By detailed structural analysis of diction, meter, imagery and generic form, Tyler illustrates how Heaney's poems create concords from discords, unities from fracture. From the preface by Rosanna Warren: A Singing Contest is written with imaginative and emotional urgency, and in some large sense, as it examines Heaney's spells, it seems itself to want to cast a spell against death. Hence Tyler's return, in various ways, to readings of elegy, whether the fictive elegies of classical pastoral poems, or Heaney's personal elegies. She pores in detail over Clearances, the sonnet sequence composed in memory of the poet's mother in The Haw Lantern, and she concludes her book with a chapter on literary elegies, Heaney's farewells to his friends and admired contemporaries Ted Hughes, Zbigniew Herbert, and Joseph Brodsky. In these analyses, one sees the wholeness of Tyler's project: her argument that for Heaney, literary tradition itself, rightly received and transformed, reaches into the voids made by death, and establishes connection across rupture. Her thesis is an ancient one, and she gives it particular shape and force in asking us to contemplate it at work in Heaney, where it binds individual to collective experience, and past to present.

Colonialism and the Modernist Moment in the Early Novels of Jean Rhys

Colonialism and the Modernist Moment in the Early Novels of Jean Rhys PDF Author: Carol Dell'Amico
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135489009
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 154

Get Book Here

Book Description
Colonialism and the Modernist Moment in the Early Novels of Jean Rhys explores the postcolonial significance of Rhys’s modernist period work, which depicts an urban scene more varied than that found in other canonical representations of the period. Arguing against the view that Rhys comes into her own as a colonial thinker only in the post-WWII period of her career, this study examines the austere insights gained by Rhys’s active cultivation of her fringe status vis-à-vis British social life and artistic circles, where her sharp study of the aporias of marginal lives and the violence of imperial ideology is distilled into an artistic statement positing the outcome of the imperial venture as a state of homelessness across the board, for colonized and ‘metropolitans’ alike. Bringing to view heretofore overlooked émigré populations, or their children, alongside locals, Rhys’s urbanites struggle to construct secure lives not simply as a consequence of commodification, alienation, or voluntary expatriation, but also as a consequence of marginalization and migration. This view of Rhys’s early work asserts its vital importance to postcolonial studies, an importance that has been overlooked owing to an over hasty critical consensus that only one of her early novels contains significant colonial content. Yet, as this study demonstrates, proper consideration of colonial elements long considered only incidental illuminates a colonial continuum in Rhys’s work from her earliest publications.

Ready to Trample on All Human Law

Ready to Trample on All Human Law PDF Author: Paul A. Jarvie
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135488444
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book explores the relationship between Dickens’s novels and the financial system. Elements of Dickens’s work form a critique of financial capitalism. This critique is rooted in the difference between use-value and exchange-value, and in the difference between productive circulations and mere accumulation. In a money-based society, exchange-value and accumulation dominate to the point where they infect even the most important and sacred relationships between parts of society and individuals. This study explores Dickens’s critique from two very different points of view. The first is philosophical, from Aristotle’s distinction between "chrematistic" accumulation and "economic" use on money through Marx’s focus on the teleology of capitalism as death. The second view is that of nineteenth-century financial journalism, of "City" writers like David Morier Evans and M. L. Meason,, who, while functioning as "cheerleaders" for financial capitalism, also reflected some of the very real "dis-ease" associated with capital formation and accumulation. The core concepts of this critique are constant in the novels, but the critique broadens and becomes more pessimistic over time. The ill effects of living in a money-based society are presented more as the consequences of individual evil in earlier novels, while in the later books they are depicted as systemic and pervasive. Texts discussed include Nicholas Nickleby, A Christmas Carol, Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend.

Occasions of Sin

Occasions of Sin PDF Author: Diarmaid Ferriter
Publisher: Profile Books
ISBN: 1847652581
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 704

Get Book Here

Book Description
Ferriter covers such subjects as abortion, pregnancy, celibacy, contraception, censorship, infanticide, homosexuality, prostitution, marriage, popular culture, social life and the various hidden Irelands associated with sexual abuse - all in the context of a conservative official morality backed by the Catholic Church and by legislation. The book energetically and originally engages with subjects omitted from the mainstream historical narrative. The breadth of this book and the richness of the source material uncovered make it definitive in its field and a most remarkable work of social history.

Melville's Monumental Imagination

Melville's Monumental Imagination PDF Author: Ian S. Maloney
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135489564
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 177

Get Book Here

Book Description
Melville's Monumental Imagination explores the connection between the contested 19th century American monument tradition and one of the nation's most revered authors, Herman Melville (1819-1891). The book was written to fill a void in recent Melville scholarship. To date, there has not been a monograph that focuses exclusively on Melville's incorporation of monuments in his fictional world. The book charts the territory of Melville's novels in order to provide a trajectory of the monumental image in one particular literary form. This feature allows the reader to gradually see the monumental image as an important marker that sheds light into Melville's eventual abandonment of long fiction. Melville's Monumental Imagination combines literary analysis and cultural criticism for a long neglected aspect of our nation's iconic development in statuary.