Literature, Politics and Intellectual Crisis in Britain Today

Literature, Politics and Intellectual Crisis in Britain Today PDF Author: C. Bloom
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230508405
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
In 1997, thirty years after the demise of 'Swinging London', Britain again seemed to be the centre of the cultural universe, with a thriving arts scene, a new Labour government and a young and enterprising prime minister. 'Cool Britannia' seemed to sum up the new spirit of the 1990s in the hip language of the 1960s. In this book, Bloom offers a radical and controversial guide to the possibilities for intellectual life, popular culture, literary production and political authority in multi-cultural Britain in 2000 and beyond.

Literature, Politics and Intellectual Crisis in Britain Today

Literature, Politics and Intellectual Crisis in Britain Today PDF Author: C. Bloom
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230508405
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234

Get Book Here

Book Description
In 1997, thirty years after the demise of 'Swinging London', Britain again seemed to be the centre of the cultural universe, with a thriving arts scene, a new Labour government and a young and enterprising prime minister. 'Cool Britannia' seemed to sum up the new spirit of the 1990s in the hip language of the 1960s. In this book, Bloom offers a radical and controversial guide to the possibilities for intellectual life, popular culture, literary production and political authority in multi-cultural Britain in 2000 and beyond.

The Death of Consensus

The Death of Consensus PDF Author: Phil Tinline
Publisher: Hurst Publishers
ISBN: 1787388840
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 556

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Book Description
Over Britain’s first century of mass democracy, politics has lurched from crisis to crisis. How does this history of political agony illuminate our current age of upheaval? To find out, journalist Phil Tinline takes us back to two past eras when the ruling consensus broke down, and the future filled with ominous possibilities – until, finally, a new settlement was born. How did the Great Depression’s spectres of fascism, bombing and mass unemployment force politicians to think the unthinkable, and pave the way to post-war Britain? How was Thatcher’s road to victory made possible by a decade of nightmares: of hyperinflation, military coups and communist dictatorship? And why, since the Crash in 2008, have new political threats and divisions forced us to change course once again? Tinline brings to life those times, past and present, when the great compromise holding democracy together has come apart; when the political class has been forced to make a choice of nightmares. This lively, original account of panic and chaos reveals how apparent catastrophes can clear the path to a new era. The Death of Consensus will make you see British democracy differently.

The Crisis of Theory

The Crisis of Theory PDF Author: Scott Hamilton
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719089091
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
The Crisis of Theory, available in paperback for the first time, tells the story of the political and intellectual adventures of E. P. Thompson, one of Britain's foremost twentieth-century thinkers. Drawing on extraordinary new unpublished documents, Scott Hamilton shows that all of Thompson's work, from his acclaimed histories to his voluminous political writings to his little-noticed poetry, was inspired by the same passionate and idiosyncratic vision of the world. Hamilton shows the connection between Thompson's famously ferocious attack on the 'Stalinism in theory' of Louis Althusser and his assaults on positivist social science in books like The making of the English working class, and he produces previously unseen evidence to show that Thompson's hostility to both left and right-wing forms of authoritarianism was rooted in first-hand experience of violent political repression. This book will appeal to scholars and general readers with an interest in left-wing politics and theory, British society, twentieth-century history, modernist poetry, and the philosophy of history.

Effeminate Years

Effeminate Years PDF Author: Declan Kavanagh
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 1611488257
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
Effeminate Years: Literature, Politics, and Aesthetics in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain investigates the gendered, eroticized, and xenophobic ways in which the controversies in the 1760s surrounding the political figure John Wilkes (1725-97) legitimated some men as political subjects, while forcefully excluding others on the basis of their perceived effeminacy or foreignness. However, this book is not a literary analysis of the Wilkes affair in the 1760s, nor is it a linear account of Wilkes’s political career. Instead, Effeminate Years examines the cultural crisis of effeminacy that made Wilkes’s politicking so appealing. The central theoretical problem that this study addresses is the argument about what is and is not political: where does individual autonomy begin and end? Addressing this question, Kavanagh traces the shaping influence of the discourse of effeminacy in the literature that was generated by Wilkes’s legal and sexual scandals, while, at the same time, he also reads Wilkes’s spectacular drumming up of support as a timely exploitation of the broader cultural crisis of effeminacy during the mid century in Britain. The book begins with the scandals and agitations surrounding Wilkes, and ends with readings of Edmund Burke’s (1729-1797) earliest political writings, which envisage political community—a vision, that Kavanagh argues, is influenced by Wilkes and the effeminate years of the 1760s. Throughout, Kavanagh shows how interlocutors in the political and cultural debates of the mid-eighteenth-century period in Britain, such as Tobias Smollett (1721-1771) and Arthur Murphy (1727-1805), attempt to resolve the problem of effeminate excess. In part, the resolution for Wilkes and Charles Churchill (1731-1764) was to shunt effeminacy onto the sexually non-normative. On the other hand, Burke, in his aesthetic theorization of the beautiful privileges the socially constitutive affects of feeling effeminate. Through an analysis of poetry, fiction, social and economic pamphlets, aesthetic treatises, journalism and correspondences, placed within the latest queer historiography, Kavanagh demonstrates that the mid-century effeminacy crisis served to re-conceive male heterosexuality as the very mark of political legitimacy. Overall, Effeminate Years explores the development of modern ideas of masculinity and the political subject, which are still the basis of debate and argument in our own time.

The Left Case for Brexit

The Left Case for Brexit PDF Author: Richard Tuck
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509542299
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
Liberal left orthodoxy holds that Brexit is a disastrous coup, orchestrated by the hard right and fuelled by xenophobia, which will break up the Union and turn what’s left of Britain into a neoliberal dystopia. Richard Tuck’s ongoing commentary on the Brexit crisis demolishes this narrative. He argues that by opposing Brexit and throwing its lot in with a liberal constitutional order tailor-made for the interests of global capitalists, the Left has made a major error. It has tied itself into a framework designed to frustrate its own radical policies. Brexit therefore actually represents a golden opportunity for socialists to implement the kind of economic agenda they have long since advocated. Sadly, however, many of them have lost faith in the kind of popular revolution that the majoritarian British constitution is peculiarly well-placed to deliver and have succumbed instead to defeatism and the cultural politics of virtue-signalling. Another approach is, however, still possible. Combining brilliant contemporary political insights with a profound grasp of the ironies of modern history, this book is essential for anyone who wants a clear-sighted assessment of the momentous underlying issues brought to the surface by Brexit.

The State of the Novel

The State of the Novel PDF Author: Dominic Head
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1444304720
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
Part of the Blackwell Manifestos series, The State of the Novel offers a lively, yet rigorous investigation into the state and future of the contemporary British novel written by an expert in the field. Evaluates the state of the ‘serious literary’ novel and novel criticism Prominent treatment is paid to the ‘internationalization’ of the novel in English Offers a manifesto on contemporary fiction from an expert in this field; Dominic Head is best known for his Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction 1950-2000 Establishes the shared interests of contemporary theorists of the novel, cultural commentators, and novel consumers An ideal supplementary text for students and faculty interested in the novel and contemporary fiction

Crisis

Crisis PDF Author: Sylvia Walby
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 150950320X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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Book Description
We are living in a time of crisis which has cascaded through society. Financial crisis has led to an economic crisis of recession and unemployment; an ensuing fiscal crisis over government deficits and austerity has led to a political crisis which threatens to become a democratic crisis. Borne unevenly, the effects of the crisis are exacerbating class and gender inequalities. Rival interpretations – a focus on ‘austerity’ and reduction in welfare spending versus a focus on ‘financial crisis’ and democratic regulation of finance – are used to justify radically diverse policies for the distribution of resources and strategies for economic growth, and contested gender relations lie at the heart of these debates. The future consequences of the crisis depend upon whether there is a deepening of democratic institutions, including in the European Union. Sylvia Walby offers an alternative framework within which to theorize crisis, drawing on complexity science and situating this within the wider field of study of risk, disaster and catastrophe. In doing so, she offers a critique and revision of the social science needed to understand the crisis.

Defining Literary Criticism

Defining Literary Criticism PDF Author: Carol Atherton
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230501079
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
Outlining the controversies that have surrounded the academic discipline of English Literature since its institutionalization in the late nineteenth century, this important book draws on a range of archival sources. It addresses issues that are central to the identity of academic English - how the subject came into existence, and what makes it a specialist discipline of knowledge - in a manner that illuminates many of the crises that have affected the development of modern English studies. Atherton also addresses contemporary arguments about the teaching of literary criticism, including an examination of the reforms to A-Level literature.

The 1990s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction

The 1990s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction PDF Author: Nick Hubble
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474242421
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
How did social, cultural and political events in Britain during the 1990s shape contemporary British Fiction? From the fall of the Berlin Wall to the turn of the millennium, the 1990s witnessed a realignment of global politics. Against the changing international scene, this volume uses events abroad and in Britain to examine and explain the changes taking place in British fiction, including: the celebration of national identities, fuelled by the move toward political devolution in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales; the literary optimism in urban ethnic fictions written by a new generation of authors, born and raised in Britain; the popularity of neo-Victorian fiction. Critical surveys are balanced by in-depth readings of work by the authors who defined the decade, including A.S. Byatt, Hanif Kureishi, Will Self, Caryl Phillips and Irvine Welsh: an approach that illustrates exactly how their key themes and concerns fit within the social and political circumstances of the decade.

The English Studies Book

The English Studies Book PDF Author: Rob Pope
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134795459
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 443

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Book Description
The English Studies Book is uniquely designed to support students and teachers working across the full range of language, literature and culture. Combining the functions of study guide, critical dictionary and text anthology, it has rapidly established itself as a core text on a wide variety of degree programmes nationally and internationally. Revised and updated throughout, features of the second edition include: * a new prologue addressing changes and challenges in English Studies * substantial entries on over 100 key critical and theoretical terms, from 'absence' and 'author' to 'text' and 'versification' - with new entries on 'creative writing', 'travel writing' and 'translation' * practical introductions to all the major theoretical approaches, with new sections on aesthetics, ethics, ecology and sexuality * a rich anthology of literary and related texts from Anglo-Saxon to Afro-Caribbean, with fresh selections representing the sonnet, haiku, slave narratives and science fiction, and with additional texts by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charles Darwin, Ian McEwan, Margaret Atwood, Amy Tan and others * handy frameworks and checklists for close reading, research, essay writing and other textual activities, including use of the Internet.