Novels of the Contemporary Extreme

Novels of the Contemporary Extreme PDF Author: Alain-Philippe Durand
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1441162135
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
This book investigates a new form of fiction that is currently emerging in contemporary literature across the globe. 'Novels of the contemporary extreme' - from North and South America, from Europe, and the Middle East - are set in a world both similar to and different from our own: a hyper real, often apocalyptic world progressively invaded by popular culture, permeated with technology and dominated by destruction. While their writing is commonly classified as 'hip' or 'underground' literature, authors of contemporary extreme novels have often been the center of public controversy and scandal; they, and their work, become international bestsellers. This collection of essays identifies and describes this international phenomenon, investigating the appeal of these novels' styles and themes, the reasons behind their success, and the fierce debates they provoked.

Novel Violence

Novel Violence PDF Author: Garrett Stewart
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226774600
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Victorian novels, Garrett Stewart argues, hurtle forward in prose as violent as the brutal human existence they chronicle. In Novel Violence, he explains how such language assaults the norms of written expression and how, in doing so, it counteracts the narratives it simultaneously propels. Immersing himself in the troubling plots of Charles Dickens, Anne Brontë, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, Stewart uses his brilliant new method of narratography to trace the microplots of language as they unfold syllable by syllable. By pinpointing where these linguistic narratives collide with the stories that give them context, he makes a powerful case for the centrality of verbal conflict to the experience of reading Victorian novels. He also maps his finely wrought argument on the spectrum of influential theories of the novel—including those of Georg Lukács and Ian Watt—and tests it against Edgar Allan Poe’s antinovelistic techniques. In the process, Stewart shifts critical focus toward the grain of narrative and away from more abstract analyses of structure or cultural context, revealing how novels achieve their semantic and psychic effects and unearthing, in prose, something akin to poetry.

Novels of the Contemporary Extreme

Novels of the Contemporary Extreme PDF Author: Alain-Philippe Durand
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1441162135
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
This book investigates a new form of fiction that is currently emerging in contemporary literature across the globe. 'Novels of the contemporary extreme' - from North and South America, from Europe, and the Middle East - are set in a world both similar to and different from our own: a hyper real, often apocalyptic world progressively invaded by popular culture, permeated with technology and dominated by destruction. While their writing is commonly classified as 'hip' or 'underground' literature, authors of contemporary extreme novels have often been the center of public controversy and scandal; they, and their work, become international bestsellers. This collection of essays identifies and describes this international phenomenon, investigating the appeal of these novels' styles and themes, the reasons behind their success, and the fierce debates they provoked.

The American Novel of War

The American Novel of War PDF Author: Wallis R. Sanborn, III
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786438630
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
In song, verse, narrative, and dramatic form, war literature has existed for nearly all of recorded history. Accounts of war continue to occupy American bestseller lists and the stacks of American libraries. This innovative work establishes the American novel of war as its own sub-genre within American war literature, creating standards by which such works can be classified and critically and popularly analyzed. Each chapter identifies a defining characteristic, analyzes existing criticism, and explores the characteristic in American war novels of record. Topics include violence, war rhetoric, the death of noncombatants, and terrain as an enemy.

The Rise of the African Novel

The Rise of the African Novel PDF Author: Mukoma Wa Ngugi
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 047212336X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
The Rise of the African Novel is the first book to situate South African and African-language literature of the late 1880s through the early 1940s in relation to the literature of decolonization that spanned the 1950s through the 1980s, and the contemporary generation of established and emerging continental and diaspora African writers of international renown. Calling it a major crisis in African literary criticism, Mukoma Wa Ngugi considers key questions around the misreading of African literature: Why did Chinua Achebe’s generation privilege African literature in English despite the early South African example? What are the costs of locating the start of Africa’s literary tradition in the wrong literary and historical period? What does it mean for the current generation of writers and scholars of African literature not to have an imaginative consciousness of their literary past? While acknowledging the importance of Achebe’s generation in the African literary tradition, Mukoma Wa Ngugi challenges that narrowing of the identities and languages of the African novel and writer. In restoring the missing foundational literary period to the African literary tradition, he shows how early South African literature, in both aesthetics and politics, is in conversation with the literature of the African independence era and contemporary rooted transnational literatures. This book will become a foundational text in African literary studies, as it raises questions about the very nature of African literature and criticism. It will be essential reading for scholars of African literary studies as well as general readers seeking a greater understanding of African literary history and the ways in which critical consensus can be manufactured and rewarded at the expense of a larger and historical literary tradition.

Cormac McCarthy's Western Novels

Cormac McCarthy's Western Novels PDF Author: Barcley Owens
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816519285
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 156

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Book Description
In the continuing redefinition of the American West, few recent writers have left a mark as indelible as Cormac McCarthy. A favorite subject of critics and fans alike despite--or perhaps because of--his avoidance of public appearances, the man is known solely through his writing. Thanks to his early work, he is most often associated with a bleak vision of humanity grounded in a belief in man's primordial aggressiveness. McCarthy scholar Barcley Owens has written the first book to concentrate exclusively on McCarthy's acclaimed western novels: Blood Meridian, National Book Award winner All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain. In a thought-provoking analysis, he explores the differences between Blood Meridian and the Border Trilogy novels and shows how those differences reflect changing conditions in contemporary American culture. Owens captures both Blood Meridian's wanton violence and the Border Trilogy's fond remembrance of the Old West. He shows how this dramatic shift from atavistic brutality to nostalgic Americana suggests that McCarthy has finally given his readers what they most want--the stuff of their mythic dreams. Owens's study is both an incisive look at one of our most important and demanding authors and a penetrating analysis of violence and myth in American culture. Fans of McCarthy's work will find much to consider for ongoing discussions of this influential body of work.

Holocaust Fiction

Holocaust Fiction PDF Author: Sue Vice
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134666225
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
Examining the controversies that have accompanied the publication of novels representing the Holocaust, this compelling book explores such literature to analyze their violently mixed receptions and what this says about the ethics and practice of millennial Holocaust literature. The novels examined, including some for the first time, are: * Time's Arrow by Martin Amis * The White Hotel by D.M. Thomas * The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski * Schindler's List by Thomas Keneally * Sophie's Choice by William Styron * The Hand that Signed the Paper by Helen Darville. Taking issue with the idea that the Holocaust should only be represented factually, this compelling book argues that Holocaust fiction is not only legitimate, but an important genre that it is essential to accept. In a growing area of interest, Sue Vice adds a new, intelligent and contentious voice to the key debates within Holocaust studies.

Bret Easton Ellis

Bret Easton Ellis PDF Author: Naomi Mandel
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 0826435629
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
Collection of new critical essays on Bret Easton Ellis, focusing on his later novels: American Psycho (1991), Glamorama (1999), and Lunar Park (2005).

Violent Affect

Violent Affect PDF Author: Marco Abel
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803209967
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
Countering previous studies of violent images based on representational and, consequently, moralistic assumptions, which, the author argues, inevitably reinforce the very violence they critique. He explains how violent images work upon the world.

Counternarrative Possibilities

Counternarrative Possibilities PDF Author: James Dorson
Publisher: Campus Verlag
ISBN: 3593505541
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
"Counternarrative Possibilities" reads Cormac McCarthy s Westerns against the backdrop of the two formative national tropes of virgin land (from the 1950s) and homeland (after 9/11) in American mythology. While both of these figures have been used in exceptionalist discourse about the United States, they are also intimately connected with the emergence and transformation of the field of American Studies. Using an integrative approach to read McCarthy s Westerns in relation to both their ideological context and the institutionalized ideology critique that has shaped their reception, the book shows how McCarthy s Westerns simultaneously counter the national narratives underlying the tropes of virgin land and homeland and reinvest them with new, potentially transformative meaning. McCarthy s work of the 1980s and 1990s both draws on postmodern strategies of narrative disruption and departs from them by staging a return to narrative that prefigures recent postpostmodern developments. Departing from prevailing accounts of McCarthy that place him in relation to his literary antecedents, "Counternarrative Possibilities" takes a forward-looking approach that reads McCarthy s work as a key influence on millennial fiction. Weaving together disciplinary history with longstanding debates over the relationship between aesthetics and politics, "Counternarrative Possibilities" is at once an exploration of the limits of ideology critique in the 21st century and a timely reconsideration of McCarthy s work after postmodernism. "

Anomalous States

Anomalous States PDF Author: David Lloyd
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822313441
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
Anomalous States is an archeology of modern Irish writing. David Lloyd commences with recent questioning of Irish identity in the wake of the northern conflict and returns to the complex terrain of nineteenth-century culture in which those questions of identity were first formed. In five linked essays, he explores modern Irish literature and its political contexts through the work of four Irish writers--Heaney, Beckett, Yeats, and Joyce. Beginning with Heaney and Beckett, Lloyd shows how in these authors the question of identity connects with the dominance of conservative cultural nationalism and argues for the need to understand Irish culture in relation to the wider experience of colonized societies. A central essay reads Yeats's later works as a profound questioning of the founding of the state. Final essays examine the gradual formation of the state and nation as one element in a cultural process that involves conflict between popular cultural forms and emerging political economies of nationalism and the colonial state. Modern Ireland is thus seen as the product of a continuing process in which, Lloyd argues, the passage to national independence that defines Ireland's post-colonial status is no more than a moment in its continuing history. Anomalous States makes an important contribution to the growing body of work that connects cultural theory with post-colonial historiography, literary analysis, and issues in contemporary politics. It will interest a wide readership in literary studies, cultural studies, anthropology, and history.