Reading Theories in Contemporary Fiction

Reading Theories in Contemporary Fiction PDF Author: Lisa McNally
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441109544
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Get Book Here

Book Description
Even after the upheavals wrought by Theory, literary criticism has generally ignored the act and experience of reading itself, proceeding as though something so fundamental to our experience of texts could be taken for granted. Reading Theories in Contemporary Fiction draws on deconstruction and the thought of Jacques Derrida to explore the ways in which contemporary fiction engages with reading, its power, the elusive nature of its experience and the failures of understanding inherent in it. Along the way, the book proceeds through close readings of such authors as J.M. Coetzee, David Mitchell, Toni Morrison and Philip Roth.

Why We Read Fiction

Why We Read Fiction PDF Author: Lisa Zunshine
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
ISBN: 0814210287
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 210

Get Book Here

Book Description
Why We Read Fiction offers a lucid overview of the most exciting area of research in contemporary cognitive psychology known as "Theory of Mind" and discusses its implications for literary studies. It covers a broad range of fictional narratives, from Richardson s Clarissa, Dostoyevski's Crime and Punishment, and Austen s Pride and Prejudice to Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Nabokov's Lolita, and Hammett s The Maltese Falcon. Zunshine's surprising new interpretations of well-known literary texts and popular cultural representations constantly prod her readers to rethink their own interest in fictional narrative. Written for a general audience, this study provides a jargon-free introduction to the rapidly growing interdisciplinary field known as cognitive approaches to literature and culture.

Reading Theories in Contemporary Fiction

Reading Theories in Contemporary Fiction PDF Author: Lisa McNally
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441109544
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Get Book Here

Book Description
Even after the upheavals wrought by Theory, literary criticism has generally ignored the act and experience of reading itself, proceeding as though something so fundamental to our experience of texts could be taken for granted. Reading Theories in Contemporary Fiction draws on deconstruction and the thought of Jacques Derrida to explore the ways in which contemporary fiction engages with reading, its power, the elusive nature of its experience and the failures of understanding inherent in it. Along the way, the book proceeds through close readings of such authors as J.M. Coetzee, David Mitchell, Toni Morrison and Philip Roth.

Reading Contingency

Reading Contingency PDF Author: David Wylot
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781032239521
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Reading Contingency: The Accident in Contemporary Fiction, David Wylot constructs an innovative study of the relationship between plotted accidents in twenty-first century British and American fiction, the phenomenology of reading, and a contemporary experience of time that is increasingly understood to be contingent and accidental. A synthesis of literary and cultural analysis, narratology, critical theories of time and the philosophy of contingency, the book explores the accident's imagination of contemporary time and the relationship between reading and living in novels by writers including A.M. Homes, Nicola Barker, Noah Hawley, J.M. Coetzee, J.G. Ballard, Jesmyn Ward, Jennifer Egan, and Tom McCarthy.

The Critical Tradition

The Critical Tradition PDF Author: David H. Richter
Publisher: Bedford/st Martins
ISBN: 9780312101060
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1655

Get Book Here

Book Description
02 The most comprehensive and up-to-date anthology of major documents in literary criticism and theory from Plato to the present, with a highly praised critical apparatus, including introductions, headnotes, bibliographies, and glosses.

The Unresolvable Plot

The Unresolvable Plot PDF Author: Elizabeth Dipple
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000639134
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 389

Get Book Here

Book Description
Originally published in 1988, the last few decades had seen the appearance of some brilliant and complex new kinds of fiction. The ambitious experiments of writers such as Greene, Garcia Márquez, Borges, Nabakov, Calvino, Beckett, Eco, Spark, Hoban, Murdoch, Bellow, Ozick, and Lessing among others had all proved the vitality of contemporary fiction in discovering exciting new forms and styles. Yet because of the difficulty of many of the texts, contemporary fiction as a genre had acquired an undeservedly unpopular reputation among students and other readers. In a very real way, the reader had become nervous rather than confident in the face of a literature that in fact is more aware of and generous to that reader than earlier and more apparently accessible literature ever managed to be. And the new fiction’s seeming remoteness from the reader is exaggerated, in a sense, by the critical academic response at the time, which tended to obscure the texts themselves behind the many aesthetic and cultural theories which had sprung up in the study of fictionalizing or narrativity in general. Elizabeth Dipple is anxious to dispel readers’ fears about these texts. She has chosen an international list of major writers of the time and presents a detailed discussion of each. Beginning each chapter with a brief explanation of the context in which each fictionist is to be examined, she then concentrates on an analysis of key texts, aiming always to look beyond jargon and theory back to the sources themselves. Professor Dipple’s purpose was to convey to the reader some of her own admiration and enthusiasm for contemporary fiction and to persuade him or her to take a fresh look at a group of writers who were producing what she felt would surely be seen by future generations as among the most sophisticated and accomplished fiction of our time.

Contemporary Fiction and the Uses of Theory

Contemporary Fiction and the Uses of Theory PDF Author: M. Greaney
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 023020807X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 191

Get Book Here

Book Description
This topical study examines the 'novelizations' of radical literary theory in the work of A.S. Byatt, Angela Carter, Umberto Eco, John Fowles, Richard Powers and many other leading novelists. It offers a comprehensive analysis of the 'post-theoretical novel', and traces an alternative history of the 'theory revolution' in recent literary fiction.

The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction: 1980–2018

The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction: 1980–2018 PDF Author: Peter Boxall
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108483410
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 335

Get Book Here

Book Description
Gives a comprehensive critical picture of the development of British fiction from the election of Thatcher to the present.

Judge for Yourself

Judge for Yourself PDF Author: Nicholas Taylor-Collins
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000191559
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 192

Get Book Here

Book Description
Judge for Yourself guides interested and advanced-level readers through the challenge of judging the quality of hyper-contemporary literature. Whether reading the latest bestseller or the book that everyone is recommending, Judge for Yourself guides you through the challenge of the text. Reading the longlist of the 2019 International Dylan Thomas Prize through five chapters, Judge for Yourself introduces readers to current critical debates that inform engagement and the reading experience of hyper-contemporary writing. Topics covered include feminism, postcolonialism, critical race theory, queer theory, class, and book reviews. Each chapter includes introductory questions for the reader, and Judge for Yourself is accompanied by an exploration of book prize culture and the challenge posed by hyper-contemporary literature. Judge for Yourself puts judging firmly in the hands of the reader, and not the academic or professional reviewers.

Reading Fiction in Antebellum America

Reading Fiction in Antebellum America PDF Author: James L. Machor
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801899338
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 419

Get Book Here

Book Description
James L. Machor offers a sweeping exploration of how American fiction was received in both public and private spheres in the United States before the Civil War. Machor takes four antebellum authors—Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Catharine Sedgwick, and Caroline Chesebro'—and analyzes how their works were published, received, and interpreted. Drawing on discussions found in book reviews and in private letters and diaries, Machor examines how middle-class readers of the time engaged with contemporary fiction and how fiction reading evolved as an interpretative practice in nineteenth-century America. Through careful analysis, Machor illuminates how the reading practices of nineteenth-century Americans shaped not only the experiences of these writers at the time but also the way the writers were received in the twentieth century. What Machor reveals is that these authors were received in ways strikingly different from how they are currently read, thereby shedding significant light on their present status in the literary canon in comparison to their critical and popular positions in their own time. Machor deftly combines response and reception criticism and theory with work in the history of reading to engage with groundbreaking scholarship in historical hermeneutics. In so doing, Machor takes us ever closer to understanding the particular and varying reading strategies of historical audiences and how they impacted authors’ conceptions of their own readership.

A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory

A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory PDF Author: Raman Selden
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 180

Get Book Here

Book Description
Unsurpassed as a text for upper-division and beginning graduate students, Raman Selden's classic text is the liveliest, most readable and most reliable guide to contemporary literary theory. Includes applications of theory, cross-referenced to Selden's companion volume, Practicing Theory and Reading Literature.