Rereading Modernist Postcards

Rereading Modernist Postcards PDF Author: Bradley D. Clissold
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000922782
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 441

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Book Description
Informed by both new and old media theory, materialist approaches to the study of everyday objects, and a series of close readings that chart the critical history of postcard use in the fiction and correspondence of Ernest Hemingway, Ring Lardner, James Joyce, and Wilfred Owen, this book locates and attempts to rediscover lost, misplaced, and neglected postcard materialities, as they relate to the archiving, editing, publishing, and fictional repurposing of postcards across Anglo-American Literary Modernism (1880-1939). It argues that postcards need to be recognized as important early twentieth-century communication technologies and distinctly modernist textualities, composed of multimedia, recto–verso intertextualities. Moreover, their material limitations encourage users to inscribe messages often in fragmented language forms and innovative cultural shorthands (a.k.a. postcardese). This study redresses the ongoing, widespread scholarly neglect of signifying postcard materialities in modernist studies and the editorial silencing of postcard features in collections of published author correspondence. It also stresses that for these four literary figures of modernism, the material choice of a postcard for communicating is always as much the (meta)message, as any of the signifying materialities they carry uploaded onto their platforming surfaces.

Rereading Modernist Postcards

Rereading Modernist Postcards PDF Author: Bradley D. Clissold
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000922782
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 441

Get Book Here

Book Description
Informed by both new and old media theory, materialist approaches to the study of everyday objects, and a series of close readings that chart the critical history of postcard use in the fiction and correspondence of Ernest Hemingway, Ring Lardner, James Joyce, and Wilfred Owen, this book locates and attempts to rediscover lost, misplaced, and neglected postcard materialities, as they relate to the archiving, editing, publishing, and fictional repurposing of postcards across Anglo-American Literary Modernism (1880-1939). It argues that postcards need to be recognized as important early twentieth-century communication technologies and distinctly modernist textualities, composed of multimedia, recto–verso intertextualities. Moreover, their material limitations encourage users to inscribe messages often in fragmented language forms and innovative cultural shorthands (a.k.a. postcardese). This study redresses the ongoing, widespread scholarly neglect of signifying postcard materialities in modernist studies and the editorial silencing of postcard features in collections of published author correspondence. It also stresses that for these four literary figures of modernism, the material choice of a postcard for communicating is always as much the (meta)message, as any of the signifying materialities they carry uploaded onto their platforming surfaces.

Durée as Einstein-in-the-Heart

Durée as Einstein-in-the-Heart PDF Author: Candice Lee Kent
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003860699
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 130

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Book Description
Durée as Einstein-in-the-Heart traces the trajectory of modernist interaction with Bergson and Einstein through the works of Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) and Mary Butts (1890–1937). It presents an overview of critical approaches that focus on time in Woolf’s novels, and that foreground Bergson in their analyses of Woolf. It then examines how Woolf’s formal experimentation, and theorisation of time, in Jacob’s Room (1922) and Mrs Dalloway (1925) relates to Bergson’s temporal theories. This is followed by a discussion on the role Bergson’s thinking played in the early formulation of Butts’s ideas of time, and an analysis of how Bergson’s ideas emerge in the short story ‘Angele au Couvent’ (1923), concluding by highlighting points of contrast in the engagements of Woolf and Butts. The book then documents the growth of Butts’s interest in Einstein’s ideas and shows how she amalgamates these with Bergson’s thinking in her journals and in the most intense of her fictional engagement with Einstein’s ideas, the novel Death of Felicity Taverner (1932). It discusses Butts’s responses to the popular science genre and examines the important role played by J. W. N. Sullivan and Arthur Eddington in the development of her understanding, and interpretation, of physics. It concludes with a discussion of Butts’s antisemitic characterisation of Kralin, as purveyor of corrupted science, in contrast with the Taverners, who are conscious of durée and delight in the abstractions of scientific truth.

Strategies of Ambiguity

Strategies of Ambiguity PDF Author: Matthias Bauer
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000987841
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
There has been a growing awareness that ambiguity is not just a necessary evil of the language system resulting, for instance, from its need for economy, or, by contrast, a blessing that allows writers to involve readers in endless games of assigning meaning to a literary text. The present volume contributes to overcoming this alternative by focusing on strategies of ambiguity (and the strategic avoidance of ambiguity) both at the production and the reception end of communication. The authors examine ways in which speakers and hearers may use ambiguous words, structures, references, and situations to pursue communicative ends. For example, the question is asked what it actually means when a listener strategically perceives ambiguity, which may happen both synchronically (e.g. in conversations) as well as diachronically (e.g. when strategically ambiguating biblical texts in order to make them applicable to moral lessons). Another example is the question whether ambiguity awareness increases the strategic use of ambiguity in prosody. Moreover, the authors not only enquire into effects of ambiguous meanings but also into the strategic use of ambiguity as such, for example, as a response to censorship or as a means of provoking irritation. This volume brings together several contributions from linguistics, literary studies, rhetoric, psychology and theology, and aims at providing a systematic approach to the strategic production and perception of ambiguity in a variety of texts and contexts. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Queer Kinship in Sarah Schulman’s AIDS Novels

Queer Kinship in Sarah Schulman’s AIDS Novels PDF Author: Jarosław Milewski
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003853706
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 140

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Book Description
Queer Kinship in Sarah Schulman’s AIDS Novels is the first book to extensively discuss the works of Sarah Schulman, a journalist, activist and globally recognized novelist. This research monograph juxtaposes the works about the AIDS epidemic which were well-received by the mainstream America with Schulman’s own output as a “bard of AIDS burnout,” in the words of Edmund White. In contrast with the prevailing representations of the epidemic, her works emphasize the importance of queer kinship, chosen families and AIDS activist groups that fall outside of the heteronorm. Bearing witness to these voluntary collectivities means also surviving the traumatizing experience of ongoing, repeated death and refusing the idea of an easy solution to the crisis. The monograph tracks the tension between the dominant narratives about the epidemic and those articulated from the excluded positions, arguing that Schulman reformulates queer kinship as the locus of social change.

Valencian Folktales, Volume 2

Valencian Folktales, Volume 2 PDF Author: Paul Scott Derrick
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003835295
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
Enric Valor (1911–2000) is one of the most important Valencian authors of the 20th century. He has been, until now, almost completely unknown to an English-speaking audience. Following the publication of Valencian Folktales (2023), this second collection of his tales will help to consolidate work done on Valor in English, opening up both his fiction and the specificity of Valencian culture to Anglophone readers. The stories included here offer a sampling of the various types of tales he wrote: magical-theme tales, local-color tales and tales with personified animals. Valor collected these stories from the inhabitants of small towns and villages in the south of the Valencian territory and later gave them a polished, literary reworking. They are characterized by a detailed and lyrical treatment of the landscape and natural habitat of the region and an entertaining sense of humor. The selection begins with an introduction written by Maria-Lluisa Gea-Valor, co-translator and the author’s granddaughter. It provides a brief background to Valor’s biography, discusses the selected tales in the context of the folklore tradition and examines issues of the translation process, ranging from general considerations to more specific aspects.

Beat Myths in Literature

Beat Myths in Literature PDF Author: Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000929442
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
Beat Myths in Literature reassesses the work of women poets associated with the Beat Generation from the critical lens of revisionist discourses. Using the metaphor and the critical lens of looking back, an act infused with feminist implications after Adrianne Rich (1972), the volume focuses on poetry, fiction, and autobiographical writing to analyze the different ways in which Beat women used revisionist discourses to refashion the Beat Generation and establish themselves as literary and artistic subjects. Offering the first comprehensive study of the use of mythology in the Beat Generation, Beath Myths in Literaute: Revisionist Strategies in Beat Women focuses on the specific re-writing or revisioning of mythical texts. As such, it studies the ways in which Beat poets incorporate mythology into their works, both through the feminist reinvention or appropriation of ancient myths, but also by debunking more contemporary myths used to contain women in particular social and artistic roles. Furthermore, this volume expands Rich’s notion of re-vision, considering memoirs and autobiographies as factual and fictional re-interpretations of history. Seen through the eyes of revisionist studies and the poets’ investment in “personal myth”, the book establishes new points of entrance into works that allow us to explore the feminist, political, and poetical relevance of the work of Beat women.

Literature for a Society of Equals

Literature for a Society of Equals PDF Author: Daniel S. Malachuk
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000962962
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
Literature for a Society of Equals defends modern equality and seeks its best literature. It accuses equality’s supposed friends on the left of attenuating this world-redefining relationship into a collection of rights and goods to distribute, secularizing it even as the right keeps sacralizing hierarchies, and optimistically handing it over to time to make it happen. In contrast, loyal to equality as modernity’s revolutionary invention, the writers examined here—from Mary Shelley to Gwendolyn Brooks to Ta-Nehisi Coates—envision "relational equality" as lately recovered by philosophers like Elizabeth Anderson and historians like Pierre Rosanvallon. Literary scholars need to reread these "pessimist egalitarians," too, though, for the discipline has failed them in the same three ways: i.e., attenuating and secularizing these writers’ portraits of equality but most of all insisting the sympathy generated by reading these texts will, with enough time, "expand the circle" of humanity. For students and teachers of literature at the university level, this volume is a guide to those writings that champion equality as relational, sacred, and ours—not time's—to realize.

The Literary Role of History in the Fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien

The Literary Role of History in the Fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien PDF Author: Nicholas Birns
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003822223
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
This volume analyzes the literary role played by history in the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. It argues that the events of The Lord of the Rings are placed against the background of an already-existing history, both in reality and in the fictional worlds of the books. History is unfolded in various ways, both in explicitly archival annals and in stories told by characters on the road or on the fly, and in which different visions of history emerge. In addition, the history within the work can resemble, or be patterned on, histories in our world. These histories range from the deep past of prehistoric and ancient worlds to the early medieval era of the barbarian invasions and Byzantium, to the modern worlds of urbane civility and a paradoxical longing for nature, and finally to great power rivalries and global prospects. The book argues that Tolkien did not employ these histories indiscriminately or reductively. Rather, he regarded them as aspects of aesthetic and representative figuration that are above all literary. While most criticism has concentrated on Tolkien’s use of historical traditions of Northern Europe, this book argues that Tolkien also valued Southern and Mediterranean pasts and registered the Germanic and the Scandinavian pasts as they related to other histories as much as his vision of them included a primeval mythic aura.

Rereading German History

Rereading German History PDF Author: Richard Evans
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134724616
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Presenting the collected reviews of one of modern Germany's single most important historians, this book offers a comprehensive summary of Richard Evans' trenchant and important analytical points on Weimar, the Third Reich and revisionism.

Rereading German History (Routledge Revivals)

Rereading German History (Routledge Revivals) PDF Author: Richard J. Evans
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131754188X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
In Rereading German History, first published in 1997, Richard J. Evans draws together his seminal review essays on the political, economic, cultural and social history of Germany through war and reunification. This book provides a study of how and why historians – mainly German, American, British and French – have provided a series of differing and often conflicting readings of the German past. It also presents a reconsideration of German history in the light of the recent decline of the German Democratic Republic, collapse of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany. Rereading German History re-examines major controversies in modern German history, such as the debate over Germany’s ‘special path’ to modernity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the discussions in the 1980s on the uniqueness or otherwise of Auschwitz. Evans also analyses the arguments over the nature of German national identity. The book offers trenchant and important analytical insights into the history of Germany in the last two centuries, and is ideal reading material for students of modern history and German studies.