Rereading the Imperial Romance

Rereading the Imperial Romance PDF Author: Laura Chrisman
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 9780198122999
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
"Chrisman's book demonstrates how South Africa played an important if now overlooked role in British imperial culture, and shows the impact of capitalism itself in the making of racial, gender and national identities. This book makes an original contribution to studies of Victorian literature of empire; South African literary history; African studies; black nationalism; and the literature of resistance."--BOOK JACKET.

Rereading the Imperial Romance

Rereading the Imperial Romance PDF Author: Laura Chrisman
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 9780198122999
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 262

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Chrisman's book demonstrates how South Africa played an important if now overlooked role in British imperial culture, and shows the impact of capitalism itself in the making of racial, gender and national identities. This book makes an original contribution to studies of Victorian literature of empire; South African literary history; African studies; black nationalism; and the literature of resistance."--BOOK JACKET.

Rereading the Stone

Rereading the Stone PDF Author: Anthony C. Yu
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691090139
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
The eighteenth-century Hongloumeng, known in English as Dream of the Red Chamber or The Story of the Stone, is generally considered to be the greatest of Chinese novels--one that masterfully blends realism and romance, psychological motivation and fate, daily life and mythical occurrences, as it narrates the decline of a powerful Chinese family. In this path-breaking study, Anthony Yu goes beyond the customary view of Hongloumeng as a vivid reflection of late imperial Chinese culture by examining the novel as a story about fictive representation. Through a maze of literary devices, the novel challenges the authority of history as well as referential biases in reading. At the heart of Hongloumeng, Yu argues, is the narration of desire. Desire appears in this tale as the defining trait and problem of human beings and at the same time shapes the novel's literary invention and effect. According to Yu, this focalizing treatment of desire may well be Hongloumeng's most distinctive accomplishment. Through close readings of selected episodes, Yu analyzes principal motifs of the narrative, such as dream, mirror, literature, religious enlightenment, and rhetorical reflexivity in relation to fictive representation. He contextualizes his discussions with a comprehensive genealogy of qing--desire, disposition, sentiment, feeling--a concept of fundamental importance in historical Chinese culture, and shows how the text ingeniously exploits its multiple meanings. Spanning a wide range of comparative literary sources, Yu creates a new conceptual framework in which to reevaluate this masterpiece.

Sol Plaatje's Mhudi

Sol Plaatje's Mhudi PDF Author: Sabata-mpho Mokae
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1847012760
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
"Sol Plaatje's Mhudi is the first full-length novel in English to have been written by a black South African and is widely regarded as one of South Africa's most important literary works. Set in the 1830s, it tells the tale of Mhudi and Ra-Thaga, a romantic story set against a violent backdrop of war between Barolong and Matebele, complicated by the intrusions of Boer trekkers with whom the Barolong form an alliance. It is notable, among other things, for the way Plaatje uses the past to explore the roots of the oppression and injustice suffered by his people a century later, when the book was written"--Page 4 of cover

Novel Cultivations

Novel Cultivations PDF Author: Elizabeth Hope Chang
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813942497
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Shortlisted for the Best Book Prize from the British Society of Literature and Science Nineteenth-century English nature was a place of experimentation, exoticism, and transgression, as site and emblem of the global exchanges of the British Empire. Popular attitudes toward the transplantation of exotic species—botanical and human—to Victorian greenhouses and cities found anxious expression in a number of fanciful genre texts, including mysteries, science fiction, and horror stories. Situated in a mid-Victorian moment of frenetic plant collecting from the far reaches of the British empire, Novel Cultivations recognizes plants as vital and sentient subjects that serve—often more so than people—as actors and narrative engines in the nineteenth-century novel. Conceptions of native and natural were decoupled by the revelation that nature was globally sourced, a disruption displayed in the plots of gardens as in those of novels. Elizabeth Chang examines here the agency asserted by plants with shrewd readings of a range of fictional works, from monstrous rhododendrons in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca and Mexican prickly pears in Olive Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm, to Algernon Blackwood’s hair-raising "The Man Whom the Trees Loved" and other obscure ecogothic tales. This provocative contribution to ecocriticism shows plants as buttonholes between fiction and reality, registering changes of form and content in both realms.

Forms of Empire

Forms of Empire PDF Author: Nathan K. Hensley
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192510940
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
In Forms of Empire, Nathan K. Hensley shows how the modern state's anguished relationship to violence pushed writers to expand the capacities of literary form. The Victorian era is often imagined as an "age of equipoise," but the period between 1837 and 1901 included more than two hundred separate wars. What is the difference, though, between peace and war? Forms of Empire unpacks the seeming paradoxes of the Pax Britannica's endless conflict, showing that the much vaunted equipoise of the nineteenth-century state depended on physical force to guarantee it. But the violence hidden in the shadows of all law --the violence of sovereign power itself--shuddered most visibly into being at the edges of law's reach, in the Empire, where emergency was the rule and death perversely routinized. This book follows some of the nineteenth century's most astute literary thinkers--George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, A.C. Swinburne, H. Rider Haggard, and Robert Louis Stevenson among them--as they wrestled with the sometimes sickening interplay between order and force, and generated new formal techniques to account for fact that an Empire built on freedom had death coiled at its very heart. In contrast to the progressive idealism we have inherited from the Victorians, the writers at the core of Forms of Empire moved beyond embarrassment and denial in the face of modernity's uncanny relation to killing. Instead they sought effects--free indirect discourse, lyric tension, and the idea of literary "character" itself--that might render thinkable the conceptual vertigoes of liberal violence. In the process, they touched up to the dark core of our post-Victorian modernity. Drawing on archival work, literary analyses, and a theoretical framework that troubles the distinction between "historicist" and "formalist" approaches, Forms of Empire links the Victorian period to the present and articulates a forceful vision of why literary thinking matters now.

Postcolonial contraventions

Postcolonial contraventions PDF Author: Laura Chrisman
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1847795323
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. This book analyses black Atlantic studies, colonial discourse analysis and postcolonial theory, providing paradigms for understanding imperial literature, Englishness and black transnationalism. Its concerns range from the metropolitan centre of Conrad's Heart of Darkness to fatherhood in Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk; from the marketing of South African literature to cosmopolitanism in Achebe; and from utopian discourse in Parry to Jameson's theorisation of empire.

Strategic Occidentalism

Strategic Occidentalism PDF Author: Ignacio M. Sanchez Prado
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810137577
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
Strategic Occidentalism examines the transformation, in both aesthetics and infrastructure, of Mexican fiction since the late 1970s. During this time a framework has emerged characterized by the corporatization of publishing, a frictional relationship between Mexican literature and global book markets, and the desire of Mexican writers to break from dominant models of national culture. In the course of this analysis, Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado engages with theories of world literature, proposing that “world literature” is a construction produced at various levels, including the national, that must be studied from its material conditions of production in specific sites. In particular, he argues that Mexican writers have engaged in a “strategic Occidentalism” in which their idiosyncratic connections with world literature have responded to dynamics different from those identified by world-systems or diffusionist theorists. Strategic Occidentalism identifies three scenes in which a cosmopolitan aesthetics in Mexican world literature has been produced: Sergio Pitol’s translation of Eastern European and marginal British modernist literature; the emergence of the Crack group as a polemic against the legacies of magical realism; and the challenges of writers like Carmen Boullosa, Cristina Rivera Garza, and Ana García Bergua to the roles traditionally assigned to Latin American writers in world literature.

Women's Experience of Modernity, 1875-1945

Women's Experience of Modernity, 1875-1945 PDF Author: Leslie W. Lewis
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801869358
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 668

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Book Description
Analyzing such cultural practices as selling and shopping, political and social activism, urban field work and rural labor, radical discourses on feminine sexuality, and literary and artistic experimentation, this volume contributes to the rich vein of current feminist scholarship on the "gender of modernism" and challenges the assumption that modernism rose naturally or inevitably to the forefront of the cultural landscape at the turn of the twentieth century.".

Victorian Material Culture

Victorian Material Culture PDF Author: Adelene Buckland
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131540012X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 423

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Book Description
From chatelaines to whale blubber, ice making machines to stained glass, this six-volume collection will be of interest to the scholar, student or general reader alike - anyone who has an urge to learn more about Victorian things. The set brings together a range of primary sources on Victorian material culture and discusses the most significant developments in material history from across the nineteenth century. The collection will demonstrate the significance of objects in the everyday lives of the Victorians and addresses important questions about how we classify and categorise nineteenth-century things. The fourth volume will look at raw materials that were handled and used by Victorians including blubber and coal.

The Globalization of Space

The Globalization of Space PDF Author: John Miller
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317318315
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
The work of Michel Foucault has been influential in the analysis of space in a variety of disciplines, most notably in geography and politics. This collection of essays is the first to focus on what Foucault termed ‘heterotopias’, spaces that exhibit multiple layers of meaning and reveal tensions within society.