Author: Peter Gay
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393325091
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 193
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Book Description
A revelatory work that examines the intricate relationship between history and literature, truth and fiction—with some surprising conclusions. Focusing on three literary masterpieces—Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1853), Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857), and Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks (1901)—Peter Gay, a leading cultural historian, demonstrates that there is more than one way to read a novel. Typically, readers believe that fiction, especially the Realist novels that dominated Western culture for most of the nineteenth century and beyond, is based on historical truth and that great novels possess a documentary value. That trust, Gay brilliantly shows, is misplaced; novels take their own path to reality. Using Dickens, Flaubert, and Mann as his examples, Gay explores their world, their craftsmanship, and their minds. In the process, he discovers that all three share one overriding quality: a resentment and rage against the society that sustains the novel itself. Using their stylish writing as a form of revenge, they deal out savage reprisals, which have become part of our Western literary canon. A New York Times Notable Book and a Best Book of 2002.
Author: Peter Séraphin Rogers
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9042027061
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 194
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Book Description
Drawing upon Flaubert's fictional works, travel writings, correspondence, and notes on his reading of the Bible and interest in iconography, Rogers traces the presence of a liturgical drama, a mystery play, in a text known as iconic of the realist novel. Showing how Flaubert's use of religious tales, topoi, and imagery extends beyond his retelling of saints' lives in the Tentation de Saint Antoine and the Trois contes, this study elucidates the biblical and devotional subcurrent in the story of Emma Bovary. Biblical episodes, religious emblems, and discussions of Catholic dogma link the adulterous heroine to the Virgin Mary, who emerges in the course of this subtle reading as the other heroine of the scandalous story. The 19th-century impulse to censor is embodied within the novel by two characters representing the secular and religious poles. The free-thinking pharmacist Homais and the parish priest concur only on the dangers of reading the Bible. When the novel itself was brought to trial for attacking religion, Flaubert's prosecutor and defense lawyer overlooked this condemnation of scripture. This study invites readers to pay close attention to the religious texts and traditions discussed and restaged in Madame Bovary to gain a new awareness of the narrow bond between theatre and religion in Flaubert's provinces.
Author: Natalie McKnight
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443833118
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 235
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Book Description
This book examines the changing roles of fathers in the nineteenth century as seen in the lives and fiction of Victorian authors. Fatherhood underwent unprecedented change during this period. The Industrial Revolution moved work out of the home for many men, diminishing contact between fathers and their children. Yet fatherhood continued to be seen as the ultimate expression of masculinity, and being involved with the lives of one’s children was essential to being a good father. Conflicting and frustrating expectations of fathers and the growing disillusionment with other paternal authorities such as church and state yielded memorable portrayals of fathers from the best novelists of the age. The essays in this volume explore how Victorian authors (the Brontës, Dickens, Gaskell, Trollope, Eliot, Hardy, and Elizabeth Sewall and Mary Augusta Ward) responded to these tensions in their lives and in their fiction. The stern Victorian father cliché persisted, but it was countered by imaginative, involved, albeit faulty fathers and surrogate fathers. This volume poses fathering questions that are still relevant today: What does it mean to be a good father? And, with distrust in patriarchal authorities continuing to increase, are there any sources of authority left that one can trust?
Author: K. Kroeber
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1403983224
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 231
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Book Description
This study provides the first detailed contrast between the experiences of reading a novel and watching a movie. Kroeber shows how fiction evokes morally inflected imagining, and how movies reveal through magnification of human movements and expression subjective effects of complex social changes.
Author: Timothy R. Mahoney
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107122694
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 417
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Book Description
Mahoney examines how the middle class from across the great West were transformed by years of recession and civil war.
Author: Alexander Nehamas
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691148651
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 198
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Book Description
Neither art nor philosophy was kind to beauty during the twentieth century. Much modern art disdains beauty, and many philosophers deeply suspect that beauty merely paints over or distracts us from horrors. Intellectuals consigned the passions of beauty to the margins, replacing them with the anemic and rarefied alternative, "aesthetic pleasure." In Only a Promise of Happiness, Alexander Nehamas reclaims beauty from its critics. He seeks to restore its place in art, to reestablish the connections among art, beauty, and desire, and to show that the values of art, independently of their moral worth, are equally crucial to the rest of life. Nehamas makes his case with characteristic grace, sensitivity, and philosophical depth, supporting his arguments with searching studies of art and literature, high and low, from Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and Manet's Olympia to television. Throughout, the discussion of artworks is generously illustrated. Beauty, Nehamas concludes, may depend on appearance, but this does not make it superficial. The perception of beauty manifests a hope that life would be better if the object of beauty were part of it. This hope can shape and direct our lives for better or worse. We may discover misery in pursuit of beauty, or find that beauty offers no more than a tantalizing promise of happiness. But if beauty is always dangerous, it is also a pressing human concern that we must seek to understand, and not suppress.
Author: David Krasner
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1405157577
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 420
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Book Description
Covering the period 1879 to 1959, and taking in everything from Ibsen to Beckett, this book is volume one of a two-part comprehensive examination of the plays, dramatists, and movements that comprise modern world drama. Contains detailed analysis of plays and playwrights, connecting themes and offering original interpretations Includes coverage of non-English works and traditions to create a global view of modern drama Considers the influence of modernism in art, music, literature, architecture, society, and politics on the formation of modern dramatic literature Takes an interpretative and analytical approach to modern dramatic texts rather than focusing on production history Includes coverage of the ways in which staging practices, design concepts, and acting styles informed the construction of the dramas
Author: Brian Hamnett
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199695040
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344
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Book Description
Brian Hamnett examines key historical novels by Scott, Balzac, Manzoni, Dickens, Eliot, Flaubert, Fontane, Galdós, and Tolstoy, revealing the contradictions inherent in this form of fiction and exploring the challenges writers encountered in attempting to represent a reality that linked past and present.
Author: Janet G. Tucker
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9401206554
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
Profane Challenge and Orthodox Response in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment presents for the first time an examination of this great novel as a work aimed at winning back “target readers”, young contemporary radicals, from Utilitarianism, nihilism, and Utopian Socialism. Dostoevsky framed the battle in the context of the Orthodox Church and oral tradition versus the West. He relied on knowledge of the Gospels as text received orally, forcing readers to react emotionally, not rationally, and thus undermining the very basis of his opponents’ arguments. Dostoevsky saves Raskol’nikov, underscoring the inadequacy of rational thought and reminding his readers of a heritage discarded at their peril. This volume should be of special interest to secondary and university students, as well as to readers interested in literature, particularly, in Russian literature, and Dostoevsky.
Author: Peter Gay
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300144296
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 164
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Book Description
A National Book Award-winning Yale scholar's reflections on the romantic period, its contributors and its legacy addresses recurring questions about how to interpret romantic figures and their works while assessing modernism's debt to romanticism.
