Playing in the Dark

Playing in the Dark PDF Author: Toni Morrison
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307388638
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 86

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Book Description
An immensely persuasive work of literary criticism that opens a new chapter in the American dialogue on race—and promises to change the way we read American literature—from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner Morrison shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that was manifestly unfree--and that came to serve white authors as embodiments of their own fears and desires. According to the Chicago Tribune, Morrison "reimagines and remaps the possibility of America." Her brilliant discussions of the "Africanist" presence in the fiction of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemingway leads to a dramatic reappraisal of the essential characteristics of our literary tradition. Written with the artistic vision that has earned the Nobel Prize-winning author a pre-eminent place in modern letters, Playing in the Dark is an invaluable read for avid Morrison admirers as well as students, critics, and scholars of American literature.

Playing in the Dark

Playing in the Dark PDF Author: Toni Morrison
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307388638
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 86

Get Book Here

Book Description
An immensely persuasive work of literary criticism that opens a new chapter in the American dialogue on race—and promises to change the way we read American literature—from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner Morrison shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that was manifestly unfree--and that came to serve white authors as embodiments of their own fears and desires. According to the Chicago Tribune, Morrison "reimagines and remaps the possibility of America." Her brilliant discussions of the "Africanist" presence in the fiction of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemingway leads to a dramatic reappraisal of the essential characteristics of our literary tradition. Written with the artistic vision that has earned the Nobel Prize-winning author a pre-eminent place in modern letters, Playing in the Dark is an invaluable read for avid Morrison admirers as well as students, critics, and scholars of American literature.

Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination

Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination PDF Author: Katherine Byrne
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521766672
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
This book examines representations of tuberculosis in Victorian fiction, giving insights into how society viewed this disease and its sufferers.

The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity

The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity PDF Author: Eva Mroczek
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190279834
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
How did Jews understand sacred writing before the concepts of "Bible" and "book" emerged? The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity challenges anachronistic categories to reveal new aspects of how ancient Jews imagined written revelation-a wildly varied collection stretching back to the dawn of time, with new discoveries always around the corner.

Time, the City, and the Literary Imagination

Time, the City, and the Literary Imagination PDF Author: Anne-Marie Evans
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030559610
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Time, the City, and the Literary Imagination explores the relationship between the constructions and representations of the relationship between time and the city in literature published between the late eighteenth century and the present. This collection offers a new way of reading the literary city by tracing the ways in which the relationship between time and urban space can shape literary narratives and forms. The essays consider the representation of a range of literary cities from across the world and consider how an understanding of time, and time passing, can impact on our understanding of the primary texts. Literature necessarily deals with time, both as a function of storytelling and as an experience of reading. In this volume, the contributions demonstrate how literature about cities brings to the forefront the relationship between individual and communal experience and time.

The German Student Movement and the Literary Imagination

The German Student Movement and the Literary Imagination PDF Author: Susanne Rinner
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857457551
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
Through a close reading of novels by Ulrike Kolb, Irmtraud Morgner, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Bernhard Schlink, Peter Schneider, and Uwe Timm, this book traces the cultural memory of the 1960s student movement in German fiction, revealing layers of remembering and forgetting that go beyond conventional boundaries of time and space. These novels engage this contestation by constructing a palimpsest of memories that reshape readers’ understanding of the 1960s with respect to the end of the Cold War, the legacy of the Third Reich, and the Holocaust. Topographically, these novels refute assertions that East Germans were isolated from the political upheaval that took place in the late 1960s and 1970s. Through their aesthetic appropriations and subversions, these multicultural contributions challenge conventional understandings of German identity and at the same time lay down claims of belonging within a German society that is more openly diverse than ever before.

Philosophy, Dreaming and the Literary Imagination

Philosophy, Dreaming and the Literary Imagination PDF Author: Michaela Schrage-Früh
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319407244
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
This book explores the intersections between dreaming and the literary imagination, in light of the findings of recent neurocognitive and empirical research, with the aim to lay a groundwork for an empirically informed aesthetics of dreaming. Drawing on perspectives from literary theory, philosophy of mind and dream research, this study investigates dreaming in relation to creativity and waking states of imagination such as writing and reading stories. Exploring the similarities and differences between the 'language' of dreams and the language of literature, it analyses the strategies employed by writers to create a sense of dream in literary fiction as well as the genres most conducive to this endeavour. The book closes with three case studies focusing on texts by Kazuo Ishiguro, Clare Boylan and John Banville to illustrate the diverse ways in which writers achieve to 'translate' the experience and 'language' of the dream.

Goodness and the Literary Imagination

Goodness and the Literary Imagination PDF Author: Toni Morrison
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813943639
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
What exactly is goodness? Where is it found in the literary imagination? Toni Morrison, one of American letters’ greatest voices, pondered these perplexing questions in her celebrated Ingersoll Lecture, delivered at Harvard University in 2012 and published now for the first time in book form. Perhaps because it is overshadowed by the more easily defined evil, goodness often escapes our attention. Recalling many literary examples, from Ahab to Coetzee’s Michael K, Morrison seeks the essence of goodness and ponders its significant place in her writing. She considers the concept in relation to unforgettable characters from her own works of fiction and arrives at conclusions that are both eloquent and edifying. In a lively interview conducted for this book, Morrison further elaborates on her lecture’s ideas, discussing goodness not only in literature but in society and history—particularly black history, which has responded to centuries of brutality with profound creativity. Morrison’s essay is followed by a series of responses by scholars in the fields of religion, ethics, history, and literature to her thoughts on goodness and evil, mercy and love, racism and self-destruction, language and liberation, together with close examination of literary and theoretical expressions from her works. Each of these contributions, written by a scholar of religion, considers the legacy of slavery and how it continues to shape our memories, our complicities, our outcries, our lives, our communities, our literature, and our faith. In addition, the contributors engage the religious orientation in Morrison’s novels so that readers who encounter her many memorable characters such as Sula, Beloved, or Frank Money will learn and appreciate how Morrison’s notions of goodness and mercy also reflect her understanding of the sacred and the human spirit.

Premodern Ecologies in the Modern Literary Imagination

Premodern Ecologies in the Modern Literary Imagination PDF Author: Vin Nardizzi
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487519532
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 357

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Book Description
Premodern Ecologies in the Modern Literary Imagination explores how the cognitive and physical landscapes in which scholars conduct research, write, and teach have shaped their understandings of medieval and Renaissance English literary "oecologies." The collection strives to practice what Ursula K. Heise calls "eco-cosmopolitanism," a method that imagines forms of local environmentalism as a defense against the interventions of open-market global networks. It also expands the idea’s possibilities and identifies its limitations through critical studies of premodern texts, artefacts, and environmental history. The essays connect real environments and their imaginative (re)creations and affirm the urgency of reorienting humanity’s responsiveness to, and responsibility for, the historical links between human and non-human existence. The discussion of ways in which meditation on scholarly place and time can deepen ecocritical work offers an innovative and engaging approach that will appeal to both ecocritics generally and to medieval and early modern scholars.

Cosmopolitanism and the Literary Imagination

Cosmopolitanism and the Literary Imagination PDF Author: C. Patell
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137107774
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
Through contemporary theories of cosmopolitanism and analyses of literary texts such as Heart of Darkness, Lilith's Brood, and Moby-Dick, this book explores the cosmopolitan impulses behind the literary imagination. Patell argues that cosmopolitanism regards human difference as an opportunity to be embraced rather than a problem to be solved.

Associationism and the Literary Imagination

Associationism and the Literary Imagination PDF Author: Craig Cairns Craig
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748628169
Category : LITERARY CRITICISM
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Associationism and the Literary Imagination traces the influence of empirical philosophy and associationist psychology on theories of literary creativity and on the experience of reading literature. It runs from David Hume's Treatise of Human Nature in 1739 to the works of major literary critics of the twentieth century, such as I.A. Richards, W.K. Wimsatt and Northrop Frye. Cairns Craig explores the ways in which associationist conceptions of literature gave rise to some of the key transformations in British writing between the romantic and modernist periods. In particular, he analyses the ways in which authors' conceptions of the form of their readers' aesthetic experience led to radical developments in literary style, from the fragmentary narrative of Sterne's Tristram Shandy in 1760 to Virginia Woolf's experiments in the rendering of characters' consciousness in the 1920s; and from Wordsworth's poetic use of autobiography to J.G. Frazer's exploration of a mythic unconscious in The Golden Bough. Detailed analyses are offered of the ways in which a wide variety of major British writers, including Scott, Lady Morgan, Dickens, Tennyson, Hardy, Yeats, Joyce and Woolf developed their literary techniques on the basis of associationist conceptions of the mind, and of how modern literary criticism - from Arthur Symons to Roland Barthes - is founded on associationist principles. Associationism and the Literary Imagination relocates the traditions of British writing since the eighteenth century within the neglected context of its native empirical philosophy, and reveals how many of the issues assumed to be products of 'postmodern' or 'deconstructive' theory have long been foregrounded and debated within the traditions of British empiricism. This is a work which provides a radical new perspective on the history of literature in Britain and Ireland and challenges many of the assumptions of contemporary theoretical debate about the