The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction

The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction PDF Author: K. Cooper
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137283386
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 251

Get Book Here

Book Description
From The Other Boleyn Girl to Fingersmith , this collection explores the popularity of female-centred historical novels in recent years. It asks how these representations are influenced by contemporary gender politics, and whether they can be seen as part of a wider feminist project to recover women's history.

The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction

The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction PDF Author: K. Cooper
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137283386
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 219

Get Book Here

Book Description
From The Other Boleyn Girl to Fingersmith , this collection explores the popularity of female-centred historical novels in recent years. It asks how these representations are influenced by contemporary gender politics, and whether they can be seen as part of a wider feminist project to recover women's history.

Life Mask

Life Mask PDF Author: Emma Donoghue
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547541465
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 737

Get Book Here

Book Description
Privilege has a price for three high-society Londoners in this eighteenth-century historical novel by the author of Room and The Pull of the Stars. In a time of looming war, of glittering spectacle and financial disasters, the wealthy liberals of the Whig Party work to topple a tyrannical prime minister and a lunatic king. Marriages and friendships stretch or break; political liaisons prove as dangerous as erotic ones; and everyone wears a mask. Will Eliza Farren, England's leading comedic actress, gain entry to that elite circle that calls itself the World? Can Lord Derby, the inventor of the horse race that bears his name, endure public mockery of his long, unconsummated courtship of the actress? Will Anne Damer, a sculptor and rumored Sapphist, be the cause of Eliza's fall from grace? Let the games begin . . . “Mesmerizing. With the French Revolution raging in the background, Donoghue has lighted on another terrific story, and she pulls off a dazzling feat of choreography.” —Julia Livshin, The Washington Post Book World “Few will be able to put it down before its enthralling tales end.” —Chicago Tribune

Conflict and Colonialism in 21st Century Romantic Historical Fiction

Conflict and Colonialism in 21st Century Romantic Historical Fiction PDF Author: Hsu-Ming Teo
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040085415
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 180

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book explores how postmillennial Anglophone women writers use romantic narrativisations of history to explore, revise, repurpose and challenge the past in their novels, exposing the extent to which past societies were damaging to women by instead imagining alternative histories. The novelists discussed employ the generic conventions of romance to narrate their understanding of historical and contemporary injustice and to reflect upon women’s achievements and the price they paid for autonomy and a life of public purpose. The volume seeks, firstly, to discuss the work of revision or reparation being performed by romantic historical fiction and, secondly, to analyse how the past is being repurposed for use in the present. It contends that the discourses and genre of romance work to provide a reparative reading of the past, but there are limitations and entrenched problems in such readings.

Travel and Colonialism in 21st Century Romantic Historical Fiction

Travel and Colonialism in 21st Century Romantic Historical Fiction PDF Author: Paloma Fresno-Calleja
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040305660
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Get Book Here

Book Description
Romantic fiction has often involved stories of travel. In narratives of the journey towards love, "romance" often involves encounters with "exotic" places and peoples. When history is invoked in such stories, the past itself is exoticised and treated as "other" to the present to serve the purposes of romanticisation: a narrative strategy by which all manner of things – settings, characters, costumes, customs, consumables – are made to perform a luxuriant otherness that amplifies the experience of love. This volume questions the reparative function of Anglophone romantic historical fiction to ask: can plots of travel and discourses of tourism empower women while narrating stories of healing for the wounds of the past? This is the first volume to consider how romanticised and exoticised women’s historical fiction not only serves the purposes of armchair travel but may also replicate colonial discourse, unintentionally positioning readers as neocolonial, neo-Orientalist cultural voyeurs as well as voyagers.

Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction

Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction PDF Author: Julia Novak
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031090195
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 397

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume addresses the current boom in biographical fictions across the globe, examining the ways in which gendered lives of the past become re-imagined as gendered narratives in fiction. Building on this research, this book is the first to address questions of gender in a sustained and systematic manner that is also sensitive to cultural and historical differences in both raw material and fictional reworking. It develops a critical lens through which to approach biofictions as ‘fictions of gender’, drawing on theories of biofiction and historical fiction, life-writing studies, feminist criticism, queer feminist readings, postcolonial studies, feminist art history, and trans studies. Attentive to various approaches to fictionalisation that reclaim, appropriate or re-invent their ‘raw material’, the volume assesses the critical, revisionist and deconstructive potential of biographical fictions while acknowledging the effects of cliché, gender norms and established narratives in many of the texts under investigation. The introduction of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com Chapter 1 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Ethics in the Arthurian Legend

Ethics in the Arthurian Legend PDF Author: Melissa Ridley Elmes
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 184384687X
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 421

Get Book Here

Book Description
An interdisciplinary and trans-historical investigation of the representation of ethics in Arthurian Literature. From its earliest days, the Arthurian legend has been preoccupied with questions of good kingship, the behaviours of a ruling class, and their effects on communities, societies, and nations, both locally and in imperial and colonizing contexts. Ethical considerations inform and are informed by local anxieties tied to questions of power and identity, especially where leadership, service, and governance are concerned; they provide a framework for understanding how the texts operate as didactic and critical tools of these subjects. This book brings together chapters drawing on English, Welsh, German, Dutch, French, and Norse iterations of the Arthurian legend, and bridging premodern and modern temporalities, to investigate the representation of ethics in Arthurian literature across interdisciplinary and transhistorical lines. They engage a variety of methodologies, including gender, critical race theory, philology, literature and the law, translation theory, game studies, comparative, critical, and close reading, and modern editorial and authorial practices. Texts interrogated range from Culhwch and Olwen to Parzival, Roman van Walewein, Tristrams Saga, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Malory's Morte Darthur. As a whole, the approaches and findings in this volume attest to the continued value and importance of the Arthurian legend and its scholarship as a vibrant field through which to locate and understand the many ways in which medieval literature continues to inform modern sensibilities and institutions, particularly where the matter of ethics is concerned.

Shakespeare and the Modern Novel

Shakespeare and the Modern Novel PDF Author: Graham Holderness
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1805397036
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Shakespearean novel is undergoing a renaissance as the long prose narrative form becomes reinvigorated through new forms of media such as television, film and the internet. Shakespeare and the Modern Novel explores the history of the novel as a literary form, suggesting that the form can trace its strongest roots beyond the eighteenth-century work of Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson to Shakespeare’s plays. Within this collection, well-established Shakespeare critics demonstrate that the diversity and flexibility of interactions between Shakespeare and the modern novel are very much alive.

How Pharaohs Became Media Stars: Ancient Egypt and Popular Culture

How Pharaohs Became Media Stars: Ancient Egypt and Popular Culture PDF Author: Abraham I. Fernández Pichel
Publisher: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1803276274
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 261

Get Book Here

Book Description
New media and its enormous diffusion in the last decades of the 20th century and up to the present has greatly increased and diversified the reception of Egyptian themes and motifs and Egyptian influence in various cultural spheres. This book seeks to provide new evidence of this interdisciplinarity between Egyptology and popular culture.

Writing Back Through Our Mothers

Writing Back Through Our Mothers PDF Author: Tegan Zimmerman
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN: 3643905602
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Get Book Here

Book Description
For the first time in the literary tradition, the contemporary woman's historical novel (post-1970) is surveyed from a transnational feminist perspective. Analyzing the maternal (the genre's central theme) reveals that historical fiction is a transnational feminist means for challenging historical erasures, silences, normative sexuality, political exclusion, and divisions of labor. (Series: Contributions to Transnational Feminism - Vol. 5)