The Serious Pleasures of Suspense

The Serious Pleasures of Suspense PDF Author: Caroline Levine
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813922171
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Get Book Here

Book Description
Scholars have long recognized that narrative suspense dominates the formal dynamics of 19th-century British fiction. This study argues that various 19th-century thinkers - John Ruskin, Michael Faraday, Charlotte Bronte - saw suspense as a vehicle for a new approach to knowledge called "realism".

The Serious Pleasures of Suspense

The Serious Pleasures of Suspense PDF Author: Caroline Levine
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813922171
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Get Book Here

Book Description
Scholars have long recognized that narrative suspense dominates the formal dynamics of 19th-century British fiction. This study argues that various 19th-century thinkers - John Ruskin, Michael Faraday, Charlotte Bronte - saw suspense as a vehicle for a new approach to knowledge called "realism".

Why I Read

Why I Read PDF Author: Wendy Lesser
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0374709815
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Wendy Lesser's extraordinary alertness, intelligence, and curiosity have made her one of America's most significant cultural critics," writes Stephen Greenblatt. In Why I Read, Lesser draws on a lifetime of pleasure reading and decades of editing one of the most distinguished literary magazines in the country, The Threepenny Review, to describe her love of literature. As Lesser writes in her prologue, "Reading can result in boredom or transcendence, rage or enthusiasm, depression or hilarity, empathy or contempt, depending on who you are and what the book is and how your life is shaping up at the moment you encounter it." Here the reader will discover a definition of literature that is as broad as it is broad-minded. In addition to novels and stories, Lesser explores plays, poems, and essays along with mysteries, science fiction, and memoirs. As she examines these works from such perspectives as "Character and Plot," "Novelty," "Grandeur and Intimacy," and "Authority," Why I Read sparks an overwhelming desire to put aside quotidian tasks in favor of reading. Lesser's passion for this pursuit resonates on every page, whether she is discussing the book as a physical object or a particular work's influence. "Reading literature is a way of reaching back to something bigger and older and different," she writes. "It can give you the feeling that you belong to the past as well as the present, and it can help you realize that your present will someday be someone else's past. This may be disheartening, but it can also be strangely consoling at times." A book in the spirit of E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel and Elizabeth Hardwick's A View of My Own, Why I Read is iconoclastic, conversational, and full of insight. It will delight those who are already avid readers as well as neophytes in search of sheer literary fun.

Seeming Human

Seeming Human PDF Author: Megan Ward
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780814213759
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Get Book Here

Book Description
Finds a new theory of Victorian realist character in the mid-twentieth-century emergence of artificial intelligence.

Sheer Pleasures

Sheer Pleasures PDF Author: Stella Cameron
Publisher: Zebra Books
ISBN: 9780821776100
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 388

Get Book Here

Book Description
When a friend disappears in Washington State's Cascade Mountains, Wilhelmina Phoenix sets out to find out what happened. She doesn't realize the danger she's in until she meets Roman Wilds, an ex-Navy SEAL who's working undercover. Reissue.

Fear in the Medical and Literary Imagination, Medieval to Modern

Fear in the Medical and Literary Imagination, Medieval to Modern PDF Author: Daniel McCann
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137559489
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book is about an emotion constantly present in human culture and history: fear. It is also a book about literature and medicine, two areas of human endeavour that engage with fear most acutely. The essays in this volume explore fear in various literary and medical manifestations, in the Western World, from medieval to modern times. It is divided into two parts. The first part, Treating Fear, examines fear in medical history, and draws from theology, medicine, philosophy, and psychology, to offer an account of how fear shifts in Western understanding from the Middle Ages to Modern times. The second part, Writing Fear, explores fear as a rhetorical and literary force, offering an account of how it is used and evoked in distinct literary periods and texts. This coherent and fascinating collection will appeal to medical historians, literary critics, cultural theorists, medical humanities’ scholars and historians of the emotions.

Elements of Surprise

Elements of Surprise PDF Author: Vera Tobin
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674919599
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 277

Get Book Here

Book Description
Why do some surprises delight—the endings of Agatha Christie novels, films like The Sixth Sense, the flash awareness that Pip’s benefactor is not (and never was!) Miss Havisham? Writing at the intersection of cognitive science and narrative pleasure, Vera Tobin explains how our brains conspire with stories to produce those revelatory plots that define a “well-made surprise.” By tracing the prevalence of surprise endings in both literary fiction and popular literature and showing how they exploit our mental limits, Tobin upends two common beliefs. The first is cognitive science’s tendency to consider biases a form of moral weakness and failure. The second is certain critics’ presumption that surprise endings are mere shallow gimmicks. The latter is simply not true, and the former tells at best half the story. Tobin shows that building a good plot twist is a complex art that reflects a sophisticated understanding of the human mind. Reading classic, popular, and obscure literature alongside the latest research in cognitive science, Tobin argues that a good surprise works by taking advantage of our mental limits. Elements of Surprise describes how cognitive biases, mental shortcuts, and quirks of memory conspire with stories to produce wondrous illusions, and also provides a sophisticated how-to guide for writers. In Tobin’s hands, the interactions of plot and cognition reveal the interdependencies of surprise, sympathy, and sense-making. The result is a new appreciation of the pleasures of being had.

Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain PDF Author: Janis McLarren Caldwell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139456644
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 219

Get Book Here

Book Description
Although we have come to regard 'clinical' and 'romantic' as oppositional terms, romantic literature and clinical medicine were fed by the same cultural configurations. In the pre-Darwinian nineteenth century, writers and doctors developed an interpretive method that negotiated between literary and scientific knowledge of the natural world. Literary writers produced potent myths that juxtaposed the natural and the supernatural, often disturbing the conventional dualist hierarchy of spirit over flesh. Clinicians developed the two-part history and physical examination, weighing the patient's narrative against the evidence of the body. Examining fiction by Mary Shelley, Carlyle, the Brontës and George Eliot, alongside biomedical lectures, textbooks and articles, Janis McLarren Caldwell demonstrates the similar ways of reading employed by nineteenth-century doctors and imaginative writers and reveals the complexities and creative exchanges of the relationship between literature and medicine.

Description and Narrative in Middle English Alliterative Poetry

Description and Narrative in Middle English Alliterative Poetry PDF Author: Thorlac Turville-Petre
Publisher: Exeter Medieval Texts and Stud
ISBN: 1786941430
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Get Book Here

Book Description
'[The book offers] meticulous case studies of authorial technique with much relevant historical detail. Discussion of sound symbolism is laudably precise and informative. [...] Glossed illustrative passages are provided throughout to maintain contact with a large potential audience. [...] The overall quality of the book cannot be ignored. This is an outstanding work of literary analysis.' Geoffrey Russom, Brown University

Drugs and the Addiction Aesthetic in Nineteenth-Century Literature

Drugs and the Addiction Aesthetic in Nineteenth-Century Literature PDF Author: Adam Colman
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030015904
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book explores the rise of the aesthetic category of addiction in the nineteenth century, a century that saw the development of an established medical sense of drug addiction. Drugs and the Addiction Aesthetic in Nineteenth-Century Literature focuses especially on formal invention—on the uses of literary patterns for intensified, exploratory engagement with unattained possibility—resulting from literary intersections with addiction discourse. Early chapters consider how Romantics such as Thomas De Quincey created, with regard to drug habit, an idea of habitual craving that related to self-experimenting science and literary exploration; later chapters look at Victorians who drew from similar understandings while devising narratives of repetitive investigation. The authors considered include De Quincey, Percy Shelley, Alfred Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Marie Corelli.

Victorian Parables

Victorian Parables PDF Author: Susan E. Colon
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441146504
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 178

Get Book Here

Book Description
The familiar stories of the good Samaritan, the prodigal son, and Lazarus and the rich man were part of the cultural currency in the nineteenth century, and Victorian authors drew upon the figures and plots of biblical parables for a variety of authoritative, interpretive, and subversive effects. However, scholars of parables in literature have often overlooked the 19th-century novel, assuming that realism bears no relation to the subversive, iconoclastic genre of parable. In this book Susan E. Colòn shows that authors such as Charles Dickens, Margaret Oliphant, and Charlotte Yonge appreciated the power of parables to deliver an ethical charge that was as unexpected as it was disruptive to conventional moral ideas. Against the common assumption that the genres of realism and parable are polar opposites, this study explores how Victorian novels, despite their length, verisimilitude, and multi-plot complexity, can become parables in ways that imitate, interpret, and challenge their biblical sources.