The Unresolvable Plot

The Unresolvable Plot PDF Author: Elizabeth Dipple
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000639134
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 426

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Book Description
Originally published in 1988, the last few decades had seen the appearance of some brilliant and complex new kinds of fiction. The ambitious experiments of writers such as Greene, Garcia Márquez, Borges, Nabakov, Calvino, Beckett, Eco, Spark, Hoban, Murdoch, Bellow, Ozick, and Lessing among others had all proved the vitality of contemporary fiction in discovering exciting new forms and styles. Yet because of the difficulty of many of the texts, contemporary fiction as a genre had acquired an undeservedly unpopular reputation among students and other readers. In a very real way, the reader had become nervous rather than confident in the face of a literature that in fact is more aware of and generous to that reader than earlier and more apparently accessible literature ever managed to be. And the new fiction’s seeming remoteness from the reader is exaggerated, in a sense, by the critical academic response at the time, which tended to obscure the texts themselves behind the many aesthetic and cultural theories which had sprung up in the study of fictionalizing or narrativity in general. Elizabeth Dipple is anxious to dispel readers’ fears about these texts. She has chosen an international list of major writers of the time and presents a detailed discussion of each. Beginning each chapter with a brief explanation of the context in which each fictionist is to be examined, she then concentrates on an analysis of key texts, aiming always to look beyond jargon and theory back to the sources themselves. Professor Dipple’s purpose was to convey to the reader some of her own admiration and enthusiasm for contemporary fiction and to persuade him or her to take a fresh look at a group of writers who were producing what she felt would surely be seen by future generations as among the most sophisticated and accomplished fiction of our time.

The Unresolvable Plot

The Unresolvable Plot PDF Author: Elizabeth Dipple
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000639134
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 426

Get Book

Book Description
Originally published in 1988, the last few decades had seen the appearance of some brilliant and complex new kinds of fiction. The ambitious experiments of writers such as Greene, Garcia Márquez, Borges, Nabakov, Calvino, Beckett, Eco, Spark, Hoban, Murdoch, Bellow, Ozick, and Lessing among others had all proved the vitality of contemporary fiction in discovering exciting new forms and styles. Yet because of the difficulty of many of the texts, contemporary fiction as a genre had acquired an undeservedly unpopular reputation among students and other readers. In a very real way, the reader had become nervous rather than confident in the face of a literature that in fact is more aware of and generous to that reader than earlier and more apparently accessible literature ever managed to be. And the new fiction’s seeming remoteness from the reader is exaggerated, in a sense, by the critical academic response at the time, which tended to obscure the texts themselves behind the many aesthetic and cultural theories which had sprung up in the study of fictionalizing or narrativity in general. Elizabeth Dipple is anxious to dispel readers’ fears about these texts. She has chosen an international list of major writers of the time and presents a detailed discussion of each. Beginning each chapter with a brief explanation of the context in which each fictionist is to be examined, she then concentrates on an analysis of key texts, aiming always to look beyond jargon and theory back to the sources themselves. Professor Dipple’s purpose was to convey to the reader some of her own admiration and enthusiasm for contemporary fiction and to persuade him or her to take a fresh look at a group of writers who were producing what she felt would surely be seen by future generations as among the most sophisticated and accomplished fiction of our time.

The Plot Thickens

The Plot Thickens PDF Author: Mary Elizabeth Leighton
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821446495
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 522

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Book Description
In the early 1800s, books were largely unillustrated. By the 1830s and 1840s, however, innovations in wood- and steel-engraving techniques changed how Victorian readers consumed and conceptualized fiction. A new type of novel was born, often published in serial form, one that melded text and image as partners in meaning-making. These illustrated serial novels offered Victorians a reading experience that was both verbal and visual, based on complex effects of flash-forward and flashback as the placement of illustrations revealed or recalled significant story elements. Victorians’ experience of what are now canonical novels thus differed markedly from that of modern readers, who are accustomed to reading single volumes with minimal illustration. Even if modern editions do reproduce illustrations, these do not appear as originally laid out. Modern readers therefore lose a crucial aspect of how Victorians understood plot—as a story delivered in both words and images, over time, and with illustrations playing a key role. In The Plot Thickens, Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge uncover this overlooked narrative role of illustrations within Victorian serial fiction. They reveal the intricacy and richness of the form and push us to reconsider our notions of illustration, visual culture, narration, and reading practices in nineteenth-century Britain.

Challenging Theory: Discipline After Deconstruction

Challenging Theory: Discipline After Deconstruction PDF Author: Catherine Burgass
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429861389
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
First published in 1999, this volume perceives that English literature in under threat as an academic discipline. In Challenging Theory, Catherine Burgass warns against the recent trend towards the conflation of literature teaching with cultural studies in British and American universities. Focusing on theory of deconstruction, as developed by Jacques Derrida in the 1960s, the book redresses some common mistenterpretations of Derrinda’s work relating to the status of metaphysical oppositions. Part One discusses textual differences and the ways in which these may dissolve and reform according to different cultural contexts. The practical issues associated with teaching literature and literary theory in universities are examined in Part Two, while Part Three high-lights some of the move invidious claims of literary theorists, and questions the value of metaphysical analysis as a tool for political critique. Challenging Theory tackles an important debate that lies at the heart of humanities teaching. It illuminates the impact on academia of the work of critical theorists over the last thirty tears, and provides a platform for future reassessment of the relationships between literature, philosophy and theory.

Metafiction

Metafiction PDF Author: Mark Currie
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317893875
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Metafiction is one of the most distinctive features of postwar fiction, appearing in the work of novelists as varied as Eco, Borges, Martin Amis and Julian Barnes. It comprises two elements: firstly cause, the increasing interpenetration of professional literary criticism and the practice of writing; and secondly effect: an emphasis on the playing with styles and forms, resulting from an enhanced self-consciousness and awareness of the elusiveness of meaning and the limitations of the realist form. Dr Currie's volume examines first the two components of metafiction, with practical illustrations from the work of such writers as Derrida and Foucault. A final section then provides the view of metafiction as seen by metafictional writers themselves.

White Noise

White Noise PDF Author: Don DeLillo
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143105981
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
The National Book Award-winning classic from the author of Underworld and Libra, now a major motion picture starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig White Noise tells the story of Jack Gladney, his fourth wife, Babette, and four ultra­modern offspring as they navigate the rocky passages of family life to the background babble of brand-name consumerism. When an industrial accident unleashes an "airborne toxic event," a lethal black chemical cloud floats over their lives. The menacing cloud is a more urgent and visible version of the "white noise" engulfing the Gladneys—radio transmissions, sirens, microwaves, ultrasonic appliances, and TV murmurings—pulsing with life, yet suggesting something ominous. For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The Narrative Reader

The Narrative Reader PDF Author: Martin McQuillan
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 0415205336
Category : Aufsatzsammlung
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
The Narrative Reader provides a comprehensive survey of theories of narrative from Plato to Post-Structuralism. The selection of texts is bold and broad, demonstrating the extent to which narrative permeates the entire field of literature and culture. It shows the ways in which narrative crosses disciplines, continents and theoretical perspectives and will fascinate students and researchers alike, providing a long overdue point of entry to the complex field of narrative theory. Canonical texts are combined with those which are difficult to obtain elsewhere, and there are new translations and introductory material. The texts cover crucial issues including: * formalism * responses to narratology * psychoanalysis * phenomenology * deconstruction * structuralism * narrative and sexual difference * race * history The final section is designed to guide the student reader through the texts, and includes a helpful chronology of narrative theory, a glossary of narrative terms, and a checklist of narrative theories.

Plot, Story, and the Novel

Plot, Story, and the Novel PDF Author: Robert L. Caserio
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400867665
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Giving a close critical reading to major texts by Dickens, Poe, Eliot, Melville, James, Conrad, Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner, Professor Caserio provides an historical dimension to the developing fate of plot, story, and the novel. In addition, he challenges the major critical positions of Northrop Frye, Roland Barthes, and Edward Said with regard to the interpretation and evaluation of narrative trends. Originally published in 1979. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Reinventions of the Novel

Reinventions of the Novel PDF Author: Karen-Margrethe Simonsen
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9789042008434
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
The history of the Novel is a story of perpetual change, so that its identity still remains open to question. The sixteen articles in Reinventions of the Novel investigate connections, differences and similarities in the Novel around the world for the past three hundred years. Rather than searching for the essence of the genre, they look for the formal and thematic patterns on which the novel thrives, considering such matters as tradition and modernity, realism, rhetoric and identity, tableau and spatiality, and wondering whether epic and avant-garde are not quite contradictory terms. Close readings combined with historical overviews and theoretical discussions open up new constellations in the history of the novel. Untraditional cross-readings are made between Rabelais and Jens Peter Jacobsen and between Balzac and Nicholson Baker. Transformations of traditional modes of epic, biography and Bildung are traced as far as Georges Perec and Günter Grass, while canonical classics like Proust, Joyce, Richardson and Goethe are read in prosaic, pragmatic and media specific contexts. In the 1920s many people predicted the death of the novel; now more than ever it seems to be the dominant literary form - perhaps because it is the same, yet always different.

British Postmodern Fiction

British Postmodern Fiction PDF Author: Theo d'. Haen
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9789051836530
Category : English fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description


English as a Creative Art

English as a Creative Art PDF Author: Linden Peach
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317657098
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
English as a Creative Art is different from previous works on either creative writing or contemporary literary criticism. It is the first book to bring the two together, demonstrating how concepts drawn from literary theory can be used to enable students to develop critical insights into their own writing. Conversely, it also aims to help students understand contemporary critical concepts and become more incisive thinkers through creative work.