Divinity, Hospitality and the Posthuman in 21st-Century Literature

Divinity, Hospitality and the Posthuman in 21st-Century Literature PDF Author: Emily McAvan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350280380
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
What does it feel like to experience the sacred today? Examining in detail many of this century's most significant writers, including Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, Elizabeth Strout, Marilynne Robinson, Mohsin Hamid, Michael Chabon, Howard Jacobson and Don DeLillo, Divinity, Hospitality and the Posthuman in 21st-Century Literature: The Material Sacred argues that contemporary social and cultural forms, most especially those of 21st century literature, are marked by what Emily McAvan calls a material sacred. Placing Christian, Jewish and Muslim writers in conversation with the new materialisms, this book shows how secular and sacred mix unpredictably in contemporary writing. In this important contribution to the understanding of religion, materialism and literature, McAvan maps new territory, arguing that the material sacred shows us that the human and non-human, the divine and the profane, have been interwoven from the start.

Divinity, Hospitality and the Posthuman in 21st-Century Literature

Divinity, Hospitality and the Posthuman in 21st-Century Literature PDF Author: Emily McAvan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350280380
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
What does it feel like to experience the sacred today? Examining in detail many of this century's most significant writers, including Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, Elizabeth Strout, Marilynne Robinson, Mohsin Hamid, Michael Chabon, Howard Jacobson and Don DeLillo, Divinity, Hospitality and the Posthuman in 21st-Century Literature: The Material Sacred argues that contemporary social and cultural forms, most especially those of 21st century literature, are marked by what Emily McAvan calls a material sacred. Placing Christian, Jewish and Muslim writers in conversation with the new materialisms, this book shows how secular and sacred mix unpredictably in contemporary writing. In this important contribution to the understanding of religion, materialism and literature, McAvan maps new territory, arguing that the material sacred shows us that the human and non-human, the divine and the profane, have been interwoven from the start.

Lee Edelman and the Queer Study of Religion

Lee Edelman and the Queer Study of Religion PDF Author: Kent L. Brintnall
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 100381820X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
This book takes the groundbreaking work of Lee Edelman in queer theory and, for the first time demonstrates its importance and relevance to contemporary theology, biblical studies, and religious studies. It argues that despite extensive interest in Edelman’s work, we have barely begun to understand the significance of Edelman’s ideas both in their own right and with respect to the study of religion. Therefore, it offers fresh approaches to Edelman’s work that necessarily complicate the established interpretations of his thinking. With essays by rising and established scholars, as well as a response by Edelman himself, it contends that by fully engaging Edelman, scholars of religion will have to confront negativity and its consequences in ways that will contribute to reshaping the terrain of scholarship on religion, race, sexuality, and social change. The insights provided in this book are new territory for much of the study of religion. As such, it will be of keen interest to scholars of religious studies, theology and Biblical studies as well as gender studies and queer, feminist, and critical race theory.

Succeeding Postmodernism

Succeeding Postmodernism PDF Author: Mary K. Holland
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1441159347
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
While critics collect around the question of what comes "after postmodernism," this book asks something different about recent American fiction: what if we are seeing not the end of postmodernism but its belated success? Succeeding Postmodernism examines how novels by DeLillo, Wallace, Danielewski, Foer and others conceptualize threats to individuals and communities posed by a poststructural culture of mediation and simulation, and possible ways of resisting the disaffected solipsism bred by that culture. Ultimately it finds that twenty-first century American fiction sets aside the postmodern problem of how language does or does not mean in order to raise the reassuringly retro question of what it can and does mean: it finds that novels today offer language as solution to the problem of language. Thus it suggests a new way of reading "antihumanist" late postmodern fiction, and a framework for understanding postmodern and twenty-first century fiction as participating in a long and newly enlivened tradition of humanism and realism in literature.

Toni Morrison and Literary Tradition

Toni Morrison and Literary Tradition PDF Author: Justine Baillie
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441183108
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
Covering her essays, short stories and dramatic works as well as her novels, this is a comprehensive study of Morrison's place in contemporary American culture.

Ethics and Desire in the Wake of Postmodernism

Ethics and Desire in the Wake of Postmodernism PDF Author: Graham Matthews
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1441134395
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
What is the significance of writing in the wake of postmodernism? The previous decade has seen a growing interest in criticism of postmodern ethics and aesthetics from theorists and writers. This book begins to answer what art form or critical methodology might take its place. Exploring the work of six contemporary novelists - Bret Easton Ellis, J.G. Ballard, Will Self, Michel Houellebecq, Tama Janowitz and Chuck Palahniuk - Ethics and Desire in the Wake of Postmodernism delivers a series of interventions into six key areas of contemporary debate: fear, nihilism, revolution, ethics, enjoyment and feminism. The book goes on to develop an innovative critical methodology which reinvigorates the ability of art and literature to engage in ideological critique. Rather than valorising separatism, plurality or indeterminacy, this approach delivers a critical framework which enacts a radical de-centering of the fundamental coordinates of contemporary society.

Divinity, Hospitality and the Posthuman in 21st-century Literature

Divinity, Hospitality and the Posthuman in 21st-century Literature PDF Author: Emily McAvan
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781350280410
Category : Holy, The, in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"The first comprehensive look at the religious significance of this century's contemporary literature, this book examines in detail many of this century's most significant writers: Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, Elizabeth Strout, Marilynne Robinson, Mohsin Hamid, Michael Chabon, Howard Jacobson and Don DeLillo"--

Bret Easton Ellis's Controversial Fiction

Bret Easton Ellis's Controversial Fiction PDF Author: Sonia Baelo-Allué
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441126481
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
Both literary author and celebrity, Bret Easton Ellis represents a type of contemporary writer who draws from both high and the low culture, using popular culture references, styles and subject matters in a literary fiction that goes beyond mere entertainment. His fiction, arousing the interest of the academia, mass media and general public, has fuelled heated controversy over his work. This controversy has often prevented serious analysis of his fiction, and this book is the first monograph to fill in this gap by offering a comprehensive textual and contextual analysis of his most important works up to the latest novel Imperial Bedrooms. Offering a study of the reception of each novel, the influence of popular, mass and consumer culture in them, and the analysis of their literary style, it takes into account the controversies surrounding the novels and the changes produced in the shifty terrain of the literary marketplace. It offers anyone studying contemporary American fiction a thorough and unique analysis of Ellis's work and his own place in the literary and cultural panorama.

Postcolonial Literatures in Context

Postcolonial Literatures in Context PDF Author: Julie Mullaney
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1847063373
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 165

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Book Description
This book presents an introduction to key issues involved in the study of postcolonial literature including diasporas, postcolonial nationalisms, indigenous identities and politics and globalization. This book also contains a chapter on afterlives and adaptations that explores a range of wider cultural texts including film, non-fiction and art.

The Cement Garden

The Cement Garden PDF Author: Ian McEwan
Publisher: RosettaBooks
ISBN: 0795302592
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 154

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Book Description
Orphaned siblings create a macabre secret world for themselves in this “irresistibly readable” novel by the New York Times-bestselling author (The New York Review of Books). This “powerful and disconcerting” novel by the Booker Prize-winning author of The Children Act and Atonement (The Daily Telegraph) tells the story of a dying family who live in a dying part of the city. A father of four children decides, in an effort to make his garden easier to control, to pave it over. In the process, he has a heart attack and dies, leaving the cement garden unfinished and the children to the care of their mother. Soon after, the mother too dies and the children, fearful of being separated by social services, decide to cover up their parents’ deaths: they bury their mother in the cement garden. The story is told from the point of view of Jack, one of the sons, who is entering adolescence with all of its attendant curiosity and appetites. Julie, the eldest, is almost a grown woman. Sue is rather bookish and observes all that goes on around her. And Tom is the youngest and the baby of the lot. The children seem to manage in this perverse setting rather well—until Julie brings home a boyfriend who threatens their secret by asking too many questions. “[A] beautiful but disturbing novel.”—The AV Club “McEwan’s evocative detail and perfect British prose lend a genteel decorum to the death and decay that surround the family.”—The New Yorker

Contemporary Narrative

Contemporary Narrative PDF Author: Fiona J. Doloughan
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441174370
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
An examination of developments in contemporary narrative, placing them in the context of wider social, cultural and technological trends, using a case-study approach.