Author: Sir Frank Kermode
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317510313
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 238
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Book Description
In this book, which was first published in 1983, Frank Kermode looks in particular at the revived Russian Formalism, a highly original body of literary theory that flourished in the years immediately following the Revolution, and at the work of Roman Jakobson, one of its most distinguished exponents. He discusses its modern ‘structuralist’ descendants, recalling the importance of Roland Barthes and the invigorating effect of his fertile and surprising mind. He considers also the work of Foucault, Laca and Levi-Strauss, as well as that of Jacques Derrida, which uses a novel and de(con)structive method of analysis to question to tacit assumptions on which structuralism is based. In an opening chapter, Professor Kermode surveys his relationship with the new theory, explaining that it is a relation from which he has benefited without ever feeling disposed to join a movement. These essays will be of interest to students of literature.
Author: William Schultz
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315470241
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 945
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Book Description
First published in 1992, this book represents the first major attempt to compile a bibliography of Derrida’s work and scholarship about his work. It attempts to be comprehensive rather than selective, listing primary and secondary works from the year of Derrida’s Master’s thesis in 1954 up until 1991, and is extensively annotated. It arranges under article type a huge number of works from scholars across numerous fields — reflecting the interdisciplinary and controversial nature of Deconstruction. The substantial introduction and annotations also make this bibliography, in part, a critical guide and as such will make a highly useful reference tool for those studying his philosophy.
Author: Timothy Gao
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108944892
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 237
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Book Description
Pondering the town he had invented in his novels, Anthony Trollope had 'so realised the place, and the people, and the facts' of Barset that 'the pavement of the city ways are familiar to my footsteps'. After his novels end, William Thackeray wonders where his characters now live, and misses their conversation. How can we understand the novel as a form of artificial reality? Timothy Gao proposes a history of virtual realities, stemming from the imaginary worlds created by novelists like Trollope, Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, and Charles Dickens. Departing from established historical or didactic understandings of Victorian fiction, Virtual Play and the Victorian Novel recovers the period's fascination with imagined places, people, and facts. This text provides a short history of virtual experiences in literature, four studies of major novelists, and an innovative approach for scholars and students to interpret realist fictions and fictional realities from before the digital age. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Author: Martyn Sampson
Publisher: Fordham University Press
ISBN: 0823294684
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 170
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Book Description
What is a “Catholic” novel? This book analyzes the fiction of Graham Greene in a radically new manner, considering in depth its form and content, which rest on the oppositions between secularism and religion. Sampson challenges these distinctions, arguing that Greene has a dramatic contribution to add to their methodological premises. Chapters on Greene’s four “Catholic” novels and two of his “post-Catholic” novels are complemented by fresh insight into the critical importance of his nonfiction. The study paints an image of an inviting yet beguilingly complex literary figure.
Author: Kathryn Hume
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317638530
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232
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Book Description
Since Plato and Aristotle’s declaration of the essence of literature as imitation, western narrative has been traditionally discussed in mimetic terms. Marginalized fantasy- the deliberate from reality – has become the hidden face of fiction, identified by most critics as a minor genre. First published in 1984, this book rejects generic definitions of fantasy, arguing that it is not a separate or even separable strain in literary practice, but rather an impulse as significant as that of mimesis. Together, fantasy and mimesis are the twin impulses behind literary creation. In an analysis that ranges from the Icelandic sagas to science fiction, from Malory to pulp romance, Kathryn Hume systematically examines the various ways in which fantasy and mimesis contribute to literary representations of reality. A detailed and comprehensive title, this reissue will be of particular value to undergraduate literature students with an interest in literary genres and the centrality of literature to the creative imagination.
Author: Lennard J. Davis
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317672224
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 237
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Book Description
"By making friends with signs", Lennard Davis argues, "we are weakening the bond that anchors us to the social world, the world of action, and binding ourselves to the ideological." For the reader, this power of the novel needs to be resisted. But there is a double resistance at work: the novel is also a defensive structure positioning us against alienation and loneliness: the dehumanising symptoms of modern life. While discussions surrounding ideology in novels traditionally concentrate on thematics, in this study – first published in 1987 - Davis approaches the subject through such structural features as location, character, dialogue and plot. Drawing on a wide range of novels from the seventeenth century to the present day, and on psychoanalysis as well as philosophy, Resisting Novels explores how fiction works subliminally to resist change and to detach the reader from the world of lived experience. This controversial critique will engage students and academics with a particular interest in literary theory.
Author: Coral Ann Howells
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317637984
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 176
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Book Description
First published in 1987, this is an introductory study of the most widely read Canadian women novelists of the 1970s and 1980s. At its centre lies the question of how the search for a distinctive cultural identity relates to the need for a national cultural identity in the post-colonial era. Coral Ann Howells argues that Canadian women’s fiction throughout the period of study represents how the Canadian cultural identity exceeds its geographical limits, and those traditional structures of patriarchal authority need revision if women’s alternative views are to be taken into account. Including short biographical sketches and a complete list of the books published by the authors under discussion, writers examined include Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, and Margaret Laurence.
Author: Rachel Bowlby
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136999574
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 131
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Book Description
The spectacular development of early consumer society in Britain, France and the United States had a profound impact on constructions of femininity and masculinity, and commercial and cultural values in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Focusing on novels by Theodore Dreiser, George Gissing and Emile Zola, Just Looking, first published in 1985, addresses itself to a central paradox of the period: the perceived antithesis of the terms "commerce" and "culture" which emerged at a time which saw the actual drawing together of commercial and cultural practices. Drawing on structural, psychoanalytic and Marxist-feminist theory, Rachel Bowlby retrieves a relatively neglected literary area for contemporary political and theoretical concerns, re-establishing the naturalist novel as a rich source for feminists, literary theorists and cultural historians.
Author: John Rignall
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317626281
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 165
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Book Description
The classic realist text has long been derided by post-structuralist critics as an unsophisticated and reactionary form. In this study, first published in 1992, John Rignall makes a powerful case for the rehabilitation of realism as a self-aware and reflexive genre. Using the novels of Scott, Balzac, Dickens, George Eliot, Flaubert, James, Ford and Conrad, Rignall argues for an understanding of realism through the recurrent figure of the flâneur. The flâneur is the strolling spectator whose problematic vision both of and in the novel makes him the representative figure of the realist text. A significant contribution to the field, this title will be of particular view to students of realism, literary theory, and comparative literature.
Author: Vijay Mishra
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791417478
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 356
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Book Description
This book reads the Gothic corpus with a thoroughly postmodern critical apparatus, pointing out that the Gothic Sublime anticipates our own doomed desire to pass beyond the hyperreal. A highly sophisticated theoretical reading of key texts of the Gothic, this book allows the reader to re-live the Gothic, not simply as a nostalgic relic or a pre-romantic aberration, but as a living presence that has strong resonances with the postmodern condition.
