Imagining Incest

Imagining Incest PDF Author: Gale Swiontkowski
Publisher: Susquehanna University Press
ISBN: 9781575910611
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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Book Description
Imagining Incest examines daughter-father relations as depicted in the poetry of Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, and Sharon Olds. Swiontkowski demonstrates a progression in these relations from daughter as victim of the father in Sexton and Plath to daughter as rebel against the father in Rich to daughter as successor to the father in Olds. Each poet utilizes the poetic motif of incest in varying degrees to convey this developing relationship, and Swiontkowski shows that the struggles and triumphs inherent in this imagined relationship parallel many of the issues raised in the recent social crisis of recovered memories. Imagining Incest thus casts light on a painful social issue and extends the hope that comparing these four women poets demonstrates that women who have suffered under the tyranny of a patriarchal system can rebel and overcome by confronting and redefining the incestuous nature of their relations with the fathers of society.

Incest and the Medieval Imagination

Incest and the Medieval Imagination PDF Author: Elizabeth Archibald
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191540854
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
Incest is a remarkably frequent theme in medieval literature; it occurs in a wide range of genres, including romances, saints's lives, and exempla. Historically, the Church in the later Middle Ages was very concerned about breaches of the complex laws against incest, which was defined very broadly at the time to cover family relationships outside the nuclear family and also spiritual relationships through baptism. Medieval writers accepted that incestuous desire was a widespread phenomenon among women as well as men. They are surprisingly open about incest, though of course they disapprove of it; in many exemplary stories incest is identified with original sin, but the moral emphasizes the importance of contrition and the availability of grace even to such heinous sinners. This study begins with a brief account of the development of medieval incest laws, and the extent to which they were obeyed. Next comes a survey of classical incest stories and their legacy; many were retold in the Middle Ages, but they were frequently adapted to the purposes of Christian moralizers. In the three chapters that follow, homegrown medieval incest stories are grouped by relationship: mother-son (focusing on the Gregorius legend), father-daughter (focusing on La Manekine and its analogues), and sibling (focusing on the Arthurian legend). The final chapter considers the very common medieval trope of the Virgin Mary as mother, daughter, sister and bride of Christ, the one exception to the incest taboo. In western society today, incest has recently been recognized as a serious social problem, and has also become a frequent theme in both fiction and non-fiction, just as it was in the Middle Ages. This interdisciplinary study is the first broad survey of medieval incest stories in Latin and the vernaculars (mainly French, English and German). It situates the incest theme in both literary and cultural contexts, and offers many thought-provoking comparisons and contrasts to our own society in terms of gender relations, the power of patriarchy, the role of religious institutions in regulating morality, and the relationship between life and literature.

Affect in Social Thinking and Behavior

Affect in Social Thinking and Behavior PDF Author: Joseph P. Forgas
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 1135845239
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
The role of affect in how people think and behave in social situations has been a source of fascination to laymen and philosophers since time immemorial. Surprisingly, most of what we know about the role of feelings in social thinking and behavior has been discovered only during the last two decades. Affect in Social Thinking and Behavior reviews and integrates the most recent research and theories on this exciting topic, and features original contributions reviewing key areas of affect research from leading researchers active in the area. The book covers fundamental issues, such as the nature and relationship between affect and cognition, as well as chapters that deal with the cognitive antecedents of emotion, and the consequences of affect for social cognition and behavior. This volume offers a highly integrated and comprehensive coverage of this field, and is suitable as a core textbook in advanced courses dealing with the role of affect in social cognition and behavior.

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

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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.

Imagining Mary

Imagining Mary PDF Author: Daniel Rancour-Laferriere
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351349678
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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Book Description
Imagining Mary breaks new ground in the long tradition of Christian mariology. The book is an interdisciplinary investigation of some of the many Marys, East and West, from the New Testament Mary of Nazareth down to Our Lady of the Good Death in the twentieth century. In Imagining Mary, Professor Rancour-Laferriere examines the mother of God in her multireligious and pan-historical context. The book is a scholarly study, but it is written in a clear, straightforward style and will be comprehensible to an educated – and, above all, intellectually curious – general audience. It will appeal to anyone who has ever wondered, for example, about the flimsy scriptural basis of many beliefs about Mary; or the tendency of many mariologists to depict Mary as an incestuous "bride of Christ"; or the theological notion of Mary’s "loving consent" to her son’s crucifixion; or the idea that Mary was a "priest" officiating at the sacrifice of her son; or the unfortunate association of Mary with Christian anti-semitism; or the curious appeal of Mary to the terminally ill; and so on. Special attention is given to the psychology of representations of Mary, such as: the psychological basis for promoting Mary to the status of a "goddess"; the psychology of Mary’s compassion for her son at the foot of the cross; and the psychological conflict in Mary’s personal relationship with her son Jesus. These topics are admittedly diverse, but they all have long been on the minds of mariologists. The author takes a questioning approach to received wisdom about marian themes – including the assumption that one has to be a theist in order to understand the great appeal of Mary down the centuries. Indeed, Imagining Mary may be regarded as a first step in the direction of an atheist mariology.

Intersectional Trauma in American Women Writers' Incest Novels from the 1990s

Intersectional Trauma in American Women Writers' Incest Novels from the 1990s PDF Author: Marinella Rodi-Risberg
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030966194
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
This book explores the intersections of sexualized, gendered, and racialized traumas in five US novels about father-daughter incest from the 1990s. It examines how incest can be connected to wider past and present structural oppression and institutional abuse, and what fiction looks like that testifies against and references a historical background of slavery, poverty, settler colonialism, annexation, and immigration. Investigating the means of resistance used against attempts at silencing and denial in these texts, the book also shows how contemporary women’s novels can propose social change. Overall, this study uniquely argues that the individual trauma of incest in these texts must be understood in relation to histories of and present collective wounding against marginalized communities. By sitting at the intersections between trauma theory and US third world feminism, it allows for theory to meet literary activism.

Imagining Autism

Imagining Autism PDF Author: Sonya Freeman Loftis
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253018137
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
A disorder that is only just beginning to find a place in disability studies and activism, autism remains in large part a mystery, giving rise to both fear and fascination. Sonya Freeman Loftis's groundbreaking study examines literary representations of autism or autistic behavior to discover what impact they have had on cultural stereotypes, autistic culture, and the identity politics of autism. Imagining Autism looks at fictional characters (and an author or two) widely understood as autistic, ranging from Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and Harper Lee's Boo Radley to Mark Haddon's boy detective Christopher Boone and Steig Larsson's Lisbeth Salander. The silent figure trapped inside himself, the savant made famous by his other-worldly intellect, the brilliant detective linked to the criminal mastermind by their common neurology—these characters become protean symbols, stand-ins for the chaotic forces of inspiration, contagion, and disorder. They are also part of the imagined lives of the autistic, argues Loftis, sometimes for good, sometimes threatening to undermine self-identity and the activism of the autistic community.

Thicker Than Water

Thicker Than Water PDF Author: Leonore Davidoff
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199546487
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 465

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Book Description
A pioneering new study of nineteenth-century kinship and family relations, focusing on the British middle class, and highlighting both the similarities and the differences in relations between brothers and sisters in the past and in the present.

Shelley and the Romantic Imagination

Shelley and the Romantic Imagination PDF Author: Thomas R. Frosch
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
ISBN: 9780874139785
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
"Frosch offers a fuller psychoanalytic account of Shelley's poetry than previously available, discussing both oedipal and pre-oedipal conflict, the positive and negative attitudes toward both the father and the mother, and the subtle workings, defensive and creative, of the ego."--Jacket.

Colonialism, Race, and the French Romantic Imagination

Colonialism, Race, and the French Romantic Imagination PDF Author: Pratima Prasad
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135846537
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
This book investigates how French Romanticism was shaped by and contributed to colonial discourses of race. It studies the ways in which metropolitan Romantic novels—that is, novels by French authors such as Victor Hugo, George Sand, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, François René de Chateaubriand, Claire de Duras, and Prosper Mérimée—comprehend and construct colonized peoples, fashion French identity in the context of colonialism, and record the encounter between Europeans and non-Europeans. While the primary texts that come under investigation in the book are novels, close attention is paid to Romantic fiction’s interdependence with naturalist treatises, travel writing, abolitionist texts, and ethnographies. Colonialism, Race, and the French Romantic Imagination is one of the first books to carry out a sustained and comprehensive analysis of the French Romantic novel’s racial imagination that encompasses several sites of colonial contact: the Indian Ocean, North America, the Caribbean, West Africa, and France. Its archival research and interdisciplinary approach shed new light on canonical texts and expose the reader to non-canonical ones. The book will be useful to students and academics involved with Romanticism, colonial historians, students and scholars of transatlantic studies and postcolonial studies, as well as those interested in questions of race and colonialism.