Author: Tzachi Zamir
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351608495
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 141
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Book Description
In Just Literature, Tzachi Zamir introduces the idea of 'philosophical criticism' as an innovative approach to interpreting literary texts. Throughout the book, Zamir uses the theme of justice as a case study for this new critical approach. By using ‘philosophical criticism’, Zamir posits that a stronger grasp of the idea of justice can increase one’s understanding of literature, and thus its value. He offers philosophical readings of works by Dante, Shakespeare, Toni Morrison, J. M. Coetzee and Philip Roth to explore the relationship between aesthetic and epistemic value. Zamir argues that, while literature and philosophy remain separate entities, examining the two in tandem may help inform the study of both. Offering an inventive twist on an established dynamic, this book is essential reading for any student or scholar of literature or philosophy.
Author: Kristin Bluemel
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748635106
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
These 10 original critical essays examine the fascinating writing of the Depression and World War II. Divided into four sections--Work, Community,War, and Documents--the volume focuses on texts that are typically ignored in accounts of modernism or The Auden Generation.Chapters examine writing by Elizabeth Bowen, Storm Jameson, William Empson, George Orwell, J. B. Priestley, Harold Heslop, T. H. White, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Rebecca West, John Grierson, Margery Allingham and Stella Gibbons. These authors were politically radical, or radically 'eccentric', and tended to be committed to working- and middle-class cultures, non-canonical genres, such as crime and fantasy, and minority forms of narrative, such as journalism, manifestos, film, and travel narratives, as well as novels. The volume supports further research with an appendix, 'Who Were the Intermodernists?', a listing of archival sources and an extensive bibliography.
Author: John Whittier Treat
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226811789
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 512
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Book Description
Treat summarizes the Japanese contribution to such ongoing international debates as the crisis of modern ethics, the relationship of experience to memory, and the possibility of writing history. This Japanese perspective, he shows, both confirms and amends many of the assertions made in the West on the shift that the death camps and nuclear weapons have jointly signaled for the modern world and for the future.
Author: D. Quentin Miller
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135037515
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 195
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Book Description
The Routledge Introduction to African American Literature considers the key literary, political, historical and intellectual contexts of African American literature from its origins to the present, and also provides students with an analysis of the most up-to-date literary trends and debates in African American literature. This accessible and engaging guide covers a variety of essential topics such as: Vernacular, Oral, and Blues Traditions in Literature Slave Narratives and Their Influence The Harlem Renaissance Mid-twentieth century black American Literature Literature of the civil rights and Black Power era Contemporary African American Writing Key thematic and theoretical debates within the field Examining the relationship between the literature and its historical and sociopolitical contexts, D. Quentin Miller covers key authors and works as well as less canonical writers and themes, including literature and music, female authors, intersectionality and transnational black writing.
Author: Robert Aston
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000078922
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 170
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Book Description
This book investigates the role of the idea of the literary canon in the teaching of literature, especially in colleges and secondary schools in the United States. Before the term "canon" was widely used in literary studies, which occurred in the second half of 20th century when the canon was first seriously viewed as politically and culturally problematic, the idea that some literary texts were more worthy of being studied than others existed since the beginning of the discipline of the teaching of literature in the 1800s. The concept of the canon, however, extends as far back as to Ancient Greece and its meaning has evolved over time. Thus, this book charts the changing meaning of the idea of the literary canon, examining its influence specifically in the teaching of literature from the beginning of the field to the 21st century. To explain how the literary canon and the teaching of literature have changed over time and continue to change, this book constructs a theory of canon formation based on the ideas of Michel Foucault and the assemblage theory of Manuel DeLanda, illustrating that the literary canon, while frequently contested, is integral to the teaching of literature yet changes as the teaching of literature changes.
Author: James D. Bloom
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812215984
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 196
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Book Description
What is "literature in these postmodern, postcanonical times? And if a small number of works being written today are "literary," what distinguishes them from those many others that are not? The store managers who shelve books in separate "literature" and "fiction" sections clearly have something in mind, but they're not talking. James Bloom has his own ideas, and he is. With zest and conviction, Bloom argues that traditional aspirations to literariness persist in the poetry and fiction of writers such as Robert Stone, Jane Smiley, Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison, Adrienne Rich, and Robert Pinsky. All, in their various ways, exhibit a critical and playful awareness of their literary antecedents, display and resist the seductions of eloquence, arouse and discipline their readers' curiosity. Bloom deftly shows how their writings negotiate with the nonliterary media that dominate our culture, even as the cultural capital of canonical authors like Shakespeare and Keats is put to work on the pages of mail-order catalogs and the New York Times, on network television, and in the products of the Disney conglomerate.
Author: Jonathan M. Hess
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804774234
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 277
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Book Description
For generations of German-speaking Jews, the works of Goethe and Schiller epitomized the world of European high culture, a realm that Jews actively participated in as both readers and consumers. Yet from the 1830s on, Jews writing in German also produced a vast corpus of popular fiction that was explicitly Jewish in content, audience, and function. Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity offers the first comprehensive investigation in English of this literature, which sought to navigate between tradition and modernity, between Jewish history and the German present, and between the fading walls of the ghetto and the promise of a new identity as members of a German bourgeoisie. This study examines the ways in which popular fiction assumed an unprecedented role in shaping Jewish identity during this period. It locates in nineteenth-century Germany a defining moment of the modern Jewish experience and the beginnings of a tradition of Jewish belles lettres that is in many ways still with us today.
Author: Joseph F. Graham
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521400787
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 336
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Book Description
In this 1992 book, Joseph Graham examines the nature of literary representation.
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Bibliography
Languages : en
Pages : 872
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Book Description
Author: Stephanie Li
Publisher:
ISBN: 0199398887
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 242
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Book Description
The postwar period witnessed an outpouring of white life novels--that is, texts by African American writers focused almost exclusively on white characters. Almost every major mid-twentieth century black writer, including Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ann Petry and James Baldwin, published one of these anomalous texts. Controversial since their publication in the 1940s and 50s, these novels have since fallen into obscurity given the challenges they pose to traditional conceptions of the African American literary canon. Playing in the White: Black Writers, White Subjects aims to bring these neglected novels back into conversations about the nature of African American literature and the unique expectations imposed upon black texts. In a series of nuanced readings, Li demonstrates how postwar black novelists were at the forefront of what is now commonly understood as whiteness studies. Novels like Hurston's Seraph on the Suwanee and Wright's Savage Holiday, once read as abdications of the political imperative of African American literature, are revisited with an awareness of how whiteness signifies in multivalent ways that critique America's abiding racial hierarchies. These novels explore how this particular racial construction is freighted with social power and narrative meaning. Whiteness repeatedly figures in these texts as a set of expectations that are nearly impossible to fulfill. By describing characters who continually fail at whiteness, white life novels ask readers to reassess what race means for all Americans. Along with its close analysis of key white life novels, Playing in the White: Black Writers, White Subjects also provides important historical context to understand how these texts represented the hopes and anxieties of a newly integrated nation.
