Laughter, War, and Feminism

Laughter, War, and Feminism PDF Author: Gabriela Castellanos
Publisher: Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
In the critical tradition, Jane Austen has long been considered a conservative writer, whose novels emphasize the importance of manners and propriety. This study, however, continues a more recent trend in Austen Scholarship, one that focuses on her feminism. It breaks new ground by identifying, as one ingredient in her fiction, an iconoclastic laughter that is closer to popular gaiety than to the elitist ironic stance of many of her predecessors. Furthermore, it underlines the presence of conflict in her narrative and points to the disruptive speech reported in Austen's elegant, hyper-correct sentences. Working with three of Austen's novels - Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice and Emma - the study analyzes the elements of feminist carnival in her prose.

Laughter, War, and Feminism

Laughter, War, and Feminism PDF Author: Gabriela Castellanos
Publisher: Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
In the critical tradition, Jane Austen has long been considered a conservative writer, whose novels emphasize the importance of manners and propriety. This study, however, continues a more recent trend in Austen Scholarship, one that focuses on her feminism. It breaks new ground by identifying, as one ingredient in her fiction, an iconoclastic laughter that is closer to popular gaiety than to the elitist ironic stance of many of her predecessors. Furthermore, it underlines the presence of conflict in her narrative and points to the disruptive speech reported in Austen's elegant, hyper-correct sentences. Working with three of Austen's novels - Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice and Emma - the study analyzes the elements of feminist carnival in her prose.

The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen

The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen PDF Author: Edward Copeland
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139826212
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
Jane Austen's stock in the popular marketplace has never been higher, while academic studies continue to uncover new aspects of her engagement with her world. This fully updated edition of the acclaimed Cambridge Companion offers clear, accessible coverage of the intricacies of Austen's works in their historical context, with biographical information and suggestions for further reading. Major scholars address Austen's six novels, the letters and other works, in terms accessible to students and the many general readers, as well as to academics. With seven new essays, the Companion now covers topics that have become central to recent Austen studies, for example, gender, sociability, economics, and the increasing number of screen adaptations of the novels.

The Stone of Laughter

The Stone of Laughter PDF Author: Hudá Barakāt
Publisher: Garnet Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
A novel of the civil war in Lebanon whose protagonist is a homosexual trying to remain neutral. But as he discovers, neutrality in a civil war is not possible. He becomes involved like everyone else and is the better man for the experience gained. The novel won an award in Lebanon.

Feminism and the Postmodern Impulse

Feminism and the Postmodern Impulse PDF Author: Magali Cornier Michael
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438412983
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Michael analyzes the intersections between feminist politics and postmodern aesthetics as demonstrated in recent Anglo-American fiction. While much has been written on various aspects of postmodernism and postmodern fiction and of feminism and feminist fiction, very little attention has been given to the postmodern aesthetic strategies that surface in post-World War II feminist fiction. Feminism and the Postmodern Impulse examines ways in which many widely read and acclaimed novels with feminist impulses engage and transform subversive aesthetic strategies usually associated with postmodern fiction to strengthen their feminist political edge. The author discusses many examples of recent feminist-postmodern fiction, and explores in greater depth Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, and Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus. She shows that feminist-postmodern fiction's emphasis on the material historical situation—the link to activist politics and commitment to enacting concrete changes in the world, and thus the need to reach a large reading public—often results in a blending and transformation of postmodern and realist aesthetic forms. Moreover, feminist fiction uses deconstructive strategies not only to disrupt the status quo but also to create a space for reconstruction, particularly of recreating new forms of female subjectivities and feminist aesthetics.

Misrule and Reversals

Misrule and Reversals PDF Author: Rozaliya Yaneva
Publisher: Herbert Utz Verlag
ISBN: 383164313X
Category : Carnival in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
How do Christopher Marlowe’s plays relate to interpretations of carnival as being either a beneficial repression inspired by anxiety or a deliberate expression of resistance towards all that is established and permanent? Where can one place carnival in his dramatic works? Renaissance drama invited a consideration of various forms of collective life and while great religious festivities of the Catholic calendar were affected by Reformation efforts to control festivity and detach it from religious worship, festive energies on Marlowe`s stage seem to have persisted. This book views Doctor Faustus, Tamburlaine the Great, The Jew of Malta and Edward the Second through concepts of irreverence, clowning, the high and the low in culture, degradation, laughter and feasting while viewing the plays’ worlds in terms of misrule, inversion and reversal. Who are the clowns in the plays, is the time for revelries restricted and how do the principle of the grotesque and the forces of debasement work are some of the intriguing questions to be pursued.

A Companion to Jane Austen Studies

A Companion to Jane Austen Studies PDF Author: Robert Thomas Lambdin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313032386
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
Jane Austen significantly shaped the development of the English novel, and her works continue to be read widely today. Though she is best known for her novels, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion, she also wrote poems, letters, prayers and various pieces of juvenalia. These writings have been attracting the attention of scholars; her major works have already generated a large body of scholarly and critical studies. This reference is a guide to her works and the response to them. Austen's works are fraught with ambiguity. Because she was adept at displaying numerous aspects of an issue, her writings invite multiple interpretations. In light of the ambiguity of her texts, each of her major works is approached from a reader-response perspective, in which an expert contributor illuminates the reader's relationship to her writing. And because so many readers have had such varied responses to her novels, the volume also includes chapters summarizing the critical response to each of her major works. In addition, the book includes separate chapters on her poems, letters, and prayers.

Jane Austen

Jane Austen PDF Author: Laurence W. Mazzeno
Publisher: Camden House
ISBN: 1571133941
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
A comprehensive look at the academic criticism of Jane Austen from her time down to the present. Among the most important English novelists, Jane Austen is unusual because she is esteemed not only by academics but by the reading public. Her novels continue to sell well, and films adapted from her works enjoy strong box-officesuccess. The trajectory of Austen criticism is intriguing, especially when one compares it to that of other nineteenth-century English writers. At least partly because she was a woman in the early nineteenth century, she was longneglected by critics, hardly considered a major figure in English literature until well into the twentieth century, a hundred years after her death. Yet consequently she did not suffer from the reaction against Victorianism thatdid so much to hurt the reputation of Dickens, Tennyson, Arnold, and others. How she rose to prominence among academic critics - and has retained her position through the constant shifting of academic and critical trends - is a story worth telling, as it suggests not only something about Austen's artistry but also about how changes in critical perspective can radically alter a writer's reputation. Laurence W. Mazzeno is President Emeritus of Alvernia University, Reading, Pennsylvania.

Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes

Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes PDF Author: Maggie Hennefeld
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231547064
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
Women explode out of chimneys and melt when sprayed with soda water. Feminist activists play practical jokes to lobby for voting rights, while overworked kitchen maids dismember their limbs to finish their chores on time. In early slapstick films with titles such as Saucy Sue, Mary Jane’s Mishap, Jane on Strike, and The Consequences of Feminism, comediennes exhibit the tensions between joyful laughter and gendered violence. Slapstick comedy often celebrates the exaggeration of make-believe injury. Unlike male clowns, however, these comic actresses use slapstick antics as forms of feminist protest. They spontaneously combust while doing housework, disappear and reappear when sexually assaulted, or transform into men by eating magic seeds—and their absurd metamorphoses evoke the real-life predicaments of female identity in a changing modern world. Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes reveals the gender politics of comedy and the comedic potentials of feminism through close consideration of hundreds of silent films. As Maggie Hennefeld argues, comedienne catastrophes provide disturbing but suggestive images for comprehending gendered social upheavals in the early twentieth century. At the same time, slapstick comediennes were crucial to the emergence of film language. Women’s flexible physicality offered filmmakers blank slates for experimenting with the visual and social potentials of cinema. Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes poses major challenges to the foundations of our ideas about slapstick comedy and film history, showing how this combustible genre blows open age-old debates about laughter, society, and gender politics.

Bakhtin and cultural theory

Bakhtin and cultural theory PDF Author: Ken Hirschkop
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526183897
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
An important collection of essays which treats Bakhtin as a provocative theorist whose work must be tested, explored and compared with the work of others. Contributors assess Bakhtin's contribution to difficult issues of colonialism, feminism, reception theory and theories of the body, amongst others. New articles explore the origins, previously unacknowledged, of Bakhtin's theory of language and provide a vivid account of the dramatic scandal surrounding Bakhtin's thesis on Rabelais. Contains dramatic new material, drawn from post-perestroika sources, which demythologizes the image of this important writer. A new bibliographical essay and introduction bring the English-language reader up-to-date with the progress of Bakhtin studies in Russia.

Jane Austen and Comedy

Jane Austen and Comedy PDF Author: Erin Goss
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1684480795
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
Jane Austen and Comedy takes for granted two related notions. First, Jane Austen’s books are funny; they induce laughter, and that laughter is worth attending to for a variety of reasons. Second, Jane Austen’s books are comedies, understandable both through the generic form that ends in marriage after the potential hilarity of romantic adversity and through a more general promise of wish fulfillment. In bringing together Austen and comedy, which are both often dismissed as superfluous or irrelevant to a contemporary world, this collection of essays directs attention to the ways we laugh, the ways that Austen may make us do so, and the ways that our laughter is conditioned by the form in which Austen writes: comedy. Jane Austen and Comedy invites reflection not only on her inclusion of laughter and humor, the comic, jokes, wit, and all the other topics that can so readily be grouped under the broad umbrella that is comedy, but also on the idea or form of comedy itself, and on the way that this form may govern our thinking about many things outside the realm of Austen’s work. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.