The Novel and the Problem of New Life

The Novel and the Problem of New Life PDF Author: Aaron Matz
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108996094
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
The novel since the nineteenth century has displayed a thorny ambivalence toward the question of having children. In its representation of human vitality it can seem to promote the giving of life, but again and again it betrays a nagging doubt about the moral implications of procreation. The Novel and the Problem of New Life identifies this tension as a defining quality of the modern British and European novel. Beginning with the procreative-skeptical writings of Flaubert, Butler, and Hardy, then turning to the high modernist work of Lawrence, Woolf, and Huxley, and culminating in the postwar fiction of Lessing and others, this book chronicles the history of the novel as it came to accommodate greater misgivings about the morality of reproduction. This is the first study to examine in literature a problem that has long troubled philosophers, environmental thinkers, and so many people in everyday life.

The Novel and the Problem of New Life

The Novel and the Problem of New Life PDF Author: Aaron Matz
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108996094
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Get Book Here

Book Description
The novel since the nineteenth century has displayed a thorny ambivalence toward the question of having children. In its representation of human vitality it can seem to promote the giving of life, but again and again it betrays a nagging doubt about the moral implications of procreation. The Novel and the Problem of New Life identifies this tension as a defining quality of the modern British and European novel. Beginning with the procreative-skeptical writings of Flaubert, Butler, and Hardy, then turning to the high modernist work of Lawrence, Woolf, and Huxley, and culminating in the postwar fiction of Lessing and others, this book chronicles the history of the novel as it came to accommodate greater misgivings about the morality of reproduction. This is the first study to examine in literature a problem that has long troubled philosophers, environmental thinkers, and so many people in everyday life.

Rereading Doris Lessing

Rereading Doris Lessing PDF Author: Claire Sprague
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469620367
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
According to Sprague, doubling in Lessing's novels is a perfect correlative for the complexity and contradiction Lessing perceives as central to the private and collective human experience. Her doubles and multiples not only indicate the fracturing or the formation of identity but they also are among the several strategies used to project complex private and societal concerns. This study of Lessing's dialectical imagination extends and revises earlier feminist approaches. Originally published in 1987. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Madness in Context: Historical, Poetic and Artistic Perspectives

Madness in Context: Historical, Poetic and Artistic Perspectives PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1848880022
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 138

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Book Description
A group of twenty scholars from different disciplinary and cultural backgrounds developed a series of dialogues and discussions on the notion, experience and representation of madness. This volume is the result of those discussions.

(Un)like Subjects

(Un)like Subjects PDF Author: Gerardine Meaney
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136321454
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
What is the relationship between feminist critical theory and literature? This book deals with the relationship between women and writing, mothers and daughters, the maternal and history. It addresses the questions about language, writing and the relations between women which have preoccupied the three most influential French feminists and three important contemporary British women novelists. Treating both fiction and theory as texts, she traces the connections between the theorists – Hélène Cixious, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva – and the novelists – Doris Lessing, Angela Carter and Muriel Spark. This reading of the work of these six major women writers explores new forms of women’s identity, subjectivity and narrative and demonstrates how theoretical and literary texts can illuminate each other to bridge the gap between theory and literary criticism.

The Fiction of Doris Lessing

The Fiction of Doris Lessing PDF Author: Ratna Raman
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 9390252555
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
Doris Lessing (1919–2013), a prolific contemporary author, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007 for her life work. Examining five decades of Lessing's unique life, narrative strategies, and the literary traditions that she drew upon and improvised, this book highlights her extraordinary significance as a writer of our times and for our times. Lessing's fiction and non-fiction provide a seminal understanding of the key issues that shaped the twentieth century. Autodidactic and keenly interested in the world around her, Lessing flagged the problems of racism in Africa; the inequity of class in modern England; the limitations of white, middle-class women's movements that overlooked the rights of women across race and class; the marginalisation of individuals; the horror of nuclear war and the need for disarmament; and the hazardous global expansion in the face of unrelenting technological progress. Further, she raised the concern of the atomisation of modern families, violence and the urgent need for alternate modes of viewing, voicing anxieties decades ahead of other contemporary writers. Making futuristic projections through innumerable genres of writing, such as realistic narratives, memoirs, diaries and science fiction, Lessing examines myth, psychoanalysis and Marxist perspectives, engaging with a gamut of experiences that have defined modernity, and sets up feminist blueprints that challenge atrophying patriarchal hegemonies.

Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing PDF Author: Harold Bloom
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 0791074412
Category : Women and literature
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
Essays of critical interpretation portray views of Doris Lessing's work, including The Golden Notebook, Marriages, and The Grass is Singing..

Critical Approaches to the Fiction of Margaret Laurence

Critical Approaches to the Fiction of Margaret Laurence PDF Author: C.E. Nicholson
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349100927
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
The essays collected in this volume offer a range of different approaches to the significance of the work of Margaret Laurence, historical, feminist, descriptive and thematic, in which critics from Europe, America and Canada offer assessments of this 20th century novelist.

Narrative Authority and Homeostasis in the Novels of Doris Lessing and Carmen Martín Gaite

Narrative Authority and Homeostasis in the Novels of Doris Lessing and Carmen Martín Gaite PDF Author: Linda E. Chown
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000639061
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 423

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Book Description
This study, originally published in 1990, assesses a shift in the presentation of self-consciousness in two pairs of novels by Doris Lessing and Carmen Martín Gaite: 1) Lessing’s The Summer Before the Dark (1973) and Martín Gaite’s Retahílas (1974) and 2) Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) and Martín Gaite’s The Back Room (1978). Three major structural divisions facilitate examining implications of the novels for 1) feminism 2) literary narrative and 3) the lives of people-at-large.

Engendering the Subject

Engendering the Subject PDF Author: Sally Robinson
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791407271
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Viewing the novels of Doris Lessing, Angela Carter, and Gayle Jones through feminist critical theory, argues that female subjectivity is engendered by women characters engaging systems that rely on the figure of the women for coherence. Paper edition (unseen), $14.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

White Woman Speaks with Forked Tongue

White Woman Speaks with Forked Tongue PDF Author: Nicole Ward Jouve
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000653129
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
Originally published in 1991. The style of this startlingly original appraisal of a broad range of women’s writing suggests a new direction for feminist criticism, combining as it does challenging, intellectual debate and fresh textual analysis with fictional example and autobiographical detail to make a wholly new invention in the field. In addressing the need for the critic to say ‘I’ and to own judgments and statements instead of attributing these to an apparently impersonal third person, the author here points up some of the shortcomings of much prevailing ‘feminist’ analysis, challenging the very foundations of the Anglo-American feminist idea. Purposely avoiding the ‘totalising’ effect of much academic criticism, the writer/critic finds a new format and a new methodology for her insights and observations on a range of writers, from Doris Lessing to Hélène Cixious. Her unique analysis of the links between criticism and autobiography enable her to highlight the absurdity of attempting to write in the light of recent critical and scientific knowledge as if the self were a stable, unified construct, introducing instead a new, creative understanding of the methods and modes of women’s writing. This sparkling collection presents an exciting and original new voice in literary criticism. It tackles issues fundamental to literary theory, feminist criticism, psychoanalysis and cultural studies, offering new critical insights and providing a significant and wholly original feminist contribution to these key fields.