Author: Talia Schaffer
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0195398041
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241
Book Description
Domestic handicraft was an extraordinarily popular leisure activity in Victorian Britain, especially amongst middle-class women. Craftswomen pasted shells onto boxes, stitched fish scales onto silk, scorched patterns into wood, cast flower petals out of wax, and made needlework portraits of the royal spaniels. Yet despite its ubiquity, little has been written about this curious hobby. Providing a much-needed history of this under-studied phenomenon, Talia Schaffer demonstrates the importance of domestic handicraft in Victorian literature and culture.Novel Craft presents what Schaffer terms the "craft paradigm" -- a set of beliefs about representation, production, consumption, value, and beauty that were crucial to mid-Victorian thought. She uncovers how handicrafts expressed anxieties about modernity and offered an alternative to the conventional financial, political, and aesthetic ideas of the era. Novel Craft reveals how this mindset evolves in four major Victorian novels: Gaskell's Cranford, Yonge's The Daisy Chain, Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, and Oliphant's Phoebe Junior. Each chapter centers on a scene of craft production that expresses the novel's ideals and also interrogates the novel itself as a form of craft, and each chapter highlights an influential craft genre: paper crafts, pressed flowers, knitting, and hair jewelry. The book closes with a coda on the current resurgent crafts movement of Etsy.com as a fresh version of a Victorian sensibility.Featuring illustrations from two centuries of domestic handicraft, Schaffer deftly combines cultural history and literary analyses to create a revealing portrait of a neglected part of nineteenth-century life and highlights its continuing relevance in today's world of Martha Stewart, women's magazine crafts, and a rapidly expanding alt craft culture.
The Ruin of Angels
Author: Max Gladstone
Publisher: Tor Books
ISBN: 0765395886
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 459
Book Description
From the co-author of the viral New York Times bestseller This is How You Lose the Time War. Max Gladstone returns with The Ruin of Angels, the sixth novel in the Hugo-nominated Craft Sequence, which The Washington Post calls "the best kind of urban fantasy" and NPR calls "sharp, original, and passionate" The God Wars destroyed the city of Alikand. Now, a century and a half and a great many construction contracts later, Agdel Lex rises in its place. Dead deities litter the surrounding desert, streets shift when people aren’t looking, a squidlike tower dominates the skyline, and the foreign Iskari Rectification Authority keeps strict order in this once-independent city—while treasure seekers, criminals, combat librarians, nightmare artists, angels, demons, dispossessed knights, grad students, and other fools gather in its ever-changing alleys, hungry for the next big score. Priestess/investment banker Kai Pohala (last seen in Full Fathom Five) hits town to corner Agdel Lex’s burgeoning nightmare startup scene, and to visit her estranged sister Lei. But Kai finds Lei desperate at the center of a shadowy, and rapidly unravelling, business deal. When Lei ends up on the run, wanted for a crime she most definitely committed, Kai races to track her sister down before the Authority finds her first. But Lei has her own plans, involving her ex-girlfriend, a daring heist into the god-haunted desert, and, perhaps, freedom for an occupied city. Because Alikand might not be completely dead—and some people want to finish the job. Also Available by Max Gladstone: The Craft Sequence 1. Three Parts Dead 2. Two Serpents Rise 3. Full Fathom Five 4. Last First Snow 5. Four Roads Cross 6. Ruin of Angels The Craft Wars 1. Dead Country 2. Wicked Problems Last Exit Empress of Forever This is How You Lose the Time War (with Amal El-Mohtar) At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Publisher: Tor Books
ISBN: 0765395886
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 459
Book Description
From the co-author of the viral New York Times bestseller This is How You Lose the Time War. Max Gladstone returns with The Ruin of Angels, the sixth novel in the Hugo-nominated Craft Sequence, which The Washington Post calls "the best kind of urban fantasy" and NPR calls "sharp, original, and passionate" The God Wars destroyed the city of Alikand. Now, a century and a half and a great many construction contracts later, Agdel Lex rises in its place. Dead deities litter the surrounding desert, streets shift when people aren’t looking, a squidlike tower dominates the skyline, and the foreign Iskari Rectification Authority keeps strict order in this once-independent city—while treasure seekers, criminals, combat librarians, nightmare artists, angels, demons, dispossessed knights, grad students, and other fools gather in its ever-changing alleys, hungry for the next big score. Priestess/investment banker Kai Pohala (last seen in Full Fathom Five) hits town to corner Agdel Lex’s burgeoning nightmare startup scene, and to visit her estranged sister Lei. But Kai finds Lei desperate at the center of a shadowy, and rapidly unravelling, business deal. When Lei ends up on the run, wanted for a crime she most definitely committed, Kai races to track her sister down before the Authority finds her first. But Lei has her own plans, involving her ex-girlfriend, a daring heist into the god-haunted desert, and, perhaps, freedom for an occupied city. Because Alikand might not be completely dead—and some people want to finish the job. Also Available by Max Gladstone: The Craft Sequence 1. Three Parts Dead 2. Two Serpents Rise 3. Full Fathom Five 4. Last First Snow 5. Four Roads Cross 6. Ruin of Angels The Craft Wars 1. Dead Country 2. Wicked Problems Last Exit Empress of Forever This is How You Lose the Time War (with Amal El-Mohtar) At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Craft in the Real World
Author: Matthew Salesses
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1948226812
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 257
Book Description
This national bestseller is "a significant contribution to discussions of the art of fiction and a necessary challenge to received views about whose stories are told, how they are told and for whom they are intended" (Laila Lalami, The New York Times Book Review). The traditional writing workshop was established with white male writers in mind; what we call craft is informed by their cultural values. In this bold and original examination of elements of writing—including plot, character, conflict, structure, and believability—and aspects of workshop—including the silenced writer and the imagined reader—Matthew Salesses asks questions to invigorate these familiar concepts. He upends Western notions of how a story must progress. How can we rethink craft, and the teaching of it, to better reach writers with diverse backgrounds? How can we invite diverse storytelling traditions into literary spaces? Drawing from examples including One Thousand and One Nights, Curious George, Ursula K. Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea, and the Asian American classic No-No Boy, Salesses asks us to reimagine craft and the workshop. In the pages of exercises included here, teachers will find suggestions for building syllabi, grading, and introducing new methods to the classroom; students will find revision and editing guidance, as well as a new lens for reading their work. Salesses shows that we need to interrogate the lack of diversity at the core of published fiction: how we teach and write it. After all, as he reminds us, "When we write fiction, we write the world."
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1948226812
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 257
Book Description
This national bestseller is "a significant contribution to discussions of the art of fiction and a necessary challenge to received views about whose stories are told, how they are told and for whom they are intended" (Laila Lalami, The New York Times Book Review). The traditional writing workshop was established with white male writers in mind; what we call craft is informed by their cultural values. In this bold and original examination of elements of writing—including plot, character, conflict, structure, and believability—and aspects of workshop—including the silenced writer and the imagined reader—Matthew Salesses asks questions to invigorate these familiar concepts. He upends Western notions of how a story must progress. How can we rethink craft, and the teaching of it, to better reach writers with diverse backgrounds? How can we invite diverse storytelling traditions into literary spaces? Drawing from examples including One Thousand and One Nights, Curious George, Ursula K. Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea, and the Asian American classic No-No Boy, Salesses asks us to reimagine craft and the workshop. In the pages of exercises included here, teachers will find suggestions for building syllabi, grading, and introducing new methods to the classroom; students will find revision and editing guidance, as well as a new lens for reading their work. Salesses shows that we need to interrogate the lack of diversity at the core of published fiction: how we teach and write it. After all, as he reminds us, "When we write fiction, we write the world."
New Kid
Author: Jerry Craft
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 006269121X
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 260
Book Description
Winner of the Newbery Medal, Coretta Scott King Author Award, and Kirkus Prize for Young Readers’ Literature! Perfect for fans of Raina Telgemeier and Gene Luen Yang, New Kid is a timely, honest graphic novel about starting over at a new school where diversity is low and the struggle to fit in is real, from award-winning author-illustrator Jerry Craft. Seventh grader Jordan Banks loves nothing more than drawing cartoons about his life. But instead of sending him to the art school of his dreams, his parents enroll him in a prestigious private school known for its academics, where Jordan is one of the few kids of color in his entire grade. As he makes the daily trip from his Washington Heights apartment to the upscale Riverdale Academy Day School, Jordan soon finds himself torn between two worlds—and not really fitting into either one. Can Jordan learn to navigate his new school culture while keeping his neighborhood friends and staying true to himself? This middle grade graphic novel is an excellent choice for tween readers, including for summer reading. New Kid is a selection of the Schomburg Center's Black Liberation Reading List. Plus don't miss Jerry Craft's Class Act!
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 006269121X
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 260
Book Description
Winner of the Newbery Medal, Coretta Scott King Author Award, and Kirkus Prize for Young Readers’ Literature! Perfect for fans of Raina Telgemeier and Gene Luen Yang, New Kid is a timely, honest graphic novel about starting over at a new school where diversity is low and the struggle to fit in is real, from award-winning author-illustrator Jerry Craft. Seventh grader Jordan Banks loves nothing more than drawing cartoons about his life. But instead of sending him to the art school of his dreams, his parents enroll him in a prestigious private school known for its academics, where Jordan is one of the few kids of color in his entire grade. As he makes the daily trip from his Washington Heights apartment to the upscale Riverdale Academy Day School, Jordan soon finds himself torn between two worlds—and not really fitting into either one. Can Jordan learn to navigate his new school culture while keeping his neighborhood friends and staying true to himself? This middle grade graphic novel is an excellent choice for tween readers, including for summer reading. New Kid is a selection of the Schomburg Center's Black Liberation Reading List. Plus don't miss Jerry Craft's Class Act!
Novel Craft
Author: Talia Schaffer
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0195398041
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241
Book Description
Domestic handicraft was an extraordinarily popular leisure activity in Victorian Britain, especially amongst middle-class women. Craftswomen pasted shells onto boxes, stitched fish scales onto silk, scorched patterns into wood, cast flower petals out of wax, and made needlework portraits of the royal spaniels. Yet despite its ubiquity, little has been written about this curious hobby. Providing a much-needed history of this under-studied phenomenon, Talia Schaffer demonstrates the importance of domestic handicraft in Victorian literature and culture.Novel Craft presents what Schaffer terms the "craft paradigm" -- a set of beliefs about representation, production, consumption, value, and beauty that were crucial to mid-Victorian thought. She uncovers how handicrafts expressed anxieties about modernity and offered an alternative to the conventional financial, political, and aesthetic ideas of the era. Novel Craft reveals how this mindset evolves in four major Victorian novels: Gaskell's Cranford, Yonge's The Daisy Chain, Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, and Oliphant's Phoebe Junior. Each chapter centers on a scene of craft production that expresses the novel's ideals and also interrogates the novel itself as a form of craft, and each chapter highlights an influential craft genre: paper crafts, pressed flowers, knitting, and hair jewelry. The book closes with a coda on the current resurgent crafts movement of Etsy.com as a fresh version of a Victorian sensibility.Featuring illustrations from two centuries of domestic handicraft, Schaffer deftly combines cultural history and literary analyses to create a revealing portrait of a neglected part of nineteenth-century life and highlights its continuing relevance in today's world of Martha Stewart, women's magazine crafts, and a rapidly expanding alt craft culture.
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0195398041
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241
Book Description
Domestic handicraft was an extraordinarily popular leisure activity in Victorian Britain, especially amongst middle-class women. Craftswomen pasted shells onto boxes, stitched fish scales onto silk, scorched patterns into wood, cast flower petals out of wax, and made needlework portraits of the royal spaniels. Yet despite its ubiquity, little has been written about this curious hobby. Providing a much-needed history of this under-studied phenomenon, Talia Schaffer demonstrates the importance of domestic handicraft in Victorian literature and culture.Novel Craft presents what Schaffer terms the "craft paradigm" -- a set of beliefs about representation, production, consumption, value, and beauty that were crucial to mid-Victorian thought. She uncovers how handicrafts expressed anxieties about modernity and offered an alternative to the conventional financial, political, and aesthetic ideas of the era. Novel Craft reveals how this mindset evolves in four major Victorian novels: Gaskell's Cranford, Yonge's The Daisy Chain, Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, and Oliphant's Phoebe Junior. Each chapter centers on a scene of craft production that expresses the novel's ideals and also interrogates the novel itself as a form of craft, and each chapter highlights an influential craft genre: paper crafts, pressed flowers, knitting, and hair jewelry. The book closes with a coda on the current resurgent crafts movement of Etsy.com as a fresh version of a Victorian sensibility.Featuring illustrations from two centuries of domestic handicraft, Schaffer deftly combines cultural history and literary analyses to create a revealing portrait of a neglected part of nineteenth-century life and highlights its continuing relevance in today's world of Martha Stewart, women's magazine crafts, and a rapidly expanding alt craft culture.
The Sell Your Novel Tool kit
Author: Elizabeth Lyon
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101153490
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 328
Book Description
ENHANCE YOUR CHANCES OF GETTING YOUR NOVEL PUBLISHED WITH THIS ONE-OF-A-KIND GUIDE Writers often spend years perfecting their first novel—then hit a dead end when it comes to getting it published. Learning to market your novel will make it stand out from the thousands of other books clamoring for the attention of an ever shrinking number of publishers. In this book, Elizabeth Lyon offers the wisdom of more than twenty years of experience as an author, book editor, writing instructor, and marketing consultant. Step-by-step, she details what editors want, what questions to ask them, and how to develop a marketing strategy. You will learn: · How to categorize your novel, and the sixteen ways of describing it · Nine ways of selling your novel · Descriptions of the jobs of literary agent, editor, and writer · Examples of actual story synopses, and successful query letters—in all the genres · How to prepare sample chapters · Thirty questions a writer needs to ask a prospective agent
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101153490
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 328
Book Description
ENHANCE YOUR CHANCES OF GETTING YOUR NOVEL PUBLISHED WITH THIS ONE-OF-A-KIND GUIDE Writers often spend years perfecting their first novel—then hit a dead end when it comes to getting it published. Learning to market your novel will make it stand out from the thousands of other books clamoring for the attention of an ever shrinking number of publishers. In this book, Elizabeth Lyon offers the wisdom of more than twenty years of experience as an author, book editor, writing instructor, and marketing consultant. Step-by-step, she details what editors want, what questions to ask them, and how to develop a marketing strategy. You will learn: · How to categorize your novel, and the sixteen ways of describing it · Nine ways of selling your novel · Descriptions of the jobs of literary agent, editor, and writer · Examples of actual story synopses, and successful query letters—in all the genres · How to prepare sample chapters · Thirty questions a writer needs to ask a prospective agent
2013 Novel & Short Story Writer's Market
Author: Scott Francis
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1599636344
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 921
Book Description
The Best Resource Available for Getting Your Fiction Published! The 2013 Novel & Short Story Writer's Market is the best resource available for fiction writers to get their short stories, novellas, and novels published. As with past editions, Novel & Short Story Writer's Market offers hundreds of listings for book publishers, literary agents, fiction publications, contests and more. Each listing includes contact information, submission guidelines, and other important tips. Fiction writers will also find and increased focus on editorial to help give context to the listing content. From amazing craft articles (crafting emotion in fiction) to helpful business advice (marketing a small press book), the 2013 Novel & Short Story Writer's Market offers everything a fiction writer looking to get published could want. PLEASE NOTE: Free subscriptions are NOT included with the e-book edition of this title.
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1599636344
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 921
Book Description
The Best Resource Available for Getting Your Fiction Published! The 2013 Novel & Short Story Writer's Market is the best resource available for fiction writers to get their short stories, novellas, and novels published. As with past editions, Novel & Short Story Writer's Market offers hundreds of listings for book publishers, literary agents, fiction publications, contests and more. Each listing includes contact information, submission guidelines, and other important tips. Fiction writers will also find and increased focus on editorial to help give context to the listing content. From amazing craft articles (crafting emotion in fiction) to helpful business advice (marketing a small press book), the 2013 Novel & Short Story Writer's Market offers everything a fiction writer looking to get published could want. PLEASE NOTE: Free subscriptions are NOT included with the e-book edition of this title.
2014 Novel & Short Story Writer's Market
Author: Rachel Randall
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1599637472
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 1122
Book Description
The best resource for getting your fiction published! The 2014 Novel & Short Story Writer's Market is the only resource you'll need to get your short stories, novellas, and novels published. As with past editions, Novel & Short Story Writer's Market offers hundreds of listings for book publishers, literary agents, fiction publications, contests, and more. Each listing includes contact information, submission guidelines, and other important tips. You'll also find an increased focus on all aspects of the writing life, from insightful articles on craft and technique to helpful advice on getting published and marketing your work. The 2014 Novel & Short Story Writer's Market offers everything a fiction writer needs to achieve publishing success. Check out interviews with award-winning author Man Martin (Days of the Endless Corvette and Paradise Dogs) and best-selling author and writing instructor James Scott Bell (Plot & Structure and Conflict & Suspense)!
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1599637472
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 1122
Book Description
The best resource for getting your fiction published! The 2014 Novel & Short Story Writer's Market is the only resource you'll need to get your short stories, novellas, and novels published. As with past editions, Novel & Short Story Writer's Market offers hundreds of listings for book publishers, literary agents, fiction publications, contests, and more. Each listing includes contact information, submission guidelines, and other important tips. You'll also find an increased focus on all aspects of the writing life, from insightful articles on craft and technique to helpful advice on getting published and marketing your work. The 2014 Novel & Short Story Writer's Market offers everything a fiction writer needs to achieve publishing success. Check out interviews with award-winning author Man Martin (Days of the Endless Corvette and Paradise Dogs) and best-selling author and writing instructor James Scott Bell (Plot & Structure and Conflict & Suspense)!
Novels, Needleworks, and Empire
Author: Chloe Wigston Smith
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 030027078X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313
Book Description
The first sustained study of the vibrant links between domestic craft and British colonialism In the eighteenth century, women's contributions to empire took fewer official forms than those collected in state archives. Their traces were recorded in material ways, through the ink they applied to paper or the artifacts they created with muslin, silk threads, feathers, and shells. Handiwork, such as sewing, knitting, embroidery, and other crafts, formed a familiar presence in the lives and learning of girls and women across social classes, and it was deeply connected to colonialism. Chloe Wigston Smith follows the material and visual images of the Atlantic world that found their way into the hands of women and girls in Britain and early America--in the objects they made, the books they held, the stories they read--and in doing so adjusted and altered the form and content of print and material culture. A range of artifacts made by women, including makers of color, brought the global into conversation with domestic crafts and consequently placed images of empire and colonialism within arm's reach. Together, fiction and handicrafts offer new evidence of women's material contributions to the home's place within the global eighteenth century, revealing the rich and complex connections between the global and the domestic.
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 030027078X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313
Book Description
The first sustained study of the vibrant links between domestic craft and British colonialism In the eighteenth century, women's contributions to empire took fewer official forms than those collected in state archives. Their traces were recorded in material ways, through the ink they applied to paper or the artifacts they created with muslin, silk threads, feathers, and shells. Handiwork, such as sewing, knitting, embroidery, and other crafts, formed a familiar presence in the lives and learning of girls and women across social classes, and it was deeply connected to colonialism. Chloe Wigston Smith follows the material and visual images of the Atlantic world that found their way into the hands of women and girls in Britain and early America--in the objects they made, the books they held, the stories they read--and in doing so adjusted and altered the form and content of print and material culture. A range of artifacts made by women, including makers of color, brought the global into conversation with domestic crafts and consequently placed images of empire and colonialism within arm's reach. Together, fiction and handicrafts offer new evidence of women's material contributions to the home's place within the global eighteenth century, revealing the rich and complex connections between the global and the domestic.
Craft Class
Author: Christopher Kempf
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421443570
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 292
Book Description
The hidden history of the creative writing workshop and the socioeconomic consequences of the craft labor metaphor. In a letter dated September 1, 1912, drama professor George Pierce Baker recommended the term "workshop" for an experimental course in playwriting he had been planning with former students at Harvard and Radcliffe. This was the first time that term, now ubiquitous, was used in the context of creative writing pedagogy. Today, the MFA (master of fine arts) industry is a booming one, with more than 200 programs and thousands of residencies and conferences for aspiring writers nationwide. Almost all of these offerings operate on the workshop model. In Craft Class, Christopher Kempf argues that the primary institutional form of creative writing studies, the workshop, has remained invisible before our scholarly eyes. While Baker and others marshaled craft toward economic critique, craft pedagogies consolidated the authority of elite educational institutions as the MFA industry grew. Transcoding professional-managerial soft skills—linguistic facility, social and emotional discernment, symbolic fluency—in the language of manual labor, the workshop nostalgically invokes practices that the university itself has rendered obsolete. The workshop poem or short story thus shares discursive space with the craft IPA or hand-loomed Pottery Barn rug—a space in which one economic practice rewrites itself in the language of another, just as right-wing corporatism continuously rewrites itself in the language of populism. Delineating an arc that extends from Boston's fin de siècle Society of Arts and Crafts through 1930s proletarian workshops to the pedagogies of Black Mountain College and the postwar MFA, Craft Class reveals how present-day creative writing restructures transhistorical questions of labor, education, and aesthetic and economic production. With the rise of the workshop in American culture, Kempf shows, manual and mental labor have been welded together like steel plates. What fissures does that weld seal shut? And on whose behalf does the poet punch in?
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421443570
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 292
Book Description
The hidden history of the creative writing workshop and the socioeconomic consequences of the craft labor metaphor. In a letter dated September 1, 1912, drama professor George Pierce Baker recommended the term "workshop" for an experimental course in playwriting he had been planning with former students at Harvard and Radcliffe. This was the first time that term, now ubiquitous, was used in the context of creative writing pedagogy. Today, the MFA (master of fine arts) industry is a booming one, with more than 200 programs and thousands of residencies and conferences for aspiring writers nationwide. Almost all of these offerings operate on the workshop model. In Craft Class, Christopher Kempf argues that the primary institutional form of creative writing studies, the workshop, has remained invisible before our scholarly eyes. While Baker and others marshaled craft toward economic critique, craft pedagogies consolidated the authority of elite educational institutions as the MFA industry grew. Transcoding professional-managerial soft skills—linguistic facility, social and emotional discernment, symbolic fluency—in the language of manual labor, the workshop nostalgically invokes practices that the university itself has rendered obsolete. The workshop poem or short story thus shares discursive space with the craft IPA or hand-loomed Pottery Barn rug—a space in which one economic practice rewrites itself in the language of another, just as right-wing corporatism continuously rewrites itself in the language of populism. Delineating an arc that extends from Boston's fin de siècle Society of Arts and Crafts through 1930s proletarian workshops to the pedagogies of Black Mountain College and the postwar MFA, Craft Class reveals how present-day creative writing restructures transhistorical questions of labor, education, and aesthetic and economic production. With the rise of the workshop in American culture, Kempf shows, manual and mental labor have been welded together like steel plates. What fissures does that weld seal shut? And on whose behalf does the poet punch in?
The Novel and the New Ethics
Author: Dorothy J. Hale
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503614077
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 466
Book Description
For a generation of contemporary Anglo-American novelists, the question "Why write?" has been answered with a renewed will to believe in the ethical value of literature. Dissatisfied with postmodernist parody and pastiche, a broad array of novelist-critics—including J.M. Coetzee, Toni Morrison, Zadie Smith, Gish Jen, Ian McEwan, and Jonathan Franzen—champion the novel as the literary genre most qualified to illuminate individual ethical action and decision-making within complex and diverse social worlds. Key to this contemporary vision of the novel's ethical power is the task of knowing and being responsible to people different from oneself, and so thoroughly have contemporary novelists devoted themselves to the ethics of otherness, that this ethics frequently sets the terms for plot, characterization, and theme. In The Novel and the New Ethics, literary critic Dorothy J. Hale investigates how the contemporary emphasis on literature's social relevance sparks a new ethical description of the novel's social value that is in fact rooted in the modernist notion of narrative form. This "new" ethics of the contemporary moment has its origin in the "new" idea of novelistic form that Henry James inaugurated and which was consolidated through the modernist narrative experiments and was developed over the course of the twentieth century. In Hale's reading, the art of the novel becomes defined with increasing explicitness as an aesthetics of alterity made visible as a formalist ethics. In fact, it is this commitment to otherness as a narrative act which has conferred on the genre an artistic intensity and richness that extends to the novel's every word.
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503614077
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 466
Book Description
For a generation of contemporary Anglo-American novelists, the question "Why write?" has been answered with a renewed will to believe in the ethical value of literature. Dissatisfied with postmodernist parody and pastiche, a broad array of novelist-critics—including J.M. Coetzee, Toni Morrison, Zadie Smith, Gish Jen, Ian McEwan, and Jonathan Franzen—champion the novel as the literary genre most qualified to illuminate individual ethical action and decision-making within complex and diverse social worlds. Key to this contemporary vision of the novel's ethical power is the task of knowing and being responsible to people different from oneself, and so thoroughly have contemporary novelists devoted themselves to the ethics of otherness, that this ethics frequently sets the terms for plot, characterization, and theme. In The Novel and the New Ethics, literary critic Dorothy J. Hale investigates how the contemporary emphasis on literature's social relevance sparks a new ethical description of the novel's social value that is in fact rooted in the modernist notion of narrative form. This "new" ethics of the contemporary moment has its origin in the "new" idea of novelistic form that Henry James inaugurated and which was consolidated through the modernist narrative experiments and was developed over the course of the twentieth century. In Hale's reading, the art of the novel becomes defined with increasing explicitness as an aesthetics of alterity made visible as a formalist ethics. In fact, it is this commitment to otherness as a narrative act which has conferred on the genre an artistic intensity and richness that extends to the novel's every word.