Reading Corporeality in Patrick White’s Fiction

Reading Corporeality in Patrick White’s Fiction PDF Author: Bridget Grogan
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004365699
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
In Reading Corporeality in Patrick White’s Fiction: An Abject Dictatorship of the Flesh, Bridget Grogan combines theoretical explication, textual comparison, and close reading to argue that corporeality is central to Patrick White’s fiction, shaping the characterization, style, narrative trajectories, and implicit philosophy of his novels and short stories. Critics have often identified a radical disgust at play in White’s writing, claiming that it arises from a defining dualism that posits the ‘purity’ of the disembodied ‘spirit’ in relation to the ‘pollution’ of the material world. Grogan argues convincingly, however, that White’s fiction is far more complex in its approach to the body. Modeling ways in which Kristevan theory may be applied to modern fiction, her close attention to White’s recurring interest in physicality and abjection draws attention to his complex questioning of metaphysics and subjectivity, thereby providing a fresh and compelling reading of this important world author.

Reading Corporeality in Patrick White’s Fiction

Reading Corporeality in Patrick White’s Fiction PDF Author: Bridget Grogan
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004365699
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Reading Corporeality in Patrick White’s Fiction: An Abject Dictatorship of the Flesh, Bridget Grogan combines theoretical explication, textual comparison, and close reading to argue that corporeality is central to Patrick White’s fiction, shaping the characterization, style, narrative trajectories, and implicit philosophy of his novels and short stories. Critics have often identified a radical disgust at play in White’s writing, claiming that it arises from a defining dualism that posits the ‘purity’ of the disembodied ‘spirit’ in relation to the ‘pollution’ of the material world. Grogan argues convincingly, however, that White’s fiction is far more complex in its approach to the body. Modeling ways in which Kristevan theory may be applied to modern fiction, her close attention to White’s recurring interest in physicality and abjection draws attention to his complex questioning of metaphysics and subjectivity, thereby providing a fresh and compelling reading of this important world author.

The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel

The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel PDF Author: Nicholas Birns
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009099507
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 373

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Book Description
The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel provides a clear, lively, and accessible account of the novel in Australia. The chapters of this book survey significant issues and developments in the Australian novel, offer historical and conceptual frameworks, and provide vivid and original examples of what reading an Australian novel looks like in practice. The book begins with novels by literary visitors to Australia and concludes with those by refugees. In between, the reader encounters the Australian novel in its splendid contradictoriness, from nineteenth-century settler fiction by women writers through to literary images of the Anthropocene, from sexuality in the novels of Patrick White to Waanyi writer Alexis Wright's call for a sovereign First Nations literature. This book is an invitation to students, instructors, and researchers alike to expand and broaden their knowledge of the complex histories and crucial present of the Australian novel.

Dissociation and Wholeness in Patrick White’s Fiction

Dissociation and Wholeness in Patrick White’s Fiction PDF Author: Laurence Steven
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
ISBN: 0889205922
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
Most studies of Patrick White's fiction are devoted to elucidating archetypal patterns, symbolic configurations, and thematic preoccupations, and generally to praising the way White's fictional elements combine to form a religio-mystical worldview. Few have questioned this critical approach to White; fewer still have questioned White's vision itself. Yet, according to the author, questioning is in order—for Patrick White is a man divided. One part of him strives for permanence, for the ideal, in a world he knows is contingent and temporal, a world that will undermine his striving. This leads him as a novelist to devalue human life and to impose arbitrary, symbolic resolutions on his novels. This has been the focus of most critics. But there is another side, a part of White that strains away from the dualism of idealism versus despair and towards a vital wholeness that can be found, not in a world beyond the one we live in, but in human relationships. It is this side of Patrick White, argues Laurence Steven, that is the source of his genuine power as a novelist. An important challenge for the critic is "to develop an ability to see, within the restrictive compass [White's] symbolic designs impose on the novels, 'the new shoots,' as [D. H.] Lawrence would have it, which indicate new life, new creativity, and which point towards a wholeness which human beings can embrace as their own" (Introduction).

Patrick White Centenary

Patrick White Centenary PDF Author: Bill Ashcroft
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443866156
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 530

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Book Description
This volume marks the birth centenary of a giant amongst contemporary writers: the Australian Nobel prize-winning novelist, Patrick White (1912–1990). It proffers an invaluable insight into the current state of White studies through commentaries drawn from an international galaxy of eminent critics, as well as from newer talents. The book proves that interest in White’s work continues to grow and diversify. Every essay offers a new insight: some are re-evaluations by seasoned critics who revise earlier positions significantly; others admit new light onto what has seemed like well-trodden terrain or focus on works perhaps undervalued in the past—his poetry, an early short story or novel—which are now subjected to fresh attention. His posthumous work has also won attention from prominent critics. New comparisons with other international writers have been drawn in terms of subject matter, themes and philosophy. The expansion of critical attention into fields like photography and film opens new possibilities for enhancing further appreciation of his work. White’s interest in public issues such as the treatment of Australia’s Indigenous peoples, human rights and Australian nationalism is refracted through the inclusion of relevant commentaries from notable contributors. For the first time in Australian literary history, Indigenous scholars have participated in a celebration of the work of a white Australian writer. All of this highlights a new direction in White studies—the appreciation of his stature as a public intellectual. The book demonstrates that White’s legacy has limitless possibilities for further growth.

Memoirs Of Many In One

Memoirs Of Many In One PDF Author: Patrick White
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 144643527X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 149

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Book Description
'Edited' by Patrick White, these memoirs are a stage upon which the Nobel Prize winner himself appears, a supporting actor and anxious director of his many-faceted, spell-binding leading lady, Alex Xenophon Demirjian Gray. Enter Alex: quick-change artist of many personae - re-enacting all that she has experienced in her various lives. We see her as Cassiani, the nun with unexpectedly blue eyes, sweeper of mouse droppings, lover of Onouphrios the monk, who is rejected by the 'Christians' of Nisos as an evil-eyed sorceress; as Sister Benedict, who on the Feast of the Kippers leads the frailest member of her order into the bush, there to learn the source of goodness; as Dolly Formosa, star-turn of 'Alex Gray's Theatrical Tour of Outback Australia', dispensing culture to a reluctant audience. These are just a sampling of a host of guises. We also see Alex in her suburban Sydney home, exasperating her daughter Hilda, who cannot imagine the great flights her mother's temperament requires and which the state of her mind allows.

Monstrous Reflection

Monstrous Reflection PDF Author: Petra Rehling
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1848884079
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2014. By engaging and questioning existing definitions and ideas, all of the essays in this volume represent the idea of a ‘monstrous reflection’ in one way or another. Monsters can serve as a means to explore the cultural anxieties they embody and the reasons for these anxieties. Thus monsters act as mirrors highlighting the causes for the creation of categories. A reflection can also be a comment or statement applicable in that the monstrous or the word ‘monster’ becomes a label of otherness and exclusion. This label is sometimes a construction, a discursive and rhetorical trope, which only serves to other those deemed different or undesirable, suggesting that the monster might not always be monstrous. This volume is about the ones gazing into the mirror and the ‘things’ staring back at humanity along with the uncomfortable truths that are revealed in the process.

J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Power

J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Power PDF Author: Emanuela Tegla
Publisher: Brill
ISBN: 9789004308435
Category : Apartheid in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Power, Emanuela Tegla offers an exploration of the interconnectedness between morality and individual conscience in Coetzee's fiction, as well as a narratological analysis of important stylistic aspects, such as tense, narrative silence or the moral implications of the novels' endings.

Mysticism and the Mid-Century Novel

Mysticism and the Mid-Century Novel PDF Author: J. Clements
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230353924
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
This book argues that many of the mid-twentieth century's significant novelists were united by a desire to return the increasingly interior novel to ethical engagement. They did not seek morality in society, politics or the individual will, but sought to unveil a transcendent Good by using techniques drawn from the canon of mystical literature

The Twyborn Affair

The Twyborn Affair PDF Author: Patrick White
Publisher: Random House Australia
ISBN: 1742743765
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, a novel that satisfies as much as it challenges. Eddie Twyborn is bisexual and beautiful, the son of a Judge and a drunken mother. With this androgynous hero - Eudoxia/Eddie/Eadith Twyborn - and through his search for identity, for self-affirmation and love in its many forms, Patrick White takes us on a journey into the ambiguous landscapes, sexual, psychological and spiritual, of the human condition.

The House of Hunger

The House of Hunger PDF Author: Dambudzo Marechera
Publisher: Waveland Press
ISBN: 1478609494
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
This explosive, award-winning novella of growing up in colonial Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), told in exquisite, imaginative prose, touches the readers nerve through the authors harrowing portrait of lives disrupted by white settlers, a young disillusioned black man, and individual suffering in the 1960s and 1970s. Marecheras raw, piercing writings secured his place in African literature as a stylistic innovator and rebel commentator of the ghetto condition. While The House of Hunger is the centerpiece of this collection, readers are also treated to a series of short sketches in which Marechera, with angry humor, further navigates themes of madness, violence, despair, and survival.