Studies in Romance Philology and Literature

Studies in Romance Philology and Literature PDF Author: Mario Pei
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 146

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Book Description

Studies in Romance Philology and Literature

Studies in Romance Philology and Literature PDF Author: Mario Pei
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 146

Get Book Here

Book Description


Reading the Romance

Reading the Romance PDF Author: Janice A. Radway
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807898856
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Originally published in 1984, Reading the Romance challenges popular (and often demeaning) myths about why romantic fiction, one of publishing's most lucrative categories, captivates millions of women readers. Among those who have disparaged romance reading are feminists, literary critics, and theorists of mass culture. They claim that romances enforce the woman reader's dependence on men and acceptance of the repressive ideology purveyed by popular culture. Radway questions such claims, arguing that critical attention "must shift from the text itself, taken in isolation, to the complex social event of reading." She examines that event, from the complicated business of publishing and distribution to the individual reader's engagement with the text. Radway's provocative approach combines reader-response criticism with anthropology and feminist psychology. Asking readers themselves to explore their reading motives, habits, and rewards, she conducted interviews in a midwestern town with forty-two romance readers whom she met through Dorothy Evans, a chain bookstore employee who has earned a reputation as an expert on romantic fiction. Evans defends her customers' choice of entertainment; reading romances, she tells Radway, is no more harmful than watching sports on television. "We read books so we won't cry" is the poignant explanation one woman offers for her reading habit. Indeed, Radway found that while the women she studied devote themselves to nurturing their families, these wives and mothers receive insufficient devotion or nurturance in return. In romances the women find not only escape from the demanding and often tiresome routines of their lives but also a hero who supplies the tenderness and admiring attention that they have learned not to expect. The heroines admired by Radway's group defy the expected stereotypes; they are strong, independent, and intelligent. That such characters often find themselves to be victims of male aggression and almost always resign themselves to accepting conventional roles in life has less to do, Radway argues, with the women readers' fantasies and choices than with their need to deal with a fear of masculine dominance. These romance readers resent not only the limited choices in their own lives but the patronizing atitude that men especially express toward their reading tastes. In fact, women read romances both to protest and to escape temporarily the narrowly defined role prescribed for them by a patriarchal culture. Paradoxically, the books that they read make conventional roles for women seem desirable. It is this complex relationship between culture, text, and woman reader that Radway urges feminists to address. Romance readers, she argues, should be encouraged to deliver their protests in the arena of actual social relations rather than to act them out in the solitude of the imagination. In a new introduction, Janice Radway places the book within the context of current scholarship and offers both an explanation and critique of the study's limitations.

Transposing Art Into Texts in French Romantic Literature

Transposing Art Into Texts in French Romantic Literature PDF Author: Henry F. Majewski
Publisher: Unc Department of Romance Studies
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 140

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Book Description
Transposing Art into Texts in French Romantic Literature

Trauma and Romance in Contemporary British Literature

Trauma and Romance in Contemporary British Literature PDF Author: Jean-Michel Ganteau
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415661072
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
"Drawing on a variety of theoretical approaches including trauma theory, psychoanalysis, genre theory, narrative theory, theories of temporality, cultural theory, and ethics, this book brings together trauma and romance, showing how romance strategies have become an essential component of trauma fiction in general and traumatic realism in particular"-- Provided by publisher.

The Romance of the Rose and the Making of Fourteenth-Century English Literature

The Romance of the Rose and the Making of Fourteenth-Century English Literature PDF Author: Philip Knox
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192847171
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
This title provides a new account of the literary history of fourteenth-century England, arguing that many of this period's most distinctive literary experiments emerge through a productive dialogue with the 'Romance of the Rose', a jointly-authored medieval French poem.

Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature

Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature PDF Author: Yogita Goyal
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139486713
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature offers a rich, interdisciplinary treatment of modern black literature and cultural history, showing how debates over Africa in the works of major black writers generated productive models for imagining political agency. Yogita Goyal analyzes the tensions between romance and realism in the literature of the African diaspora, examining a remarkably diverse group of twentieth-century authors, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Chinua Achebe, Richard Wright, Ama Ata Aidoo and Caryl Phillips. Shifting the center of black diaspora studies by considering Africa as constitutive of black modernity rather than its forgotten past, Goyal argues that it is through the figure of romance that the possibility of diaspora is imagined across time and space. Drawing on literature, political history and postcolonial theory, this significant addition to the cross-cultural study of literatures will be of interest to scholars of African American studies, African studies and American literary studies.

The Secret Wound

The Secret Wound PDF Author: Marion Wells
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804767446
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
This book offers a new reading of early modern romance in the light of historically contemporary accounts of mind, and specifically the medical tradition of love-melancholy. The book argues that the medical profile of the melancholic lover provides an essential context for understanding the characteristic patterns of romance: narrative deferral, epistemological uncertainty, and the endless quest for a quasi-phantasmic beloved. Unlike many recent studies of romance, this book establishes a detailed historical basis for investigating the psychological structure of romance. Wells begins by tracing the development of the medical disorder first known in the Latin west as amor hereos (lovesickness) from its earliest roots in Greek and Arabic medicine to its translation into the Latin medical tradition. Drawing on this detailed historical material, the book considers three important early modern romances: Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata, and Spenser's The Faerie Queene, concluding with a brief consideration of the significance of this literary and medical legacy for Romanticism. Most broadly, the interdisciplinary nature of this study allows the author to investigate the central critical problem of early modern subjectivity in substantially new ways.

The Danger of Romance

The Danger of Romance PDF Author: Karen Sullivan
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022654043X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
The curious paradox of romance is that, throughout its history, this genre has been dismissed as trivial and unintellectual, yet people have never ceased to flock to it with enthusiasm and even fervor. In contemporary contexts, we devour popular romance and fantasy novels like The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and Game of Thrones, reference them in conversations, and create online communities to expound, passionately and intelligently, upon their characters and worlds. But romance is “unrealistic,” critics say, doing readers a disservice by not accurately representing human experiences. It is considered by some to be a distraction from real literature, a distraction from real life, and little more. Yet is it possible that romance is expressing a truth—and a truth unrecognized by realist genres? The Arthurian literature of the Middle Ages, Karen Sullivan argues, consistently ventriloquizes in its pages the criticisms that were being made of romance at the time, and implicitly defends itself against those criticisms. The Danger of Romance shows that the conviction that ordinary reality is the only reality is itself an assumption, and one that can blind those who hold it to the extraordinary phenomena that exist around them. It demonstrates that that which is rare, ephemeral, and inexplicable is no less real than that which is commonplace, long-lasting, and easily accounted for. If romance continues to appeal to audiences today, whether in its Arthurian prototype or in its more recent incarnations, it is because it confirms the perception—or even the hope—of a beauty and truth in the world that realist genres deny.

Women and Romance

Women and Romance PDF Author: Laurie Langbauer
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501723065
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
No detailed description available for "Women and Romance".

Loving Literature

Loving Literature PDF Author: Deidre Shauna Lynch
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022618384X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
One of the most common—and wounding—misconceptions about literary scholars today is that they simply don’t love books. While those actually working in literary studies can easily refute this claim, such a response risks obscuring a more fundamental question: why should they? That question led Deidre Shauna Lynch into the historical and cultural investigation of Loving Literature. How did it come to be that professional literary scholars are expected not just to study, but to love literature, and to inculcate that love in generations of students? What Lynch discovers is that books, and the attachments we form to them, have played a vital role in the formation of private life—that the love of literature, in other words, is deeply embedded in the history of literature. Yet at the same time, our love is neither self-evident nor ahistorical: our views of books as objects of affection have clear roots in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century publishing, reading habits, and domestic history. While never denying the very real feelings that warm our relationship to books, Loving Literature nonetheless serves as a riposte to those who use the phrase “the love of literature” as if its meaning were transparent. Lynch writes, “It is as if those on the side of love of literature had forgotten what literary texts themselves say about love’s edginess and complexities.” With this masterly volume, Lynch restores those edges and allows us to revel in those complexities.