Utopian Negotiation

Utopian Negotiation PDF Author: Oddvar Holmesland
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 0815652089
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
Aphra Behn (1640–1689) and Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673) were two of the boldest women authors of seventeenth century England. They made gestures toward a utopian future involving female emancipation and gender agreement, but depicted a world too complex for simple answers. In the first book-length exploration of the two authors together, Holmesland reevaluates the nature of utopianism in the writings of both, considering a wide range of their literary output. Both writers try to avoid fixed positions, exploring areas in between, seeking mediating solutions through "utopian negotiation." Requiring more equal gender relations, for instance, they challenge patriarchalism; however, while seeking to redefine the heroic code of honor, idealizing gentleness in men, they call for a femininity with heroic resources. Aspiring to such ideals of male-female mutuality, both authors extend this thinking to their view of the body politic.

Utopian Negotiation

Utopian Negotiation PDF Author: Oddvar Holmesland
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 0815652089
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 364

Get Book Here

Book Description
Aphra Behn (1640–1689) and Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673) were two of the boldest women authors of seventeenth century England. They made gestures toward a utopian future involving female emancipation and gender agreement, but depicted a world too complex for simple answers. In the first book-length exploration of the two authors together, Holmesland reevaluates the nature of utopianism in the writings of both, considering a wide range of their literary output. Both writers try to avoid fixed positions, exploring areas in between, seeking mediating solutions through "utopian negotiation." Requiring more equal gender relations, for instance, they challenge patriarchalism; however, while seeking to redefine the heroic code of honor, idealizing gentleness in men, they call for a femininity with heroic resources. Aspiring to such ideals of male-female mutuality, both authors extend this thinking to their view of the body politic.

English Women’s Spiritual Utopias, 1400-1700

English Women’s Spiritual Utopias, 1400-1700 PDF Author: Alexandra Verini
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031009177
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
English Women’s Spiritual Utopias, 1400-1700: New Kingdoms of Womanhood uncovers a tradition of women’s utopianism that extends back to medieval women’s monasticism, overturning accounts of utopia that trace its origins solely to Thomas More. As enclosed spaces in which women wielded authority that was unavailable to them in the outside world, medieval and early modern convents were self-consciously engaged in reworking pre-existing cultural heritage to project desired proto-feminist futures. The utopianism developed within the English convent percolated outwards to unenclosed women's spiritual communities such as Mary Ward's Institute of the Blessed Virgin and the Ferrar family at Little Gidding. Convent-based utopianism further acted as an unrecognized influence on the first English women’s literary utopias by authors such as Margaret Cavendish and Mary Astell. Collectively, these female communities forged a mode of utopia that drew on the past to imagine new possibilities for themselves as well as for their larger religious and political communities. Tracking utopianism from the convent to the literary page over a period of 300 years, New Kingdoms writes a new history of medieval and early modern women’s intellectual work and expands the concept of utopia itself.

Utopian Drama

Utopian Drama PDF Author: Siân Adiseshiah
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474295819
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
Shortlisted for The TaPRA David Bradby Monograph Prize 2023 As the first full-length study to analyse utopian plays in Western drama from antiquity to the present, Utopian Drama: In Search of a Genre offers an illuminating appraisal of the objectives of utopianism as manifested in drama through the ages, and carefully ascertains the added value that live performance brings to the persuasion of utopian thought. Siân Adiseshiah scrutinises the distinctive intervention of utopian drama through its examination alongside the utopian prose tradition – in this way, the book establishes new ways of approaching utopian aesthetics and new ways of interpreting utopian drama. This book provides fresh understandings of the generic features of utopian plays, identifies the gains of establishing a new genre, and ascertains ways in which this genre functions as political theatre. Referring to over 40 plays, of which 18 are examined in detail, Utopian Drama traces the emergence of the utopian play in the Western tradition from ancient Greek Comedy to experimental contemporary work. Works discussed in detail include plays by Aristophanes, Margaret Cavendish, George Bernard Shaw, Howard Brenton, Claire MacDonald, Cesi Davidson, and Mojisola Adebayo. As well as offering extended attention to the work of these playwrights, the book reflects on the development of utopian drama through history, notes the persistent features, tropes, and conventions of utopian plays, and considers the implications of their registration for both theatre studies and utopian studies.

Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel

Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel PDF Author: Caroline Edwards
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108498701
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
Explores how the experience of time in contemporary British novels reveals the persistence of the utopian imagination today.

Subject to Negotiation

Subject to Negotiation PDF Author: Elaine Neil Orr
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813917153
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
Challenges the "subversive" model of feminist criticism and argues for the importance of negotiation for feminist practice within a plurality of critical positions and identities, presenting an empirical method for a negotiating feminist criticism and demonstrating the model with analysis of the writing of five American women authors: Edith Wharton, Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, Toni Morrison, and Marge Piercy. For scholars of feminist literary theory and 20th-century American literature. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Handbook of the British Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century

Handbook of the British Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century PDF Author: Katrin Berndt
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110650444
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 606

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Book Description
The handbook offers a comprehensive introduction to the British novel in the long eighteenth century, when this genre emerged to develop into the period’s most versatile and popular literary form. Part I features six systematic chapters that discuss literary, intellectual, socio-economic, and political contexts, providing innovative approaches to issues such as sense and sentiment, gender considerations, formal characteristics, economic history, enlightened and radical concepts of citizenship and human rights, ecological ramifications, and Britain’s growing global involvement. Part II presents twenty-five analytical chapters that attend to individual novels, some canonical and others recently recovered. These analyses engage the debates outlined in the systematic chapters, undertaking in-depth readings that both contextualize the works and draw on relevant criticism, literary theory, and cultural perspectives. The handbook’s breadth and depth, clear presentation, and lucid language make it attractive and accessible to scholar and student alike.

Gender and Utopia in the Eighteenth Century

Gender and Utopia in the Eighteenth Century PDF Author: Brenda Tooley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317130308
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
Focusing on eighteenth-century constructions of symbolic femininity and eighteenth-century women's writing in relation to contemporary utopian discourse, this volume adjusts our understanding of the utopia of the Enlightenment, placing a unique emphasis on colonial utopias. These essays reflect on issues related to specific configurations of utopias and utopianism by considering in detail English and French texts by both women (Sarah Scott, Sarah Fielding, Isabelle de Charrière) and men (Paltock and Montesquieu). The contributors ask the following questions: In the influential discourses of eighteenth-century utopian writing, is there a place for 'woman,' and if so, what (or where) is it? How do 'women' disrupt, confirm, or ground the utopian projects within which these constructs occur? By posing questions about the inscription of gender in the context of eighteenth-century utopian writing, the contributors shed new light on the eighteenth-century legacies that continue to shape contemporary views of social and political progress.

The Utopian Impulse in Latin America

The Utopian Impulse in Latin America PDF Author: K. Beauchesne
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230339611
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
An exploration of the concept of utopia in Latin America from the earliest accounts of the New World to current cultural production, the carefully selected essays in this volume represent the latest research on the topic by some of the most important Latin Americanists working in North American academia today.

Europe's Utopias of Peace

Europe's Utopias of Peace PDF Author: Bo Stråth
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474237746
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 553

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Book Description
Europe's Utopias of Peace explores attempts to create a lasting European peace in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars and the two world wars. The book charts the 250 year cycle of violent European conflicts followed by new utopian formulations for peace. The utopian illusion was that future was predictable and rules could prescribe behaviour in conflicts to come. Bo Stråth examines the reiterative bicentenary cycle since 1815, where each new postwar period built on a design for a project for European unification. He sets out the key historical events and the continuous struggle with nationalism, linking them to legal, political and economic thought. Biographical sketches of the most prominent thinkers and actors provide the human element to this narrative. Europe's Utopias of Peace presents a new perspective on the ideological, legal, economic and intellectual conditions that shaped Europe since the 19th century and presents this in a global context. It challenges the conventional narrative on Europe's past as a progressive enlightenment heritage, highlighting the ambiguities of the legacies that pervade the institutional structures of contemporary Europe. Its long-term historical perspective will be invaluable for students of contemporary Europe or modern European history.

Genre in English Literature, 1650-1700: Transitions in Drama and Fiction

Genre in English Literature, 1650-1700: Transitions in Drama and Fiction PDF Author: Pilar Cuder-Dominguez
Publisher: Cambria Press
ISBN: 1604978821
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
This book examines the theories and practices of narrative and drama in England between 1650 and 1700, a period that, in bridging the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, has been comparatively neglected, and on which, at the time of writing, there is a dearth of new approaches. Critical consensus over these two genres has failed to account for its main features and evolution throughout the period in at least two ways. First, most approaches omit the manifold contradictions between the practice and the theory of a genre. Writers were generally aware of working within a tradition of representation which they nevertheless often challenged, even while the theory was being drafted (e.g., by John Dryden). The ideal and the real were in unacknowledged conflict. Second, critical readings of these late Stuart texts have fitted them proactively into a neat evolutionary pattern that reached eighteenth-century genres without detours or disjunctions, or else they have oversimplified the wealth of generic conventions deployed in the period, so that to the present-day reader, for instance, Restoration drama consists only of either city comedies or Dryden's tragedies. A cursory survey of the critical history of seventeenth-century drama and fiction confirms these views. Although the 1970s and 1980s brought about a crop of interesting reassessments of the field, fiction continues to be seen as a genre that emerged in the eighteenth century. Most critics still treat earlier manifestations as marginal or as prenovelistic experiments; and in most instances it is even possible to discern a sexist bias to justify this treatment, as these works were written by women, unlike much of the canonical fiction of the eighteenth century. A revision of the critical foundations hitherto held and a re-evaluation of the works of fiction written in the seventeenth century is therefore in order. This study adopts, as a basic and essential methodological tenet, the need to decenter the analysis of Restoration fiction and drama from the traditional canon, too limited and conservative and featuring works that are not always suitable as paradigmatic instances of the literary production of the period. These studies have thus been based on a larger than usual--if not on a full--corpus of works produced within the period, and have sought to ascertain the role played in the development of each of the genres under consideration by works, topics, or even by authors hitherto somewhat outside mainstream literary criticism. This opens the field of English literature further through the framing of new questions or revising of old ones, as well as to beginning a dialogue, yet again, as to the meanings of these literary works and also to their circulation from their inception up to the present time. In addition, the rare attention given to works by women makes this all the more an important book for collections in English literature of the period.