Literary studies: fiction Books

Book SynopsisIn Mobilities and Cosmopolitanisms, Anna-Leena Toivanen combines mobilities research, postcolonial literary studies, and theories of cosmopolitanism to explore the representations and often complex intertwinements of different mobility practices and cosmopolitanisms in contemporary Franco- and Anglophone African and Afrodiasporic literary texts.Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction  1 Mobility and Cosmopolitanism: Complex Relations, Shortcomings, and Unease  2 Mobilities, Representation, and the Literary Form  3 Outline of the Book and Chapter Summaries PART 1 Trouble in the Business Class 1 Anxious Mobilities of Afropolitans avant la lettre Ama Ata Aidoo’s Changes: A Love Story  1 Automobility: Undecidedness in the Streets of Accra  2 Hotels as In-between Spaces  3 Transnational Business Class Travel: Afropolitans avant la lettre  4 Conclusion: Freedom of Movement? 2 The Hotel as a Space of Transit in Sefi Atta’s and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Short Stories  1 Atta’s Hotel: A Chronotope of Hypermobility, Inequality, and Unbelonging  2 Adichie’s Hotel Room: Adulterous Space between the Domestic and the Public  3 Conclusion: Being in Transit, Longing for Home 3 Uneasy ‘Homecoming’ in Alain Mabanckou’s Lumières de Pointe-Noire  1 Returnee: A Tourist-Native  2 Nostalgia and Loss  3 Returned Gazes, Unbalanced Dialogues  4 Blind Spot behind the Camera: La blanche  5 Conclusion: Problematics of a Business Class Return PART 2 Budget Travels, Practical Cosmopolitanisms 4 New Technologies and Communication Gaps in Novels by Liss Kihindou, Véronique Tadjo, NoViolet Bulawayo, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie  1 Formal Matters: The Mobile Poetics of Communication Technologies  2 Technological Advances – From Letters to Email and Skype  3 Creating Distance: Communication Gaps  4 Conclusion: Ruptured Dialogues and Unbalanced Cosmopolitanisms 5 Everyday Urban Mobilities in Michèle Rakotoson’s Elle, au printemps and Alain Mabanckou’s Tais-toi et meurs  1 Cartographies of Paris  2 Débrouillardise Cosmopolitanism: Survival in a New Environment  3 Peripheral Dead Ends  4 Conclusion: Managing the Metropolis through Mobility 6 European Peripheries and Practical Cosmopolitanism in Fabienne Kanor’s Faire l’aventure  1 Peripheries and the Dream of “la grosse Europe”  2 Débrouillardise Cosmopolitanism: Limits and Potentials  3 Conclusion: Out of Reach? Centres and Cosmopolitan Ideals PART 3 Abject Travels of Citizens of Nowhere 7 Failing Border Crossings and Cosmopolitanism in Brian Chikwava’s Harare North  1 Cosmopolitanism as an Active Engagement  2 Instances of Anti-cosmopolitanism  3 Non-dialogue and Linguistic Nonconformity  4 Parodying the Afropolitan  5 Abject Unbelonging  6 Conclusion: Cosmopolitanism’s Breakdown 8 Arrested Clandestine Odysseys in Sefi Atta’s “Twilight Trek” and Marie NDiaye’s Trois femmes puissantes  1 Erased Identities  2 Tropes of Mobility: Shoes, Trucks, and Boats  3 Sand and Sea: The Slavery Parallel  4 Conclusion: Precarious Journeys 9 Zombie Travels J. R. Essomba’s Le Paradis du nord and Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore  1 Tropes of Zombifying Mobilities: Hiding, Confinement, Dehumanisation, and Darkness  2 Not Feeling It: Lost Selves, Lost Emotions  3 Europe and the Failures of Cosmopolitanism  4 Eliminating the Zombie  5 Conclusion: The Poetics of Zombification Coda Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisIf you want to know how globalisation affects literary studies today this is the book for you. Why has world literature become so hotly debated? How does it affect the study of national literatures? What does geopolitics have to do with literature? Does American academe still set an example for the rest of the world? Is China taking over? What about European literature? Europe’s literatures? Do “minor” European literatures get lost in the shuffle? How can authors from such literatures get noticed? Who gains and who loses in an age of world literature? If those are questions that bewilder you look no further: this book provides answers and leaves you fully equipped to dig deeper into the fascinating world of world literature in an age of geopolitics.Table of ContentsContents Preface and Acknowledgments  1 Mapping World Literature  2 Worlding World Literature  3 Why World Literature Now?  4 Major/Minor in World Literature  5 Major and Minor Players in World Literature  6 Victor Klemperer Saves Europe through Weltliteratur  7 Brussels as Transnational Node for World Literature  8 Larger than Holland: J. Slauerhoff and World Literature  9 Adventures of Mark Twain in World Literature  10 Caribbean Exile into World Literature  11 Anglo-Phone Literature as Global Literature  12 Re-orient  13 Wither European Literature? Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisNarcisse ? Cambrioleur ? Illusionniste ? Le dandy s’invente des rôles et cache son visage derrière de nombreux masques pour dérouter son public. De Fortunio à Arsène Lupin, sans oublier la femme dandy, de Saint-Just à Romain Gary, les seize études du présent ouvrage font défiler une exceptionnelle galerie de figures qui jalonnent l’histoire du dandysme. Narcissus? A burglar? An illusionist? The dandy invents his own roles and hides his face behind multiple masks to confuse his audience. From Fortunio to Arsène Lupin, not forgetting the dandy woman, from Saint-Just to Romain Gary, the sixteen studies in this book present an exceptional gallery of figures that delineate the history of dandyism.Table of ContentsContents Notes sur les contributeurs Introduction: Savoir jouer ou mourir  Edyta Kociubińska Partie 1: Métamorphoses romanesques 1 Fortunio, le dandy d’Inde  Maxime Foerster 2 Eugène Sue et le « mal du siècle » – portraits de dandys désenchantés  Marie-Hélène Dumont 3 La face sombre du dandy balzacien  Shoshana-Rose Marzel 4 L’évolution du dandy transgresseur dans l’œuvre de Barbey d’Aurevilly  Roxanne Covelo 5 Jules Vallès et le dandysme. Lectures, chroniques et romans  Aurélien Lorig 6 Le Masque (1889) de Maupassant, récit d’un dandy dans l’embarras  Esther Bautista Naranjo 7 Prince d’enfances et de décadences : Narcisse comme dandy dans les contes de fées de Jean Lorrain  Ryan Atticus Doherty 8 Arsène Lupin : des bandits gentilshommes au dandy bandit  Cédric Hannedouche 9 Le dandy idéal : la femme héroïque ? La lionne athlétique ? Généalogie de la femme dandy à travers Chateaubriand, Baudelaire, Gautier et George Sand  Marie-Christine Garneau de l’Isle-Adam Partie 2: Figures aux mille visages 10 Saint-Just : un dandy à la Convention  Ronan Chalmin 11 Du dandysme et de Robert-Houdin : le prestidigitateur comme dandy  Emma Bielecki 12 Robert de Montesquiou, dandy décadent et ses doubles littéraires  Edyta Kociubińska 13 L’épée et la plume : Jean Joseph-Renaud, dandy sportif  Fleur Hopkins-Loféron 14 Louis de Gonzague Frick, l’amical dandy  Stephen Steele et Anne-Françoise Bourreau-Steele 15 Henry de Montherlant ou la tentation du dandysme  Pierre Damamme et Pierre Azou 16 Le dandysme de Romain Gary, la promesse de Roman Kacew  Jérémy Labbé Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisOne of the defining features of modernism lies in its far-reaching rethinking of the relation between the human and the non-human. In the present volume, this crucial aspect of modernism’s legacy is investigated from an authentically transnational perspective, taking an innovative stance on a diverse range of authors – from posthumanist classics such as Beckett and Woolf to Valentine de Saint-Point, Radoje Domanovic and Aldo Palazzeschi among others. On the one hand, this collection sheds new light on the modernist contribution to posthumanism, providing a valuable reference point for future studies on the topic. On the other, it offers a new take on the transnational dimension of modernism, highlighting unexplored convergences between modernist authors from several different national contexts.Table of ContentsList of Figures Notes on Contributors Introduction   Alberto Godioli and Carmen van den Bergh Part 1 Modernism and the Nonhuman 1 Prefiguring Modernist Posthumanism: Baudelaire, Rimbaud and the Objectification of the Lyric Self   Alessandro Cabiati 2 Becoming-Digit: Valentine de Saint-Point’s Posthumanist Futurism   Pavlina Radia 3 Politics of Identity: Giuseppe Ungaretti’s Poetry of the Great War Between Nomadic Subjectivity and Performative Realism   Enrica Maria Ferrara 4 Variations On “Maquinismo”: Looking Beyond the Human in Ramón Gómez de la Serna’s Writings    ngela Fernandes 5 The Tender Being of Something Else: Geography and Lists in Gertrude Stein’s Ida   Laura Oulanne 6 Samuel Beckett and Modernist Vitalism   Marc Farrant Part 2 Modernist Animals 7 Rumination of a Serbian Ox: Radoje Domanovic’s Satire of Anthropocentric Folly   Vedran Catovic 8 “Come se”: Transcending the Human-Animal Divide in Pirandello’s Short Stories   Santi Luca Famà 9 Modernist Exiles: the Berlin Years of Viktor Shklovsky, Aleksei Remizov, and the Masturbating Ape   Asiya Bulatova 10 “Brandishing Her Plumes”: Virginia Woolf, Feather Tropes, and the Plumage (Prohibition) Bill   Saskia McCracken 11 Posthumanism avant la lettre: Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities and the Boundaries of Humankind   Florian Kappeler 12 Animals and Logos in Samuel Beckett’s Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable   Laura Lainväe 13 Towards an Interpretation of a Modernist Bestiary in Color: Palazzeschi’s Bestie Del 900 and Maccari’s Illustrations   Sarah Bonciarelli Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisAnna Langfus, lauréate du prix Goncourt en 1962, est une autrice majeure de la littérature de la Shoah. Ce volume, qui contient des textes rares ou inédits de Langfus, est la première étude littéraire consacrée à son œuvre. Anna Langfus, a winner of the Prix Goncourt in 1962, is a major contributor to the literature of the Holocaust. This volume, including Langfus’s rare or unpublished texts, is the first literary study dedicated to her work.Table of ContentsNotes sur les contributeurs Introduction : Anna Langfus, la Shoah, le silence et la voix  Maxime Decout et Nelly Wolf 1 Comment et pourquoi faire la biographie d’Anna Langfus ?  Jean-Yves Potel Partie 1: Trauma et résilience 2 Saute, Barbara : Les limites de l’empathie  France Grenaudier-Klijn 3 Cryptophorie et revenants dans Le Sel et le soufre et Les Bagages de sable d’Anna Langfus  José Luis Arráez 4 La résilience narrative : Anna Langfus et l’écriture  Amelia Peral 5 Quand « l’Enfant fou » s’empare du monde : Saute, Barbara (1965) d’Anna Langfus à travers le prisme de l’analyse transactionnelle  Diana Mistreanu Partie 2: L’écriture romanesque d’Anna Langfus 6 « Mettre à la douleur des pantoufles » ? Les impressions sensibles et les images dans Le Sel et le soufre d’Anna Langfus  Annelies Schulte Nordholt 7 La composition sur des lignes de fuite ou un équilibre manqué : le parti pris de l’espace dans les œuvres narratives d’Anna Langfus  Jadwiga Bodzińska-Bobkowska 8 La surconscience linguistique et l’hétérolinguisme fantomatique dans les romans d’Anna Langfus  Piotr Sadkowski 9 Saute, Michael  Maxime Decout 10 Le Sel et le soufre : une écriture moderne entre silence et puissance de l’image  Juliette Adams Partie 3: Approches sociologiques et historiques 11 Le Prix Goncourt d’Anna Langfus : un nouvel imaginaire de la judéité  Nelly Wolf 12 Anna Langfus vue par ses critiques contemporains  Jean-Yves Potel 13 La Pologne d’Anna Langfus  Jean-Yves Potel Partie 4: Le théâtre d’Anna Langfus 14 Anna Langfus : du théâtre au roman. Les Lépreux et Le Sel et le soufre  Jean-Paul Dufiet 15 Quelques aspects de l’écriture dramatique inédite d’Anna Langfus  Renata Jakubczuk 16 L’identité passée sous silence – lecture pirandellienne du théâtre inédit d’Anna Langfus  Sylwia Kucharuk Annexe 1 : Textes d’Anna Langfus 211 Annexe 2 : Anna Langfus (1920-1966) : Chronologie 249  Jean-Yves Potel

Read more less

Book SynopsisDans l’œuvre de Maylis de Kerangal l’esthétique et l’éthique ne s’excluent pas. Cette première étude monographique examine la façon dont l’intérêt pour les paysages, pour la géographie révèle une attention au monde et une réflexion politique soucieuse des fondamentaux démocratiques. Maylis de Kerangal combines aesthetics with ethics in her work. This first monographic study focuses on how her interest for landscapes and geography reveals both her attention to the world and a political stance mindful of the democratic fundamentals.Table of ContentsRemerciements Liste des abréviations des ouvrages de Maylis de Kerangal étudiés Introduction partie 1: État des lieux 1 Construction de l’espace  1 Comment les lieux construisent-ils la narration ?   1.1 « Écrire c’est instaurer un paysage »   1.2 La corniche : transgression et devenir  2 Une phrase paysage   2.1 Une phrase caméléon   2.2 Le flux, le flow, le flot  3 Paysages en mouvement   3.1 Tout est mouvement   3.2 L’absence de mouvement, « ça pue la mort » 2 Personnages et espaces  1 Lieux personnifiés et personnages-paysages   1.1 Symbiose entre le personnage et le paysage   1.2 La « fille-planète » et autres corps-paysages  2 Paysage et psychologie   2.1 Des personnages définis par les lieux   2.2 Le labyrinthe : se perdre, se retrouver  3 Frontières, clôtures, ouvertures   3.1 Frontières   3.2 Zones de contact   3.3 Créer des ponts 3 Les lieux comme réservoir à images  1 Une topographie passée par le filtre de l’imaginaire   1.1 Paysages carrefours   1.2 Le Havre, une géographie intime  2 Les grands espaces   2.1 Puissance émotionnelle et narrative de la Sibérie   2.2 Images américaines partie 2: Une écriture de contact 4 Paysages intertextuels  1 L’intertextualité : une écriture de la relation   1.1 « Texte, tissu et tresse »   1.2 L’incorporation des références cinématographiques   1.3 « Un troisième paysage »  2 La grotte, métaphore de l’intertextualité   2.1 La matrice   2.2 D’une grotte à l’autre   2.3 Entrelacer la documentation et l’imaginaire : Lascaux 5 « À la culotte des choses »  1 Un regard d’ethnologue   1.1 Une « écriture de contact »   1.2 La méthode ethnologique   1.3 L’ethnologue, une figure de la bonne conscience ?  2 « Au ras du réel c’est là où on peut capter la vie »   2.1 Saisir le monde dans sa matérialité pour mieux le comprendre   2.2 La métaphore du travail de l’écrivain  3 Littératures transdisciplinaires et « indisciplinaires »   3.1 Littératures de terrain   3.2 Kiruna : la tentation de la littérature de terrain 6 Un monde en réseau  1 Une structure rhizomatique   1.1 Les paradoxes de la mobilité : lier et délier   1.2 « Mustang » : la difficulté à se connecter   1.3 Se relier aux autres : la puissance du collectif   1.4 L’expérience du collectif Inculte   1.5 Une écriture en réseau  2 Circuler dans le temps   2.1 « Une tranche de temps »   2.2 Un réseau entre passé et présent   2.3 La recherche des traces   2.4 Le « temps long » partie 3: Une oeuvre politique 7 Une oeuvre engagée ?  1 Qu’est-ce que la littérature engagée ?   1.1 Le modèle sartrien   1.2 Peut-on parler de littérature engagée aujourd’hui ?  2 Formes de l’engagement dans la littérature contemporaine   2.1 Des fictions critiques   2.2 Montrer plutôt que démontrer  3 L’identité, une question politique   3.1 Une mise à distance de l’autobiographie   3.2 Sortir de l’identité figée   3.3 Métissage   3.4 Le lisse et le strié 8 Démocratisation  1 Donner la parole à tous   1.1 L’hybridation des voix   1.2 Série télévisée et fondamentaux démocratiques   1.3 Entre références savantes et références populaires  2 L’oeuvre de Kerangal : une « poéthique »   2.1 Une attention portée aux problèmes sociaux et politiques   2.2 Un exemple d’implication par glissement   2.3 L’auteur, un être aux aguets, une vigie partie 4: Magnifier le monde 9 Une socio-épopée  1 Les héros du quotidien   1.1 L’épopée, une définition fuyante   1.2 Un grandissement de l’ordinaire   1.3 Un débordement dans la langue : le vertige de l’hypotypose   1.4 Des récits de fondation  2 Une chanson de(s) geste(s)   2.1 Oralité et « auralité », les deux pôles du chant épique   2.2 L’héroïsation des gestes du travail  3 « Réenchanter le travail »   3.1 L’univers du travail dans la littérature contemporaine   3.2 L’univers du travail : la singularité de Kerangal 10 Une écriture de l’élan  1 Le sublime   1.1 Pseudo-Longin : quelques exemples du style sublime   1.2 Style haut/style bas   1.3 L’envol : le sublime en action  2 « L’euphorie communicative »   2.1 Le ravissement du lecteur   2.2 Une narration enthousiaste   2.3 L’écriture au présent : l’expression d’une anti-nostalgie   2.4 La jeunesse : « un moteur narratif »  3 Le monde en mieux   3.1 Capter la texture du monde : une démarche empathique   3.2 Amender le monde   3.3 Le care : prendre soin du monde, un projet politique Conclusion Bibliographie Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisHow does the spectre appear in Icelandic literature and visual art created in the aftermath of the economic crash in Iceland in 2008? Why does it emerge at that specific point in time and what can it tell us about repressed collective memories in Iceland? The book explores how the crash becomes an implicit background setting in novels that address the silences and gaps of the family archive, and how crime fiction employs generic features of horror to explicitly tackle the ghosts residing in the lost homes of the financial crash. Spectral space is an apparent theme of cultural memories produced in times of crisis, and the book explores how this is made apparent in visual art of the period.Table of ContentsPreface List of Figures Introduction  1 Spectral Memory: What and Why?  2 What is Cultural Memory?  3 Spectral Memory as a Dynamic and Transformative Encounter Between Past and Present  4 Outline of Chapters Part 1:Spectral Memories of the Financial Crisis 1 The Spectral Spaces of the Economic Crisis: Visual Art  1 The Crash: A Collective Shock  2 The Crash: Crisis of Memory and Identity  3 Aesthetic Response to the Crash: The Spectral-Uncanny  4 Roles: Photorealist Drawings of the Unhomely Space  5 Roles: The House and the Human Subject  6 Waiting: Crash-Photographs of Emptiness and Melancholia in the Urban Space  7 Waiting: Contemporary Urban Space and Memory  8 Waiting: Capitalist Ruins  9 Spectral Mourning in the Urban Space: Conclusion 2 Ghosts and Specters of Crash Fiction: Literature  1 I Remember You: A Crash-Horror in the Time of Economic Crisis  2 I Remember You: Two Stories of Hauntings in the Wake of the Crash  3 I Remember You: The Haunted House  4 Reactions and Agency: Why Does the Ghost Return?  5 Hauntings in Ísafjörður: Three Different Types of Spectral Presence  6 Hauntings in Ísafjörður: Spectral Mourning as Haunting  7 Significance of the Haunting for the Narrative and Broader Context  8 Hvítfeld: Uncanny Family Novel  9 Hvítfeld and the Crash: The Falseness and Collapse of the Ideal  10 Hvítfeld: Unhomely Family Life and Melancholic Characters  11 Hvítfeld: Melancholic Mourning  12 Hvítfeld and the Spectral Space: The Unhomely Home  13 Literary Ghosts and Spectral Memories of the Financial Crisis:Conclusion Part 2: Spectral Memories From the Post-Crash Archive 3 Spectral Memories From the Institutional Archive: Visual Art  1 The Archive as Storage for Spectral Memories  2 Modernisation of the Archive: Colonialism and Photography  3 Musée Islandique and Das Experiment Island by Ólöf Nordal  4 Musée Islandique  5 The Colonial Archive and Historical Context  6 Das Experiment Island  7 The Uncanny Associations of the Archive  8 What Kind of Memories?  9 Traces by Unnar Örn Auðarson  10 Fragments From the Deeds of Unrest: Part II  11 The Photograph as an Archival Record  12 Photograph as Spectre  13 Fragments From the Deeds of Unrest: The Photograph and National Imagery  14 Fragments: Murmur of a Nation  15 Spectral Memories of the Institutional Archive: Conclusion 4 Spectral Memories From the Family Archive: Literature  1 The Family Archive in Fórnarleikar: The Spectral State of Postmemories  2 Postmemory and the Family Trauma  3 Postmemory and the Family Archive  4 Family Pictures: Archived Photographs  5 Fórnarleikar: The Impossibility of Writing a Life Story  6 Spectral Memories of the Childhood Archive in Elín, Ýmislegt  7 “Enigmatic Time-Capsules” and Archive Fiction  8 Archived Material: Spectral Memories  9 Elín, Ýmislegt: A Novel on Forgetting?  10 Spectral Memories From the Family Archive: Conclusion Conclusion Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book SynopsisPatrick Modiano (1945-) has published seventeen novels over the past twenty-seven years and is considered one of France's foremost writers. His first three works, dealing principally with the German occupation of France during World War II, are generally considered to have led to a reconsideration of the Gaullist myth which endured for twenty-five years after the war. Along with Marcel Ophuls's film, The Sorrow and the Pity, Modiano's novels opened French eyes to the more ambiguous role played during the occupation by the average French citizen. His subsequent novels have continued to probe the relationship between history, memory and fiction. This study will be of interest to readers of French fiction and history as it looks at their relation-ship to memory and shows that the three are inextricably linked in a way that enriches our understanding of our past, whether it be collective or personal. Modiano, while seemingly obsessed with his own past, in fact indicates an opening toward the future by attempting to put the past to rest in his fiction.Table of ContentsINTRODUCTION. Memory and Narration. CHAPTER 1: THE ECHOES OF MEMORY. Precarious Memories (Remise de peine). Memory Through the Generations. The Labyrinth of Memory in Modiano's Paris (Fleurs de ruine). Discrete Objects of Desire (Remise de peine). CHAPTER 2: METHODOLOGIES. The Play of the Visual: The Role of the Cinema and Modiano's Neo-Realism (Quartier perdu). Repetition as an Agent of Forgetting (Quartier perdu). Remembering to Forget (Rue des boutiques obscures). Modiano's Historical Methodology (Rue des boutiques obscures and Fleurs de ruine). Why Novels? (De si braves garçons). CHAPTER 3: SHEDDING THE PAST. Who is this Man? The Question of the Narrator (Un Cirque passe). L'Entrecroisement de l'Histoire et de la Fiction (Introduction). Historical Ironies (La Place de l'étoile). Historical Ambiguities (La Ronde de nuit and Lacombe Lucien). A la recherche du père (Les Boulevards de ceinture). Rewriting History: The Gaullist Myth. CONCLUSION. Flight toward the Future (Du plus loin de l'oubli). WORKS CITED.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis volume is a pioneering study in the theory and history of the imitation of music in fiction and constitutes an important contribution to current intermediality research. Starting with a comparison of basic similarities and differences between literature and music, the study goes on to provide outlines of a general theory of intermediality and its fundamental forms, in which a more specialized theory of the musicalization of (narrative) literature based on contemporary narratology and a typology of the forms of musico-literary intermediality are embedded. It also addresses the question of how to recognize a musicalized fiction when reading one and why Sterne's Tristram Shandy, contrary to what has been previously said, is not to be regarded as a musicalized fiction. In its historical part, the study explores forms and functions of experiments with the musicalization of fiction in English literature. After a survey of the major preconditions for musicalization - the increasing appreciation of music in 18th and 19th-century aesthetics and its main causes - exemplary fictional texts from romanticism to postmodernism are analyzed. Authors interpreted are De Quincey, Joyce, Woolf, A. Huxley, Beckett, Burgess and Josipovici. Whilst the limitations of a transposition of music into fiction remain apparent, experiments in this field yield valuable insights into mainly a-mimetic and formalist aesthetic tendencies in the development of more recent fiction as a whole and also show to what extent traditional conceptions of music continue to influence the use of this medium in literature. The volume is of relevance for students and scholars of English, comparative and general literature as well as for readers who take an interest in intermediality or interart research.Trade Review"Inspiring the reader’s great respect, this brilliant study will for a long time to come also function as a model, spurring to further intermedial (or interart) research." - in: Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 48 "…well worth reading…" - in: the International Fiction Review, Vol. 29 (2002)Table of ContentsAcknowledgements. 1. Introduction. PART I: THEORY THE COMPARABILITY OF MUSIC AND LITERATURE; INTERMEDIALITY AND THE SPECIAL CASE OF THE MUSICALIZATION OF LITERATURE/FICTION 2. Music and (narrative) literature: principal similarities and differences. 3. 'Intermediality': definition, typology, related terms 4. Musico-literary intermediality and the musicalization of literature/fiction: definition and typology 5. How to recognize a musicalized fiction when reading one PART II: HISTORY. THE MUSICALIZATION OF FICTION IN ENGLISH LITERATURE: AESTHETIC PREHISTORY AND INTERMEDIAL EXPERIMENTS FROM ROMANTICISM TO POSTMODERNISM. 6. The prehistory of the musicalization of fiction: the rise of music in aesthetic evaluation from the eighteenth century to romanticism - stages and factors. 7. Romantic musicalization of fiction: De Quincey, Dream Fugue 8. Modernist musicalization of fiction I: the Sirens episode in Joyce's Ulysses 9. Modernist musicalization of fiction II: Woolf, The String Quartet 10. Modernist musicalization of fiction III: Huxley, Point Counter Point 11. Postmodernist musicalization of fiction I: Beckett, Ping - an intermedial borderline case 12. Postmodernist musicalization of fiction II: Burgess, Napoleon Symphony 13. Postmodernist musicalization of fiction III: Josipovici, Fuga 14. Summary Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis lively and fascinating new collection of European essays on contemporary Anglophone fiction has arisen out of the ESSE/3 Conference, which was held in Glasgow in September 1995. The contributors live and work in University English Departments in Bulgaria, Croatia, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, The Netherlands, Portugal and Spain, as well as in the United Kingdom itself. Essays on general theoretical aspects of the subject head and conclude the collection, and there are also essays on individual writers or groups of writers, such as John Fowles, A.S. Byatt, Charles Palliser, Peter Ackroyd, William Golding, Doris Lessing, Daphne du Maurier, Angela Carter and Christina Stead. The performative aspect of the subject-matter of these essays is balanced by a locational aspect, including utopian and dystopian writing in authors as diverse as Michael Crichton, Jenny Diski and Salman Rushdie, and the travel literature of Bruce Chatwin. These essays show theoretical alertness, but no single theoretical position is privileged. The aim of the collection is to provide an indication of the range of work being carried out throughout European academe on Anglophone (mainly British) writing today.Trade Review”…this fascinating polyvocal collection […] a lively picture of how contemporary Anglophone […] fiction is being read in the European Academe …” in: Merope, 2001 No. 27Table of ContentsForeword. Daniela CARPI: Twentieth-Century Revision of Myth: the Myths of Writing. Pedro GALLARDO-TORRANO: Rediscovering the Island as Utopian Locus: Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park. Silvia CAPORALE BIZZINI: Language and Power in Jenny Diski's Rainforest. Andreas HÖFELE: Wasteland Sprouting: Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses and the Cityscapes of Modernism. Hartmut HIRSCH: 'A Novel of a Future': Textual Strategies and Political Discourse in Recent Utopian Fiction in English. Catherine BERNARD: Bruce Chatwin: fiction on the frontier. Tatjana JUKI_: From worlds to words and the other way around: the Victorian inheritance in the postmodern British novel. Margarita CHOUROVA: 'The Death of the Author' and the tragicomic allegory of William Golding's The Paper Men. Peter CONRADI: Angus Wilson: Impersonations. Isabel C. ANIEVAS GAMALLO: Motherhood and the fear of the Other: Magic, fable and the gothic in Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child. John MEPHAM: Conversation and Friendship in Doris Lessing's Novels. Sarah SCEATS: Flesh and Bones: Eating, not eating and the social vision of Doring Lessing. Susana ONEGA: Mirror Games and Hidden Narratives in The Quincunx. Agnes SURÁNYI: A Comparison of Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus and Christina Stead's Little Hotel. Avril HORNER and Sue ZLOSNIK: Daphne du Maurier: The French Connection. Chris WALSH: Postmodernist Reflections: A.S. Byatt's Possession. Christien FRANKEN: The Turtle and its Adversaries: Gender Disruption in A.S. Byatt's Critical and Academic Work. Marta Sofía LÓPEZ: Historiographic metafiction and resistance postmodernism. Index.

Read more less

Book SynopsisKafka's three novels, to be understood as an ever more intricate portrayal of the inner life of one central character (Henry James's 'centre of consciousness'), each reflecting the problems of their self-critical creator, are tantamount to dreams. The hieroglyphic, pictorial language in which they are written is the symbolic language in which dreams and thoughts on the edge of sleep are visualized. Not for nothing did Kafka define his writing as a matter of fantasizing with whole orchestras of [free] associations. Written in a deliberately enhanced hypnagogic state, these novels embody the alternative logic of dreams, with the emphasis on chains of association and verbal bridges between words and word-complexes. The product of many years' preoccupation with its subject, Patrick Bridgwater's new book is an original, chapter-by-chapter study of three extraordinarily detailed novels, of each of which it offers a radically new reading that makes more, and different, sense than any previous reading. In Barthes' terms these fascinating novels are 'unreadable', but the present book shows that, properly read, they are entirely, if ambiguously, readable. Rooted in Kafka's use of language, it consistently explores, in detail, (i) the linguistic implications of the dreamlike nature of his work, (ii) the metaphors he takes literally, and (iii) the ambiguities of so many of the words he chooses to use. In doing so it takes account not only of the secondary meanings of German words and the sometimes dated metaphors of which Kafka, taking them literally, spins his text, but also, where relevant, of Czech and Italian etymology. Split, for ease of reference, into chapters corresponding to the chapters of the novels in the new Originalfassung, the book is aimed at all readers of Kafka with a knowledge of German, for the author shows that Kafka's texts can be understood only in the language in which they were written: because Kafka's meaning is often hidden beneath the surface of the text, conveyed via secondary meanings that are specific to German, any translation is necessarily an Oberflächenübersetzung.Trade Review”…obviously both a labour of love and the result of many years of painstaking research…” in: Seminar, Vol. xli, No. 2, May 2005, pp. 79-182Table of ContentsPreface Abbreviations and Signs Introduction 1. DER VERSCHOLLENE 2. DER PROCESS 3. DAS SCHLOSS Bibliography

Read more less

Book SynopsisJoseph Conrad: The Short Fiction offers a wide range of perspectives on Conrad’s short stories. Nine essays, by established and emerging scholars, deal with early and classic stories as well as the relatively neglected works of Conrad’s later career. The essays explore in depth the historical and publishing contexts of individual stories and provide insights into Conrad’s practice as a writer of short fiction. These new readings, based on contemporary theoretical and interpretive perspectives, will appeal not only to specialists of literary Modernism but also to the advanced student and the general reader.Trade Review”…a first-rate collection of essays…” in: Studies in English Literature, Vol. 46, 2005Table of ContentsForeword Contributors Jürgen KRAMER: What the Country Doctor did not see: The Limits of the Imagination in Amy Foster Cedric WATTS: Fraudulent Signifiers: Saussure and the Sixpence in Karain Sema POSTACIOGLU-BANON: Gaspar Ruiz: A Vitagraph of Desire P.A. MARCH-RUSSELL: The Anarchy of Love: The Informer Michael LUCAS: Rehabilitating The Brute Stephen DONOVAN: Magic Letters and Mental Degradation: Advertising in An Anarchist and The Partner Mark D. LARABEE: Territorial Vision and Revision in Freya of the Seven Isles Jeremy HAWTHORN: Conrad and the Erotic: A Smile of Fortune and The Planter of Malata Jennifer TURNER: Petticoats and Sea Business: Women Characters in Conrad’s Edwardian Short Stories

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis volume represents the first in-depth English-language study of the French combat novel of the Great War, an immensely popular genre at the time which includes influential texts such as Henri Barbusse’s Le Feu and Roland Dorgelès’s Les Croix de bois. It explores through these works, and less well-known but equally popular patriotic novels of the period, the effect that experiencing war has upon the writer’s understanding of the world, arguing that, in their depiction of conflict, these writers demonstrate a decidedly complex and modernist understanding of humanity’s place in the world. In particular, the author examines the French combat novel’s evocation of a world where a sense of the Absurd vies with the novelist’s desire to re-impose order through a particular political understanding of the Great War itself, be it in the form of revolutionary socialism, French nationalism, or humanism. In this way, this volume contends, ideology becomes a force for responding to and countering the sense of contingency that characterises the human experience of combat. It will be of interest to scholars of twentieth-century French fiction and thought.Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction Part I. A World at War 1. Continuity and Change 2. The Horizon of War 3. The Time of War Part II: Revolt 4. The Warrior’s Apprenticeship 5. The Dialogic Community: The Nationalist Model 6. The Dialogic Community: The Anti-War Model Part III: Convincing Fictions 7. Commitment, Ideology, and Authority 8. the Mythical Dimension of the Combat Novel Conclusion Appendices Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisAllegories of Telling: Self-Referential Narrative in Contemporary British Fiction has as its founding premise Ross Chambers’s notion that “one of the important powers of fiction is its power to theorize the act of storytelling in and through the act of storytelling.” In this critical study, Lynn Wells presents detailed readings of novels by five prominent British authors – John Fowles, Angela Carter, Graham Swift, A.S. Byatt and Salman Rushdie – with an emphasis on how the texts' self-referential aspects illuminate the acts of reading and writing fiction in contemporary Britain and, by extension, around the world. The book begins by situating contemporary British fiction historically as the product of an “aesthetics of compromise” arising from the “realism versus experimentalism” debate that consumed the English literary establishment during the 1960s. In her discussion of the texts, Lynn Wells then draws on a wide range of theoretical approaches, from narrative and psychoanalytic theory to existentialist philosophy and the historiographic ideas of thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault and Giambattista Vico. These original readings challenge superficial “postmodern” interpretations of contemporary British fiction as pessimistically anti-historical, and reassert the value of readerly engagement and narrative reconstruction of the past.Table of ContentsIntroduction Chapter One: Narrative as Seduction: John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman Chapter Two: A Postmodern Allegory of Reading: Angela Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman Chapter Three: The Whole Story: Graham Swift’s Waterland Chapter Four: Corso, Ricorso: Historical Repetition and Cultural Reflection in A.S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance Chapter Five: Unfinished Business: Intertextuality and Historiography in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and Midnight’s Children Conclusion Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisChristoph Hein is one of the best-known authors of the former GDR, and his works of fiction have been widely interpreted as responses to and critiques of socialist society. In this study, David Clarke undertakes a detailed analysis of all of Christoph Hein’s major works of fiction from Der fremde Freund (1928) to Willenbrock (2000) in order to explore Hein’s critique of the GDR regime, whilst also demonstrating how aspects of that critique provided a starting point for Hein’s rejection of capitalism both before and after German unification. For Hein, socialism had failed to make good its promise to create a community bound together by common values and goals, preferring instead to impose conformity upon its citizens. Capitalism, he believed, was equally unable to meet the need for community, and Hein sought to demonstrate the consequences of this state of affairs in the figure of Wörle in his first post-unification novel, Das Napoleon-Spiel (1993). After this point, Clarke argues, Hein was nevertheless forced to re-examine his criticism of capitalism, a process which ultimately led to the more differentiated and convincing portrayal to be found in Willenbrock.Trade Review"…a significant contribution to Hein scholarship…" - in: The German Quarterly, Vol. 77, No. 3 (Summer 2004) "Clarke’s thorough scholarship, clear writing style, and careful editing make this a book worthy of a spot on our crowded bookshelves." - in: Monatshefte, Vol. 97, No. 2 (2005) "…this is a useful work for anyone interested in Christoph Hein and his writing." - in: MLR, 99.2 (2004), pp. 548-9 "…a valuable addition to collections supporting undergraduate and graduate programs in German Studies or literature." - in: German Studies Review, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Feb. 2005), pp. 233-4Table of ContentsAbbreviations. Introduction. Chapter 1. ‘Mit Kunst der Welt beikommen’. Hein on the Role of the Writer and the Uses of Literature. Chapter 2. ‘Über die Möglichkeiten und Unmöglichkeiten, sich miteinander zu verständigen. Chapter 3. Rethinking the Past. Horns Ende. Chapter 4. Getting Back on Track. The Triumph of Conformity in Der Tangospieler. Chapter 5. Facing West. Christoph Hein and the ‘Wende’. Chapter 6. ‘Spiele aus Notwehr’. Hein’s Critique of the West in Das Napoleon-Spiel. Chapter 7. ‘Schicksal’, ‘Gelassenheit’ und Laughter. Von allem Anfang an. Chapter 8. Materialism and Violence in Willenbrock. Conclusion. Bibliography.

Read more less

Book SynopsisAddressed to all readers of Our Nig, from professional scholars of African American writing through to a more general readership, this book explores both Our Nig’s key cultural contexts and its historical and literary significance as a narrative. Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig (1859) is a startling tale of the mistreatment of a young African American mulatto woman, Frado, living in New England at a time when slavery, though abolished in the North, still existed in the South. Frado, a Northern ‘free black’, yet treated as badly as many Southern slaves of the time, is unforgettably portrayed as experiencing and resisting vicious mistreatment. To achieve this disturbing portrait, Harriet Wilson’s book combines several different literary genres – realist novel, autobiography, abolitionist slave narrative and sentimental fiction. R.J. Ellis explores the relationship of Our Nig to these genres and, additionally, to laboring class writing (Harriet Wilson was an indentured farm servant). He identifies the way Our Nig stands as a double first: the first separately-published novel written in English by an African American female it is also one of the first by a member of the laboring class about the laboring class. This study explores how, as a result, Our Nig tells a series of disturbing two-stories about America’s constitutional guarantee of ‘freedom’ and the way these relate to Frado’s farm life.Trade Review”Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig looks great; it takes a fresh approach to Wilson’s fundamental contribution to the African American canon. I shall recommend it without reservation” – Henry Louis Gates, JrTable of ContentsPreface and Acknowledgements Illustrations and Photographs Abbreviations Introduction Chapter One: Our Nig and Wilson’s Life Chapter Two: Antislavery, Abolitionism and the Slave Narrative Chapter Three: Sentimental Fiction, Sentimentality and Religion Chapter Four: Poverty, Gender and Race Issues Chapter Five: Work, Class and the Free Market Chapter Six: Textualities Conclusion Appendix A Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisKafka, Gothic and Fairytale is an original comparative study of the novels and some of the related shorter punishment fantasies in terms of their relationship to the Gothic and fairytale conventions. It is an absorbing subject and one which, while keeping to the basic facts of his life, mind-set and literary method, shows Kafka’s work in a genuinely new light. The contradiction between his persona with its love of fairytale and his shadow with its affinity with Gothic is reflected in his work, which is both Gothic and other than Gothic, both fairytale-like and the every denial of fairytale. Important subtexts of the book are the close connexion between Gothic and fairytale and between both of these and the dream. German text is quoted in translation unless the emphasis is on the meaning of individual words or phrases, in which case the words in question are quoted and their English meanings discussed. This means that readers without German can, for the first time, begin to understand the underlying ambiguity of Kafka’s major fictions. The book is addressed to all who are interested in the meaning of his work and its place in literary history, but also to the many readers in the English and German-speaking worlds who share the author’s enthusiasm for Gothic and fairytale.Table of ContentsPreface Abbreviations and Signs 1. Introduction 2. Landmarks 3. The Gothic Circle 4. Novel and Dream 5. Fairytale 6. Der verschollene 7. Der Proceß 8. Das Schloß 9. Fairytale and Gothic Tale 10. Postscript Bibliography

Read more less

Book SynopsisDrawing on personal interviews, manuscript collections, and the author's unpublished writings, Judie Newman offers a comprehensive study of the work of Alison Lurie from her early involvement in the Poets' Theatre to the AIDS comedy of her most recent novel, The Last Resort (1988). In her profound social and intellectual engagement with American Utopianism, from its historical origins through such contemporary manifestations as Walter Benjamin's Hollywood, the American University, feminist theorisations, the religious cult and the gay heterotopia, and in her intertextual reworkings of folk and fairy tale, biography, diary novel, the ‘International Theme’ and the classic ghost story, Lurie maintains an uncanny ability to serve critical aesthetic purposes within a popular fictional form. Semiotic comedies - comedies of the sign - rather than novels of manners, Lurie's fictions place her squarely within a radical American tradition.Table of ContentsPreface. Acknowledgements. Chapter One. Biographical Introduction. Chapter Two. Hell Week with Emerson and Thoreau: Love and Friendship. Chapter Three. Walter Benjamin Goes to Hollywood: The Nowhere City. Chapter Four. The Revenge of the Trance Maiden: Imaginary Friends. Chapter Five. The Ghost-Writer: Real People and Women and Ghosts. Chapter Six. Vietnam Domestic: The War Between The Tates. Chapter Seven. The Uses of Enchantment: Only Children. Chapter Eight. Paleface into Redskin: Foreign Affairs. Chapter Nine. Truth, Secrets and Lies: The Truth About Lorin Jones. Chapter Ten. The Gay Imaginary: The Last Resort. Bibliography. Index.

Read more less

Book SynopsisOn the centenary of Fontane’s death and at the turn of the century these essays take a new look at this supreme chronicler of Prussia and of the Germany that emerges after 1871. Written by scholars from different countries and disciplines, they focus on novels and theatre reviews from the perspectives of philosophy, sociology, comparative literature and translation theory, and in the contexts of topography and painting. Connections and crosscurrents emerge to reveal new aspects of Fontane’s poetics and to produce contrasting but complementary readings of his novels. He appears in the company of predecessors and contemporaries, such as Scott, Thackeray, Saar, Ibsen, Turgenev, but also in that of writers he has rarely, if ever, been seen beside, such as E.T.A. Hoffmann, Stendhal, Trollope, Henry James and Edith Wharton, Beckett and Faulkner. The historical novel and the social position of women are each a recurring focus of interest. Fontane emerges as receptive to other voices, as a precursor of developments in modern narrative, and confirmed as the novelist who brings the nineteenth-century German novel closest to the broad traditions of European realism.Trade Review”…interesting, stimulating, and useful.” in: The Modern Language Review 98.4, 2003, pp. 1053-4Table of ContentsPreface Rüdiger GÖRNER: Fontane and the European Context: Introduction Renate BÖSCHENSTEIN: Fontane’s Writing and the Problem of “Reality” in Philosophy and Literature Norbert BACHLEITNER: Of Grieving Girls and Suicidal Soldiers: Theodor Fontane and Ferdinand von Saar Peter James BOWMAN: Schach von Wuthenow : Interpreters and Interpretants Yves CHEVREL: Theodor Fontane and France: A Problematic Encounter Hans ESTER: Problems of Translation, Arising from the Context of Fontane’s Works Barbara EVERETT: Night Air: Effi Briest and other Novels by Fontane Inga-Stina EWBANK: Hedda Gabler, Effi Briest and “The Ibsen Effect” Hans VILMAR GEPPERT: Prussian Decadence: Schach von Wuthenow in an International Context Barbara HARDY: Tellers and Listeners in Effi Briest Patricia HOWE: “A visibly-appointed stopping-place”: Narrative Endings at the End of the Century Helmut KUZMICS: Aristocracy and Bourgeoisie in Late Nineteenth-century Prussia and England: Comparing Processes of Individualisation in Fontane and Trollope Jacques LEGRAND: Fontane and Stendhal: Mediators of a European Idea of Intellectual Nobility W.J. Mc CORMACK: Haunted Realism: Beckett through Fontane Domenico MUGNOLO: Theodor Fontane and the Nineteenth-century Italian Novel: A Contrastive Comparison Teresa MARTINS DE OLIVEIRA: Fontane’s Effi Briest and Eça de Queirós’s O Primo Bazilio: Two Novels of Adultery in the Context of European Realism Alexander STILLMARK: Fontane and Turgenev: Two Kinds of Realism Godela WEISS-SUSSEX: Fontane’s and Georg Hermann’s Berlin: Relationships with Contemporary Berlin Painting Maite ZUBIAURRE: Panoramic Views in Fontane, Galdós and Clarín: An Essay on Female Blindness List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn this study of D.H.Lawrence and critical theory, Robert Burden pays particular attention to the critical formations that underpin the reception history of the main novels, including the much maligned “leadership” novels, because strong readings have always contested the meaning and significance of Lawrence, and because there has been a persistent reluctance to approach his writing through post-structuralist theory. This study demonstrates in some detail that once Lawrence’s texts are the objects of the newer critical paradigms, their principles of coherence are understood differently; and that older notions of textual unity are displaced by aesthetic structures of degrees of generic and linguistic destabilization. This enables a radicalizing of Lawrence’s fiction by drawing out its deconstructive effects on his myth-making and essentialist notions of the self. The sexual identities represented in the fiction are read as experiments, or “thought adventures”, as Lawrence himself characterized his work. The different approaches to Lawrence’s writing in this study lead to a radical reassessment of his relationship to Modernism, especially in the light of the more elastic concept of Modernism in recent discussion, and one which traditional Lawrence scholars have ignored. What emerges is a more self-deconstructive Lawrence, with some surprising results.Trade Review"…diligent and extensively researched…" - in: English, Vol. 53, No. 207 (Autumn 2004) "…Robert Burden’s impressive and scholarly book… [..] …a convenient, reliable and stimulating repository of information and ideas." - in: Years Work in English Studies, Vol. 81, No. 14 (2002)Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Critical Formations of Lawrence Studies. 1. Sons and Lovers and the Possibility of a Psychoanalytic Criticism. 2. The Rainbow the Discursive Formations of History: Towards a Foucauldian Reading. 3. The Carnivalizing Novel: Bakhtinian Readings of Women in Love, The Lost Girl, and Mr Noon. 4. Deconstructing Masculinity 1: The Crisis of Post-War Masculinity and the Modernism of Aaron's Rod. 5. Deconstructing Masculinity 2: Male Bonding, Mythic Resolution and Textual Instabilities in Kangaroo and The Plumed Serpent. 6. Lady Chatterley's Lover: Sexual Politics and Class Politics. Conclusions: Modernism, Modernity, and Critical Theory. Bibliography. Index.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis collection of papers from an international conference held at the Institut français, London, in 1999 focuses on Marguerite Duras’s place within the major literary, political and cultural events that helped define the 20th century. Covering the broad areas of Duras’s public persona and paraliterary writings, her engagement with the image and with theatre, the implications of her politico-cultural trajectory, and her representations of the body, sexuality and transgression, the diversity of critical approaches deployed in this volume reflects the scope and rich texture of the author’s oeuvre and the enduring fascination of the Duras phenomenon.

Read more less

Book SynopsisWomen’s Movement critically explores the transgressive potential of feminist escape narratives and argues that they are, almost by definition, radically different from paradigmatic male escape narratives. While definitions of escape are necessarily broad, they have too often excluded the ambiguous escape – the escape most closely associated with the female. Indeed, feminist escape narratives often resist a happy ending, and Women’s Movement argues that these narrative closures reflect the changing face of feminism, as it sheds its old certainties, is faced with a monumental “backlash” and is refigured as the potentially less threatening “postfeminism”. Resisting the automatic association of “escape” with “escapist,” Women’s Movement analyzes male adventure and quest narratives, including Moby-Dick, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Blood Meridian, and Deliverance, before turning to a range of feminist texts. While being the first book to give critical attention to some postfeminist novels, Women’s Movement more often acts as a channel for offering different ways of approaching familiar feminist texts, including, among others, Marian Engel’s Bear, Atwood’s Surfacing and The Handmaid’s Tale, Joan Barfoot’s Gaining Ground and Dancing in the Dark, Anne Tyler’s Earthly Possessions and Ladder of Years, Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying and Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners.Trade Review"Women’s Movement is a talented work, a real contribution that proves its point incontestably…" - in: Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 8.2.2002 "Women’s Movement is a valuable contribution to the on-going debates surrounding contemporary North American feminist fiction." - in: Atlantis 26.1 (2001) "stimulating text […]" - in: American Studies, Vol. 36 (2002), pp. 538-539 "… a remarkably insightful analysis of escape in literature. […] … an invaluable addition to the study of Canadian and American culture." - in: British Journal of Canadian Studies, 14.2Table of ContentsIntroduction: Transiency and Transgression: Feminist Literary Escape. Part One: (En)Gendering Escape. Chapter One: Escapist Literature and the Literature of Escape. Chapter Two: The Literature of Adventure. Chapter Three: The Literature of Quest Part Two: Charting the Disappeared. Chapter Four: Breaking the Ties that Bind: Escaping the 1970s. Chapter Five: From Hoboes to Handmaids: Divergent Impulses in the 1980s. Chapter Six: Patriarchy and Postfeminism: Refiguring the Ties that Bind.

Read more less

Book SynopsisDarling of the Jazz Age, the globe-trotting diplomat and acclaimed writer Paul Morand and his literary and political careers underwent a radical shift following his collaboration with the Vichy government during the Occupation of France. Abandoning the terse, glittering portraits of the contemporary era that had garnered him early fame, he turned to the past and to historical fiction, biography and autobiography.Paul Morand: The Politics and Practice of Writing in Post-War France, the first full-length study of Morand in English and the first ever of his post-war works, traces Morand’s politically charged explorations of history as he obsessively rewrites the Occupation in historical guise. From Napoleonic Spain to the court of Louis XIV, nineteenth-century California, Revolutionary France and Venice across the ages, Morand probes the limits of historiography and genre as he constructs a curiously Benjaminian model of redemption for his collaborationist heroes. This book analyses Morand’s post-war project, placing it within the highly-politicized context of writing during the de Gaullian era. Many issues are at stake in Morand’s late oeuvre, from the genres of historical fiction, biography and autobiography, to the very act of historicization itself in the context of the post-war era. Morand’s handling of these issues suggests that literature furnishes perhaps the best space within which the complex and highly political question of our ties to the past may be most tellingly examined.Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction: L’Affaire Morand I. Lacerating Time: History, Penance, and Redemption in Le Flagellant de Séville II. Reading the Past: Parfaite de Saligny and La Folle amoureuse III. Filming the Event: Fouquet ou le soleil offusqué IV. Postcards from Venice V. Morand retro. Bibliography of Works by Paul Morand Annotated Bibliography of Works Devoted To Paul Morand Works Consulted Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn this study, Geoffrey Westgate offers a new understanding of Irmtraud Morgner by reading her as a specifically East German writer. Through close analysis of her works – the early journalism and socialist realism, the ‘socialist modernism’ of the banned Rumba auf einen Herbst, the largely neglected, but key, texts of the late 1960s, the major novels, Beatriz and Amanda, and the final, uncompleted work, Das heroische Testament – the book examines the literary strategies Morgner adopted with respect to pivotal cultural-political developments in the GDR. The first to consider the trajectory of Morgner’s career as a whole, the study uncovers texts which have not appeared in bibliographies of her writings and draws on new biographical material, including the writer’s Nachlaß. In addition, the author uses archival material from the GDR Ministerium für Kultur and Ministerium für Staatssicherheit to illustrate how Morgner’s texts were censored and how the writer was monitored by the secret police. The book therefore provides a case study of official GDR Autorenpolitik and also shows that Morgner’s oeuvre cannot be fully understood unless it is viewed in the context of this state control and surveillance. Morgner’s writings bear complex but eloquent testimony to the possibilities for literature in a dictatorship.Trade Review"…well-written and solidly researched…" - in: Monatshefte, Vol. 97, No. 2 (2005) "…Es ist Westgate gelungen eine Lücke innerhalb der Forschung zu schliessen." - in: Weimarer Beiträge, Vol. 51, Heft 4 (2005) "…this significantly increases our understanding of Morgner’s literature and GDR culture…." - in: German Studies Review, 26/3 (2003), pp.706-7 "…a ‘must’ for those working on East German literature and society, as well as those interested in Irmtraud Morgner." - in: The German Quarterly (Winter 2003), pp.96-7 "This is a very well-written, immaculately produced, and thoroughly researched contribution to Morgner scholarship which should lead to new discussions …." - in: The Modern Language Review, 98.4 (2003)Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction 1. Engagement: From Socialist Realism to Socialist Modernism 2. The Apparatus of Control 3. Experiments Under Control 1965-1974 4. Censorship and Surveillance 5. Reckoning: Amanda The Surveyed Subject Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisBritish fictions of the early twentieth century appear obsessed with Europe. Various texts from E.M. Forster and D.H. Lawrence to Bram Stoker and the period's travel writing explore European spaces, constructing the European as an Other threatening the position of the English. What they constantly repeat is England's difference and the secondary role of European spaces, whose representation resembles that of colonial lands. By reading selected texts, both canonized and popular, published between 1894 and 1916, this study argues that this xenophobic construction is a sign of the pervading presence of concerns related to the maintenance of English national identity, Englishness, allegedly threatened by the European Other. By drawing on current postcolonial theory, the case studies in the volume show that the discourse on the Other produced in British writings on Europe contributes more than has been understood to the making and promoting of Englishness. The authors studied include D.H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Anthony Hope, Arnold Bennett, Mrs Alec Tweedie, Erskine Childers, and Joseph Conrad. The study will renew our understanding of the role of Europe in the period's cultural imagination, showing that the identities of the English are formed in encounters with different internal and external Others.Table of ContentsAcknowledgements. 1 Introduction: Writing England and/or Europe. 2 The Prisoner of Zenda and the Borders of Empire. 3 Othering “Eastern” Europe: Mrs Alec Tweedie's Finnish Tour of 1896. 4 Spying for England: Erskine Childer's Nation. 5 D.H. Lawrence's English Exports. 6 Home and Nation in Arnold Bennett's The Old Wives' Tale. 7 Katherine Mansfield's German (M)Others. 8 Remapping Europe: ”Universal” Unhomeliness in Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes. 9 Epilogue. Bibliography. Index.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis study offers new perspectives on Wolfgang Koeppen, a writer too often consigned to the margins of post-1945 literary history. Examining the interaction of the personal and the social in Koeppen's writings, this book demonstrates that the politics of his works are inherent to their form. Through a series of close readings, the book explores the positive and negative aspects of liminality, a dominant trope in Koeppen’s works. Stressing the thematic and formal continuities of his oeuvre, the first section illustrates how his protagonists perpetually establish a space for themselves 'in between' states. The second section examines how Koeppen negotiates with the discourse of 'nation' during two central periods of his career. It shows how his experiences in the Third Reich and his reappraisal of the years prior to 1933 determine his perspective on modernity, modernism and Germany after 1945. Having defined the location of culture in his works, the book concludes by resituating Koeppen's writings within post-war West German literary culture.Trade Review"Negotiating Positions offers an insightful, fresh look at a much-debated issue…" - in: German Studies Review, Vol. 28, Nr. 2 (May 2005) "…a helpful contribution to Koeppen exegesis. …well produced…" - in: The Modern Language Review, 98.4 (2003), pp. 1059-1060 "…a very valuable book…" - in: Colloquia Germanica, pp. 193-4Table of ContentsPREFACE; CHAPTER ONE: STATES OF LIMINALITY SECTION ONE: LOCATING THE LIMINAL SUBJECT: CHAPTER TWO: PLAYING ROLES; CHAPTER THREE: WRITING A HOME BETWEEN HOMES; SECTION TWO: COMPROMISE AND CRITIQUE: CHAPTER FOUR: THE LIMITS OF NEGOTIATION; CHAPTER FIVE: THE UNHOMELY RUINS: THE POLITICS OF NATION; CHAPTER SIX: LIMINALITY IN THE FICTION OF THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC; SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY CLASSIFICATION BY SUBJECT LIST: LITERATURE AND CULTURE, GERMAN, 20TH CENTURY

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn this compact but highly concentrated study, the author unites clinical and literary critical skills in an attempt to go beyond familiar psychological commentary on Henry James and conduct a detailed and rigorous psychoanalytic investigation into recurring and psychologically significant patterns in his major and minor fiction. Drawing freely on material from notebooks, letters, and other biographical sources, the volume centres on James's unconscious fantasies concerning the human body, mostly the damaged or incomplete human body. These core fantasies are firmly placed at the root of James's creativeness. While one of these fantasies of physical mutilation finds expression in the famous “obscure hurt” of James's late teens, the author develops a hypothesis concerning their much earlier history and their place in the larger psychological constellation of the James family. Accordingly, Henry James Senior, his wife Mary, together with William and Alice James, all figure largely in the intricate and perilous family context of Henry's creative activity. This book also includes original factual research, casting sidelights on matters such as the relation between James's early work and that of Dr Silas Weir Mitchell, and on the early history of psychoanalysis in the United States, including William James's meeting with Freud and his view of early psychoanalytic thinking, and Henry's contact as a patient with early psychoanalytic practitioners at the beginning of the twentieth century.Trade Review”Bailie’s study is of great value.” in: Miscelánea: a Journal of English and American Studies 24 (2001): pp.129-131Table of Contents1 Introduction 2 Preliminary Investigation “Theodolinde” 3 Case History “A Most Extraordinary Case” “The Jolly Corner” 4 Autopsy The Turn of the Screw 5 The Jameses and Psychoanalysis Appendix “The Case of George Dedlow” Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis book presents a new and exciting theory of the modern French novel by developing the notion of the narrative as a “textual machine”. Many turn-of-the-century French novels thematically identified their means of narration through the various machines that they depicted. The narrative devices that were particularly important in this self-reflection included: the temporal order of the plot, the question of a narrative’s beginning and end, the hierarchy of narrative voices, and the techniques of the point of view. The question of mechanization became central on all these fronts. Has the novel become automated or machine-like? At the same time, the machine metaphors in the novels of Alfred Jarry, Emile Zola, Jules Verne, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Raymond Roussel combined the question of the narrative form with new ways to think about man’s relationship with technology and the cultural environment. The early modernist texts drew upon contradictory notions of technological promise and threat while they also depicted new forms of identity and behavior, related to or modeled after machines. These texts highlighted cultural assumptions concerning technological innovations and critiqued, mainly through parody and through various figures of man-machine fusion, the positivistic belief in progress. Such writers looked for evidence of advanced forms of consciousness arising out of encounters with new technology such as: telephones, trains, bicycles, telegraphy, phonographs and electricity. This volume will be of interest to anyone working in the field of modern French literary and cultural history. It will especially appeal to anyone intrigued with the origins of the modernist novel, the history of narrative forms, and the question of how the experience of new technology may be portrayed in literary texts.Table of ContentsAcknowledgements I Introduction: Monstrous Machines and Plotted Designs II The Copy of Consciousness and the Micro-Politics of the Narrative Form: Baudelaire, Huysmans, Dujardin III The Electric Narrative in Jules Verne’s Le Château des Carpathes and Paris au XXe siècle IV The Plot Engine in Emile Zola’s La Bête humaine V Narrative Lines of Desire in Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s Future Eve VI The Work of Life in an Age of Mechanical Competition: Alfred Jarry’s Le surmâle VII Twice-Told Tales and Semiotic Translation in Raymond Roussel’s Novels References Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisEdmond de Goncourt’s four solo novels are not simply extensions of the Goncourt brothers’ joint project, but attempts to deviate from the Naturalism with which their name had come to be associated. By analysing paratexts, the relationship between documentation and fiction, as well as plot devices and themes, this study links the evolution of Goncourt’s fiction to wider literary debates surrounding Naturalism, Decadence and the renewal of the novel in fin de siècle France. In bringing Goncourt’s writings to an English-speaking public, it will be of interest to students and scholars of the literary history of late-nineteenth-century France.Table of ContentsAcknowledgements References I. Introduction Towards a New Novel II. Paratexts Titles: Novel Transformations Prefaces and Literary History III. Facts and Fictions Documentary Processes Les Frères Zemganno: Author as Acrobat La Faustin: Origins and Heredity Chérie: Female Documents IV. Language and Forms Plot Development Textual Voices Language and the Literary Field Natural and Artificial Expression V. Conclusion Conclusion Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisMervyn Peake has been acclaimed as an author of fantasy and as an illustrator, but as yet has received little attention from literary critics. This book is the first to analyse all of Peake’s works of fiction, including his two picture story books and novella as well as the Gormenghast series and Mr Pye. Alice Mills pinpoints the fictional quirks that render Mervyn Peake such a memorable fantasy writer, examining his literary works from Jungian, Freudian, Kristevan and post-Jungian perspectives. Stuckness in the Fiction of Mervyn Peake will be of interest to fantasy lovers and students of fantasy as a genre, as well as those exploring the psychoanalysis of literary texts.Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Prefatory Note Introduction 1 Psychoanalytic Perspectives 2 Aspects of Stuckness in “Mr Slaughterboard” and Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor 3 Stuckness, Adherence and Slippage in the Gormenghast Novels 4 Nonsense, Stuckness and the Abject in Titus Groan 5 Surviving Stuckness in Titus Groan and Gormenghast 6 Compulsive Repetition as a Form of Stuckness in Letters from a Lost Uncle 7 Stuckness, Inflation and Literalized Metaphor in Mr Pye 8 Topographies of Love and Stuckness in Titus Alone 9 The Coherence of Titus Alone 10 Stuck Boy in Darkness 11 Titus Alone and the Production of Moral Sludge Conclusion Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis book explores fictional responses to the changing transport and urban infrastructure of nineteenth-century France, arguing that networks of movement (and an accompanying ‘culture of networks’) which had become firmly established by the time of the Second Empire constitute a privileged subject for representation, and that naturalist fiction in particular is that representation’s privileged form. Contextualizing the study’s critical focus by way of a brief historical outline of the development of infrastructural networks in nineteenth-century France and a delineation of the problematical parameters of French naturalism, Duffy examines literary representations of new forms and conceptualisations of movement, principally in works by Flaubert, Zola, and Maupassant. Other authors discussed include the Goncourt brothers, Huysmans, Baudelaire and Claretie. Literary texts are examined alongside a range of related scientific, sociological and medical texts. What emerges strikingly from consideration of these works and the discourses they – often subversively – incorporate, is that movement, central to nineteenth-century industrial society’s view of itself, is frequently perceived and presented self-deludingly in the idealised metaphorical terms of smoothly-functioning systems of perpetual motion, and that naturalist fiction, by exploiting to their full potential the same metaphors in its narratives, challenges this ‘anti-entropic’ vision.Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Author’s Note Introduction: ‘Le Grand Transit Moderne’ Chapter 1 A Complex Kind of Training : L’Éducation sentimentale, Modernity, and the Changing Phenomenology of Motion Chapter 2 An Evolutionary Naturalist Intertext: The Traffic Jam as Exemplary Taxonomic Motif Chapter 3 Haussmannization, Circulation and the Ideal City of Au Bonheur des Dames Chapter 4 Convulsions, Détraquement and the Circulus: Zola’s Dehystericisation of Prostitution Chapter 5 Beyond the Pressure Principle: Bestialisation, Anthropomorphism and the ‘Thermodynamic’ Death Instinct in Naturalist Fiction Chapter 6 Maupassant, Doxa and the Banalisation of Modern Travel Conclusion: ‘Ce Parasite Supplémentaire’ Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis volume is the first in-depth study of the French novelist Marguerite Yourcenar’s fiction to contend that the author’s texts exhibit in unexpected ways numerous characteristics of the neobaroque. This subversive, postmodern aesthetic privileges extravagant artistic play, flux, and heterogeneity. In demonstrating the affinity of Yourcenar’s texts with the neobaroque, the author of this study casts doubt on their presumed transparency and stability, qualities associated with the French neoclassical tradition of the past century, where the Yourcenarian œuvre is most often placed. Yourcenar’s election to the prestigious, tradition-bound French Academy in 1981 as its first female “immortal” cemented her already well-established niche in the twentieth-century French literary pantheon. A self-taught classicist, historian, and modern-day French moralist, Yourcenar has been praised for her polished, “classical” style and analyzed for her use of myth and universal themes. While those factors at first seem to justify amply the neoclassical label by which Yourcenar is most widely recognized, this study’s close reading of four of her fictions reveals instead the texts’ opacity and subversive resistance to closure, their rejection of stable interpretations, and their deconstruction of postmodern Grand Narratives. Theirs is a neobaroque “logic,” which stresses the absence of theoretical assurances and the limitations of reason. The coincidence of the new millennium — which in so many ways reflects Yourcenar’s disquieting vision — and her centenary in 2003 affords not so much an excuse to reject the author’s neoclassical label, but rather the obligation to reassess it in light of contemporary discourses. This study will be of interest to students of twentieth-century French fiction and comparative literature, especially that of the latter half of the twentieth century.Table of ContentsI. A Frontispiece II. Introduction Marguerite Yourcenar and the Writing of Fiction: An Aesthetic Imperative III. Chapter 1 Anna,Soror...: Neobaroque Sacralizes the Abject IV. Chapter 2 Denier du rêve : Baroque Discourses,Fascist Practices V. Chapter 3 Neobaroque Humanism: “Sounding the Abyss ” in L ’Œuvre au Noir VI. Chapter 4 Neobaroque Confessions: Un homme obscur and the Oppressive Superficiality of Words VII. Conclusion An Author for the New Millennium VIII. Selected Works Cited and Consulted IX. Index of Proper Names

Read more less

Book SynopsisTwenty-five years after his death, critics and academics, film-makers and journalists continue to argue over Sartre's legacy. But certain interpretations have congealed around his iconic text Nausea, tending to confine it within the framework provided by the later philosophical work, Being and Nothingness. This volume opens up the text to a range of new approaches within the fields of English and Comparative Literature, as well as Philosophy and French Studies, under the headings: ‘Text’, ‘Context’, and ‘Intertext’: the textual strategies at work within the novel; the literary, cultural and philosophical context of its production; and the intertextual web within which it is situated. This volume will interest a wide public of teachers, students and all those who want to reconsider Sartre’s legacy in the twenty–first century.Table of ContentsEditors’ Foreword Alistair ROLLS, Elizabeth RECHNIEWSKI: Uprooting the Chestnut Tree: Nausea Today Text Lawrence R. SCHEHR: Sartre’s Autodidacticism George WOODS: Sounds, ‘Sounds, Smells, Degrees of Light’: Art and Illumination in Nausea Thomas MARTIN: The Role of Others in Roquentin’s Nausea Peter POIANA: The Subject as Symptom in Nausea Context Elizabeth RECHNIEWSKI: Avatars of Contingency: Suarès and Sartre Chris FALZON: Sartre and Meaningful Existence Amanda CRAWLEY-JACKSON : La Nausée des Fins de Voyage ? Intertext Keryn STEWART: ‘I Have Finished Travelling’: Travel, Displacement and Intertextuality in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea Debra HELY: Fact or Fiction? Reading Through the Nothingness behind Nausea Alistair ROLLS: Seduction, Pleasure and a Laying on of Hands: A Hands-on Reading of Sartre’s Nausea Notes on Contributors Bibliography

Read more less

Book SynopsisFiction after the Fatwa: Salman Rushdie and the Charm of Catastrophe proposes for the first time an examination of what Rushdie has achieved as a writer since the fourteenth of February 1989, the date of the fatwa. This study argues that his constant questioning of fictional form and the language used to articulate it have opened up new opportunities and further possibilities for writing in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Through close readings and intensive textual analysis, arranged chronologically, Fiction after the Fatwa provides a thought-provoking reflection on the writer’s achievements over the last thirteen years. Aimed principally at academics and students, but also of interest to the general reader, it engages with the specific nature of the post-fatwa fiction as it moves from the fairy-tale world of Haroun and the Sea of Stories to the heartbreaking post-realism of Fury.Trade Review”…challenging, provocative and uncompromisingly argued […] hugely enjoyable…” – Claire Pégon-DavisonTable of Contents1. Fiction after the Fatwa 2. Haroun and the Sea of Stories: “The Uses of Enchantment” 3. East, West: The Dislocation of Culture 4. The Moor’s Last Sigh: Escaping Identity, Marginal Alternatives, The Inferno of Language 5. The Ground Beneath Her Feet: Postmodern Baroque, Reflections on Truth 6. Fury: Devoured by Pop 7. Afterword: The Charm of Catastrophe 8. Appendix: Plot Summaries 9. Select Bibliography 10. Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisVictorian Literary Mesmerism examines the engagement between literature and mesmerism in Victorian writing. Drawing on recent trends in interdisciplinary literary scholarship the essays collected here investigate the complex connections between scientific mesmerism, its manifestations in the Victorian social and cultural world, and the literary imagination. Here, for the first time, the varied themes and contexts shaped by mesmeric practices are brought together in one volume. Mesmerism’s influence on phrenology, medicine and mental health; its interaction with the occult and with communication technologies; the effects of mesmeric principles on gender and sexuality, as well as on criminal behaviour, are all set within the context of literary texts that interrogate and critique mesmerism’s influence on the Victorians. This volume will be of interest, therefore, to scholars of Victorian literature and the history of science, as well as to those interested in cultural history with a focus on gender, sexuality, and sciences of the mind.Table of ContentsMartin WILLIS and Catherine WYNNE: Introduction Ilana KURSHAN: Mind Reading: Literature in the Discourse of Early Victorian Phrenology and Mesmerism Gavin BUDGE: Mesmerism and Medicine in Bulwer-Lytton’s Novels of the Occult Anthony ENNS: Mesmerism and the Electric Age: From Poe to Edison Louise HENSON: Mesmeric Delusions: Mind and Mental Training in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Writings Tiffany DONNELLY: Mesmerism, Clairvoyance and Literary Culture in Mid-Century Australia Angelic RODGERS: Jim Crows, Veiled Ladies and True Womanhood: Mesmerism in The House of the Seven Gables Martin WILLIS: George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil and the Cultural Politics of Clairvoyance Sharrona PEARL: Dazed and Abused: Gender and Mesmerism in Wilkie Collins Alisha SIEBERS: Marie Corelli’s Magnetic Revitalizing Power Mary Elizabeth LEIGHTON: Under the Influence: Crime and Hypnotic Fictions of the Fin de Siècle Catherine WYNNE: Arthur Conan Doyle’s Domestic Desires: Mesmerism, Mediumship and Femmes Fatales Notes on Contributors Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe essays in this collection were originally given at the international colloquium Cent Ans de Bataille: La Bataille de Cent Ans held at the Fondació Tàpies in Barcelona in September 1998. They are written from a variety of perspectives but are drawn together by the singular aim of addressing and interrogating Georges Bataille as our contemporary whose fascination with the rupture between mythical and experimental forms of discourse defines our own age as much as it did in Bataille’s own time. More precisely, the essays in this collection range over Bataille’s status as a novelist, a poet, an art critic, a philosopher and a prophet of post-modernity with this aim in mind. They not only seek to advance and clarify debate about Bataille’s present status in the post-modern canon but also shed new light on the complex relation between Bataille and the present generation of readers who have come to him through the prism of post-modernist thought. It is of significance for each writer in this collection, most crucially, that the premonition of catastrophe which defined Bataille’s fluid political positions is also located between tragedy and irony.Table of ContentsAndrew HUSSEY: The Beast at Heaven’s Gate: Georges Bataille and the Art of Transgression Boris BELAY: Le Secret du corps de Madame Edwarda (Bataille de la philosophie à la limite de l’obscène) Martin CROWLEY: L’eschatologie trouée de Ma Mère Lina FRANCO: Deux écrivains face à l’histoire: George Bataille et Elio Vittorini. La hantise du politique Patrick FFRENCH: Dirty Life Paul HEGARTY: As Above, So Below; Informe/Sublime/Abject Andrew HUSSEY: ‘The Slaughterhouse of Love’: The Corpse of ‘Laure’ Ian JAMES: From Recuperation to Simulacrum: Klossowski’s Readings of George Bataille Cathy MACGREGOR: The Eye of the Storm: Female Representation in Bataille’s Madame Edwarda and Histoire de l’oeil John PHILLIPS: ‘The Law of the Mother’: Masochism, Fetishism and Subjectivity in George Bataille’s Histoire de l’oeil Malcolm POLLARD: The Use-Value of Georges Bataille: Philippe Sollers and the Act of Writing Richard WILLIAMS: Informe and ‘Anti Form’ Notes on Contributors

Read more less

Book SynopsisRecent crime fiction increasingly transcends national boundaries, with investigators operating across countries and continents. Frequently, the detective is a migrant or comes from a transcultural background. To solve the crime, the investigator is called upon to decipher the meaning(s) hidden in clues and testimonies that require transcultural forms of understanding. For the reader, the investigation discloses new interpretive methods and processes of social investigation, often challenging facile interpretations of the postcolonial world order. Under the rubric 'postcolonial postmortems', this collection of essays seeks to explore the tropes, issues and themes that characterise this emergent form of crime fiction. But what does the 'postcolonial' bring to the genre apart from the well-known, and valid, discourses of resistance, subversion and ethnicity? And why 'postmortems'? A dissection and medical examination of a body to determine the cause of death, the 'postmortem' of the postcolonial not only alludes to the investigation of the victim's remains, but also to the body of the individual text and its contexts. This collection interrogates literary concepts of postcoloniality and crime from transcultural perspectives in the attempt to offer new critical impulses to the study of crime fiction and postcolonial literatures. International scholars offer insights into the 'postcolonial postmortems' of a wide range of texts by authors from Africa, South Asia, the Asian and African Diaspora, and Australia, including Robert G. Barrett, Unity Dow, Wessel Ebersohn, Romesh Gunesekera, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sujata Massey, Alexander McCall Smith and Michael Ondaatje.Trade Review"This is an exemplary series of studies, tracing new lines of affiliation across familiar national and genre boundaries, and I recommend it strongly to any serious student of postcolonial literary and cultural experience. The importance of popular genres in postcolonial contexts has long been overlooked; this challenging and diverse collection of essays extends the boundaries of postcolonial understanding, raising questions of authority, power and subversion in relation to the depiction of crime and its detection through a range of detailed analyses of texts and their contexts." – Dennis Walder, Open University, Milton Keynes, UK "…a stimulating and accessible collection…" – in: Moving Worlds 7/1 (2007)Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Christine MATZKE and Susanne MÜHLEISEN: Postcolonial Postmortems: Issues and Perspectives Stephen KNIGHT: Crimes Domestic and Crimes Colonial: The Role of Crime Fiction in Developing Postcolonial Consciousness Wendy KNEPPER: Confession, Autopsy and the Postcolonial Postmortems of Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost Tobias DÖRING: Sherlock Holmes – He Dead: Disenchanting the English Detective in Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans Suchitra MATHUR: Holmes's Indian Reincarnation: A Study in Postcolonial Transposition Katja SARKOWSKY: Manga, Zen, and Samurai: Negotiating Exoticism and Orientalist Images in Sujata Massey’s Rei Shimura Novels including an interview with Sujata Massey Vera ALEXANDER: Investigating the Motif of Crime as Transcultural Border Crossing: Cinnamon Gardens and The Sandglass Elfi BETTINGER: Riddles in the Sands of the Kalahari: Detectives at Work in Botswana Geoffrey V. DAVIS: Political Loyalties and the Intricacies of the Criminal Mind: The Detective Fiction of Wessel Ebersohn A.B. Christa SCHWARZ: Colonial Struggle on Manhattan Soil: George Schuyler's 'The Ethiopian Murder Mystery' Xavier PONS: 'Redneck Wonderland': Robert G. Barrett's Crime Fiction Patricia PLUMMER: Transcultural British Crime Fiction: Mike Phillips's Sam Dean Novels including an interview with Mike Phillips References Notes on contributors Name index Subject index

Read more less

Book SynopsisPrévost journaliste se souvenait volontiers qu’il était aussi romancier. Les récits brefs qu’il multiplie dans ses périodiques se limitent quelquefois à un copieux paragraphe et amorcent ailleurs, au long de quelque cinq ou six numéros, de petits feuilletons. Dispersés au hasard d’une copie abondante et souvent pressée, ils paraissaient, dès la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle, assez remarquables pour faire l’objet de plusieurs éditions séparées: les premiers lecteurs ont dû y reconnaître comme un condensé du génie de Prévost romancier. La critique prévostienne, pourtant, n’avait jamais vraiment fait un sort à cet ensemble disparate, dont le présent recueil propose une première prospection systématique. Les récits brefs de Prévost, du coup, se profilent, aux lisières du romanesque et du journalistique, comme un véritable laboratoire poétologique aménagé par un virtuose de la réécriture; ils consonent aussi bien avec ses préoccupations éclairées qu’avec ses angoisses les plus profondes, où bon nombre des études ici rassemblées engagent à découvrir certain envers obscur des Lumières.Table of ContentsAvant-Propos Jean SGARD: Une genre singulier Shelly CHARLES: « Réformer l’ouvrage d’autrui »: récit et réécriture dans Le Pour et Contre Kris PEETERS: Une poétique de l’extraordinaire Daniel ACKE: L’abbé Prévost conteur et la tradition des moralistes classiques Pierre BERTHIAUME: L’épouvante et l’enchantement Sjef HOUPPERMANS: Etrangetés Familières dans Le Pour et Contre Paul PELCKMANS: La tentation du fantastique Richard FRANCIS: L’« Histoire de Donna Maria »: Feuilleton ou roman manqué? Franck SALAÜN: Prévost ventriloque à propos du récrit « Effet héroïque de vertu morale » Mladen KOZUL: Le paradoxe du comédien de Prévost: sensibilité et jeu théâtral dans le « Trait curieux de morale dans la conduite d’un comédien » Paul PELCKMANS: « Histoire intéressante » ou la tragédie ignorée Jan HERMAN: Le Monde Moral de Prévost: le recueil de contes comme atelier du roman Alexandre DUQUAIRE: Pour une définition rhétorique du récit: les histoires tragiques du Monde moral Marc LABUSSIÉRE: Une poétique de l’horreur: Prévost et les mangeurs d’enfants Résumés

Read more less

Book SynopsisZone of Evaporation: Samuel Beckett’s Disjunctions is a valuable, and very readable, addition to Beckett studies. From Dream of Fair to Middling Women to How It Is, the book traces the modes of disjunction Beckett employed in his effort to “eff the ineffable”. From the comic incongruities of Watt to the ontological gaps of The Unnammable, Zone of Evaporation demonstrates the crucial and consistent role disjunction played in Beckett’s novels. The book describes Beckett’s divergence from Proustian metaphor and the revelation of the “real” towards an art which exploited the gaps and fissures within language and narrative and, ultimately, to an art which would go on to upset the post-structuralism of Jacques Derrida. For those coming fresh to the works, Zone of Evaporation, written with an eye on the comic instincts of Beckett, provides almost a disjunctive guide to Beckett’s early and mid-period novels. To the seasoned Beckett reader, Zone of Evaporation offers an engaging, and challenging, new perspective on Beckett’s aesthetic practice.Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction Chapter 1: The Proustian Vision and the Beckettian Dream Chapter 2: Comic Watt Chapter 3: Molloy (for the purposes of beginning) and Narrative Chapter 4: Being Beyond the Unnamable Chapter 5: Beckett / Derrida Chapter 6: In Conclusion: The Play of The Three Dialogues Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis comprehensive study of George Gissing’s short stories and related non-fiction is essential reading for students of nineteenth-century realism. For the first time readers will be able to follow the development which transformed Gissing’s unremarkable early stories into the very individual tales that elevated his work to the vanguard of realistic short fiction. Gissing’s American period is notable for its accumulation of themes that were repeatedly refined and adapted for his later work, causality emerging as the dominant voice. On his return to England, shifting political and philosophical beliefs expressed in his non-fiction had a vital impact on his second phase of short fiction, and the part played by realism in the author’s short stories and his writings on Charles Dickens added further dimensions to his work as a whole. By the final phase of Gissing’s remarkable development, it is evident that his interest in the concept of causality as the major force in his short work had been replaced by a more challenging preoccupation with the human psyche. This introduced philosophical, sociological and psychological dimensions to Gissing’s work that established him in the field of short fiction as a leading exponent of late nineteenth-century realismTable of ContentsChronology of the Short Stories Introduction Chapter One Exile in America Chapter Two A Promising Start Chapter Three The Formative Years Chapter Four A Time of Transition Chapter Five Changing Values Chapter Six The Place of Realism in Gissing’s Short Fiction Chapter Seven The Right Place at the Right Time Chapter Eight Gissing on Dickens Chapter Nine A Victim of Circumstances Chapter Ten Conclusion Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisWhile François Mauriac’s reputation as a novelist is well established, it is often forgotten that fiction forms only part of his output, and that in the post-war years especially, it was principally his activities as a journalist which kept him in the public eye. His interventions in the key debates of the period helped to consolidate his position as a major intellectual alongside Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. This book examines the evolution of François Mauriac’s career during the twentieth century, and his gradual transformation from novelist to intellectual. Situating Mauriac and his activities firmly in their socio-cultural context, it draws in particular on the insights provided by Bourdieusian sociology to explore the mechanisms and social processes which allow Mauriac to emerge as an authoritative voice of moral conscience. In doing so, it offers new perspective on key moments in his career, from his changing fortunes as a novelist in the 1930s, examined here for the first time through the prism of his reception by the influential Nouvelle Revue française, to his unlikely collaboration with the then-radical L’Express in the 1950s. At the same time, it argues that tracing Mauriac’s trajectory helps to crystallise the broader changes affecting the literary and cultural landscape in France during the twentieth century.Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Conventions of Reference Introduction Chapter 1: Choices and Positionings Chapter 2: Death and Resurrection Chapter 3: Responsibility and Commitment Chapter 4: Commitment and Commodification Chapter 5: Abdication and Alienation Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisD. H. Lawrence has suffered criticism for the emotional excess of his language, and for a suspected leaning towards right-wing politics. This book contextualises his style and political values in German culture, especially its Romantic tradition which has been subjected to the same criticism as himself. In his writing Lawrence struggles between opposing German cultural elements from thee eighteenth century onwards, to dramatise the conflicts in Modern European culture and history in the first half of the Twentieth century. The book demonstrates how his failures are integral to his achievements, and how the self-contradictory nature of his art is actually its saving grace. This volume surveys the whole span of Lawrence’s career; it is intended for both students and teachers of the author, and for those interested in the cross cultural relations of European Modernism. Previous studies have tended to outline references in Lawrence’s work to Germany without focusing on the historical, cultural and ideological issues at stake. These issues are the subject of this book.Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Introduction I Towards a Modernist Tragedy: The White Peacock II Between Wagner and Nietzsche: The Trespasser III Versions of Modernist Realism: Sons and Lovers and Buddenbrooks IV Unity and Fragmentation in The Rainbow V Myth and History in Women in Love VI Rewriting Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre in The Lost Girl VII A Reflection on Past Influences: Mr Noon VIII Leadership and the “Dead Ideal”: Aaron’s Rod and Kangaroo IX The Völkisch Ideologies in The Plumed Serpent Conclusion: The Lady Chatterley Novels Select Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisAprès une introduction synthétique offrant une vue d'ensemble de l'œuvre de Georges Perec et de sa réception critique, le livre met en lumière la diversité des genres, des registres et des stratégies d'écriture pratiqués par l'auteur de La Vie mode d'emploi. L'enjeu dépasse les questions souvent débattues du mélange des genres, du métissage ou de l'hybridation. Il s'agit avant tout de dialogues, de la prise en compte des différences radicales des discours en présence, notamment entre fiction et autobiographie. Face à une œuvre foncièrement polymorphe, l'approche se veut multipolaire et résolument ouverte, refusant toute clôture générique, thématique ou biographique. Ainsi, l'examen approfondi d'un livre comme W ou le souvenir d'enfance éclaire la complexité des relations entre texte et péritexte. L'accent mis sur le montage de récits antithétiques donne lieu à une approche comparatiste: de Faulkner à Barthes et Robbe-Grillet. L'importance accordée au dialogue des genres permet d'inscrire l'œuvre dans le contexte plus large de la Nouvelle Autobiographie. Souligner le rôle primordial des contraintes ouvre sur des problèmes théoriques relatifs aux différentes stratégies de lecture mises en jeu. La nouvelle place donnée à l'espace textuel conduit à réfléchir sur un aspect longtemps négligé de la poétique perecquienne : la dimension scriptographique. Celle-ci n'est plus perçue comme une composante externe et contingente (paratextuelle), mais participe pleinement de la textualité de l'œuvre.Table of ContentsI. Perec hétérographe II. Les quatre champs III. Une nouvelle autobiographie IV. L’abc de l’espace: du péritexte au texte V. W ou le souvenir d’en face VI. Parcours de lecture: le texte virtuel VII. Lisibilité du texte contraint/ lecturabilité des contraintes VIII. La rotation des clôtures Bibliographie

Read more less

Book SynopsisWith their appearance during the 1760s, the five instalments of Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman caused something like a booksellers’ hype. Small publishers and anonymous imitators seized on Sterne’s success by bringing out great numbers of spurious new volumes, critical or ironic pamphlets, and works that in style and title express a congeniality with Tristram Shandy. This study explores these eighteenth-century imitations as indicators of contemporary assumptions about Sterne’s intentions. Comparisons between the original, the first reactions, and a number of late eighteenth-century imitations, show that Tristram Shandy was initially read against the background of Augustan and Grub-street satire. The earliest imitators harked back to traditions of banter and folklore, bawdy and grotesque humour, pathetic stories and orthodox religiosity, reaffirming a pattern of moral and aesthetic values that was conservative for its time. Philosophical Sentimentalism appears to have been a late development. It is also argued that, partly because of their bad reputation, some of the authors of forgeries and parodies had a greater influence on the original than the reviewers to whom Sterne is often said to have listened. The imitators followed leads and themes in the first instalments, developing them according to their own conception of Sterne’s project and the reasons for his success. As a consequence, they unintentially put a pressure on Sterne to alter his course, and even to abandon some of the narrative lines and themes he had set out for himself. The literature section contains a chronological checklist of English eighteenth-century Sterneana.Trade Review"[..]readable and well-illustrated introduction to this subject." – in: Times Literary Supplement, 16 January 2009 "[…] a richer study, filled with meaty discussions and pertinent insights. […] Bosch builds his several arguments on detailed readings of these derivative texts and thus justifies the inclusion of much quoted material. He has amassed a great many titles, some never before explored…" – in: Eighteenth-Century Studies 43/1 (Fall 2009)Table of ContentsA Note on References Introduction Part I – Positive Expectations 1. Tristram in Grub Street 2. Sterne in Covent-Garden 3. Sentiment, or Something Like It Part II – Contamination 4. Impulses 5. Nonsense and the Grotesque Part III – Shifting Themes 6. Soldiers 7. Women 8. Physicians 9. Philosophers Epilogue: The Waning of the Satirical Age Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn the first decade of a new century, this collection of bilingual essays examines Camus’s continuing popularity for a new generation of readers. In crucial respects, the world Camus knew has changed beyond all recognition: decolonization, the fall of the Iron Curtain, a new era of globalization and the rise of new forms of terrorism have all provoked a reconsideration of Camus’s writings. If the Absurd once struck a particular chord, Meursault is as likely now to be seen as a colonial figure who expresses the alienation of the settler from the land of his birth. Yet this increasing orthodoxy must also take account of the reasons why a new community of Algerian readers have embraced Camus. Equally, once isolated because of his anti-Communist stance, Camus has been taken up by disaffected members of the Left, convinced that new forms of totalitarianism are abroad in the world. This volume, which ranges from interpretations of Camus’s literary works, his journalism and his political writings, will be of interest to all those seeking to re-evaluate Camus’s work in the light of ethical and political issues that are of continuing relevance today.Table of ContentsAbbreviations Mark ORME and Christine MARGERRISON: Introduction I: Maurice WEYEMBERGH: Réflexions sur l’(in)actualité de Camus Colonialism II: Peter DUNWOODIE: Negotiation or Confrontation? Camus, Memory and the Colonial Chronotope III: Maria Teresa PULEIO: Albert Camus lu par Assia Djebar, ou comment écrire “ensemble” l’histoire des pieds-noirs et des colonisés IV: Raylene RAMSAY: Colonial/Postcolonial Hybridity in Le Premier Homme and Jean-Marie Tjibaou’s “First Man”, Kanaké V: Christine MARGERRISON: Sous le regard des hommes: “La Femme adultère” Ethics VI: Kevin NEWMARK: Tongue-tied: What Camus’s Fiction Couldn’t Teach Us about Ethics and Politics VII: Jørn BOISEN: Hédonisme et éthique: un paradoxe camusien? VIII: Geraldine F. MONTGOMERY: “Plus loin que la morale”: considérations sur la quête camusienne d’une éthique et d’un au-delá IX: Tobias CHEUNG: Life-Worlds and the Problem of Subjectivity: A Comparison Between L’Étranger and Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country X: Rouven PORZ, Jackie LEACH SCULLY and Christoph REHMANN-SUTTER: The Absurd in the Field of Genetic Diagnosis XI: Lissa LINCOLN: Discours du juste ou juste un discours? Discours et jugement chez Albert Camus dans un âge de justification morale Politics XII: André ABBOU: L’actualité de Camus, demain. Contre “l’ensauvagement”: ré-humaniser l’homme XIII: Guy DUGAS: Camus, Sénac, Roblès: les écrivains de l’École d’alger face au terrorisme XIV: John FOLEY: Albert Camus and Political Violence XV: Virginie LUPO: Camus, l’éternel contemporain XVI: Anne TEULAT: Lire Camus au XXIe siècle: un journalisme visionnaire et éthique XVII: Mark ORME: Camus et le défis de la démocratie au XXIe siècle XVIII: Samantha NOVELLO: Tragedy and “Aesthetic Politics”: Re-thinking the Political beyond Nihilism in the Work of Albert Camus Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisPierre Loti and the Theatricality of Desire offers an original analysis of patterns of unconscious desire observable in the life and work of the French orientalist writer Pierre Loti. It aims to reconcile attitudes and conduct that have been regarded as contradictory and not amenable to analysis by locating the unconscious urges that motivate them. It looks at the ambiguous feelings Loti expresses towards his mother, the conflicting desires inherent in his bisexuality, and his deeply ambiguous sense of a cultural identity as expressed through his cross-cultural transvestism. The political implications of this reappraisal are also considered, offering a potential reassessment of the apparently exploitative nature of much of Loti's writing. This new reading in terms of the unconscious not only serves as a way of understanding inconsistencies, but also suggests how such new interpretations can offer an alternative way of viewing the hierarchies of power his work portrays on both a sexual and political level. This volume is consequently of interest to those interested in gender studies and sexual politics, and offers a way of appreciating writing that might otherwise appear dated and embarrassingly sexist and colonialist in content to twenty-first century readers.Table of ContentsPreface Chapter 1 Theatricality Chapter 2 The Cast Chapter 3 The Stage Chapter 4 The Wardrobe Chapter 5 The Audience General Bibliography Bibliography of Texts by and on Loti

Read more less