Search results for ""Author John Schad""

"Each century," wrote Charles Dickens "[is] more amazed by the century following it than by all the centuries before." Victorians in theory explores the startling conceit that nineteenth-century poetry is amazed by twentieth-century literary theory. In a daring and exciting departure from critical convention, Schad re-reads postructuralist theory through Victorian poetry. Each chapter pairs a poet with a theorist: Robert Browning meets Jacques Derrida; Christina Rossetti encounters Luce Irigaray; Matthew Arnold is after Michel Foucault; Gerald Manley Hopkins dreams with Jacques Lacan; and Elizabeth Barrett Browning haunts Hélène Cixous. Reading both across and between these writers, Schad opens up a radically intertextual space; he wanders, in Matthew Arnold's words, "between two worlds." Across this no-man's land appear a host of unlikely specters, among them T. S. Eliot, Martin Luther, Friedrich Nietzsche, Lewis Carroll's Alice, Walter Benjamin's "angel of history," and the woman taken in adultery.This book will fascinate anyone interested in the Victorians or theory; at once rigorous and readable, it will appeal to both the scholar and the student.

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Someone called Jacques Derrida, someone called him on the phone, someone who was dead -- this was August 22nd 1979. A mystery, he thought; but it is a mystery that began more than ten years earlier, in 1968, when Derrida, a philosopher, visits Oxford and there, before the very eyes of the Philosophy Sub-Faculty, he dies, several times. Murder, he thought. And so I shall investigate, and begin with a sign that the philosopher says he left within a book from the thirteenth century, a strange fortune-telling book that he had found in the oldest part of Oxford's Bodleian Library. In the book are a host of cryptic questions, but the philosopher directs us to one in particular, a peculiar question about a boy, and the question is this: Does the boy live? The philosopher will not, though, give the answer; he requires, instead, that we go to Oxford to open the book for ourselves.

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This book brings together a number of John Schad's very best uncollected essays, interleaved with a selection of autobiographical poems and a striking new work that brings together both critical and creative modes of writing. Turns thus plots the intriguing trajectory of Schad's very distinctive work over the last twenty years -- a trajectory that moves from a series of essays that juggle Christian, Marxist and Derridean intuitions, through a radically literary engagement with Deconstruction, to a daringly critical-creative mode of writing. In this exciting new field, as in the more established world of literature and religion, Schad is an idiosyncratic and sometimes audacious pioneer. The book is to be published simultaneously in hardback and paperback to accommodate adoption on critical-creative courses at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

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The daughter of a wealthy railway magnate, Paula Power inherits De Stancy Castle, an ancient castle in need of modernization. She commissions George Somerset, a young architect, to undertake the work. Somerset falls in love with Paula but she, the Laodicean of the title, is torn between his admiration and that of Captain De Stancy, whose old-world romanticism contrasts with Somerset's forward-looking attitude. Paula's vacillation, however, is not only romantic. Her ambiguity regarding religion, politics and social progress is a reflection of the author's own. This new Penguin Classics edition of Hardy's text contains an introduction and notes that illuminate and clarify these themes, and draws parallels between the text and the author's life and views.

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