Download or read book Complete Fiction of W M Spackman written by William Mode Spackman and published by Dalkey Archive Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 654 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An omnibus collection of novels and short stories by a late writer (1905-1990) whose witty tales of adultery found few publishers in their day. Typical is the novel, An Armful of Warm Girl, written in the 1950s and dealing with the many affairs of an upper-class roue. No publisher would accept the manuscript which took nearly 20 years to sell.
Download or read book Nominalism and Literary Discourse written by Hugo Keiper and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 1997 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Influential accounts of European cultural history variously suggest that the rise of nominalism and its ultimate victory over realist orientations were highly implemental factors in the formation of Modern Europe since the later Middle Ages, but particularly the Reformation. Quite probably, this is a simplification of a state of affairs that is in fact more complex, indeed ambiguous. However, if there is any truth in such propositions - which have, after all, been made by many prominent commentators, such as Panofsky, Heer, Blumenberg, Foucault, Eco, Kristeva - we may no doubt assume that literary texts will have responded and in turn contributed, in a variety of ways, to these processes of cultural transformation. It seems of considerable interest, therefore, to take a close look at the complex, precarious position which literature, as basically a symbolic mode of signification, held in the perennial struggles and discursive negotiations between the semiotic 'twin paradigms' of nominalism and realism. This collection of essays (many of them by leading scholars in the field) is a first comprehensive attempt to tackle such issues - by analyzing representative literary texts in terms of their underlying semiotic orientations, specifically of nominalism, but also by studying pertinent historical, theoretical and discursive co(n)texts of such developments in their relation to literary discourse. At the same time, since 'literary nominalism' and 'realism' are conceived as fundamentally aesthetic phenomena instantiating a genuinely 'literary debate over universals', consistent emphasis is placed on the discursive dimension of the texts scrutinized, in an endeavour to re-orient and consolidate an emergent research paradigm which promises to open up entirely new perspectives for the study of literary semiotics, as well as of aesthetics in general. Historical focus is provided by concentrating on the English situation in the era of transition from late medieval to early modern (c. 1350-1650), but readers will also find contributions on Chrétien de Troyes and Rabelais, as well as on the 'aftermath' of the earlier debates - as exemplified in studies of Locke and (post)modern critical altercations, respectively, which serve to point up the continuing relevance of the issues involved. A substantial introductory essay seeks to develop an overarching theoretical framework for the study of nominalism and literary discourse, in addition to offering an in-depth exploration of the 'nominalism/realism-complex' in its relation to literature. An extensive bibliography and index are further features of interest to both specialists and general readers.
Download or read book More Matter written by John Updike and published by Random House. This book was released on 2009-02-19 with total page 929 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this collection of nonfiction pieces, John Updike gathers his responses to nearly two hundred invitations into print, each “an opportunity to make something beautiful, to find within oneself a treasure that would otherwise remain buried.” Introductions, reviews, and humorous essays, paragraphs on New York, religion, and lust—here is “more matter” commissioned by an age that, as the author remarks in his Preface, calls for “real stuff . . . not for the obliquities and tenuosities of fiction.” Still, the novelist’s shaping hand, his gift for telling detail, can be detected in many of these literary considerations. Books by Edith Wharton, Dawn Powell, John Cheever, and Vladimir Nabokov are incisively treated, as are biographies of Isaac Newton, Abraham Lincoln, Queen Elizabeth II, and Helen Keller. As George Steiner observed, Updike writes with a “solicitous, almost tender intelligence. The critic and the poet in him . . . are at no odds with the novelist; the same sharpness of apprehension bears on the object in each of Updike’s modes.”
Download or read book The Novel An Alternative History 1600 1800 written by Steven Moore and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2013-08-29 with total page 548 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Christian Gauss Award for excellence in literary scholarship from the Phi Beta Kappa Society Having excavated the world's earliest novels in his previous book, literary historian Steven Moore explores in this sequel the remarkable flowering of the novel between the years 1600 and 1800-from Don Quixote to America's first big novel, an homage to Cervantes entitled Modern Chivalry. This is the period of such classic novels as Tom Jones, Candide, and Dangerous Liaisons, but beyond the dozen or so recognized classics there are hundreds of other interesting novels that appeared then, known only to specialists: Spanish picaresques, French heroic romances, massive Chinese novels, Japanese graphic novels, eccentric English novels, and the earliest American novels. These minor novels are not only interesting in their own right, but also provide the context needed to appreciate why the major novels were major breakthroughs. The novel experienced an explosive growth spurt during these centuries as novelists experimented with different forms and genres: epistolary novels, romances, Gothic thrillers, novels in verse, parodies, science fiction, episodic road trips, and family sagas, along with quirky, unclassifiable experiments in fiction that resemble contemporary, avant-garde works. As in his previous volume, Moore privileges the innovators and outriders, those who kept the novel novel. In the most comprehensive history of this period ever written, Moore examines over 400 novels from around the world in a lively style that is as entertaining as it is informative. Though written for a general audience, The Novel, An Alternative History also provides the scholarly apparatus required by the serious student of the period. This sequel, like its predecessor, is a “zestfully encyclopedic, avidly opinionated, and dazzlingly fresh history of the most 'elastic' of literary forms” (Booklist).
Download or read book The Novel An Alternative History written by Steven Moore and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2013-09-17 with total page 705 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Encyclopedic in scope and heroically audacious, The Novel: An Alternative History is the first attempt in over a century to tell the complete story of our most popular literary form. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the novel did not originate in 18th-century England, nor even with Don Quixote, but is coeval with civilization itself. After a pugnacious introduction, in which Moore defends innovative, demanding novelists against their conservative critics, the book relaxes into a world tour of the pre-modern novel, beginning in ancient Egypt and ending in 16th-century China, with many exotic ports-of-call: Greek romances; Roman satires; medieval Sanskrit novels narrated by parrots; Byzantine erotic thrillers; 5000-page Arabian adventure novels; Icelandic sagas; delicate Persian novels in verse; Japanese war stories; even Mayan graphic novels. Throughout, Moore celebrates the innovators in fiction, tracing a continuum between these pre-modern experimentalists and their postmodern progeny. Irreverent, iconoclastic, informative, entertaining-The Novel: An Alternative History is a landmark in literary criticism that will encourage readers to rethink the novel.
Download or read book Best European Fiction 2012 Best European Fiction written by Aleksandar Hemon and published by Dalkey Archive Press. This book was released on 2011-11-08 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Translated from more than 25 languages and highlighting the future luminaries and revolutionaries of international literature. Fans of the series will find everything they've grown to love, while new readers will discover what they've been missing!
Download or read book Garden Ashes written by Danilo Kiš and published by Dalkey Archive Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Garden, Ashes is the remarkable account of Andi Scham's childhood during World War II, as his Jewish family traverses Eastern Europe to escape persecution. As the family moves from house to house, the novel focuses on Andi's relationship with his father; he recounts the endless hours his father poured into the creation of his all-inclusive third edition of the Bus, Ship, Rail, and Air Travel Guide, to the bizarre sermons he delivered to his befuddled family, to his eventual disappearance and assumed death at Auschwitz. Despite the apocalyptic events fueling this family's story, Kis's writing emphasizes the specific details of life during this period, constructing a personal account of a future artist growing up under the shadow of the Nazis and in a world capable of containing a person as unique as his father.
Download or read book Fables of the Novel written by Warren F. Motte and published by Dalkey Archive Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Readers of the contemporary novel in France are witnessing the most astonishing reinvigoration of narrative prose since the New Novel of the 1950s. In the last few years, bold, innovative, and richly compelling novels have been written by a variety of young writers. These texts question traditional strategies of character, plot, theme, and message; and they demand new strategies of reading, too. Choosing ten novels published during the 1990s as examples of that trend, Warren Motte traces the resurgence of the novel in France. He argues that each of the novels under consideration here, quite apart from what other stories it tells, presents a?fable?of the novel that deals with the genre's possibilities, limitations, and future as a cultural form.
Download or read book Italian Stories written by Joseph Papaleo and published by Dalkey Archive Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of stories set in an Italian American neighborhood in the Bronx of the 1940s.
Download or read book Fiction Now written by Warren F. Motte and published by Dalkey Archive Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fiction Now reports on the current states of the novel in France, taking a series of soundings within the compass of innovative French writing since 2001. Chapters focus closely upon Jean Echenoz, Marie Redonnet, Christian Gailly, Lydie Salvayre, Gérard Gavarry, Hélène Lenoir, Patrick Lapeyre, and Christine Montalbetti. Each of the authors invoked exemplified in his or her work a different set of strategies, concerns, and approaches: one of them transposes the Book of Judith to the Parisian suburbs; another imagines the most taciturn of cowboys in the American West; still another goes well beyond death, into the afterlife of a concert pianist. Despite their diversity of theme and technique, these writers share a will to make French fiction new, and demonstrate compellingly that the novel as it is practiced in France today is an extremely vigorous, deeply enthralling, and richly plural cultural form.
Download or read book On the Decay of Criticism written by W.M. Spackman and published by Fantagraphics Books. This book was released on 2017-06-21 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Best known for the sleek, sophisticated novels he wrote in the 1970s and ’80s, W. M. Spackman was also a literary critic of formidable power and slashing wit. Gathered here are all the essays and reviews he published, including those that appeared in his 1967 book of essays On the Decay of Humanism, which one critic praised as “a critical book of astonishing arrogance, brio, and erudition.” Spackman brought wide learning and cosmopolitan savoir-faire to his concerns for how literature is taught and evaluated, processes that he felt desperately needed to be overhauled. Ranging from ancient Greek and Latin literature to the latest poetry and novels, these brilliant essays argue that a work of literature should be evaluated on its artistry and craftsmanship, not on its content or ideas. Spackman quotes with approval Nabokov’s belief that “Style and structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are a lot of hogwash,” and insists “aesthetic assessments… must come before everything else.” On those grounds, he finds such celebrated masters as Leo Tolstoy and Henry James inferior to lesser-known artists like Henry Green and Ivy Compton-Burnett. His iconoclastic views are supported with close technical analyses, but in a relaxed style that delights as it instructs. Spackman provides both a fresh look at the Western literary canon and a model for writing about it. Spackman’s Complete Essays is a necessary and important book for anyone who cares deeply about literary culture.
Download or read book An Unwritten Novel Fernando Pessoa s The Book of Disquiet written by Thomas Cousineau and published by Dalkey Archive Press. This book was released on 2013-07-16 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A richly insightful guide to Fernando Pessoa’s masterpiece, for both students and the common reader. “Anything and everything, depending on how one sees it, is a marvel or a hindrance, an all or a nothing, a path or a problem,” says Bernardo Soares, the putative author of Fernando Pessoa’s classic The Book of Disquiet. Thomas Cousineau’s An Unwritten Novel offers the general reader, as well as students and teachers, an “Ariadne’s thread” that will help them to find their way through this labyrinthine masterpiece: a self-proclaimed “factless autobiography” in which all the expected elements of the contemporary novel remain “unwritten.”
Download or read book The Book of Jokes written by Momus and published by Dalkey Archive Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imagine a universe where every joke you've ever heard is solid, real, and occasionally dangerous--and all happening, one after the other, to the same small group of people. Detailing a series of filthy and ludicrous episodes in the life of a single family, saddled with a super-eccentric, sexually rapacious father, "The Book of Jokes" tells the story of the youth and education of a bland young boy doomed to record--in an incongruously serious, autobiographical mode--all the ridiculous incidents befalling his household. With their lives dictated by set ups and punchlines, the boy's family quickly becomes luridly dysfunctional, and he realizes that the only way to escape his tragicomic fate is by trying to take control of the joke-telling himself. Channeling the spirits of Chaucer, Rabelais, Flann O'Brien, and Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini, the Vatican secretary who compiled the first known book of jokes in 1451, "The Book of Jokes" is a happy raspberry in the face of life as we know and tell it.
Download or read book Pigeon Post written by Dumitru Țepeneag and published by Dalkey Archive Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A man, a writer, lives alone in a rather squalid Paris apartment. He is trying to write a novel, but he has nothing to say. He tries multiple beginnings, interspersed with one digression (but from what?) after another. In the hope of finding subject matter for his would-be realistic story, he then sends letters to three friends - Edmond, Edgar, and Edourd - with a list of questions about their lives, some rather personal inquiries, some bordering on the obscene. The responses are not very helpful, and even seem suspiciously untrue. Out of this melange of stops and starts, false information, questionable memories, pieces of this and that, an insanely comic novel starts to emerge." "Dumitru Tsepeneag takes us into a game of memory and storytelling, where the tenderness of the past clashes with the comedy of the present, and where fictional characters and actual friends mingle in the play of the imagination."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Camera written by Jean-Philippe Toussaint and published by Dalkey Archive Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In this improbable love story, we meet a man who is obsessed with himself: how he does things and all the ways he might have done them, how he thinks, why he thinks the way that he thinks, how he might do or think otherwise. What happens? He takes driving lessons, goes grocery shopping, slowly yet methodically battles an olive on a plate. It is all simple and amusing until life intercedes: there is love, suddenly, and change, a flurry of emotion, and an unexpected incident with a camera on a ship. Only Jean-Philippe Toussaint - master of poignant deadpan - could write a novel at once so aloof and so touching, where we come to know our narrator intimately while knowing almost nothing about him."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Do Not Touch written by Eric Laurrent and published by Dalkey Archive Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At age 40, Clovis Baccara is a successful Parisian financial wheeler-dealer and lothario love struck by the sight of his longtime business partner's young intended, Veronica. Oscar, the would-be groom, has gotten increasingly paranoid about their life of white-collar crime, and the marriage marks his resolve to get out of the business and start a family. That plan goes awry when the police apprehend Oscar on his wedding day.
Download or read book Dust written by Arkadiĭ Dragomoshchenko and published by Dalkey Archive Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Russia's leading founder of Language poetry, in his new collection of essays fuses seemingly disparate elements of poetry, philosophy, journalism, and prose in an attempt to capture the workings of memory. At stake is not what he writes about--whether memory, Gertrude Stein, immortality, or a walk on Nevsky Prospect--but how he writes it. Formally, Dragomoshchenko never tires of digression, creating playful games of patience and anticipation for his reader. In so doing, he pushes story and closure into the background--arriving, finally, but not to a destination. Ultimately, Dragomoshchenko "carefully seeks out the dust of traces from the period of oblivion," which evidently lead to the oblivion of minds.
