Download or read book The Critical Muse written by Henry James and published by Penguin Classics. This book was released on 1987 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'The critic, in his conception, was not the narrow lawgiver or the rigid censor that he is often assumed to be; he was the student, the inquirer, the interpreter, the taker of notes, the active, restless commentator...' James's words on Sainte-Beuve could very easily be applied to himself. The pleasures of his own criticism - wit and urbanity, metaphorical artistry, his way of stalking and teasing out his subject - always lift his essays from the merely instructive to the delightful.
Download or read book Criticism and Literary Theory 1890 to the Present written by Chris Baldick and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-11 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a coherent and accessible historical account of the major phases of British and American Twentieth-century criticism, from 'decadent' aestheticism to feminist, decontsructonist and post-colonial theories. Special attention is given to new perspectives on Shakesperean criticism, theories of the novel and models of the literary canon. The book will help to define and account for the major developments in literary criticism during this century exploring the full diversity of critical work from major critics such as T S Eliot and F R Leavis to minor but fascinating figures and critical schools. Unlike most guides to modern literary theory, its focus is firmly on developments within the English speaking world.
Download or read book Reconstructing Criticism written by Philip Smallwood and published by Bucknell University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study aims to bring the modern theory of literary criticism, and Pope's 'Essay on Criticism' of 1711, into a more productive and intersting association than critical-historical structures have generally allowed. Smallwood marks out in current terms and in depth the specialized theoretial and aesthetic problem of defining criticism. He recognizes that criticism, no more than literature or art, cannot be finally codified or defined, but insists on the need for clarity in the exposition of criticism's purposes and a fuller consciousness of a common community of practice available to audiences outside the academic fold. Affirming the unfailing currency and utility of the term criticism as new languages have taken over the critical domain, or have sought to replace or abolish literature, Smallwood distinguishes between the normative definitions that are everywhere apparent in modern theory of criticism, and the advantages to conceptual comprehension achieved by Pope's poetic idea of criticism in the 'Essay'.
Download or read book The Dangers of Interpretation written by Ilona Treitel and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-08-22 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1996. This comparative study investigates thematic and technical similarities in the works of the two authors who shared a cultural heritage and achieved comparable status in their separate literary traditions. Drawing upon theories by Bloom, Bakhtin, and Lacan, the book examines ways in which Henry James and Thomas Mann treat the creative artist and analyze the creative and interpretive processes in their fiction. The texts covered range from early works to their great modern novels: The GoldenBowland Doctor Faustus To a great extent, the similarities between the works stem from the authors' preoccupation with artistic responsibility. Adopting Bloom's claim that the creative activity is an interpretive one, and that the reader, as well as the writer, interprets a text into being the book also investigates the reader's responsibility in confronting the dilemmas challenging James' and Mann's artist figures. Such challenges are "the dangers of interpretation" discussed in this book. Index. Bibliography.
Download or read book David Foster Wallace s Infinite Jest written by Stephen J. Burn and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2012-04-19 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Infinite Jest has been hailed as one the great modern American novels and its author, David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide in 2008, as one of the most influential and innovative authors of the past 20 years. Don DeLillo called Infinite Jest a "three-stage rocket to the future," a work "equal to the huge, babbling spin-out sweep of contemporary life," while Time Magazine included Infinite Jest on its list of 100 Greatest Novels published between 1923-2006. David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest: A Reader's Guide was the first book to be published on the novel and is a key reference for those who wish to explore further. Infinite Jest has become an exemplar for difficulty in contemporary Fiction-its 1,079 pages full of verbal invention, oblique narration, and a scattered, nonlinear, chronology. In this comprehensively revised second edition, Burn maps Wallace's influence on contemporary American fiction, outlines Wallace's poetics, and provides a full-length study of the novel, drawing out the most important themes and ideas, before surveying Wallace's post-Infinite Jest output, including The Pale King.
Download or read book Thomas Hardy written by Barbara Hardy and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2000-12-01 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author offers close readings of Thomas Hardy's poetry and novels, regarding these as expressive forms of everyday and professional acts of the imagination. Hardy is placed in the long tradition of writers who subject is not art but imagination and whose most interesting aesthetic introspectionÆs, like those of Jane Austen and George Eliot, are oblique or sub-textual. So what the reader follows here is Hardy's imagining of imagination in his elegies and nature poems and in his major characters from Gabriel Oak to Tess and Jude.The themes and forms examined by Barbara Hardy include narrative, conversation, gossip, memory, gender, poetry of place and imaginative thresholds. Altogether the study is a lucid and accessible introduction, which locates Hardy's place in the tradition of English literature.
Download or read book Short Stories Knowledge and the Supernatural written by Amândio Reis and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-07-11 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book proposes a comparative approach to the supernatural short stories of Machado de Assis, Henry James and Guy de Maupassant. It offers an alternative to predominantly novel-centric and Anglo-centric perspectives on literary pre-modernism by investigating a transnational and multilingual connection between genre, theme and theory, i.e., between the modern short story, the supernatural and the problem of knowledge. Incorporating a close analysis of the literary texts into a discussion of their historical context, the book argues that Machado, James and Maupassant explore and reinvent the supernatural short story as a metafictional genre. This modernized and innovative form allows them to challenge the dichotomies and conventions of realist and supernatural fiction, inviting their past and present readers to question common assumptions on reality and literary representation.
Download or read book Edinburgh Companion to the Short Story in English written by Paul Delaney and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2018-02-01 with total page 563 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a clear introduction to the key terms and frameworks in cognitive poetics and stylistics
Download or read book Evolution and Literary Theory written by Joseph Carroll and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 1096 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past two decades, poststructuralism in its myriad forms has come to dominate literary criticism to the exclusion of virtually any other point of view. Few scholars have escaped the coercive authority of its programmatic radicalism. In Evolution and Literary Theory, Joseph Carroll vigorously attacks the foundational principles of poststructuralism and offers in their stead a bold new theory that situates literary criticism within the matrix of evolutionary theory.
Download or read book Austen Eliot Charlotte Bronte and the Mentor Lover written by P. Menon and published by Springer. This book was released on 2003-05-23 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This lucid and tightly-argued study uses the motif of the mentor-lover - embodying diverse permutations of sexual love, power and judgement - to explore, evaluate and compare the works of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot as they contend with issues of sexuality, family, selfhood, freedom, conduct and gender. The figure also provides a means to probe their relationship to the reader as they become mentor-lovers through authorship, each eliciting a different form of love and electing a different style of instruction.
Download or read book Jane Austen and the Morality of Conversation written by Bharat Tandon and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An ingeniously innovative analysis of Jane Austen's work, a highly respected and engaging critical study.
Download or read book The Nineteenth Century Novel Realisms written by Delia Correa Sousa de and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-13 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this volume trace the experimentation of nineteenth-century writers in advancing new modes of realist fiction while revitalizing the inheritance of the Gothic and the Romantic. Focusing on some of the most popular novels of the century (Northanger Abbey, Jayne Eyre, Dombey and Son, Middlemarch, Far from the Madding Crowd and Germinal), this attractive volume explores some of the recurring themes in nineteenth-century fiction: aspiration and vocation; social class; sexual politics; political reform; colonialism and commerce. This is an ideal introduction to some of the major fictional achievements of the first industrial era, and to most of the crucial themes in nineteenth-century fiction.
Download or read book No Place in Time written by Sharon B. Oster and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-12 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the temporal function that "the Jew" plays in literature. No Place in Time: The Hebraic Myth in Late-Nineteenth-Century American Literature examines how the Hebraic myth, in which Jewishness became a metaphor for an ancient, pre-Christian past, was reimagined in nineteenth-century American realism. The Hebraic myth, while integral to a Protestant understanding of time, was incapable of addressing modern Jewishness, especially in the context of the growing social and national concern around the "Jewish problem." Sharon B. Oster shows how realist authors consequently cast Jews as caught between a distant past and a promising American future. In either case, whether creating or disrupting temporal continuity, Jewishness existed outside of time. No Place in Time complicates the debates over Eastern European immigration in the 1880s and questions of assimilation to a Protestant American culture. The first chapter begins in the world of periodicals, an interconnected literary culture, out of which Abraham Cahan emerged as a literary voice of Jewish immigrants caught between nostalgia and a messianic future outside of linear progression. Moving from the margins to the center of literary realism, the second chapter revolves around Henry James's modernization of the "noble Hebrew" as a figure of mediation and reconciliation. The third chapter extends this analysis into the naturalism of Edith Wharton, who takes up questions of intimacy and intermarriage, and places "the Jew" at the nexus of competing futures shaped by uncertainty and risk. A number of Jewish female perspectives are included in the fourth chapter that recasts plots of cultural assimilation through intermarriage in terms of time: if a Jewish past exists in tension with an American future, these writers recuperate the "Hebraic myth" for themselves to imagine a viable Jewish future. No Place in Time ends with a brief look at poet Emma Lazarus, whose understanding of Jewishness was distinctly modern, not nostalgic, mythical, or dead. No Place in Time highlights a significant shift in how Jewishness was represented in American literature, and, as such, raises questions of identity, immigration, and religion. This volume will be of interest to scholars of nineteenth- and turn-of-the-century American literature, American Jewish literature, and literature as it intersects with immigration, religion, or temporality, as well as anyone interested in Jewish studies.
Download or read book Letter and the Spirit of Nineteenth Century American Literature written by Thomas Loebel and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2005 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moving back to the trial of Anne Hutchinson in Puritan Massachusetts and the captivity narrative of Mary Rowlandson in order to analyse theo-political signification, Loebel provides a new context for examining the politically performative function of language in such texts as The Scarlet Letter, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Waiting for the Verdict. He also argues, however, that a specific theo-logic manifests itself in the political rhetoric of the nation, such that the afterlife of the New Jerusalem resonates not just in the Blessings of Liberty enshrined in the Constitution but also in the shift from a religious understanding of union with Jesus to that of the Union of States as a nation. theorising representation as a political, theological, legal, and literary issue that has continued currency both in twentieth-century literature and in the political discourse of America's global vision, such as the axis of evil and the new world order. Anyone interested in American literature and culture will view the relationship between ethics and justice differently after reading this book.
Download or read book Literature and Degree in Renaissance England written by Peter Holbrook and published by University of Delaware Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: He argues that despite recent influential historicizations of English Renaissance literature, we still need a nuanced understanding of the ways in which "degree," the structure of social distinctions in Renaissance England, was symbolized in the period's literature.
Download or read book Jamesian Cultural Anxiety in the East and West written by Choon-Hee Kim and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2020-01-31 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the world that shaped Henry James’s work and influenced his legacy through the themes of Jamesian cultural anxiety between and beyond spatio-temporal boundaries. As such, each chapter constructs a mode of reading to map and formulate one’s own cultural perspective in various contexts relying on their unique engagement with James’s and Jamesian creative acts of writing—aesthetics and science, the (auto-)biographical as social aspects, genre as literary-social context, the artistic and the economic, editorship and readership, and Asian perspectives on cultural influences and identities—to generate insights and establish new intercultural understandings. These are the traces of the contributors’ national, social, cultural consciousness that allow the definition of the Jamesian worldview as a particularly universal one in a global context.
Download or read book A Companion to the English Novel written by Stephen Arata and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2015-06-29 with total page 511 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of authoritative essays represents the latest scholarship on topics relating to the themes, movements, and forms of English fiction, while chronicling its development in Britain from the early 18th century to the present day. Comprises cutting-edge research currently being undertaken in the field, incorporating the most salient critical trends and approaches Explores the history, evolution, genres, and narrative elements of the English novel Considers the advancement of various literary forms – including such genres as realism, romance, Gothic, experimental fiction, and adaptation into film Includes coverage of narration, structure, character, and affect; shifts in critical reception to the English novel; and geographies of contemporary English fiction Features contributions from a variety of distinguished and high-profile literary scholars, along with emerging younger critics Includes a comprehensive scholarly bibliography of critical works on and about the novel to aid further reading and research
