Download or read book Dark Humor and Social Satire in the Modern British Novel written by Lisa Colletta and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2003-10-01 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literary modernism traditionally focuses on the writings of self-consciously avant-garde writers who attempted to break with literary and aesthetic forms inherited from the nineteenth-century. This view of Modernism has overlooked much of the social comedy of the period, assessing it as satiric and therefore conservative, reinforcing the very cultural values it sets out to critique. Examining the work of Virginia Woolf, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Evelyn Waugh, and Anthony Powell in light of psychoanalytic theories of joke-work and gallows humor, Colletta claims that dark humor is an important characteristic of Modernism.

Download or read book Dark Humour and Social Satire in the Modern British Novel written by L. Colletta and published by Springer. This book was released on 2003-09-30 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Colletta uses psychoanalytic theories of joke-work and gallows humour to argue that dark humour is an important, defining characteristic of Modernism. She brings together the usual suspects alongside more often overlooked writers from the period, and asks probing questions about the relationship between a dark humour that 'revels in the non-rational, the unstable, and the fragmented, and resists easy definition and political usefulness' and the historical and social circumstances of the period. Colletta makes a compelling argument that probing deeply into the nature of humour or satire that define these 'social comedies' brings to light a more complex, and more accurate, understanding of the social changes and historical circumstances that define the modern era.

Download or read book Dark Humour and Social Satire in the Modern British Novel written by L Colletta and published by Palgrave MacMillan. This book was released on 2003-11-13 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Triumph of Narcissism written by Lisa Colletta and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Teaching Modern British and American Satire written by Evan R. Davis and published by Modern Language Association. This book was released on 2019-05-01 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume addresses the teaching of satire written in English over the past three hundred years. For instructors covering current satire, it suggests ways to enrich students' understanding of voice, irony, and rhetoric and to explore the questions of how to define satire and how to determine what its ultimate aims are. For instructors teaching older satire, it demonstrates ways to help students gain knowledge of historical context, medium, and audience, while addressing more specific literary questions of technique and form. Readers will discover ways to introduce students to authors such as Swift and Twain, to techniques such as parody and verbal irony, and to the difficult subject of satire's offensiveness and elitism. This volume also helps teachers of a wide variety of courses, from composition to gateway courses and surveys, think about how to use modern satire in conceiving and structuring them.

Download or read book Humour in British First World War Literature written by Emily Anderson and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-09-11 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how humorous depictions of the Great War helped to familiarise, domesticate and tame the conflict. In contrast to the well-known First World War literature that focuses on extraordinary emotional disruption and the extremes of war, this study shows other writers used humour to create a gentle, mild amusement, drawing on familiar, popular genres and forms used before 1914. Emily Anderson argues that this humorous literature helped to transform the war into quotidian experience. Based on little-known primary material uncovered through detailed archival research, the book focuses on works that, while written by celebrated authors, tend not to be placed in the canon of Great War literature. Each chapter examines key examples of literary texts, ranging from short stories and poetry, to theatre and periodicals. In doing so, the book investigates the complex political and social significance of this tame style of humour.

Download or read book Modernism Satire and the Novel written by Jonathan Greenberg and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-09-15 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this groundbreaking study, Jonathan Greenberg locates a satiric sensibility at the heart of the modern. By promoting an antisentimental education, modernism denied the authority of emotion to guarantee moral and literary value. Instead, it fostered sophisticated, detached and apparently cruel attitudes toward pain and suffering. This sensibility challenged the novel's humanistic tradition, set ethics and aesthetics into conflict and fundamentally altered the ways that we know and feel. Through lively and original readings of works by Evelyn Waugh, Stella Gibbons, Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Samuel Beckett and others, this book analyzes a body of literature - late modernist satire - that can appear by turns aloof, sadistic, hilarious, ironic and poignant, but which continually questions inherited modes of feeling. By recognizing the centrality of satire to modernist aesthetics, Greenberg offers not only a new chapter in the history of satire but a persuasive new idea of what made modernism modern.

Download or read book The Image of the English Gentleman in Twentieth Century Literature written by Christine Berberich and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-03 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studies of the English gentleman have tended to focus mainly on the nineteenth century, encouraging the implicit assumption that this influential literary trope has less resonance for twentieth-century literature and culture. Christine Berberich challenges this notion by showing that the English gentleman has proven to be a remarkably adaptable and relevant ideal that continues to influence not only literature but other forms of representation, including the media and advertising industries. Focusing on Siegfried Sassoon, Anthony Powell, Evelyn Waugh and Kazuo Ishiguro, whose presentations of the gentlemanly ideal are analysed in their specific cultural, historical, and sociological contexts, Berberich pays particular attention to the role of nostalgia and its relationship to 'Englishness'. Though 'Englishness' and by extension the English gentleman continue to be linked to depictions of England as the green and pleasant land of imagined bygone days, Berberich counterbalances this perception by showing that the figure of the English gentleman is the medium through which these authors and many of their contemporaries critique the shifting mores of contemporary society. Twentieth-century depictions of the gentleman thus have much to tell us about rapidly changing conceptions of national, class, and gender identity.

Download or read book Evelyn Waugh s Satire written by Naomi Milthorpe and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-06-23 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966) is one of the twentieth century’s great prose stylists and the author of a suite of devastating satires on modern English life, from his first unforgettably funny novel Decline and Fall, to his last work of fiction, “Basil Seal Rides Again.” Evelyn Waugh’s Satire: Texts and Contexts renews scholarly debates central to Waugh’s work: the forms of his satire, his attitudes towards modernity and modernism, his place in the literary culture of the interwar period, and his pugnacious (mis)reading of literary and other texts. This study offers new exegetical accounts of the forms and figures of Waugh’s satire, linking original readings of Waugh’s texts to the literary-historical contexts that informed them. Posing fresh readings of familiar works and affording attention to more neglected texts, Evelyn Waugh’s Satire: Texts and Contexts offers readers and scholars a timely opportunity to return to the rich, dark art of this master of prose satire.

Download or read book Humor in Contemporary Junior Literature written by Julie Cross and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-12-14 with total page 535 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this new book, Julie Cross examines the intricacies of textual humor in contemporary junior literature, using the tools of literary criticism and humor theory. Cross investigates the dialectical paradoxes of humor and debunks the common belief in oppositional binaries of ‘simple’ versus ‘complex’ humor. The varied combinations of so-called high and low forms of humor within junior texts for young readers, who are at such a crucial stage of their reading and social development, provide a valuable commentary upon the culture and values of contemporary western society, making the book of considerable interest to scholars of both children’s literature and childhood studies. Cross explores the ways in which the changing content, forms and functions of the many varied combinations of humor in junior texts, including the Lemony Snickett series, reveal societal attitudes towards young children and childhood. The new compounds of seemingly paradoxical high and low forms of humor, in texts for developing readers from the 1960s onwards, reflect and contribute to contemporary society’s hesitant and uneven acceptance of the emergent paradigm of children’s rights, abilities, participation and empowerment. Cross identifies four types of potentially subversive/transgressive humor which have emerged since the 1960s which, coupled with the three main theories of humor – relief, superiority and incongruity theories – enables a long-overdue charting of developments in humor within junior texts. Cross also argues that the gradual increase in the compounding of the simple and the complex provide opportunities for young readers to play with ambiguous, complicated ideas, helping them embrace the complexities and contradictions of contemporary life.

Download or read book Exploring the Frontiers of Fiction Humour Modernism and Narrative Form in Virginia Woolf s Jacob s Room 1922 written by Lindy van Rooyen and published by diplom.de. This book was released on 2012-02-15 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inhaltsangabe:Introduction: Virginia Woolf is not a popular writer. Despite a fierce pride in her work it was never her ambition to be one. Most people have heard of her work, vaguely associating it with the second wave of the women s liberation movement in the 1970s and the type of fiction that is commonly called difficult , and few people unfamiliar with her work would associate her reputation with humour. These are some of the first impressions of a writer who is now hailed by scholars of English literature as one of the icons of modernism. To speak of first impressions of Virginia Woolf s work is not as fatuous as it may seem. After all Woolf s fiction was initially founded on impressions, and I hope to show that one of the distinctive characteristics of her oeuvre compared to other modernists like T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats or James Joyce, is the intensely visual nature of her art. Furthermore, she is often associated with a movement of modern painting in the early twentieth century known as Post-Impressionism , including painters like Cézanne, Picasso and Georges Braque. Finally, laughter in all its registers - whether merry, cruel or parodic - runs like a golden thread throughout the texture of her essays, short stories and novels; as satire does more generally throughout modernism. I have chosen Virginia Woolf s third novel, Jacob s Room (1922), as the focus of my study of Woolf s modernism. It is not her best known novel, as most critical acclaim is reserved for Mrs. Dalloway (1925) or To the Lighthouse (1927). She started writing fiction in 1915 just as the First World War started and, for four reasons, I believe that Jacob s Room is the perfect starting point from which to survey Woolf s particular contribution to the Modernist Movement. Firstly, the social catastrophe associated with the First World War is widely considered to be the decisive historic event in the collective consciousness of early twentieth century Europe, its effects reverberating throughout the literary- and visual arts in the 1920s. Secondly, Jacob s Room was published in a year which falls nicely within the boundaries of the period of High Modernism, which culminated in the decades between 1910 and 1930. Indeed the year of 1922 marks the publication of two other seminal modernist works, T.S. Eliot s Wasteland and James Joyce s Ulysses. Thirdly, Jacob s Room is commonly regarded as Virginia Woolf s first experimental novel in which she, in her own phrase, [...]

Download or read book Ageing in the Modern Arabic Novel written by Aghacy Samira Aghacy and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-21 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are more than 15 million people aged over 65 currently living in the MENA region, yet little attention has been paid to the cultural significance of growing old. This book recognises the widespread silence by countering the critical corpus that reads modern Arabic novels as a political discourse with an emphasis on youth achievement. By assembling a range of fictional works from different parts of the Arab world that incorporate older characters, this book draws on a range of theoretical approaches to aging, particularly from the perspective of gender and feminism, to reconcile the biological and cultural understandings of old age. It reveals that there is no standard female or male experience and no single prototype of oldness in the modern Arabic novel, and that men and women manifest a multiplicity of identities, concerns, and experiences as they grow older.

Download or read book Gender and the Superhero Narrative written by Michael Goodrum and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2018-10-01 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributions by Dorian L. Alexander, Janine Coleman, Gabriel Gianola, Mel Gibson, Michael Goodrum, Tim Hanley, Vanessa Hemovich, Christina Knopf, Christopher McGunnigle, Samira Nadkarni, Ryan North, Lisa Perdigao, Tara Prescott-Johnson, Philip Smith, and Maite Ucaregui The explosive popularity of San Diego’s Comic-Con, Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Rogue One, and Netflix’s Jessica Jones and Luke Cage all signal the tidal change in superhero narratives and mainstreaming of what were once considered niche interests. Yet just as these areas have become more openly inclusive to an audience beyond heterosexual white men, there has also been an intense backlash, most famously in 2015’s Gamergate controversy, when the tension between feminist bloggers, misogynistic gamers, and internet journalists came to a head. The place for gender in superhero narratives now represents a sort of battleground, with important changes in the industry at stake. These seismic shifts—both in the creation of superhero media and in their critical and reader reception—need reassessment not only of the role of women in comics, but also of how American society conceives of masculinity. Gender and the Superhero Narrative launches ten essays that explore the point where social justice meets the Justice League. Ranging from comics such as Ms. Marvel, Batwoman: Elegy, and Bitch Planet to video games, Netflix, and cosplay, this volume builds a platform for important voices in comics research, engaging with controversy and community to provide deeper insight and thus inspire change.

Download or read book Interwar Women s Comic Fiction written by Nicola Darwood and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2020-01-10 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays examines the work of five intermodernist writers. Some were established authors before the First World War and others continued to write after the Second World War, but this book focuses particularly on their writing between 1918 and 1939. Elizabeth von Arnim, Stella Benson, Bradda Field, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Stella Gibbons and Winifred Watson had much in common: they all wrote novels full of comic moments, which often challenged the cultural politics of the interwar period. Drawing on the literary and critical contexts of each novel, the essays here discuss the use of comic structures that enabled the authors to critique the dominant patriarchal structures of their time, and offer an alternative, sometimes subversive, view of the world in which their characters reside. This book contributes to the growing scholarly interest in interwar fiction, focusing principally on novelists who have fallen out of public view. It widens our understanding both of the authors and of the continuing, highly topical debate about interwar women novelists.

Download or read book Mapping the Modern Mind Virginia Woolf s Parodic Approach to the Art of Fiction in Jacob s Room written by Lindy van Rooyen and published by Diplomica Verlag. This book was released on 2012-05 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this study the author conducts a close reading of Virginia Woolf’s first ‘experimental’ novel, Jacob’s Room (1922). Her reading is based on the fundamental premise that the novel is an exploration of fictional form, rather than an exposition of any preconceived idea. Jacob’s Room is an essentially modernist text, and is characterised by extensive genre-mixing typical of the art of fiction in the early 20th century. Throughout her study the author analyses the extent to which the novel transgress the ‘boundaries’ of the novelistic genre. She explores the generic interface between the novel and those genres which are deemed to be innate to Virginia Woolf’s sensibility, i.e. the journalistic essay, biography and impressionist painting. The premise of this study leads the author to read the novel on two levels of significance: On the narrative, ‘surface’ level of the novel, Woolf constructs the tragic life of a promising young Englishman, Jacob Flanders, who dies in the First World War. Simultaneously, on the metafictional level of significance, Woolf, through her garrulous narrator, mocks and evaluates the actions of her characters, experimenting with various points of view in an attempt to define the character of her protagonist. Jacob’s ‘room’ is thus conceived as a ‘mental space’ in which a modern writer’s mind is ‘mapped’. The central aesthetic question which is debated in this room or forum relates to the essential art of modern fiction in general and the efficiency of characterisation in fiction in particular. It is argued that Virginia Woolf probes into the epistemic question of the essence of modern man and, in an attempt to capture the essence of her protagonist, speculates on the corresponding literary question how, and to what extent, the ‘soul’ of man can to be represented in fiction. The author uses this generic approach to the novel as a broad structuring principle for her study of Jacob’s Room. After discussing the socio-political context of modernism in the early 20th century, including the impact of the First World War on modernist writing, she focuses her study on those aspects of Woolf’s fiction which are deemed fundamental to the narrative strategy in Jacob’s Room, i.e. the role and nature of Woolf’s humour within the context of modernism; the ‘nodes’ or clusters of metaphors and symbols recurring in the text; the role of the narrator as ‘toastmaster’ of the debate on character and fiction in Jacob’s Forum; the extent to which the novel parodies the ‘new biography’ of the early twentieth century; and the extent to which Woolf transvaluates the tools of impressionist painting into modernist fiction.

Download or read book The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature written by David Scott Kastan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2006-03-03 with total page 2656 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From folk ballads to film scripts, this new five-volume encyclopedia covers the entire history of British literature from the seventh century to the present, focusing on the writers and the major texts of what are now the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. In five hundred substantial essays written by major scholars, the Encyclopedia of British Literature includes biographies of nearly four hundred individual authors and a hundred topical essays with detailed analyses of particular themes, movements, genres, and institutions whose impact upon the writing or the reading of literature was significant. An ideal companion to The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, this set will prove invaluable for students, scholars, and general readers. For more information, including a complete table of contents and list of contributors, please visit www.oup.com/us/ebl

Download or read book George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics written by K. Bluemel and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-30 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics celebrates the lives, literature, and politics of a group of four 'radical eccentrics' - the Tory anarchist poet Stevie Smith, the Marxist Indian nationalist Mulk Raj Anand, and the glamour-girl-turned-socialist Inez Holden - who formed a friendly circle around the famously radical and eccentric George Orwell. Demonstrating that Smith, Anand, and Holden matter for literary history just as they mattered for Orwell, George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics gives name and shape to a neglected movement within interwar and wartime English writing. It focuses on the lives and texts of Smith, Anand, and Holden in order to argue that these three writers throw into question limiting assumptions about art and politics-about standard relations between literary form and sex, gender, race, class, and empire-in ways that their group's most influential radical, Orwell, cannot. Embarking upon a kind of biographical-political-cultural-literary criticism, this book brings the radical eccentrics' vital, potentially transformative conversation to the attention of scholars of English literature for the first time, suggesting fascinating new approaches to the study of literary London during the thirties and forties.