Download or read book Degeneration Culture and the Novel written by William M. Greenslade and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1994-04-28 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the impact of degeneration theories on British culture and fiction.
Download or read book Degeneration Culture and the Novel written by William P. Greenslade and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-02-11 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Towards the end of the nineteenth century many affluent and educated people, influenced by developments in medical, biological and psychiatric sciences, became convinced that ignorance, insanity and criminality - even homosexuality and hysteria - were symptoms of the degeneration of the human race. Such theories seemed to provide plausible explanations for disturbing social changes, and new insights into human character and morality. For a time they achieved extraordinary dominance. In this book William Greenslade investigates the impact of degeneration theories on British culture, and on fiction. He traces the difficulties experienced by writers, including Hardy, Gissing, Conrad, Wells, Forster and Woolf, in negotiating their own freedom of interpretation in the light of such theories; he pursues the survival of degenerationism in the work of popular writers Warwich Deeping and John Buchan; and he charts the resilience of its tropes through the 1930s.
Download or read book Degenerative Realism written by Christy Wampole and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-23 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new strain of realism has emerged in France. The novels that embody it represent diverse fears—immigration and demographic change, radical Islam, feminism, new technologies, globalization, American capitalism, and the European Union—but these books, often best-sellers, share crucial affinities. In their dystopian visions, the collapse of France, Europe, and Western civilization is portrayed as all but certain and the literary mode of realism begins to break down. Above all, they depict a degenerative force whose effects on the nation and on reality itself can be felt. Examining key novels by Michel Houellebecq, Frédéric Beigbeder, Aurélien Bellanger, Yann Moix, and other French writers, Christy Wampole identifies and critiques this emergent tendency toward “degenerative realism.” She considers the ways these writers draw on social science, the New Journalism of the 1960s, political pamphlets, reportage, and social media to construct an atmosphere of disintegration and decline. Wampole maps how degenerative realist novels explore a world contaminated by conspiracy theories, mysticism, and misinformation, responding to the internet age’s confusion between fact and fiction with a lament for the loss of the real and an unrelenting emphasis on the role of the media in crafting reality. In a time of widespread populist anxieties over the perceived decline of the French nation, this book diagnoses the literary symptoms of today’s reactionary revival.
Download or read book Heart Flesh Degeneration written by Ludwig Laher and published by Ariadne Press (CA). This book was released on 2006 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Degeneration written by Max Simon Nordau and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1993-01-01 with total page 612 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Max Nordau was a famous writer, a practicing physician, a bourgeois examplar of enterprise and energy when his Degeneration appeared in Germany in 1892. He argued that the spirit of the times was characterized by enervation, exhaustion, hysteria, egotism, and inability to adjust or to act. Culture had degenerated, he said, and if criminals, prostitutes, anarchists, and lunatics were degenerates, so were the authors and artists of the era. Degeneration, and the controversy it aroused, served to define the fine de siècle. Its targets included Nietzsche, Oscar Wilde, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Richard Wagner, Zola, and Walt Whitman. The book was enormously influential. Nordau anticipated Freud in describing art as a product of neurosis, and he set a precedent for psychological and sociological critiques of literature. You may wish to talk back to Degeneration, as George Bernard Shaw did, but you will be entertained by its vitality. Holbrook Jackson, in The Eighteen Nineties, called the book "an example of the very liveliness of a period which was equally lively in making or marring itself."
Download or read book The Great Degeneration written by Niall Ferguson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-06-24 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling author of The Ascent of Money and The Square and the Tower, a searching and provocative examination of the widespread institutional rot that threatens our collective future What causes rich countries to lose their way? Symptoms of decline are all around us today: slowing growth, crushing debts, increasing inequality, aging populations, antisocial behavior. But what exactly has gone wrong? The answer, Niall Ferguson argues in The Great Degeneration, is that our institutions—the intricate frameworks within which a society can flourish or fail—are degenerating. With characteristic verve and historical insight, Ferguson analyzes the causes of this stagnation and its profound consequences for the future of the West. The Great Degeneration is an incisive indictment of an era of negligence and complacency—and to arrest the breakdown of our civilization, Ferguson warns, will take heroic leadership and radical reform.
Download or read book Dirt in Victorian Literature and Culture written by Sabine Schülting and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-05 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Addressing the Victorian obsession with the sordid materiality of modern life, this book studies dirt in nineteenth-century English literature and the Victorian cultural imagination. Dirt litters Victorian writing – industrial novels, literature about the city, slum fiction, bluebooks, and the reports of sanitary reformers. It seems to be "matter out of place," challenging traditional concepts of art and disregarding the concern with hygiene, deodorization, and purification at the center of the "civilizing process." Drawing upon Material Cultural Studies for an analysis of the complex relationships between dirt and textuality, the study adds a new perspective to scholarship on both the Victorian sanitation movement and Victorian fiction. The chapters focus on Victorian commodity culture as a backdrop to narratives about refuse and rubbish; on the impact of waste and ordure on life stories; on the production and circulation of affective responses to filth in realist novels and slum travelogues; and on the function of dirt for both colonial discourse and its deconstruction in postcolonial writing. They address questions as to how texts about dirt create the effect of materiality, how dirt constructs or deconstructs meaning, and how the project of writing dirt attempts to contain its excessive materiality. Schülting discusses representations of dirt in a variety of texts by Charles Dickens, E. M. Forster, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Gissing, James Greenwood, Henry James, Charles Kingsley, Henry Mayhew, George Moore, Arthur Morrison, and others. In addition, she offers a sustained analysis of the impact of dirt on writing strategies and genre conventions, and pays particular attention to those moments when dirt is recycled and becomes the source of literary creation.
Download or read book Freaks in Late Modernist American Culture written by Nancy Bombaci and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2006 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Freaks in Late Modernist American Culture explores the emergence of what Nancy Bombaci terms «late modernist freakish aesthetics» - a creative fusion of «high» and «low» themes and forms in relation to distorted bodies. Literary and cinematic texts about «freaks» by Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Tod Browning, and Carson McCullers subvert and reinvent modern progress narratives in order to challenge high modernist literary and social ideologies. These works are marked by an acceptance of the disteleology, anarchy, and degeneration that racist discourses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries associated with racial and ethnic outsiders, particularly Jews. In a period of American culture beset with increasing pressures for social and political conformity and with the threat of fascism from Europe, these late modernist narratives about «freaks» defy oppressive norms and values as they search for an anarchic and transformational creativity.
Download or read book Degenerate Moderns written by E. Michael Jones and published by Ignatius Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this groundbreaking new book, Jones shows how some of the major determining leaders in modern thought and culture have rationalized their own immoral behavior and projected it onto a universal canvas. The main thesis of this book is that, in the intellectual life, there are only two ultimate alternatives: either the thinker conforms desire to truth or he conforms truth to desire. In the last one hundred years, the western cultural elite embarked upon a project which entailed the reversal of the values of the intellectual life so that truth would be subjected to desire as the final criterion of intellectual value. In looking at recent biographies of such major moderns as Freud, Kinsey, Keynes, Margaret Mead, Picasso, and others, there is a remarkable similarity between their lives and thought. After becoming involved in sexual license early on, they invariably chose an ideology or art form which subordinated reality to the exigencies of their sexual misbehavior.
Download or read book A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture written by David Bradshaw and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-10-20 with total page 626 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Companion combines a broad grounding in the essential texts and contexts of the modernist movement with the unique insights of scholars whose careers have been devoted to the study of modernism. An essential resource for students and teachers of modernist literature and culture Broad in scope and comprehensive in coverage Includes more than 60 contributions from some of the most distinguished modernist scholars on both sides of the Atlantic Brings together entries on elements of modernist culture, contemporary intellectual and aesthetic movements, and all the genres of modernist writing and art Features 25 essays on the signal texts of modernist literature, from James Joyce’s Ulysses to Zora Neal Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God Pays close attention to both British and American modernism
Download or read book Figures of the World written by Christopher Laing Hill and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-15 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Figures of the World: The Naturalist Novel and Transnational Form overturns Eurocentric genealogies and globalizing generalizations about “world literature” by examining the complex, contradictory history of naturalist fiction. Christopher Laing Hill follows naturalism’s emergence in France and circulation around the world from North and South America to East Asia. His analysis shows that transnational literary studies must operate on multiple scales, combine distant reading with close analysis, and investigate how literary forms develop on the move. The book begins by tracing the history of naturalist fiction from the 1860s into the twentieth century and the reasons it spread around the world. Hill explores the development of three naturalist figures—the degenerate body, the self-liberated woman, and the social milieu—through close readings of fiction from France, Japan, and the United States. Rather than genealogies of European influence or the domination of cultural “peripheries” by the center, novels by Émile Zola, Tayama Katai, Frank Norris, and other writers reveal conspicuous departures from metropolitan models as writers revised naturalist methods to address new social conditions. Hill offers a new approach to studying culture on a large scale for readers interested in literature, the arts, and the history of ideas.
Download or read book Faces of Degeneration written by Daniel Pick and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the historical contexts in France, Italy, and England within which the idea was developed, this text traces the political issues to which the concept of degeneration gave rise during the period from the revolutions of 1848 to the First World War and beyond.
Download or read book The Gothic Body written by Kelly Hurley and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1996-12-05 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The popularity of the Gothic in the British fin de siècle, and its links with scientific and social theories.
Download or read book Literature After Darwin written by V. Richter and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-12-14 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What makes us human? Where is the limit between human and animal? These are questions that haunt post-Darwinian literature. Covering fiction from Kipling to Kafka, this study offers a historically embedded analysis of anthropological anxiety in the period between the publication of the Origin of Species and the beginning of the Second World War.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture written by Juliet John and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 769 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Structured around three broad sections (on ‘Ways of Being: Identity and Ideology’, ‘Ways of Understanding: Knowledge and Belief’, and ‘Ways of Communicating: Print and Other Cultures’), the volume is sub-divided into 9 sub-sections each with its own ‘lead’ essay: on subjectivity, politics, gender and sexuality, place and race, religion, science, material and mass culture, aesthetics and visual culture, and theatrical culture. The collection, like today’s Victorian studies, is thoroughly interdisciplinary and yet its substantial Introduction explores a concern which is evident both implicitly and explicitly in the volume’s essays: that is, the nature and status of ‘literary’ culture and the literary from the Victorian period to the present.
Download or read book Literature of an Independent England written by C. Westall and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-07-09 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some of the most incisive writers on the subject rethink the relationship between Britain, England and English literary culture. It is premised on the importance of devolution, the uncertainty of the British union, the place of English Literature within the union, and the need for England to become a self-determining literary nation.
Download or read book Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination written by Katherine Byrne and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines representations of tuberculosis in Victorian fiction, giving insights into how society viewed this disease and its sufferers.
