Download or read book Goodness and the Literary Imagination written by Toni Morrison and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What exactly is goodness? Where is it found in the literary imagination? Toni Morrison, one of American letters’ greatest voices, pondered these perplexing questions in her celebrated Ingersoll Lecture, delivered at Harvard University in 2012 and published now for the first time in book form. Perhaps because it is overshadowed by the more easily defined evil, goodness often escapes our attention. Recalling many literary examples, from Ahab to Coetzee’s Michael K, Morrison seeks the essence of goodness and ponders its significant place in her writing. She considers the concept in relation to unforgettable characters from her own works of fiction and arrives at conclusions that are both eloquent and edifying. In a lively interview conducted for this book, Morrison further elaborates on her lecture’s ideas, discussing goodness not only in literature but in society and history—particularly black history, which has responded to centuries of brutality with profound creativity. Morrison’s essay is followed by a series of responses by scholars in the fields of religion, ethics, history, and literature to her thoughts on goodness and evil, mercy and love, racism and self-destruction, language and liberation, together with close examination of literary and theoretical expressions from her works. Each of these contributions, written by a scholar of religion, considers the legacy of slavery and how it continues to shape our memories, our complicities, our outcries, our lives, our communities, our literature, and our faith. In addition, the contributors engage the religious orientation in Morrison’s novels so that readers who encounter her many memorable characters such as Sula, Beloved, or Frank Money will learn and appreciate how Morrison’s notions of goodness and mercy also reflect her understanding of the sacred and the human spirit.
Download or read book Playing in the Dark written by Toni Morrison and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-07-24 with total page 86 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An immensely persuasive work of literary criticism that opens a new chapter in the American dialogue on race—and promises to change the way we read American literature—from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner Morrison shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that was manifestly unfree--and that came to serve white authors as embodiments of their own fears and desires. According to the Chicago Tribune, Morrison "reimagines and remaps the possibility of America." Her brilliant discussions of the "Africanist" presence in the fiction of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemingway leads to a dramatic reappraisal of the essential characteristics of our literary tradition. Written with the artistic vision that has earned the Nobel Prize-winning author a pre-eminent place in modern letters, Playing in the Dark is an invaluable read for avid Morrison admirers as well as students, critics, and scholars of American literature.
Download or read book The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity written by Eva Mroczek and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did Jews understand sacred writing before the concepts of "Bible" and "book" emerged? The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity challenges anachronistic categories to reveal new aspects of how ancient Jews imagined written revelation-a wildly varied collection stretching back to the dawn of time, with new discoveries always around the corner.
Download or read book Civil Rights in the White Literary Imagination written by Jonathan W. Gray and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2013-02 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The statement, "The Civil Rights Movement changed America," though true, has become something of a cliché. Civil rights in the White Literary Imagination seeks to determine how, exactly, the Civil Rights Movement changed the literary possibilities of four iconic American writers: Robert Penn Warren, Norman Mailer, Eudora Welty, and William Styron. Each of these writers published significant works prior to the Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954 and the Montgomery Bus Boycott that began in December of the following year, making it possible to trace their evolution in reaction to these events. The work these writers crafted in response to the upheaval of the day, from Warren's Who Speaks for the Negro?, to Mailer's "The White Negro" to Welty's "Where Is the Voice Coming From?" to Styron's Confessions of Nat Turner, reveal much about their own feeling in the moment even as they contribute to the national conversation that centered on race and democracy. By examining these works closely, Gray posits the argument that these writers significantly shaped discourse on civil rights as the movement was occurring but did so in ways that--intentionally or not--often relied upon a notion of the relative innocence of the South with regard to racial affairs, and on a construct of African Americans as politically and/or culturally na*ve. As these writers grappled with race and the myth of southern nobility, their work developed in ways that were simultaneously sympathetic of, and condescending to, black intellectual thought occurring at the same time.
Download or read book Time the City and the Literary Imagination written by Anne-Marie Evans and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-11-18 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Time, the City, and the Literary Imagination explores the relationship between the constructions and representations of the relationship between time and the city in literature published between the late eighteenth century and the present. This collection offers a new way of reading the literary city by tracing the ways in which the relationship between time and urban space can shape literary narratives and forms. The essays consider the representation of a range of literary cities from across the world and consider how an understanding of time, and time passing, can impact on our understanding of the primary texts. Literature necessarily deals with time, both as a function of storytelling and as an experience of reading. In this volume, the contributions demonstrate how literature about cities brings to the forefront the relationship between individual and communal experience and time.
Download or read book Epistrophies written by Brent Hayes Edwards and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-05 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1941 Thelonious Monk and Kenny Clarke copyrighted “Epistrophy,” one of the best-known compositions of the bebop era. The song’s title refers to a literary device—the repetition of a word or phrase at the end of successive clauses—that is echoed in the construction of the melody. Written two decades later, Amiri Baraka’s poem “Epistrophe” alludes slyly to Monk’s tune. Whether it is composers finding formal inspiration in verse or a poet invoking the sound of music, hearing across media is the source of innovation in black art. Epistrophies explores this fertile interface through case studies in jazz literature—both writings informed by music and the surprisingly large body of writing by jazz musicians themselves. From James Weldon Johnson’s vernacular transcriptions to Sun Ra’s liner note poems, from Henry Threadgill’s arresting song titles to Nathaniel Mackey’s “Song of the Andoumboulou,” there is an unending back-and-forth between music that hovers at the edge of language and writing that strives for the propulsive energy and melodic contours of music. At times this results in art that gravitates into multiple media. In Duke Ellington’s “social significance” suites, or in the striking parallels between Louis Armstrong’s inventiveness as a singer and trumpeter on the one hand and his idiosyncratic creativity as a letter writer and collagist on the other, one encounters an aesthetic that takes up both literature and music as components of a unique—and uniquely African American—sphere of art-making and performance.
Download or read book Peter Pan s Shadows in the Literary Imagination written by Kirsten Stirling and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-12-21 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a literary analysis of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan in all its different versions -- key rewritings, dramatisations, prequels, and sequels -- and includes a synthesis of the main critical interpretations of the text over its history. A comprehensive and intelligent study of the Peter Pan phenomenon, this study discusses the book’s complicated textual history, exploring its origins in the Harlequinade theatrical tradition and British pantomime in the nineteenth century. Stirling investigates potential textual and extra-textual sources for Peter Pan, the critical tendency to seek sources in Barrie’s own biography, and the proliferation of prequels and sequels aiming to explain, contextualize, or close off, Barrie’s exploration of the imagination. The sources considered include Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson’s Starcatchers trilogy, Régis Loisel’s six-part Peter Pan graphic novel in French (1990-2004), Andrew Birkin’s The Lost Boys series, the films Hook (1991), Peter Pan (2003) and Finding Neverland (2004), and Geraldine McCaughrean’s "official sequel" Peter Pan in Scarlet (2006), among others.
Download or read book Obsolete Objects in the Literary Imagination written by Francesco Orlando and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Translated here into English for the first time is a monumental work of literary history and criticism comparable in scope and achievement to Eric Auerbach’s Mimesis. Italian critic Francesco Orlando explores Western literature’s obsession with outmoded and nonfunctional objects (ruins, obsolete machinery, broken things, trash, etc.). Combining the insights of psychoanalysis and literary-political history, Orlando traces this obsession to a turning point in history, at the end of eighteenth-century industrialization, when the functional becomes the dominant value of Western culture. Roaming through every genre and much of the history of Western literature, the author identifies distinct categories into which obsolete images can be classified and provides myriad examples. The function of literature, he concludes, is to remind us of what we have lost and what we are losing as we rush toward the future.
Download or read book Slavery and the Literary Imagination written by Deborah E. McDowell and published by Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seven noted scholars examine slave narratives and the topic of slavery in American literature, from Frederick Douglass's Narrative (1845)-- treated in chapters by James Olney and William L. Andrews-- to Sheley Anne William's "Dessa Rose" (1984). Among the contributors, Arnold Rampersad reads W.E.B. DuBois's classic work "The Souls of Black Folk" (1903) as a response to Booker T. Washington's "Up from Slavery" (1901). Hazel V. Carby examines novels of slavery and novels of sharecropping and questions the critical tendency to conflate the two, thereby also conflating the nineteenth century with the twentieth, the rural with the urban.
Download or read book The Western in the Global Literary Imagination written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-11-21 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking collection of essays shows how the American Western has been reimagined in different national contexts, producing fictions that interrogate, reframe, and remix the genre in unexpectedly critical ways.
Download or read book Associationism and the Literary Imagination written by Craig Cairns Craig and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-31 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Associationism and the Literary Imagination traces the influence of empirical philosophy and associationist psychology on theories of literary creativity and on the experience of reading literature. It runs from David Hume's Treatise of Human Nature in 1739 to the works of major literary critics of the twentieth century, such as I.A. Richards, W.K. Wimsatt and Northrop Frye. Cairns Craig explores the ways in which associationist conceptions of literature gave rise to some of the key transformations in British writing between the romantic and modernist periods. In particular, he analyses the ways in which authors' conceptions of the form of their readers' aesthetic experience led to radical developments in literary style, from the fragmentary narrative of Sterne's Tristram Shandy in 1760 to Virginia Woolf's experiments in the rendering of characters' consciousness in the 1920s; and from Wordsworth's poetic use of autobiography to J.G. Frazer's exploration of a mythic unconscious in The Golden Bough. Detailed analyses are offered of the ways in which a wide variety of major British writers, including Scott, Lady Morgan, Dickens, Tennyson, Hardy, Yeats, Joyce and Woolf developed their literary techniques on the basis of associationist conceptions of the mind, and of how modern literary criticism - from Arthur Symons to Roland Barthes - is founded on associationist principles. Associationism and the Literary Imagination relocates the traditions of British writing since the eighteenth century within the neglected context of its native empirical philosophy, and reveals how many of the issues assumed to be products of 'postmodern' or 'deconstructive' theory have long been foregrounded and debated within the traditions of British empiricism. This is a work which provides a radical new perspective on the history of literature in Britain and Ireland and challenges many of the assumptions of contemporary theoretical debate about the
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.
Download or read book Slavery and the Roman Literary Imagination written by William Fitzgerald and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000-03-09 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines slavery in Roman culture through analysis of Roman literature; topics covered include punishment, fantasy, and the use of slaves as intermediaries between free persons.
Download or read book Premodern Ecologies in the Modern Literary Imagination written by Vin Nardizzi and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2019-04-08 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Premodern Ecologies in the Modern Literary Imagination explores how the cognitive and physical landscapes in which scholars conduct research, write, and teach have shaped their understandings of medieval and Renaissance English literary "oecologies." The collection strives to practice what Ursula K. Heise calls "eco-cosmopolitanism," a method that imagines forms of local environmentalism as a defense against the interventions of open-market global networks. It also expands the idea’s possibilities and identifies its limitations through critical studies of premodern texts, artefacts, and environmental history. The essays connect real environments and their imaginative (re)creations and affirm the urgency of reorienting humanity’s responsiveness to, and responsibility for, the historical links between human and non-human existence. The discussion of ways in which meditation on scholarly place and time can deepen ecocritical work offers an innovative and engaging approach that will appeal to both ecocritics generally and to medieval and early modern scholars.
Download or read book Iris Murdoch and the Literary Imagination written by Miles Leeson and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-07-25 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is the third volume in Palgrave' Macmillan's new Iris Murdoch Today scholarly series. Iris Murdoch and the Literary Imagination is the first major collection of literary essays since her centenary in 2019. It brings together leading Murdoch scholars from across the world who expand the boundaries of recent criticism offering work not only on the novels, but on her unpublished poetry and archival materials. This collection discusses her interest in, and use of, Japanese literature; her relationship with, and reader-response to her, in Australia; Murdoch in the post #metoo era; her lifelong interest in the supernatural, same-sex relationships and friendships; as well as the use and abuse of biographical material. The collection widens the field of Murdoch studies and marks a new waypoint in the development of her critical reception.
Download or read book Literature and the Political Imagination written by Andrea T. Baumeister and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-04-15 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume shows how modern political theory can be enriched through an engagement with works of literature. It uses the resources of literature to explore issues such as nationalism, liberal philosophy, utopiansim, narrative and the role of theory in political thought. A variety of approaches are adopted and the aim is to show some of the many and diverse ways in which literature may enrich political theorising, as well as considering some of the problems to which this may give rise. The theorists discussed include Richard Rorty, Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and Martha Nussbaum. There are literary references from Greek tradegy, Jonathan Swift, Brian Moore, Elizabeth Bowen and contemporary feminist utopian fiction. All the contributors have a long-standing interest in the relations between literature and moral and political thought. They are concerned not to be restricted by conventional academic boundaries and are not united by any party-line or uniformity of intellectual commitments. This volume will be of great interest to all students engaged in the study of politics and literature.
Download or read book The Future of Environmental Criticism written by Lawrence Buell and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2009-02-09 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by one of the world’s leading theorists in ecocriticism, this manifesto provides a critical summary of the ecocritical movement. A critical summary of the emerging discipline of “ecocriticism”. Written by one of the world’s leading theorists in ecocriticism. Traces the history of the ecocritical movement from its roots in the 1970s through to its diversification and proliferation today. Takes account of different ecocritical positions and directions. Describes major tensions within ecocriticism and addresses major criticisms of the movement. Looks to the future of ecocriticism, proposing that discourses of the environment should become a permanent part of literary and cultural studies.
