Download or read book Postwar Academic Fiction written by K. Womack and published by Springer. This book was released on 2001-12-17 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a literary genre, academic fiction has emerged in recent years as one of the most popular modes for satirizing the cultural conflicts and sociological nuances inherent in campus life. Drawing upon recent insights in ethical criticism and moral philosophy, Postwar Academic Fiction: Satire, Ethics, Community offers new readings of fictional and nonfictional works by such figures as Kingsley Amis, Vladimir Nabokov, Joyce Carol Oates, David Lodge, David Mamet, Ishmael Reed, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar and Jane Smiley.
Download or read book Postwar American Fiction and the Rise of Modern Conservatism written by Bryan M. Santin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-11 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bryan M. Santin examines over a half-century of intersection between American fiction and postwar conservatism. He traces the shifting racial politics of movement conservatism to argue that contemporary perceptions of literary form and aesthetic value are intrinsically connected to the rise of the American Right. Instead of casting postwar conservatives as cynical hustlers or ideological fanatics, Santin shows how the long-term rhetorical shift in conservative notions of literary value and prestige reveal an aesthetic antinomy between high culture and low culture. This shift, he argues, registered and mediated the deeper foundational antinomy structuring postwar conservatism itself: the stable social order of traditionalism and the creative destruction of free-market capitalism. Postwar conservatives produced, in effect, an ambivalent double register in the discourse of conservative literary taste that sought to celebrate neo-aristocratic manifestations of cultural capital while condemning newer, more progressive manifestations revolving around racial and ethnic diversity.
Download or read book Postwar Academic Fiction written by and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a literary genre, academic fiction has emerged in recent years as one of the most popular modes for satirizing the cultural conflicts and sociological nuances inherent in campus life. Drawing upon recent insights in ethical criticism and moral philosophy, "Postwar Academic Fiction: Satire, Ethics, Community" offers new readings of fictional and nonfictional works by such figures as Kingsley Amis, Vladimir Nabokov, Joyce Carol Oates, David Lodge, David Mamet, Ishmael Reed, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar and Jane Smiley.
Download or read book The Program Era written by Mark McGurl and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-11-30 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Program Era, Mark McGurl offers a fundamental reinterpretation of postwar American fiction, asserting that it can be properly understood only in relation to the rise of mass higher education and the creative writing program. McGurl asks both how the patronage of the university has reorganized American literature and—even more important—how the increasing intimacy of writing and schooling can be brought to bear on a reading of this literature. McGurl argues that far from occasioning a decline in the quality or interest of American writing, the rise of the creative writing program has instead generated a complex and evolving constellation of aesthetic problems that have been explored with energy and at times brilliance by authors ranging from Flannery O’Connor to Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth, Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates, and Toni Morrison. Through transformative readings of these and many other writers, The Program Era becomes a meditation on systematic creativity—an idea that until recently would have seemed a contradiction in terms, but which in our time has become central to cultural production both within and beyond the university. An engaging and stylishly written examination of an era we thought we knew, The Program Era will be at the center of debates about postwar literature and culture for years to come.
Download or read book Redlining Culture written by Richard Jean So and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-15 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The canon of postwar American fiction has changed over the past few decades to include far more writers of color. It would appear that we are making progress—recovering marginalized voices and including those who were for far too long ignored. However, is this celebratory narrative borne out in the data? Richard Jean So draws on big data, literary history, and close readings to offer an unprecedented analysis of racial inequality in American publishing that reveals the persistence of an extreme bias toward white authors. In fact, a defining feature of the publishing industry is its vast whiteness, which has denied nonwhite authors, especially black writers, the coveted resources of publishing, reviews, prizes, and sales, with profound effects on the language, form, and content of the postwar novel. Rather than seeing the postwar period as the era of multiculturalism, So argues that we should understand it as the invention of a new form of racial inequality—one that continues to shape the arts and literature today. Interweaving data analysis of large-scale patterns with a consideration of Toni Morrison’s career as an editor at Random House and readings of individual works by Octavia Butler, Henry Dumas, Amy Tan, and others, So develops a form of criticism that brings together qualitative and quantitative approaches to the study of literature. A vital and provocative work for American literary studies, critical race studies, and the digital humanities, Redlining Culture shows the importance of data and computational methods for understanding and challenging racial inequality.
Download or read book A Novel Marketplace written by Evan Brier and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2012-02-25 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As television transformed American culture in the 1950s, critics feared the influence of this newly pervasive mass medium on the nation's literature. While many studies have addressed the rhetorical response of artists and intellectuals to mid-twentieth-century mass culture, the relationship between the emergence of this culture and the production of novels has gone largely unexamined. In A Novel Marketplace, Evan Brier illuminates the complex ties between postwar mass culture and the making, marketing, and reception of American fiction. Between 1948, when television began its ascendancy, and 1959, when Random House became a publicly owned corporation, the way American novels were produced and distributed changed considerably. Analyzing a range of mid-century novels—including Paul Bowles's The Sheltering Sky, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, and Grace Metalious's Peyton Place—Brier reveals the specific strategies used to carve out cultural and economic space for the American novel just as it seemed most under threat. During this anxious historical moment, the book business underwent an improbable expansion, by capitalizing on an economic boom and a rising population of educated consumers and by forming institutional alliances with educators and cold warriors to promote reading as both a cultural and political good. A Novel Marketplace tells how the book trade and the novelists themselves successfully positioned their works as embattled holdouts against an oppressive mass culture, even as publishers formed partnerships with mass-culture institutions that foreshadowed the multimedia mergers to come in the 1960s. As a foil for and a partner to literary institutions, mass media corporations assisted in fostering the novel's development as both culture and commodity.
Download or read book The Body in Postwar Japanese Fiction written by Douglas Slaymaker and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-08-02 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores one of the crucial themes in postwar Japanese fiction. Through an examination of the work of a number of prominent twentieth century Japanese writers, the book analyses the meaning of the body in postwar Japanese discourse, the gender constructions of the imagery of the body and the implications for our understanding of individual and national identity. This book will be of interest to all students of modern Japanese literature.
Download or read book Metafiction and the Postwar Novel written by Andrew Dean and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Metafiction and the Postwar Novel is a full-length reassessment of one of the definitive literary forms of the postwar period, sometimes known as 'postmodern metafiction'. In the place of large-scale theorizing, this book centres on the intimacies of writing situations - metafiction as it responds to readers, literary reception, and earlier works in a career. The emergence of archival materials and posthumously published works helps to bring into view the stakes of different moments of writing. It develops new terms for discussing literary self-reflexivity, derived from a reading of Don Quixote and its reception by J.L. Borges - the 'self of writing' and the 'public author as signature'. Across three comprehensive chapters, Metafiction and Postwar Fiction shows how some of the most highly-regarded postwar writers were motivated to incorporate reflexive elements into their writing - and to what ends. The first chapter, on South African novelist J. M. Coetzee, shows with a new clarity how his fictions drew from and relativized academic literary theory and the conditions of writing in apartheid South Africa. The second chapter, on New Zealand writer Janet Frame, draws widely from her fictions, autobiographies, and posthumously published materials. It demonstrates the terms in which her writing addresses a readership seemingly convinced that her work expressed the interior experience of 'madness'. The final chapter, on American writer Philip Roth, shows how his early reception led to his later, and often explosive, reconsiderations of identity and literary value in postwar America.
Download or read book Reconstruction Fiction written by Paula Derdiger and published by . This book was released on 2022-08-08 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Assesses the impact of World War II and the welfare state on literary fiction by focusing on housing.
Download or read book Postwar written by Tony Judt and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2006-09-05 with total page 1000 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize • Winner of the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award • One of the New York Times' Ten Best Books of the Year “Impressive . . . Mr. Judt writes with enormous authority.” —The Wall Street Journal “Magisterial . . . It is, without a doubt, the most comprehensive, authoritative, and yes, readable postwar history.” —The Boston Globe Almost a decade in the making, this much-anticipated grand history of postwar Europe from one of the world's most esteemed historians and intellectuals is a singular achievement. Postwar is the first modern history that covers all of Europe, both east and west, drawing on research in six languages to sweep readers through thirty-four nations and sixty years of political and cultural change-all in one integrated, enthralling narrative. Both intellectually ambitious and compelling to read, thrilling in its scope and delightful in its small details, Postwar is a rare joy. Judt's book, Ill Fares the Land, republished in 2021 featuring a new preface by bestselling author of Between the World and Me and The Water Dancer, Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Download or read book Paraliterary written by Merve Emre and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-11-14 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literature departments are staffed by, and tend to be focused on turning out, “good” readers—attentive to nuance, aware of history, interested in literary texts as self-contained works. But the vast majority of readers are, to use Merve Emre’s tongue-in-cheek term, “bad” readers. They read fiction and poetry to be moved, distracted, instructed, improved, engaged as citizens. How should we think about those readers, and what should we make of the structures, well outside the academy, that generate them? We should, Emre argues, think of such readers not as non-literary but as paraliterary—thriving outside the institutions we take as central to the literary world. She traces this phenomenon to the postwar period, when literature played a key role in the rise of American power. At the same time as American universities were producing good readers by the hundreds, many more thousands of bad readers were learning elsewhere to be disciplined public communicators, whether in diplomatic and ambassadorial missions, private and public cultural exchange programs, multinational corporations, or global activist groups. As we grapple with literature’s diminished role in the public sphere, Paraliterary suggests a new way to think about literature, its audience, and its potential, one that looks at the civic institutions that have long engaged readers ignored by the academy.
Download or read book Post War Jewish Fiction written by D. Brauner and published by Springer. This book was released on 2001-07-18 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this groundbreaking study, David Brauner explores the representation of Jewishness in a number of works by postwar British and American Jewish writers, identifying a transatlantic sensibility characterised by an insistent compulsion to explain themselves and their Jewishness in ambivalent terms. Through detailed readings of novels by famous American authors such as Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud and Arthur Miller, alongside those by lesser-known British writers such as Frederic Raphael, Jonathan Wilson, Howard Jacobson and Clive Sinclair, certain common preoccupations emerge: Gentiles who mistake themselves for Jews; Jewish hostility towards Nature; writing (and not writing) about the Holocaust, and the relationship between fact and fiction.
Download or read book Memory and Trauma in the Postwar Spanish Novel written by Sarah Leggott and published by Bucknell University Press. This book was released on 2013-12-11 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, much Spanish literary criticism has been characterized by debates about collective and historical memory, stemming from a national obsession with the past that has seen an explosion of novels and films about the Spanish Civil War and Franco dictatorship. This growth of so-called memory studies in literary scholarship has focused on the representation of memory and trauma in contemporary narratives dealing with the Civil War and ensuing dictatorship. In contrast, the novel of the postwar period has received relatively little critical attention of late, despite the fact that memory and trauma also feature, in different ways and to varying degrees, in many works written during the Franco years. The essays in this study argue that such novels merit a fresh critical approach, and that contemporary scholarship relating to the representation of memory and trauma in literature can enhance our understanding of the postwar Spanish novel. The volume opens with essays that engage with aspects of contemporary theoretical approaches to memory in order to reveal the ways in which these are pertinent to Spanish novels written in the first postwar decades, with studies on novels by Camilo José Cela, Carmen Laforet, Arturo Barea and Ana María Matute. Its second section focuses on the representation of trauma in specific postwar novels, drawing on elements from trauma studies scholarship to discuss neglected works by Mercedes Salisachs, Dolores Medio and Ignacio Aldecoa. The final essays continue the focus on the theme of trauma and revisit works by women writers, namely Carmen Laforet, Rosa Chacel, Ana María Matute and María Zambrano, that foreground the experiences of female protagonists who are seeking to deal with a traumatic past. The essays in this volume thus propose a new direction for the study of Spanish literature of 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s, enhancing existing approaches to the postwar Spanish novel through an engagement with contemporary scholarship on memory and trauma in literature.
Download or read book Uncontained written by Elizabeth A. Wheeler and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the post-war era, American urban fiction was dominated by the imagery of containment. This book offers a critique of this familiar story, evident in the noir narratives of James M. Cain and in work by Ellison, Roth, Salinger, Percy, Capote and others.
Download or read book The Complicit Text written by Ivan Stacy and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-12-10 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Complicit Text: Failures of Witnessing in Postwar Fiction identifies the causes of complicity in the face of unfolding atrocities by examining the works of Albert Camus, Milan Kunera, Kazuo Ishiguro, W. G. Sebald, Thomas Pynchon, and Margaret Atwood. Ivan Stacy argues that complicity often stems from narrative failures to bear witness to wrongdoing. However, literary fiction, he contends, can at once embody and examine forms of complicity on three different levels: as a theme within literary texts, as a narrative form, and also as it implicates readers themselves through empathetic engagement with the text. Furthermore, Stacy questions what forms of non-complicit action are possible and explores the potential for productive forms of compromise. Stacy discusses both individual dilemmas of complicity in the shadow of World War II and collective complicity in the context of contemporary concerns, such as the hegemony of neoliberalism and the climate emergency.
Download or read book Art History and Postwar Fiction written by Kevin Brazil and published by Oxford English Monographs. This book was released on 2019-02-06 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Art, History, and Postwar Fiction explores the ways in which novelists responded to the visual arts from the aftermath of the Second World War to the present day. If art had long served as a foil to enable novelists to reflect on their craft, this book argues that in the postwar period, novelists turned to the visual arts to develop new ways of conceptualizing the relationship between literature and history. The sense that the novel was becalmed in the end of history was pervasive in the postwar decades. In seeming to bring modernism to a climax whilst repeating its foundational gestures, visual art also raised questions about the relationship between continuity and change in the development of art. In chapters on Samuel Beckett, William Gaddis, John Berger, and W. G. Sebald, and shorter discussions of writers like Doris Lessing, Kathy Acker, and Teju Cole, this book shows that writing about art was often a means of commenting on historical developments of the period: the Cold War, the New Left, the legacy of the Holocaust. Furthermore, it argues that forms of postwar visual art, from abstraction to the readymade, offered novelists ways of thinking about the relationship between form and history that went beyond models of reflection or determination. By doing so, this book also argues that attention to interactions between literature and art can provide critics with new ways to think about the relationship between literature and history beyond reductive oppositions between formalism and historicism, autonomy and context.
Download or read book Postmodern Postwar and After written by Jason Gladstone and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2016-07 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Within the past ten years, the field of contemporary American literary studies has changed significantly. Following the turn of the twenty-first century and mounting doubts about the continued explanatory power of the category of “postmodernism,” new organizations have emerged, book series have been launched, journals have been created, and new methodologies, periodizations, and thematics have redefined the field. Postmodern/Postwar—and After aims to be a field-defining book—a sourcebook for the new and emerging critical terrain—that explores the postmodern/postwar period and what comes after. The first section of essays returns to the category of the “post-modern” and argues for the usefulness of key concepts and themes from postmodernism to the study of contemporary literature, or reevaluates postmodernism in light of recent developments in the field and historical and economic changes in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. These essays take the contemporary abandonments of postmodernism as an occasion to assess the current states of postmodernity. After that, the essays move to address the critical shift away from postmodernism as a description of the present, and toward a new sense of postmodernism as just one category among many that scholars can use to describe the recent past. The final section looks forward and explores the question of what comes after the postwar/postmodern. Taken together, these essays from leading and emerging scholars on the state of twenty-first-century literary studies provide a number of frameworks for approaching contemporary literature as influenced by, yet distinct from, postmodernism. The result is an indispensable guide that seeks to represent and understand the major overhauling of postwar American literary studies that is currently underway.
