Download or read book Prequels Coquels and Sequels in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction written by Armelle Parey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-08-30 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers to delineate a key phenomenon in contemporary Anglophone fiction: novel expansion, when the plot and characters from a finished novel are retrieved to be developed in new adventures set before, after or during the narrative time of the source-text. If autographic and allographic sequels are almost as old as literature, prequels – that imagine the anteriority of a narrative – and coquels – that develop secondary characters in the same story time as the source-text – are more recent. The overall trend for novel expansion spread in the mid-1980s and 1990s and has since shown no sign of abating. This volume is organised following three types of relationships to the source-texts even if these occasionally combine to produce a more complex structure. This book comprises 11 essays, preceded by an introduction, that examine narrative strategies, aesthetic, ethical and political tendencies underlying these novel expansions. Following the overview provided in the introduction, the reader will find case studies of prequels, coquels and sequels before a final chapter that encompasses them all and more.

Download or read book Making Time written by Carolin Gebauer and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-04-19 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Responding to the current surge in present-tense novels, Making Time is an innovative contribution to narratological research on present-tense usage in narrative fiction. Breaking with the tradition of conceptualizing the present tense purely as a deictic category denoting synchronicity between a narrative event and its presentation, the study redefines present-tense narration as a fully-fledged narrative strategy whose functional potential far exceeds temporal relations between story and discourse. The first part of the volume presents numerous analytical categories that systematically describe the formal, structural, functional, and syntactic dimensions of present-tense usage in narrative fiction. These categories are then deployed to investigate the uses and functions of present-tense narration in selected twenty-first century novels, including Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Ian McEwan’s Nutshell, and Irvine Welsh’s Skagboys. The seven case studies serve to illustrate the ubiquity of present-tense narration in contemporary fiction, ranging from the historical novel to the thriller, and to investigate the various ways in which the present tense contributes to narrative worldmaking.

Download or read book The Nineteenth Century Revis it ed written by Ina Bergmann and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-29 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nineteenth Century Revis(it)ed: The New Historical Fiction explores the renaissance of the American historical novel at the turn of the twenty-first century. The study examines the revision of nineteenth-century historical events in cultural products against the background of recent theoretical trends in American studies. It combines insights of literary studies with scholarship on popular culture. The focus of representation is the long nineteenth century – a period from the early republic to World War I – as a key epoch of the nation-building project of the United States. The study explores the constructedness of historical tradition and the cultural resonance of historical events within the discourse on the contemporary novel and the theory formation surrounding it. At the center of the discussion are the unprecedented literary output and critical as well as popular success of historical fiction in the USA since 1995. An additional postcolonial and transatlantic perspective is provided by the incorporation of texts by British and Australian authors and especially by the inclusion of insights from neo-Victorian studies. The book provides a critical comment on current and topical developments in American literature, culture, and historiography.

Download or read book Transmodern Perspectives on Contemporary Literatures in English written by Jessica Aliaga-Lavrijsen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-03-14 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Transmodern Perspectives on Contemporary Literatures in English offers a constructive dialogue on the concept of the transmodern, focusing on the works by very different contemporary authors from all over the world, such as: Chimanda Ngozi Adichie, Margaret Atwood, Sebastian Barry, A. S. Byatt, Tabish Khair, David Mitchell, Alice Munroe, Harry Parker, Caryl Phillips, Richard Rodriguez, Alan Spence, Tim Winton and Kenneth White. The volume offers a thorough questioning of the concept of the transmodern, as well as an informed insight into the future formal and thematic development of literatures in English.

Download or read book Victorian Dress in Contemporary Historical Fiction written by Danielle Mariann Dove and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-10-19 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Victorian Dress in Contemporary Historical Fiction is the first full-length study to investigate and attend to the deeply suggestive and highly symbolic iterations of Victorian women's dress in the contemporary cultural imagination. Drawing upon a range of popular and less well-studied neo-Victorian novels published between 1990 and 2014, as well as their Victorian counterparts, 19th-century illustrative material, and extant Victorian garments, Danielle Dove explores the creative possibilities afforded by dress and fashion as gendered sites of agency and affect. Focusing on the relationship between texts and textiles, she demonstrates how dress is central to the narrativization, re-formulation, and re-fashioning of the material past in the present. In its examination of the narrative trajectories, lively vitalities, and material entanglements that accrue to, and originate from, dress in the neo-Victorian novel, this study brings a fresh approach to reading Victorian sartorial culture. For researchers and students of Victorian and neo-Victorian studies, dress history, material culture, and gender studies, this volume offers a rich resource with which to illuminate the power of fashion in fiction.

Download or read book Memory and Identity written by Linda Pillière and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-10-24 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the ways in which ghosts haunt and shape cultural identities and memory, considering the manner in which the fluctuations of such identities sometimes imply the rethinking or rewriting of the past. Drawing on case studies in historical, political, literary and linguistic studies, it explores the narratives that produce imagined communities and identities and the places in which cultural identities are constructed through memory, asking how far these identities and memories disinherit or exclude otherness, and how far ghosts disturb orderly narratives, inviting multiple readings of the past. Thematically organized to consider the persistence of ghosts within present memory and identity, the creation of new identities through intertwining narratives of the past, and the reclamation of identities in postcolonial contexts, Memory and Identity: Ghosts of the past in the English-speaking world offers a multi-disciplinary examination of the concept of haunting. Memory and Identity will appeal to scholars of sociology, anthropology, cultural studies and history with interests in memory and identity.

Download or read book Origin and Ellipsis in the Writing of Hilary Mantel written by Eileen Pollard and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-04-11 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Origin and Ellipsis in the Writing of Hilary Mantel provokes a re-engagement with Derrida’s thinking in contemporary literature, with particular emphasis on the philosopher’s preoccupation with the process of writing. This is the first book-length study of Mantel’s writing, not just in terms of Derrida’s thought, but through any critical perspective or lens to date.

Download or read book David Foster Wallace and the Body written by Peter Sloane and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-05-17 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Foster Wallace and the Body is the first full-length study to focus on Wallace’s career-long fascination with the human body and the textual representation of the body. The book provides engaging, accessible close readings that highlight the importance of the overlooked, and yet central theme of all of this major American author’s works: having a body. Wallace repeatedly made clear that good fiction is about what it means to be a ‘human being’. A large part of what that means is having a body, and being conscious of the conflicts that arise, morally and physically, as a result; a fact with which, as Wallace forcefully and convincingly argues, we all desire ‘to be reconciled’. Given the ubiquity of the themes of embodiment in Wallace’s work, this study is an important addition to an expanding field. The book also opens up the themes addressed to interrogate aspects of contemporary literature, culture, and society more generally, placing Wallace’s works in the history of literary and philosophical engagements with the brute fact of embodiment.

Download or read book Extreme States written by Coco d'Hont and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-11-14 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Transgressive fiction explores the crossing of boundaries. Because of its extreme content and style, it is often considered controversial. However, transgressive fiction is not just shocking or disruptive. It is a continuation of an American tradition of creating culture through the crossing of moral, geographical and social boundaries. Extreme States traces the evolution of American transgressive fiction from the 1960s to 2000, exploring how transgressive fiction reflects, exaggerates and critically interrogates how central American ideologies are perpetually (re)constructed in its extra-textual context.

Download or read book From the Delivered to the Dispatched written by Harriet Stilley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-11-08 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Delivered to the Dispatched: Masculinity in Modern American Fiction (1969-1977) focuses on masculinity in late twentieth-century American fiction. This rigorous study shows the ways post-war American authors engage with the tension between capitalist consumer culture and traditional national conceptions of American manhood. Drawing on examples from the works of prolific contemporary American writers, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison and Michael Herr, Stilley investigates hypermasculine male violence, the classical and grotesque body, as well as specific regional themes such as the Western frontier, the American Adam, the Southern Gothic and the Suburban Gothic.

Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Jane Austen written by Cheryl A. Wilson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-10-13 with total page 637 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published anonymously, as ‘a lady’, Jane Austen is now among the world’s most famous and highly revered authors. The Routledge Companion to Jane Austen provides wide-ranging coverage of Jane Austen’s works, reception, and legacy, with chapters that draw on the latest literary research and theory and represent foundational and authoritative scholarship as well as new approaches to an author whose works provide seemingly endless inspiration for reinterpretation, adaptation, and appropriation. The Companion provides up-to-date work by an international team of established and emerging Austen scholars and includes exciting chapters not just on Austen in her time but on her ongoing afterlife, whether in the academy and the wider world of her fans or in cinema, new media, and the commercial world. Parts within the volume explore Jane Austen in her time and within the literary canon; the literary critical and theoretical study of her novels, unpublished writing, and her correspondence; and the afterlife of her work as exemplified in film, digital humanities, and new media. In addition, the Companion devotes special attention to teaching Jane Austen.

Download or read book George R R Martin and the Fantasy Form written by Joseph Rex Young and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-03-13 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using the frameworks of literary theory relevant to modern fantasy, Dr. Joseph Young undertakes a compelling examination of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and his employment of the structural demands and thematic aptitudes of his chosen genre. Examining Martin’s approaches to his obligations and licenses as a fantasist, Young persuasively argues that the power of A Song of Ice and Fire derives not from Martin’s abandonment of genre convention, as is sometimes asserted, but from his ability to employ those conventions in ways that further, rather than constrain, his authorial program. Written in clear and accessible prose, George R. R. Martin and the Fantasy Form is a timely work which encourages a reassessment of Martin and his approach to his most famous novels. This is an important work for both students and critics of Martin’s work and argues for a reading of A Song of Ice and Fire as a wide-ranging example of what modern fantasy can accomplish when employed with an eye to its capabilities and purpose.

Download or read book Theorizing Ethnicity and Nationality in the Chick Lit Genre written by Erin Hurt and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-26 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars and readers alike need little help identifying the infamous Bridget Jones or Carrie Bradshaw. While it is no stretch to say that these fictional characters are the most recognizable within the chic lit genre, there are certainly many others that have helped define this body of work. While previous research has focused primarily on white American chick lit, Theorizing Ethnicity and Nationality in the Chick Lit Genre, takes a wider look at the genre, by exploring chick lit novels featuring protagonists from a variety of ethnic backgrounds set both within and outside of the US.

Download or read book Haruki Murakami written by Chikako Nihei and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-05-03 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Haruki Murakami: Storytelling and Productive Distance studies the evolution of the monogatari, or narrative and storytelling in the works of Haruki Murakami. Author Chikako Nihei argues that Murakami’s power of monogatari lies in his use of distancing effects; storytelling allows individuals to "cross" into a different context, through which they can effectively observe themselves and reality. His belief in the importance of monogatari is closely linked to his generation’s experience of the counter-­‐‐culture movement in the late1960s and his research on the 1995 Tokyo Sarin Gas Attack caused by the Aum shinrikyo cult, major events in postwar Japan that revealed many people’s desire for a stable narrative to interact with and form their identity from.

Download or read book Never Ending Watchmen written by Will Brooker and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-09-07 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What began with Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' landmark graphic novel, Watchmen (1987) is no longer a single story, but rather a cross-platform, multi-media franchise, including a role-playing game and video game, a motion comic, a Zack Snyder movie, and a series of comic book prequels and sequels, as well as a prestige HBO TV series. Will Brooker explores the way that Watchmen expanded over time from the mid-1980s to the present day, drawing on theories of adaptation, intertextuality and deconstruction to argue that each addition subtly changes our understanding of the original. Does it matter whether these adaptations are 'faithful'? Can they ever be, as they cross over into another medium? How does each version enter a dialogue with the others? And as Damon Lindelof's series ran parallel to an entirely distinct comic book Watchmen sequel, Doomsday Clock, how do readers and viewers make sense of these conflicting narratives? Can we relate the unstable, shifting stories of Watchmen to our contemporary climate of post-truth, where we have to weigh up contradictory versions of the facts and decide which we believe?

Download or read book Adapting Endings from Book to Screen written by Armelle Parey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-09-09 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a new perspective on adaptation of books to the screen; by focusing on endings, new light is shed on this key facet of film and television studies. The authors look at a broad range of case studies from different genres, eras, countries and formats to analyse literary and cinematic traditions, technical considerations and ideological issues involved in film and television adaptions. The investigation covers both the ideological implications of changes made in adapting the final pages to the screen, as well as the aesthetic stance taken in modifying (or on the contrary, maintaining) the ending of the source text. By including writings on both film and television adaptations, this book examines the array of possibilities for the closure of an adapted narrative, focusing both on the specificities of film and different television forms (miniseries and ongoing television narratives) and at the same time suggesting the commonalities of these audiovisual forms in their closing moments. Adapting Endings from Book to Screen will be of interest to all scholars working in media studies, film and television studies, and adaptation studies.

Download or read book The Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism written by Mads Rosendahl Thomsen and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-07-23 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As our ideas of the human have come under increasing challenges – from technological change, from medical advances, from the existential threat of climate crisis, from an ideological decentering of the human, amongst many other things – the 'posthuman' has become an increasingly central topic in the Humanities. Bringing together leading scholars from across the world and a wide range of disciplines, this is the most comprehensive available survey of cutting edge contemporary scholarship on posthumanism in literature, culture and theory. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism explores: - Central critical concepts and approaches, including transhumanism, new materialism and the Anthropocene - Ethical perspectives on ecology, race, gender and disability - Technology, from data and artificial intelligence to medicine and genetics - A wide range of genres and forms, from literary and science fiction, through film, television and music, to comics, video games and social media.