Download or read book The Humanist Re Turn Reclaiming the Self in Literature written by Michael Bryson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-07-31 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The exciting new book argues for a renewed emphasis on humanism--contrary to the trend of post-humanism, or what Neema Parvini calls "the anti-humanism" of the last several decades of literary and theoretical scholarship. In this trail-blazing study, Michael Bryson argues for this renewal of perspective by covering literature written in different languages, times, and places, calling for a return to a humanism, which focuses on literary characters and their psychological and existential struggles—not struggles of competition, but of connection, the struggles of fragmented, incomplete individuals for integration, wholeness, and unity.

Download or read book Humanism Anti Authoritarianism and Literary Aesthetics written by Ulf Schulenberg and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2023-08-10 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presenting pragmatist humanism as a form of anti-authoritarianism, this book sheds light on the contemporary significance of pragmatist aesthetics and the revival of humanism. This interdisciplinary study shows that a mediation between pragmatist aesthetics – which emphasizes the significance of creating, making, and inventing – and Marxist materialist aesthetics – which values form – promises interesting results and that the former can learn from the latter. In doing so, Ulf Schulenberg discusses 3 layers of the multi-layered phenomenon that is the revival of humanism: He first explains the potential of a pragmatist humanism, clarifying the contemporary significance of humanism. He then argues that pragmatist humanism is a form of anti-authoritarianism. Finally, he shows the possibility of bringing together the resurgence of humanism and a renewed interest in the work of aesthetic form by arguing that pragmatist aesthetics needs a more complex conception of form. Establishing a transatlantic theoretical dialogue, Humanism, Anti-Authoritarianism, and Literary Aesthetics brings together literary and aesthetic theory, philosophy, and intellectual history. It discusses a broad range of authors – from Emerson, Whitman, James, Nietzsche, Proust, and Dewey to Wittgenstein, Lukács, Adorno, Jameson, Latour, and Rorty – to illuminate how humanism, pragmatism, and anti-authoritarianism are interlinked.

Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Humanism and Literature written by Michael Bryson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-03-31 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Companion to Humanism and Literature provides readers with a comprehensive reassessment of the value of humanism in an intellectual landscape. Offering contributions by leading international scholars, this volume seeks to define literature as a core expressive form and an essential constitutive element of newly reformulated understandings of humanism. While the value of humanism has recently been dominated by anti-humanist and post-humanist perspectives which focused on the flaws and exclusions of previous definitions of humanism, this volume examines the human problems, dilemmas, fears, and aspirations expressed in literature, as a fundamentally humanist art form and activity. Divided into three overarching categories, this companion will explore the histories, developments, debates, and contestations of humanism in literature, and deliver fresh definitions of "the new humanism" for the humanities. This focus aims to transcend the boundaries of a world in which human life is all too often defined in terms of restrictions—political, economic, theological, intellectual—and lived in terms of obedience, conformity, isolation, and fear. The Routledge Companion to Humanism and Literature will provide invaluable support to humanities students and scholars alike seeking to navigate the relevance and resilience of humanism across world cultures and literatures.

Download or read book The Monarch and the Non Human in Literature and Cinema written by Nizar Zouidi and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-12-27 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection studies the representations of the character of the monarch in literature and cinema. Being a person, an institution, a character archetype and a narrative role, the characters of the monarch and other royal or regal characters oscillate between humanity and the non-human. As such, they are hybrid forms of existence and subjectivity. The authors of this collection explore this hybridity across large spectra of genres, historical periods and cultural contexts. Some of the most prolific and widely read scholars analyze the archetype of the monarch on the page, the stage and the screen. They cover large swathes of intersecting creative and interpretive territories including ancient epic and religious poetry, Arthurian legends, British Renaissance and modern drama, British horror films and Hollywood crime and sports films. This collection also features interviews with six prominent comic book writers and artists, who discuss the influence of classical royal archetypes on their works.

Download or read book Contemporary Capitalism Crisis and the Politics of Fiction written by Roberto del Valle Alcalá and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-10-28 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary Capitalism, Crisis, and the Politics of Fiction: Literature Beyond Fordism proposes a fresh approach to contemporary fictional engagements with the idea of crisis in capitalism and its various social and economic manifestations. The book investigates how late-twentieth and twenty-first-century Anglophone fiction has imagined, interpreted, and in most cases resisted, the collapse of the socio-economic structures built after the Second World War and their replacement with a presumably immaterial order of finance-led economic development. Through a series of detailed readings of the words of authors Martin Amis, Hari Kunzru, Don DeLillo, Zia Haider Rahman, John Lanchester, Paul Murray and Zadie Smith among others, this study sheds light on the embattled and decidedly unstable nature of contemporary capitalism.

Download or read book The Working Class and Twenty First Century British Fiction written by Phil O'Brien and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-12-05 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Working Class and Twenty-First-Century British Fiction looks at how the twenty-first-century British novel has explored contemporary working-class life. Studying the works of David Peace, Gordon Burn, Anthony Cartwright, Ross Raisin, Jenni Fagan, and Sunjeev Sahota, the book shows how they have mapped the shift from deindustrialisation through to stigmatization of individuals and communities who have experienced profound levels of destabilization and unemployment. O'Brien argues that these novels offer ways of understanding fundamental aspects of contemporary capitalism for the working class in modern Britain, including, class struggle, inequality, trauma, social abjection, racism, and stigmatization, exclusively looking at British working-class literature of the twenty-first century.

Download or read book Reading Contingency written by David Wylot and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-11-25 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Reading Contingency: The Accident in Contemporary Fiction, David Wylot constructs an innovative study of the relationship between plotted accidents in twenty-first century British and American fiction, the phenomenology of reading, and a contemporary experience of time that is increasingly understood to be contingent and accidental. A synthesis of literary and cultural analysis, narratology, critical theories of time and the philosophy of contingency, the book explores the accident’s imagination of contemporary time and the relationship between reading and living in novels by writers including A.M. Homes, Nicola Barker, Noah Hawley, J.M. Coetzee, J.G. Ballard, Jesmyn Ward, Jennifer Egan, and Tom McCarthy.

Download or read book Dissent and the Dynamics of Cultural Change written by Matthew Pifer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-11-08 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dissent and the Dynamics of Cultural Change: Lessons from the Underground Presses of the Late Sixties, examines alternative presses’ critique of culture at a time of infamous transformation and revolution in the United States. In this new study, author Matthew Pifer seeks to delineate the structure of dissent to better understand how cultural change is realized, and explores the relationships between the public and those cultural institutions that define the values and social norms that shaped daily life.

Download or read book Urban Captivity Narratives written by Heather Hillsburg and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-07-30 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Evolving from a rigorous study of post-9/11 women's writing, Dr. Heather Hillsburg's new monograph identifies an emerging genre, which she names Urban Captivity Narratives. Using examples ranging from memoir to young adult fiction, each of the texts examined in the study follows a female protagonist who has survived abduction, been held captive for months or even years, and subjected to sexual, emotional, and physical abuse by their captor. Hillsburg contextualizes these narratives, and takes into consideration our current political atmosphere, the role of patriarchy, and various social anxieties that come into play when discussing the kind of oppression seen in these narratives.

Download or read book Oxford Guides to Chaucer Troilus and Criseyde written by Barry Windeatt and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-10-31 with total page 477 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a comprehensive critical guide to Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. This new edition has been comprehensively revised in light of the latest scholarly and critical research and with a fully updated bibliography. It includes a full account of Chaucer's imaginative deployment of his sources, and an extended survey of this narrative poem's innovative combination of a range of generic identities. The chapters explain how Chaucer builds thematic significance into his poem's symmetrical structure, and the poem's distinctive variety in style and language, as well as a full commentary on the poem's concerns with love in the contexts of time and mutability and human free will. The Guide explores the poem as an extended debate about the nature and value of love, and how love was conceptualized and experienced as a form of service in quest of compassionate reward, a quasi-religious devotion, and a potentially fatal illness always in hope of cure. The subjectivities of the chief protagonists are fully analysed, as is the poem's problematic ending. Alongside discussions of theme and structure, there is also an account of what the extant manuscripts of Troilus and Criseyde may reveal about the poem's early genesis, and a unique survey of responses to Troilus from its own times to the present day. Barry Windeatt's contribution to the series is a comprehensive single-volume guide to Troilus and Criseyde, bringing together a wide range of material and providing a readable commentary on all aspects of the work. Combining the informative substance of a reference book with the coherence of a critical reading, the Guide has taken its place as the standard introduction to Troilus and Criseyde since its first publication in 1992.

Download or read book Approaches to Teaching the Works of Edwidge Danticat written by Celucien Joseph and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-09-20 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Providing an intellectual interpretation to the work of Edwidge Danticat, this new edited collection provides a pedagogical approach to teach and interpret her body of work in undergraduate and graduate classrooms. Approaches to Teaching the Works of Edwidge Danticat starts out by exploring diasporic categories and postcolonial themes such as gender constructs, cultural nationalism, cultural and communal identity, and moves to investigate Danticat’s human rights activism, the immigrant experience, the relationship between the particular and the universal, and the violence of hegemony and imperialism in relationship with society, family, and community. The Editors of the collection have carefully compiled works that show how Danticat’s writings may help in building more compassionate and relational human communities that are grounded on the imperative of human dignity, respect, inclusion, and peace.

Download or read book Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature written by Joshua Scodel and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-02-09 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines how English writers from the Elizabethan period to the Restoration transformed and contested the ancient ideal of the virtuous mean. As early modern authors learned at grammar school and university, Aristotle and other classical thinkers praised "golden means" balanced between extremes: courage, for example, as opposed to cowardice or recklessness. By uncovering the enormous variety of English responses to this ethical doctrine, Joshua Scodel revises our understanding of the vital interaction between classical thought and early modern literary culture. Scodel argues that English authors used the ancient schema of means and extremes in innovative and contentious ways hitherto ignored by scholars. Through close readings of diverse writers and genres, he shows that conflicting representations of means and extremes figured prominently in the emergence of a self-consciously modern English culture. Donne, for example, reshaped the classical mean to promote individual freedom, while Bacon held extremism necessary for human empowerment. Imagining a modern rival to ancient Rome, georgics from Spenser to Cowley exhorted England to embody the mean or lauded extreme paths to national greatness. Drinking poetry from Jonson to Rochester expressed opposing visions of convivial moderation and drunken excess, while erotic writing from Sidney to Dryden and Behn pitted extreme passion against the traditional mean of conjugal moderation. Challenging his predecessors in various genres, Milton celebrated golden means of restrained pleasure and self-respect. Throughout this groundbreaking study, Scodel suggests how early modern treatments of means and extremes resonate in present-day cultural debates.

Download or read book Margaret Atwood and the Female Bildungsroman written by Ellen McWilliams and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2009 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her study of Margaret Atwood, Ellen McWilliams explores how the Bildungsroman has been appropriated by women writers in the second half of the twentieth century. Early works by Atwood are placed in dialogue with more recent novels, thus furthering our

Download or read book The Atheist Milton written by Michael E. Bryson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-23 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Basing his contention on two different lines of argument, Michael Bryson posits that John Milton-possibly the most famous 'Christian' poet in English literary history-was, in fact, an atheist. First, based on his association with Arian ideas (denial of the doctrine of the Trinity), his argument for the de Deo theory of creation (which puts him in line with the materialism of Spinoza and Hobbes), and his Mortalist argument that the human soul dies with the human body, Bryson argues that Milton was an atheist by the commonly used definitions of the period. And second, as the poet who takes a reader from the presence of an imperious, monarchical God in Paradise Lost, to the internal-almost Gnostic-conception of God in Paradise Regained, to the absence of any God whatsoever in Samson Agonistes, Milton moves from a theist (with God) to something much more recognizable as a modern atheist position (without God) in his poetry. Among the author's goals in The Atheist Milton is to account for tensions over the idea of God which, in Bryson's view, go all the way back to Milton's earliest poetry. In this study, he argues such tensions are central to Milton's poetry-and to any attempt to understand that poetry on its own terms.

Download or read book Towards a New Literary Humanism written by A. Mousley and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-02-08 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literature cultivates 'deep selves' for whom books matter because they take over from religion fundamental questions about the meaning of existence. This volume embraces and questions this perspective, whilst also developing a 'new humanist' critical vocabulary which specifies, and therefore opens to debate, the human significance of literature.

Download or read book Love and its Critics written by Michael Bryson and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2017-07-10 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a history of love and the challenge love offers to the laws and customs of its times and places, as told through poetry from the Song of Songs to John Milton’s Paradise Lost. It is also an account of the critical reception afforded to such literature, and the ways in which criticism has attempted to stifle this challenge. Bryson and Movsesian argue that the poetry they explore celebrates and reinvents the love the troubadour poets of the eleventh and twelfth centuries called fin’amor: love as an end in itself, mutual and freely chosen even in the face of social, religious, or political retribution. Neither eros nor agape, neither exclusively of the body, nor solely of the spirit, this love is a middle path. Alongside this tradition has grown a critical movement that employs a 'hermeneutics of suspicion', in Paul Ricoeur’s phrase, to claim that passionate love poetry is not what it seems, and should be properly understood as worship of God, subordination to Empire, or an entanglement with the structures of language itself – in short, the very things it resists. The book engages with some of the seminal literature of the Western canon, including the Bible, the poetry of Ovid, and works by English authors such as William Shakespeare and John Donne, and with criticism that stretches from the earliest readings of the Song of Songs to contemporary academic literature. Lively and enjoyable in its style, it attempts to restore a sense of pleasure to the reading of poetry, and to puncture critical insistence that literature must be outwitted. It will be of value to professional, graduate, and advanced undergraduate scholars of literature, and to the educated general reader interested in treatments of love in poetry throughout history.

Download or read book The Right to Narcissism written by Pleshette DeArmitt and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2013-11-11 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book aims to wrest the concept of narcissism from its common and pejorative meanings— egoism and vanity—by revealing its complexity and importance. DeArmitt undertakes the work of rehabilitating “narcissism” by patiently reexamining the terms and figures that have been associated with it, especially in the writings of Rousseau, Kristeva, and Derrida. These thinkers are known for incisively exposing a certain (traditional) narcissism that has been operative in Western thought and culture and for revealing the violence it has wrought— from the dangers of amour-propre and the pathology of a collective “one’s own” to the phantasm of the sovereign One. Nonetheless, each of these thinkers denounces the naive denunciation of “narcissism,” as the dangers of a non-negotiation with narcissism are more perilous. By rethinking “narcissism” as a complex structure of self-relation through the Other, the book reveals the necessity of an im-possible self-love.