Download or read book The Sea in the Literary Imagination written by Ekaterina V. Kobeleva and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2019-01-03 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection explores nautical themes in a variety of literary contexts from multiple cultures. Including contributors from five continents, it emphasizes the universality of human experience with the sea, while focusing on literature that spans a millennium, stretching from medieval romance to the twenty-first-century reimagining of classic literary texts in film. These fresh essays engage in discussions of literature from the UK, the USA, India, Chile, Turkey, Spain, Japan, Colombia, and the Caribbean. Scholars of maritime literature will find the collection interesting for the unique insights it offers on individual literary texts, while general readers will be intrigued by the interconnectedness that it reveals in human experience with the sea.
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: The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls revealed a world of early Jewish writing larger than the Bible: from multiple versions of biblical texts to 'revealed' books not found in our canon. But despite this diversity, the way we read Second Temple Jewish literature remains constrained by two anachronistic categories: a theological one, 'Bible,' and a bibliographic one, 'book.' 'The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity' suggests ways of thinking about how Jews understood their own literature before these categories had emerged.
Download or read book The View from the Masthead written by Hester Blum and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2012-09-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With long, solitary periods at sea, far from literary and cultural centers, sailors comprise a remarkable population of readers and writers. Although their contributions have been little recognized in literary history, seamen were important figures in the nineteenth-century American literary sphere. In the first book to explore their unique contribution to literary culture, Hester Blum examines the first-person narratives of working sailors, from little-known sea tales to more famous works by Herman Melville, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, and Richard Henry Dana. In their narratives, sailors wrote about how their working lives coexisted with--indeed, mutually drove--their imaginative lives. Even at leisure, they were always on the job site. Blum analyzes seamen's libraries, Barbary captivity narratives, naval memoirs, writings about the Galapagos Islands, Melville's sea vision, and the crisis of death and burial at sea. She argues that the extent of sailors' literacy and the range of their reading were unusual for a laboring class, belying the popular image of Jack Tar as merely a swaggering, profane, or marginal figure. As Blum demonstrates, seamen's narratives propose a method for aligning labor and contemplation that has broader applications for the study of American literature and history.
Download or read book The Novel and the Sea written by Margaret Cohen and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For a century, the history of the novel has been written in terms of nations and territories: the English novel, the French novel, the American novel. But what if novels were viewed in terms of the seas that unite these different lands? Examining works across two centuries, The Novel and the Sea recounts the novel's rise, told from the perspective of the ship's deck and the allure of the oceans in the modern cultural imagination. Margaret Cohen moors the novel to overseas exploration and work at sea, framing its emergence as a transatlantic history, steeped in the adventures and risks of the maritime frontier. Cohen explores how Robinson Crusoe competed with the best-selling nautical literature of the time by dramatizing remarkable conditions, from the wonders of unknown lands to storms, shipwrecks, and pirates. She considers James Fenimore Cooper's refashioning of the adventure novel in postcolonial America, and a change in literary poetics toward new frontiers and to the maritime labor and technology of the nineteenth century. Cohen shows how Jules Verne reworked adventures at sea into science fiction; how Melville, Hugo, and Conrad navigated the foggy waters of language and thought; and how detective and spy fiction built on sea fiction's problem-solving devices. She also discusses the transformation of the ocean from a theater of skilled work to an environment of pristine nature and the sublime. A significant literary history, The Novel and the Sea challenges readers to rethink their land-locked assumptions about the novel.
Download or read book Literature and Lore of the Sea written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-11-08 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 The Sea in the Greek Imagination written by Marie-Claire Beaulieu and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Sea in the Greek Imagination, Marie-Claire Beaulieu unifies the multifarious representations of the sea and sea-crossing in Greek myth and imagery by positing the sea as a cosmological boundary between the worlds of the living, the dead, and the gods, or between reality and imagination.
Download or read book The Liberal Imagination written by Lionel Trilling and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2012-07-18 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Liberal Imagination is one of the most admired and influential works of criticism of the last century, a work that is not only a masterpiece of literary criticism but an important statement about politics and society. Published in 1950, one of the chillier moments of the Cold War, Trilling’s essays examine the promise —and limits—of liberalism, challenging the complacency of a naïve liberal belief in rationality, progress, and the panaceas of economics and other social sciences, and asserting in their stead the irreducible complexity of human motivation and the tragic inevitability of tragedy. Only the imagination, Trilling argues, can give us access and insight into these realms and only the imagination can ground a reflective and considered, rather than programmatic and dogmatic, liberalism. Writing with acute intelligence about classics like Huckleberry Finn and the novels of Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald, but also on such varied matters as the Kinsey Report and money in the American imagination, Trilling presents a model of the critic as both part of and apart from his society, a defender of the reflective life that, in our ever more rationalized world, seems ever more necessary—and ever more remote.
Download or read book The Sea Us written by Catherine de Saint Phalle and published by Transit Lounge . This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Stella shortlisted author of Poum and Alexandre, this is a heartwarming novel about longing, absence and the people we unexpectedly come to love. After many years spent living in Seoul, a young man called Harold drifts back to Australia and rents a room above a fish and chip shop called The Sea & Us. Who he meets and what he experiences there propels him to question his own yearnings and failings, and to fight for meaning and a sense of place that can only be reached by facing what is lost. By turns electric, tender, and hopeful, The Sea & Us is a gem of literary imagination. Catherine de Saint Phalle brilliantly captures disparate characters and their common human desire for community and connection. Long after the last page closes, ‘we can hear the bell tinkle. Someone wants some fish and chips.’ 'Mesmerising. Full of love and charm...beautifully written.' — Herald Sun
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 Islands Identity and the Literary Imagination written by Elizabeth McMahon and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2016-07-09 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Australia is the planet’s sole island continent. This book argues that the uniqueness of this geography has shaped Australian history and culture, including its literature. Further, it shows how the fluctuating definition of the island continent throws new light on the relationship between islands and continents in the mapping of modernity. The book links the historical and geographical conditions of islands with their potent role in the imaginaries of European colonisation. It prises apart the tangled web of geography, fantasy, desire and writing that has framed the Western understanding of islands, both their real and material conditions and their symbolic power, from antiquity into globalised modernity. The book also traces how this spatial imaginary has shaped the modern 'man' who is imagined as being the island's mirror. The inter-relationship of the island fantasy, colonial expansion, and the literary construction of place and history, created a new 'man': the dislocated and alienated subject of post-colonial modernity. This book looks at the contradictory images of islands, from the allure of the desert island as a paradise where the world can be made anew to their roles as prisons, as these ideas are made concrete at moments of British colonialism. It also considers alternatives to viewing islands as objects of possession in the archipelagic visions of island theorists and writers. It compares the European understandings of the first and last of the new worlds, the Caribbean archipelago and the Australian island continent, to calibrate the different ways these disparate geographies unifed and fractured the concept of the planetary globe. In particular it examines the role of the island in this process, specifically its capacity to figure a 'graspable globe' in the mind. The book draws on the colonial archive and ranges across Australian literature from the first novel written and published in Australia (by a convict on the island of Tasmania) to both the ancient dreaming and the burgeoning literature of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in the twenty-first century. It discusses Australian literature in an international context, drawing on the long traditions of literary islands across a range of cultures. The book's approach is theoretical and engages with contemporary philosophy, which uses the island and the archipleago as a key metaphor. It is also historicist and includes considerable original historical research.
Download or read book The Sea written by Richard Hamblyn and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2021-10-13 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sailing across time and geography, the imaginary and the real, The Sea chronicles the many physical and cultural meanings of the watery abyss. This book explores the sea and its meanings from ancient myths to contemporary geopolitics, from Atlantis to the Mediterranean migrant crisis. Richard Hamblyn traces a cultural and geographical journey from estuary to abyss, beginning with the topographies of the shoreline and ending with the likely futures of our maritime environments. Along the way he considers the sea as a site of work and endurance; of story and song; of language, leisure, and longing. By meditating on the sea as both a physical and a cultural presence, the book shines new light on the sea and its indelible place in the human imagination.
Download or read book The Literary Imagination written by Derek Traversi and published by University of Delaware Press. This book was released on 1982 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays collected in this book include two each on Dante and Chaucer that appear for the first time in print and three on Shakespeare that are based on Dr. Traversi's Approach to Shakespeare. Dante's Purgatorio, Chaucer's the Franklin's Tale, and Shakespeare's the Tempest are among the texts analyzed here.
Download or read book East West Literary Imagination written by Yoshinobu Hakutani and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2017-06-30 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study traces the shaping presence of cultural interactions, arguing that American literature has become a hybridization of Eastern and Western literary traditions. Cultural exchanges between the East and West began in the early decades of the nineteenth century as American transcendentalists explored Eastern philosophies and arts. Hakutani examines this influence through the works of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. He further demonstrates the East-West exchange through discussions of the interactions by modernists such as Yone Noguchi, Yeats, Pound, Camus, and Kerouac. Finally, he argues that African American literature, represented by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and James Emanuel, is postmodern. Their works exhibit their concerted efforts to abolish marginality and extend referentiality, exemplifying the postmodern East-West crossroads of cultures. A fuller understanding of their work is gained by situating them within this cultural conversation. The writings of Wright, for example, take on their full significance only when they are read, not as part of a national literature, but as an index to an evolving literature of cultural exchanges.
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.
Download or read book The Sea The Sea written by Iris Murdoch and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2001-03-01 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the prestigious Booker Prize—a tale of the strange obsessions that haunt a playwright as he composes his memoirs Charles Arrowby, leading light of England's theatrical set, retires from glittering London to an isolated home by the sea. He plans to write a memoir about his great love affair with Clement Makin, his mentor, both professionally and personally, and amuse himself with Lizzie, an actress he has strung along for many years. None of his plans work out, and his memoir evolves into a riveting chronicle of the strange events and unexpected visitors-some real, some spectral-that disrupt his world and shake his oversized ego to its very core. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Download or read book Philosophy Dreaming and the Literary Imagination written by Michaela Schrage-Früh and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-10-18 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the intersections between dreaming and the literary imagination, in light of the findings of recent neurocognitive and empirical research, with the aim to lay a groundwork for an empirically informed aesthetics of dreaming. Drawing on perspectives from literary theory, philosophy of mind and dream research, this study investigates dreaming in relation to creativity and waking states of imagination such as writing and reading stories. Exploring the similarities and differences between the 'language' of dreams and the language of literature, it analyses the strategies employed by writers to create a sense of dream in literary fiction as well as the genres most conducive to this endeavour. The book closes with three case studies focusing on texts by Kazuo Ishiguro, Clare Boylan and John Banville to illustrate the diverse ways in which writers achieve to 'translate' the experience and 'language' of the dream.
