Download or read book The Serious Pleasures of Suspense written by Caroline Levine and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars have long recognized that narrative suspense dominates the formal dynamics of 19th-century British fiction. This study argues that various 19th-century thinkers - John Ruskin, Michael Faraday, Charlotte Bronte - saw suspense as a vehicle for a new approach to knowledge called "realism".
Download or read book The Virtue of Suspense written by Rick Cypert and published by Associated University Presse. This book was released on 2008 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Does experiencing a suspenseful situation allow one to develop virtue?" "The suspense writer, Charlotte Armstrong (1905-69), no doubt believed that it could. In her works she implied the benefits of experiencing suspense by illustrating the rhetorical benefits of resolving it ethically or virtuously. Thus, in their dealings with other characters, her protagonists discover a virtuous approach to resolving suspense that involves an expanded view of the language one uses and the perspective one adopts." "After writing a number of theatrical plays, Armstrong began writing mysteries - whodunits - and then, at the advice of her literary agent, changed directions. She began writing suspense stories so that her readers, if not the other characters, would know the identity of the villain. This move left her free to focus on how one creates suspense and to what end." "Her shift in focus coincided with the family's move from New Rochelle, NY, to Glendale, CA, in the mid 1940s in time for Armstrong to absorb the elements of suspense in the new genre of film noir. Nonetheless, while informed by film noir, Armstrong's work is set in the everyday, the commonplace, where with one simple action, a series of events are set into motion that keep readers in high suspense." "In Armstrong's correspondence, one observes the lucrative market of women's magazines and newspapers for serialized novels and short stories, the painful bottom line of publishing houses, the diplomatic skills of literary agents toward their authors, the advent of television and its markets for, and marketing of, literary works, and the ever-present and ever-elusive offers from the film industry." "This book seeks to understand Armstrong's contribution to popular fiction through an exploration of her childhood diaries, her adult correspondence, her published and cinematic works, the reviews of those works, and the recollections of her agent, children, and grandchildren. What emerges is the portrait of a writer whose determination, curiosity, analytic mien, and ideas about humanity shaped her writing in ways that fascinated her critics and readers, a fashion that perhaps unconsciously recognized the virtue of suspense in her written works."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Fear in the Medical and Literary Imagination Medieval to Modern written by Daniel McCann and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-05-19 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about an emotion constantly present in human culture and history: fear. It is also a book about literature and medicine, two areas of human endeavour that engage with fear most acutely. The essays in this volume explore fear in various literary and medical manifestations, in the Western World, from medieval to modern times. It is divided into two parts. The first part, Treating Fear, examines fear in medical history, and draws from theology, medicine, philosophy, and psychology, to offer an account of how fear shifts in Western understanding from the Middle Ages to Modern times. The second part, Writing Fear, explores fear as a rhetorical and literary force, offering an account of how it is used and evoked in distinct literary periods and texts. This coherent and fascinating collection will appeal to medical historians, literary critics, cultural theorists, medical humanities’ scholars and historians of the emotions.
Download or read book Sensation Fiction and Modernity written by James Aaron Green and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Science Fiction and the Fin de Si cle Periodical Press written by Will Tattersdill and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-29 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this revisionary study, Will Tattersdill argues against the reductive 'two cultures' model of intellectual discourse by exploring the cultural interactions between literature and science embodied in late nineteenth-century periodical literature, tracing the emergence of the new genre that would become known as 'science fiction'. He examines a range of fictional and non-fictional fin-de-siècle writing around distinct scientific themes: Martian communication, future prediction, X-rays, and polar exploration. Every chapter explores a major work of H. G. Wells, but also presents a wealth of exciting new material drawn from a variety of late Victorian periodicals. Arguing that the publications in which they appeared, as well as the stories themselves, played a crucial part in the development of science fiction, Tattersdill uses the form of the general interest magazine as a way of understanding the relationship between the arts and the sciences, and the creation of a new literary genre.
Download or read book Pleasure and Efficacy written by Grace Elisabeth Lavery and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2023-05-30 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A leading trans scholar and activist explores cultural representations of gender transition in the modern period In Pleasure and Efficacy, Grace Lavery investigates gender transition as it has been experienced and represented in the modern period. Considering examples that range from the novels of George Eliot to the psychoanalytic practice of Sigmund Freud to marriage manuals by Marie Stopes, Lavery explores the skepticism found in such works about whether it is truly possible to change one’s sex. This ambivalence, she argues, has contributed to both antitrans oppression and the civil rights claims with which trans people have confronted it. Lavery examines what she terms “trans pragmatism”—the ways that trans people resist medicalization and pathologization to achieve pleasure and freedom. Trans pragmatism, she writes, affirms that transition works, that it is possible, and that it happens. With Eliot and Freud as the guiding geniuses of the book, Lavery covers a vast range of modern culture—poetry, prose, criticism, philosophy, fiction, cinema, pop music, pornography, and memes. Since transition takes people out of one genre and deposits them in another, she suggests, it should be no surprise that a cultural history of gender transition will also provide, by accident, a history of genre transition. Considering the concept of technique and its associations with feminine craftiness, as opposed to masculine freedom, Lavery argues that techniques of giving and receiving pleasure are essential to the possibility of trans feminist thriving—even as they are suppressed by patriarchal and antitrans feminist philosophies. Contesting claims for the impossibility of transition, she offers a counterhistory of tricks and techniques, passed on by women to women, that comprises a body of knowledge written in the margins of history.
Download or read book Jesus in the Victorian Novel written by Jessica Ann Hughes and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-01-27 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book tells the story of how nineteenth-century writers turned to the realist novel in order to reimagine Jesus during a century where traditional religious faith appeared increasingly untenable. Re-workings of the canonical Gospels and other projects to demythologize the story of Jesus are frequently treated as projects aiming to secularize and even discredit traditional Christian faith. The novels of Charles Kingsley, George Eliot, Eliza Lynn Linton, and Mary Augusta Ward, however, demonstrate that the work of bringing the Christian tradition of prophet, priest, and king into conversation with a rapidly changing world can at times be a form of authentic faith-even a faith that remains rooted in the Bible and historic Christianity, while simultaneously creating a space that allows traditional understandings of Jesus' identity to evolve.
Download or read book Quaint Exquisite written by Grace Lavery and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-10 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How Japan captured the Victorian imagination and transformed Western aesthetics From the opening of trade with Britain in the 1850s, Japan occupied a unique and contradictory place in the Victorian imagination, regarded as both a rival empire and a cradle of exquisite beauty. Quaint, Exquisite explores the enduring impact of this dramatic encounter, showing how the rise of Japan led to a major transformation of Western aesthetics at the dawn of globalization. Drawing on philosophy, psychoanalysis, queer theory, textual criticism, and a wealth of in-depth archival research, Grace Lavery provides a radical new genealogy of aesthetic experience in modernity. She argues that the global popularity of Japanese art in the late nineteenth century reflected an imagined universal standard of taste that Kant described as the “subjective universal” condition of aesthetic judgment. The book features illuminating cultural histories of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado, English derivations of the haiku, and retellings of the Madame Butterfly story, and sheds critical light on lesser-known figures such as Winnifred Eaton, an Anglo-Chinese novelist who wrote under the Japanese pseudonym Onoto Watanna, and Mikimoto Ryuzo, a Japanese enthusiast of the Victorian art critic John Ruskin. Lavery also explains the importance and symbolic power of such material objects as W. B. Yeats’s prized katana sword and the “Japanese vellum” luxury editions of Oscar Wilde. Quaint, Exquisite provides essential insights into the modern understanding of beauty as a vehicle for both intimacy and violence, and the lasting influence of Japanese forms today on writers and artists such as Quentin Tarantino.
Download or read book British Murder Mysteries 1880 1965 written by Laura E. Nym Mayhall and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-08-09 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: British Murder Mysteries, 1880-1965: Facts and Fictions conceptualizes detective fiction as an archive, i.e., a trove of documents and sources to be used for historical interpretation. By framing the genre as a shifting set of values, definitions, and practices, the book historicizes the contested meanings of analytical categories like class, race, gender, nation, and empire that have been applied to the forms and functions of detection. Three organizing themes structure this investigation: fictive facticity, genre fluidity, and conservative modernity. This volume thus shows how British detective fiction from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century both shaped and was shaped by its social, cultural, and political contexts and the lived experience of its authors and readers at critical moments in time.
Download or read book Aging Duration and the English Novel written by Jacob Jewusiak and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues that novelists graft aging onto narrative duration and reveals the politics of senescence in nineteenth and early-twentieth century plots.
Download or read book An Introduction to Literature Criticism and Theory written by Andrew Bennett and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-02 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lively, original and highly readable, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory is the essential guide to literary studies. Starting at ‘The Beginning’ and concluding with ‘The End’, chapters range from the familiar, such as ‘Character’, ‘Narrative’ and ‘The Author’, to the more unusual, such as ‘Secrets’, ‘Pleasure’ and ‘Ghosts’. Now in its fifth edition, Bennett and Royle’s classic textbook successfully illuminates complex ideas by engaging directly with literary works, so that a reading of Jane Eyre opens up ways of thinking about racial difference, for example, while Chaucer, Raymond Chandler and Monty Python are all invoked in a discussion of literature and laughter. The fifth edition has been revised throughout and includes four new chapters – ‘Feelings’, ‘Wounds’, ‘Body’ and ‘Love’ – to incorporate exciting recent developments in literary studies. In addition to further reading sections at the end of each chapter, the book contains a comprehensive bibliography and a glossary of key literary terms. A breath of fresh air in a field that can often seem dry and dauntingly theoretical, this book will open the reader’s eyes to the exhilarating possibilities of reading and studying literature.
Download or read book Believing in Shakespeare written by Claire McEachern and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-19 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A discussion of the connections between believing in Shakespeare's play and a post-Reformation understanding of salvation.
Download or read book Limited Access written by Kyoko Takanashi and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2022-11-17 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A recurrent trope in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British fiction compares reading to traveling and asserts that the pleasures of novel-reading are similar to the joys of a carriage journey. Kyoko Takanashi points to how these narratives also, however, draw attention to the limits of access often experienced in travel, and she demonstrates the ways in which the realist novel, too, is marked by issues of access both symbolic and material. Limited Access draws on media studies and the history of books and reading to bring to life a history of realism concerned with the inclusivity of readers. Examining works by Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, and George Eliot, Takanashi shows how novelists employed metaphors of transport to constantly reassess what readers could and could not access. She gives serious attention to marginalized readers figured within the text, highlighting their importance and how writers were concerned about the "limited access" of readers to their novels. Discussions of transport allowed novelists to think about mediation, and, as this study shows, these concerns about access became part of the rise of the novel and the history of realism in a way that literary history has not yet recognized.
Download or read book Eighteenth century Fiction and the Reinvention of Wonder written by Sarah Tindal Kareem and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A footprint materializes mysteriously on a deserted shore; a giant helmet falls from the sky; a traveler awakens to find his horse dangling from a church steeple. Eighteenth-century British fiction brims with moments such as these, in which the prosaic rubs up against the marvelous. While it is a truism that the period's literature is distinguished by its realism and air of probability, Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Reinvention of Wonder argues that wonder is integral to--rather than antithetical to--the developing techniques of novelistic fiction. Positioning its reader on the cusp between recognition and estrangement, between faith and doubt, modern fiction hinges upon wonder. Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Reinvention of Wonder's chapters unfold its new account of British fiction's rise through surprising new readings of classic early novels-from Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe to Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey--as well as bringing to attention lesser known works, most notably Rudolf Raspe's Baron Munchausen's Narrative of His Marvellous Travels. In this bold new account, the eighteenth century bears witness not to the world's disenchantment but rather to wonder's re-location from the supernatural realm to the empirical world, providing a re-evaluation not only of how we look back at the Enlightenment, but also of how we read today.
Download or read book Tense Future written by Paul K. Saint-Amour and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A work of literary history that redefines literary modernism's development in relation to the concurrent emergence of total war and the psychological effects it created between the two world wars.
Download or read book Hyperbolic Realism written by Samir Sellami and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2024-01-11 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What comes after postmodernism in literature? Hyperbolic Realism engages the contradiction that while it remains impossible to present a full picture of the world, assessing reality from a planetary perspective is now more than ever an ethical obligation for contemporary literature. The book thus examines the hyperbolic forms and features of Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day and Roberto Bolaño's 2666 – their discursive and material abundance, excessive fictionality, close intertwining of fantastic and historical genres, narrative doubt and spiraling uncertainty – which are deployed not as an escape from, but a plunge into reality. Faced with a reality in a permanent state of exception, Pynchon and Bolaño react to the excesses and distortions of the modern age with a new poetic and aesthetic paradigm that rejects both the naive illusion of a return to the real and the self-enclosed artificiality of classical postmodern writing: hyperbolic realism.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Popular Fiction written by David Glover and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-05 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Popular commercial fiction emerged in the nineteenth century, with serialised novels and sensational penny dreadfuls. Today it remains a multi-million dollar industry giving pleasure to many, but it is also a field of growing interest for scholars and students of literature. This Companion covers the major developments in the history of popular fiction, with specially commissioned chapters on pulp fiction, bestsellers, and comics and graphic narratives. The volume also examines the public and personal everyday contexts within which popular texts are read, highlighting the ways in which such narratives have circulated across a variety of constantly changing media, including theatre, television, cinema and new computer-based digital forms. Case studies from key genres - crime fiction, romance and Gothic horror - as well as a full chronology and guide to further reading make this collection indispensable to all those interested in this complex and vibrant cultural field.
