Download or read book Relations Stop Nowhere written by Hugh Ridley and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book attempts for the first time a comparative literary history of Germany and the USA in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its material does not come from the familiar overlaps of individual German and American writers, but from the work of the literary historians of the two countries after 1815, when American intellectuals took Germany as a model for their project to create an American national literature. The first part of the book examines fundamental structural affinities between the two literary histories and the common problems these caused, especially in questions of canon, realism, aesthetics and in the marginalization of popular and women’s writing. In the second part, significant figures whose work straddle the two literatures – from Sealsfield and Melville, Whitman and Thomas Mann to Nietzsche, Emerson and Bellow – are discussed in detail, and the arguments of the first part are shown in their relevance to understanding major writers. This book is not merely comparative in scope: it shows that only international comparison can explain the course of American literary history in the nineteenth and twentieth century. As recent developments in American Studies explore the multi-cultural and ‘hybrid’ nature of the American tradition, this book offers evidence of the dependencies which linked American and German national literary history.

Download or read book The Obsolete Empire written by Philip Tsang and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2021-11-02 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modernist literature at the end of the British empire challenges conventional notions of homeland, heritage, and community. Finalist of the MSA First Book Prize by The Modernist Studies Association The waning British empire left behind an abundance of material relics and an inventory of feelings not easily relinquished. In The Obsolete Empire, Philip Tsang brings together an unusual constellation of writers—Henry James, James Joyce, Doris Lessing, and V. S. Naipaul—to trace an aesthetics of frustrated attachment that emerged in the wake of imperial decline. Caught between an expansive Britishness and an exclusive Englishness, these writers explored what it meant to belong to an empire that did not belong to them. Thanks to their voracious reading of English fiction and poetry in their formative years, all of these writers experienced a richly textured world with which they deeply identified but from which they felt excluded. The literary England they imagined, frozen in time and out of place with the realities of imperial decline, in turn figures in their writings as a repository of unconsummated attachments, contradictory desires, and belated exchanges. Their works arrest the linear progression from colonial to postcolonial, from empire to nation, and from subject to citizen. Drawing on a rich body of scholarship on affect and temporality, Tsang demonstrates how the British empire endures as a structure of desire that outlived its political lifespan. By showing how literary reading sets in motion a tense interplay of intimacy and exclusion, Tsang investigates a unique mode of belonging arising from the predicament of being conscripted into a global empire but not desired as its proper citizen. Ultimately, The Obsolete Empire asks: What does it mean to be inside or outside any given culture? How do large-scale geopolitical changes play out at the level of cultural attachment and political belonging? How does literary reading establish or unsettle narratives of who we are? These questions preoccupied writers across Britain's former empire and continue to resonate today.

Download or read book The Victorian Novel written by Francis O'Gorman and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This guide steers students through significant critical responses to the Victorian novel from the end of the nineteenth century to the present day.

Download or read book Penelope Fitzgerald and the Consolation of Fiction written by Christopher Knight and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-09-13 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christopher J. Knight’s Penelope Fitzgerald and the Consolation of Fiction is a study of the British author Penelope Fitzgerald (1916 – 2000), attending to her nine novels, especially as viewed through the lens both of "late style" (she published her first novel, The Golden Child, at age sixty) and, in her words, of "consolation, that is, for doubts and fears as well as for naked human loss." As in Shakespeare’s late, religiously inflected, romances, the two concerns coincide; and Fitzgerald’s ostensible comedies are marked by a clear experience of the tragic and the palpable sense of a world that verges on the edge of indifference to human loss. Yet Fitzgerald, her late age pessimism notwithstanding, seeks (with the aid of her own religious understandings), in each of her novels, to wrestle meaning, consolation and even comedy from circumstances not noticeably propitious. Or as she herself memorably spoke of her own "deepest convictions": "I can only say that however close I’ve come, by this time, to nothingness, I have remained true to my deepest convictions—I mean to the courage of those who are born to be defeated, the weaknesses of the strong, and the tragedy of misunderstandings and missed opportunities, which I have done my best to treat as a comedy, for otherwise how can we manage to bear it?" The recipient of Britain’s Booker Prize and America’s National Book Critics Circle Award, Penelope Fitzgerald’s reputation as a novelist, and author more generally, has grown, since her death, significantly, to the point that she is now widely judged one of Britain’s finest writers, comparable in worth to the likes of Jane Austen, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf.

Download or read book The Rhetoric of Fiction written by Wayne C. Booth and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1983-02-15 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A standard reference point in advanced discussions of how fictional form works, how authors make novels accessible, and how readers recreate texts. Its concepts and terms have become standard critical lexicon.

Download or read book Forgiving the Boundaries written by Terry Caesar and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Caesar attempts to historicize the sustaining interplay between romanticism and travel writing, but also emphasizes that his understanding of American travel writing has more to do with narrative form, epistemology, and cultural inheritance than particular historical shapings

Download or read book Finding the Figure in the Carpet written by Lee McKay Johnson and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2006-12-05 with total page 991 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his 1896 short story, The Figure in the Carpet, James sets forth a riddle for his critical readers as he approaches the major phase in his career. He imagines a fictional novelist, Hugh Vereker, who tantalizes his critics with the idea of a single thread, a design woven throughout all of his major works, hidden in plain sight. The design, Vereker says, is as obvious as a foot stuck in a shoe but the distinguished novelist is convinced no one will ever see it. One critic, Corvick, however, during a trip to India, has an astonishing flash of revelation: he sees the figure and the discovery is immense. When Corvick returns and shares his epiphany with Vereker, the novelist assures him that his discovery is precisely accurate; there is not a single, wrong note. But Corvick dies in a road accident before he can write his definitive book on Verekers secret design. My study will show the reader that there is a distinct figure in the carpet in the works of Henry James himself. But James only uses the figure in a select group of his major novels and tales, all six of which we will examine here. These major works are all experimental and radical and show James allowing himself the artistic freedom to follow his own arcane and personal path. The pattern is fully manifested in The Turn of the Screw in 1897 and remains the consistent thread all the way through the Masters final completed novel, The Golden Bowl, in 1904. I began writing about the relation of writing to painting and how James translates structural aspects of the silent art of painting into prose. James borrows both silence and simultaneity from the painter, his brother of the brush, and experiments with their narrative equivalents. I saw with increasing clarity that James admiration of the powers of painting led him into depicting nonverbal aspects of consciousness in language. Finally I saw the whole system lock into place; everything fit. The figure in the carpet was revealed as visible silence. With only a minute adjustment of focus I suddenly saw that James narrative pictorial structure that I had been tracing all these years constitutes the figure in the carpet itself. The pictorial pattern literally governs every line, and chooses every word.. James brings the reader into the full consciousness of his character by taking us into the silent radiation of the visible. As readers we experience the silence before language, the silence between words, and the silence after language. In this book I will show my reader how the figure in the carpet operates as the controlling design in every square inch of text in each of James most famous novels and tales.

Download or read book Different Dispatches written by David T. Humphries and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-03-09 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In "Different Dispatches", David Humphries brings together in a new way a diverse group of well-known American writers of the inter-war period including: Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemmingway, Zora Neale Hurston, James Agee and Robert Penn Warren. He demonstrates how these writers engage journalism in creating innovative texts that address mass culture as well as underlying cultural conditions. The book will be of interest to readers approaching these well-known authors for the first time or for scholars grappling with larger issues of cultural production and reception.

Download or read book Who s Afraid of James Joyce written by Karen R. Lawrence and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2010-06-27 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The development of Joycean studies into a respected and very large subdiscipline of modernist studies can be traced to the work of several important scholars. Among those who did the most to document Joyce's work, Karen Lawrence can easily be considered one of that elite cadre. A retrospective of decades of work on Joyce, this collection includes published journal articles, book chapters, and selections from her best known work (all updated and revised), along with one new essay. Featuring engaging close readings of such Joyce works as Dubliners and Ulysses, it will be a welcome addition to any serious Joycean's library and will prove extremely useful to new generations of Joyce critics looking to build on Lawrence's expansive scholarship. Both readable and lively, this work may inspire a lifetime of reading, re-reading, and teaching Joyce.

Download or read book The Thread of Connection written by C. C. Barfoot and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 1982 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Maladies of the Will written by Jennifer L. Fleissner and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-12-16 with total page 499 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of the nineteenth-century American novel that argues for a new genealogy of the concept of the will. What if the modern person were defined not by reason or sentiment, as Enlightenment thinkers hoped, but by will? Western modernity rests on the ideal of the autonomous subject, charting a path toward self-determination. Yet novelists have portrayed the will as prone to insufficiency or excess—from indecision to obsession, wild impulse to melancholic inertia. Jennifer Fleissner’s ambitious book shows how the novel’s attention to the will’s maladies enables an ongoing interrogation of modern premises from within. Maladies of the Will reveals the nineteenth-century American novel’s relation to a wide-ranging philosophical tradition, highly relevant to our own tumultuous present. In works from Moby-Dick and The Scarlet Letter to Elizabeth Stoddard’s The Morgesons and Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition, the will’s grandeur and its perversity emerge as it alternately aligns itself with and pits itself against a bigger Will—whether of God, the state, society, history, or life itself. Today, when invocations of autonomy appear beside the medicalization of many behaviors, and democracy’s tenet of popular will has come into doubt, Maladies of the Will provides a map to how we got here, and how we might think these vital dilemmas anew.

Download or read book Collaborators in Literary America 1870 1920 written by S. Ashton and published by Springer. This book was released on 2003-06-27 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much has been written recently about the important changes in understandings of authorship and literary labour in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries. Collaborators in Literary America, 1870-1920 argues that the collaborative novels of this period were instrumental to that reconstruction. More than just a gimmick, these novels (there were dozens published between The Gilded Age (1873) by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner and The Sturdy Oak (1917) by Mary Austin, Kathleen Norris, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Henry Kitchell Webster, et. al. ) were a serious attempt to work through the anxieties authors faced in an ever more competitive and business-like market. By examining the issues surrounding collaborative production of writers such as Henry James, Mark Twain, and William Dean Howells, Ashton demonstrates that in union there was strength.

Download or read book Happy Endings in Hollywood Cinema written by James MacDowell and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-22 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "e;Hollywood 'happy ending' has long been considered among the most famous and standardised features in the whole of narrative filmmaking. Yet, while ceaselessly invoked, this notorious device has received barely any detailed attention from the field of film studies. This book is thus the first in-depth examination of one of the most overused and under-analysed concepts in discussions of popular cinema. What exactly is the 'happy ending'? Is it simply a cliche, as commonly supposed? Why has it earned such an unenviable reputation? What does it, or can it, mean? Concentrating especially on conclusions featuring an ultimate romantic union - the final couple - this wide-ranging investigation probes traditional associations between the 'happy ending' and homogeneity, closure, 'unrealism', and ideological conservatism, testing widespread assumptions against the evidence offered by a range of classical and contemporary films. "e;

Download or read book Out of Context written by Michaela Bronstein and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-03 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do novels travel through time? How might they endure in a changing world and reach the readers of an unknowable future? Modernist writers were eager to think of their books as reaching audiences they could not yet imagine. In recent years however, scholars of modernism have focused on pinning them down: putting these books in their context and these authors in their place. By looking to the future, scholars fear that looking to the future will make literature disengaged, irresponsible, or apolitical; the worry is that literature cannot escape its own moment without also evading the hard truths of history. Out of Context suggests an alternative to this scholarship, proposing that literature travels through time not by transcending history, but by adapting to historical change. The chapters of this book each pair a modernist author with a later reader. In each case, this future reader is also a novelist--someone who reads with an eye to form and craft, and who puts what they see to new use in their own novels. James Baldwin adapts Henry James's modes of characterization; Ngugi wa Thiong'o repurposes Joseph Conrad's nonchronological narratives; and Ken Kesey builds on William Faulkner's use of multiple perspectives. Reading the modernists through these authors' eyes offers a different perspective on them. Literary forms, in this history, do not have intrinsic political meanings; they have a multitude of political uses. Rather than see modernist literary form, in all its fragmentation and complexity, as a source of disruption and doubt, these later authors use modernist forms to distill doubts into conviction. The experiments of modernist fiction stand revealed as tools not of political critique but of political commitment.

Download or read book Experience and Experimental Writing written by Paul Grimstad and published by . This book was released on 2013-08-15 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book traces connections between the literary experiments of Emerson, Poe, Melville, and Henry James, and the emergence of classical American pragmatism.

Download or read book Henry James s Style of Retrospect written by Oliver Herford and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-26 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Henry James's Style of Retrospect traces James's engagement with the writing of the recent past across the last twenty-five years of his life and examines the thoroughgoing change his style underwent in this last phase of his career, as his focus turned from the observation of contemporary manners to biographical commemoration and autobiographical reminiscence, and the balance of his output gradually shifted from fiction to non-fiction. The 'late personal writings' of the book's subtitle are works of retrospective non-fiction. They are a varied group, representing a broad array of genres and occasions: commemorative essays and obituary tributes, textual revisions and accounts of revisiting familiar places, cultural and literary criticism, biography and autobiography, and family memoir. Oliver Herford proposes that we read the late personal writings as a coherent sequence, bound together by a close texture of cross-references and allusive echoes, and united by James's newly discovered sense for the literary possibilities of non-fiction. Closely analyzing the style of these writings, this study offers a boldly revisionist account of the way style itself challenges and preoccupies the very late James. A linked series of innovative close readings takes the major works of this period in sequence, addressing a key point of style in each: particular attention is paid to procedures of reference (to the historical past, to real persons and places and objects), a dimension of style often neglected and sometimes actively slighted in analyses of James's late work. Henry James's Style of Retrospect asks what it means for so distinguished a novelist to alter the foundations of his written manner so strikingly in late life, and shows how we may begin to reconfigure our understanding of late Jamesian aesthetics accordingly.

Download or read book Theory of Fiction Henry James written by Henry James and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1972-01-01 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comprised of more than 250 selections from Henry James's stories about writers, his critical and speculative essays, his Notebooks, Prefaces, and letters, this collection brings together for the first time, in a single, systematic volume, all the important passages in James's work which have implications for or ideas about his theory of fiction. The result is the most comprehensive, exhaustive, and innovative volume of fictional theory ever published; in many ways it is the consummation of James's contribution to letters. In a masterful introductory essay, James E. Miller Jr., presents James's theory of fiction in outline; he also contributes brief introductions to each of the seventeen chapters, summarizing the major points. Abundant guides direct the reader to subjects and sources.