Download or read book American Fiction and the Metaphysics of the Grotesque written by Dieter Meindl and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By synthesizing Kayser's and Bakhtin's views of the grotesque and Heidegger's philosophy of Being, American Fiction and the Metaphysics of the Grotesque seeks to demonstrate that American fiction from Poe to Pynchon has tried to convey the existential dimension: the pre-individual totality or flow of life, which defines itself against the mind and its linguistic capacity. Dieter Meindl shows how the grotesque, through its self-contradictory nature, has been instrumental in expressing this reality-conception, an antirationalist stance in basic agreement with existential thought. The historical validity of this new metaphysics, which grants precedence to Being--the context of cognition--over the cognizant subject, must be upheld in the face of deconstructive animadversions upon any metaphysics of presence. The notion of decentering the subject, Meindl argues, did not originate with deconstruction. The existential grotesque confirms the protomodernist character of classic American fiction. Meindl traces its course through a number of well-known texts by Melville, James, Gilman, Anderson, Faulkner, and O'Connor, among others. To convey life conceived as motion, these writers had to capture--that is, immobilize--it in their art: an essentially distortive and, therefore, grotesque device. Melville's "Bartleby," dealing with a mort vivant, is the seminal text in this mode of indirectness. As opposed to the existential grotesque, which grants access to a preverbal realm, the linguistic grotesque of postmodern fiction works on the assumption that all reality is referable to language in a textual universe. American Fiction and the Metaphysics of the Grotesque will significantly alter our understanding of certain traditions in American literature.
Download or read book Silver Fork Novels 1826 1841 Vol 3 written by Harriet Devine Jump and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-08-01 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The novels in this collection present a vivid picture of late-Regency society clinging to modes of behaviour which soon became obsolete and mark an important point of transition to Victorian cultural values.
Download or read book The Metaphysical Novel in England and America written by Edwin M. Eigner and published by . This book was released on 1978 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Theory of the Novel written by Michael McKeon and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2000-12 with total page 972 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: McKeon and others delve into the significance of the novel as a genre form, issues in novel techniques such as displacement, the grand theory, narrative modes such as subjectivity, character, and development, critical interpretation of the structure of the novel, and the novel in historical context.
Download or read book Rider Haggard and the Imperial Occult written by Simon Magus and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-12-06 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Rider Haggard and the Imperial Occult, Simon Magus explores the occult world of H. Rider Haggard through an analysis of his literary engagement with ancient Egypt, Romanticism and Theosophy.
Download or read book A Historical Guide to Herman Melville written by Giles Gunn and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2005-06-02 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection gathers together original essays dealing with Melville's relations with his historical era, with class, with the marketplace, with ethnic otherness, and with religion. These essays are framed by a new, short biography by Robert Milder, an introduction by Giles Gunn, an illustrated chronology, and a bibliographical essay. Taken together, these pieces afford a fresh and searching set of perspectives on Melville's connections both with his own age and also with our own. This book makes the case, as does no other collection of criticism of its size, for Melville's commanding centrality to nineteenth-century American writing.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne written by Richard H. Millington and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-09-23 with total page 507 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne, first published in 2004, offers students and teachers an introduction to Hawthorne's fiction and the lively debates that shape Hawthorne studies. In commissioned essays, twelve eminent scholars of American literature introduce readers to key issues in Hawthorne scholarship and deepen our understanding of Hawthorne's writing. Each of the major novels is treated in a separate chapter, while other essays explore Hawthorne's art in relation to a stimulating array of issues and approaches. The essays reveal how Hawthorne's work explores understandings of gender relations and sexuality, of childhood and selfhood, of politics and ethics, of history and modernity. An Introduction and a selected bibliography will help students and teachers understand how Hawthorne has been a crucial figure for each generation of readers of American literature.
Download or read book The Textual Life of Dickens s Characters written by James A. Davies and published by Springer. This book was released on 1989-06-18 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By focusing on selected characters and characterizations from all stages of Dickens' literary career, both fiction and non-fiction, this book looks at the thematic significance of the modern distinction between story and text.
Download or read book Melville s Later Novels written by William B. Dillingham and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The confidence-man and alchemy -- Keeping true: Billy Budd, sailor.
Download or read book The Coming Race written by Edward Bulwer-Lytton and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2007-03-05 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of a fascinating underground world of winged beings
Download or read book H G Wells written by John Batchelor and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1985-03-21 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: H. G. Wells wrote almost a hundred books, yet he is generally remembered for only a handful of them. He is known above all as a writer who heralded the future, yet throughout his life he clung to fixed attitudes from the Victorian past. He began his career as a draper's apprentice; by the age of forty-five he had secured an international reputation as the author of The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, Kipps and Tono Bungay; he went on to establish himself as an influential educator, polemicist and sage. In this book John Batchelor offers a readable introduction to Wells's huge and varied output as a writer and thinker. He guides the reader through the whole oeuvre, and argues persuasively that at his best Wells was a great artist: a man with a remarkable, restless imagination (not limited, as many critics have implied, merely to his early romances) and with a coherent and responsible theory of fiction.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville written by Robert S. Levine and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998-05-13 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville is intended to provide a critical introduction to Melville's work. The essays have been specially commissioned for this volume, and provide a comprehensive overview of Melville's career. All of Melville's key works, including Moby-Dick, Typee, White Jacket, The Tambourine in Glory and The Confidence Man, are examined, as well as most of his poetry and short fiction. Written at a level both challenging and accessible, the volume provides fresh perspectives on one of the most significant writers of nineteenth-century America whose work continues to fascinate readers and stimulate new study.
Download or read book Commissioned Spirits written by Jonathan Arac and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel written by Deirdre David and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel, first published in 2000, a series of specially-commissioned essays examine the work of Charles Dickens, the Brontës, George Eliot and other canonical writers, as well as that of such writers as Olive Schreiner, Wilkie Collins and H. Rider Haggard, whose work has recently attracted new attention from scholars and students. The collection combines the literary study of the novel as a form with analysis of the material aspects of its readership and production, and a series of thematic and contextual perspectives that examine Victorian fiction in the light of social and cultural concerns relevant both to the period itself and to the direction of current literary and cultural studies. Contributors engage with topics such as industrial culture, religion and science and the broader issues of the politics of gender, sexuality and race. The Companion includes a chronology and a comprehensive guide to further reading.
Download or read book The Half vanished Structure written by Magnus Ullén and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2004 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book takes issue with the tendency in twentieth-century Hawthorne-criticism to blur the distinction between symbolism and allegory. Rejecting the long-standing notion that Hawthorne is a symbolist in allegorical disguise, Ullén argues that allegory is the key to understanding how religion, sexuality, aesthetics and politics are interwoven in Hawthorne's writings. The study presents a model for allegorical interpretation of general applicability, which is brought to bear on each of Hawthorne's mature romances, and on the oft-neglected Wonder Books written for children. An unparalleled analysis of the formal intricacies of Hawthorne's writings, this book is an eloquent plea for the necessity of grounding ideological analysis in aesthetical considerations.
Download or read book Gothic written by Fred Botting and published by Routledge. This book was released on 1996 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tailored specifically for students new to the daunting field of literary theory, Fred Botting's Gothic is a clear and welcome introduction to the study of this compelling genre. This lucid, easy-to-follow guide: * Explains the transformations of the genre through history * Outlines all the major figures which define the genre, such as ghosts, monsters and vampires * Charts key texts over two centuries * Traces origins of the form * Looks at the cultural and historical location of gothic images and texts * Provides a succinct introduction to the field which is a.
Download or read book A History of American Crime Fiction written by Chris Raczkowski and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-26 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A History of American Crime Fiction places crime fiction within a context of aesthetic practices and experiments, intellectual concerns, and historical debates generally reserved for canonical literary history. Toward that end, the book is divided into sections that reflect the periods that commonly organize American literary history, with chapters highlighting crime fiction's reciprocal relationships with early American literature, romanticism, realism, modernism and postmodernism. It surveys everything from 17th-century execution sermons, the detective fiction of Harriet Spofford and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, to the films of David Lynch, HBO's The Sopranos, and the podcast Serial, while engaging a wide variety of critical methods. As a result, this book expands crime fiction's significance beyond the boundaries of popular genres and explores the symbiosis between crime fiction and canonical literature that sustains and energizes both.
