Peter D. McDonald
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780198725152
- eISBN:
- 9780191792595
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198725152.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory, Prose (inc. letters, diaries)
Some forms of literature interfere with the workings of the literate brain, posing a challenge to readers of all kinds. This book argues that they pose as much of a challenge to the way states ...
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Some forms of literature interfere with the workings of the literate brain, posing a challenge to readers of all kinds. This book argues that they pose as much of a challenge to the way states conceptualize language, culture, and community. Drawing on a wealth of evidence, from Victorian scholarly disputes over the identity of the English language to the constitutional debates about its future in Ireland, India, and South Africa, and from quarrels over the idea of culture within the League of Nations to UNESCO’s ongoing struggle to articulate a viable concept of diversity, it brings together a large group of legacy writers, including T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Rabindranath Tagore, putting them in dialogue with each other and with the policymakers who shaped the formation of modern states and the history of internationalist thought from the 1860s to the 1940s. The second part of the book reflects on the continuing evolution of these dialogues, showing how a varied array of more contemporary writers from Amit Chaudhuri, J. M. Coetzee, and Salman Rushdie, to Antjie Krog, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, and Es’kia Mphahlele cast new light on a range of questions that have preoccupied UNESCO since 1945. At once a novel contribution to institutional and intellectual history and an innovative exercise in literary and philosophical analysis, Artefacts of Writing affords a unique perspective on literature’s place at the centre of some of the most fraught, often lethal public controversies that defined the long-twentieth century and that continue to haunt us today.Less
Some forms of literature interfere with the workings of the literate brain, posing a challenge to readers of all kinds. This book argues that they pose as much of a challenge to the way states conceptualize language, culture, and community. Drawing on a wealth of evidence, from Victorian scholarly disputes over the identity of the English language to the constitutional debates about its future in Ireland, India, and South Africa, and from quarrels over the idea of culture within the League of Nations to UNESCO’s ongoing struggle to articulate a viable concept of diversity, it brings together a large group of legacy writers, including T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Rabindranath Tagore, putting them in dialogue with each other and with the policymakers who shaped the formation of modern states and the history of internationalist thought from the 1860s to the 1940s. The second part of the book reflects on the continuing evolution of these dialogues, showing how a varied array of more contemporary writers from Amit Chaudhuri, J. M. Coetzee, and Salman Rushdie, to Antjie Krog, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, and Es’kia Mphahlele cast new light on a range of questions that have preoccupied UNESCO since 1945. At once a novel contribution to institutional and intellectual history and an innovative exercise in literary and philosophical analysis, Artefacts of Writing affords a unique perspective on literature’s place at the centre of some of the most fraught, often lethal public controversies that defined the long-twentieth century and that continue to haunt us today.
Jennifer Yee
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198722632
- eISBN:
- 9780191789335
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198722632.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature, Prose (inc. letters, diaries)
The Colonial Comedy demonstrates that the colonies play a role at a distance even in the most metropolitan texts of the French realist and naturalist canon. The presence of the colonies offstage is ...
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The Colonial Comedy demonstrates that the colonies play a role at a distance even in the most metropolitan texts of the French realist and naturalist canon. The presence of the colonies offstage is apparent in what Edward Said called ‘geographical notations’ of race and imperialism, such as imported objects, colonial merchandise, and individuals whose colonial experience is transformative. The realist novel registers the presence of the emerging global world-system through networks of importation, financial speculation, and immigration as well as direct colonial violence and power structures. The literature of the century responds to the last decades of French slavery, and direct colonialism (notably in Algeria), but also economic imperialism and the extension of French influence elsewhere. Far from imperialist triumphalism, in the realist novel exotic objects are portrayed as fake or mass-produced for the growing bourgeois market, while economic imperialism is associated with fraud and manipulation. The polemic contrast of colonialism and exoticism within the metropolitan novel, and ironic distancing of colonial embedded narratives as well as paradigms of racial difference, reveal the realist mode to be capable of questioning its own epistemological basis. Indeed, The Colonial Comedy argues for the existence in the nineteenth century of a Critical Orientalism characterized by critique of its own discursive foundations. Using the tools of literary analysis (and notably analysis of metonymy) within a materialist approach, The Colonial Comedy opens up the metropolitan Paris–Provinces axis of Realism to signifying chains pointing outwards to the broader colonial sphere.Less
The Colonial Comedy demonstrates that the colonies play a role at a distance even in the most metropolitan texts of the French realist and naturalist canon. The presence of the colonies offstage is apparent in what Edward Said called ‘geographical notations’ of race and imperialism, such as imported objects, colonial merchandise, and individuals whose colonial experience is transformative. The realist novel registers the presence of the emerging global world-system through networks of importation, financial speculation, and immigration as well as direct colonial violence and power structures. The literature of the century responds to the last decades of French slavery, and direct colonialism (notably in Algeria), but also economic imperialism and the extension of French influence elsewhere. Far from imperialist triumphalism, in the realist novel exotic objects are portrayed as fake or mass-produced for the growing bourgeois market, while economic imperialism is associated with fraud and manipulation. The polemic contrast of colonialism and exoticism within the metropolitan novel, and ironic distancing of colonial embedded narratives as well as paradigms of racial difference, reveal the realist mode to be capable of questioning its own epistemological basis. Indeed, The Colonial Comedy argues for the existence in the nineteenth century of a Critical Orientalism characterized by critique of its own discursive foundations. Using the tools of literary analysis (and notably analysis of metonymy) within a materialist approach, The Colonial Comedy opens up the metropolitan Paris–Provinces axis of Realism to signifying chains pointing outwards to the broader colonial sphere.
Neil Rhodes
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780198704102
- eISBN:
- 9780191822568
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198704102.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature, Prose (inc. letters, diaries)
This book attempts to see the development of literary culture in sixteenth-century England as a whole and to explain the relationship between the Reformation and the literary renaissance of the ...
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This book attempts to see the development of literary culture in sixteenth-century England as a whole and to explain the relationship between the Reformation and the literary renaissance of the Elizabethan period. Its central theme is ‘the common’ in its double sense of something shared and something base, and it argues that making common the work of God is at the heart of the English Reformation, just as making common the literature of antiquity and of early modern Europe is at the heart of the English Renaissance. The book addresses the central question of why the Renaissance in England arrived so late in terms of the relationship between humanism and Protestantism and the tensions between democracy and the imagination which persist throughout the century. The first part of the book establishes a social dimension for literary culture in the period by exploring the associations of ‘commonwealth’ and related terms. It then addresses the role of Greek in the period before and during the Reformation in disturbing the old binary of elite Latin and common English. It argues that the Reformation principle of making common is coupled with a hostility towards fiction, which has the effect of closing down the humanist renaissance of the earlier decades. The final part of the book discusses the Elizabethan literary renaissance and deals in turn with poetry, short prose fiction, and the drama written for the common stage. In between, the middle part of the book presents translation as the link between Reformation and Renaissance.Less
This book attempts to see the development of literary culture in sixteenth-century England as a whole and to explain the relationship between the Reformation and the literary renaissance of the Elizabethan period. Its central theme is ‘the common’ in its double sense of something shared and something base, and it argues that making common the work of God is at the heart of the English Reformation, just as making common the literature of antiquity and of early modern Europe is at the heart of the English Renaissance. The book addresses the central question of why the Renaissance in England arrived so late in terms of the relationship between humanism and Protestantism and the tensions between democracy and the imagination which persist throughout the century. The first part of the book establishes a social dimension for literary culture in the period by exploring the associations of ‘commonwealth’ and related terms. It then addresses the role of Greek in the period before and during the Reformation in disturbing the old binary of elite Latin and common English. It argues that the Reformation principle of making common is coupled with a hostility towards fiction, which has the effect of closing down the humanist renaissance of the earlier decades. The final part of the book discusses the Elizabethan literary renaissance and deals in turn with poetry, short prose fiction, and the drama written for the common stage. In between, the middle part of the book presents translation as the link between Reformation and Renaissance.
Rebecca Braun
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- September 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780199542703
- eISBN:
- 9780191715372
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199542703.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature, Prose (inc. letters, diaries)
This book traces a long-standing concern with issues of authorship throughout the work of Günter Grass, Germany's best-known contemporary writer and public intellectual. Through detailed ...
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This book traces a long-standing concern with issues of authorship throughout the work of Günter Grass, Germany's best-known contemporary writer and public intellectual. Through detailed close-readings of all of his major literary works from 1970 onwards and careful analysis of his political writings from 1965 to 2005, it argues that Grass's tendency to insert clearly recognizable self-images into his literary texts represents a coherent and calculated reaction to his constant exposure in the media-led public sphere. It underlines the degree of play which has characterized Grass's relationship to this sphere and his identity as part of it and explains how a concern with the very concept of authorship has conditioned the way his work as a whole has developed on both thematic and structural levels. The major achievement of this study is to develop a new interpretative paradigm for Grass's work. It explains for the first time how his playful tendency to manipulate his own authorial image conditions all levels of his texts and is equally manifest in literary and political realms.Less
This book traces a long-standing concern with issues of authorship throughout the work of Günter Grass, Germany's best-known contemporary writer and public intellectual. Through detailed close-readings of all of his major literary works from 1970 onwards and careful analysis of his political writings from 1965 to 2005, it argues that Grass's tendency to insert clearly recognizable self-images into his literary texts represents a coherent and calculated reaction to his constant exposure in the media-led public sphere. It underlines the degree of play which has characterized Grass's relationship to this sphere and his identity as part of it and explains how a concern with the very concept of authorship has conditioned the way his work as a whole has developed on both thematic and structural levels. The major achievement of this study is to develop a new interpretative paradigm for Grass's work. It explains for the first time how his playful tendency to manipulate his own authorial image conditions all levels of his texts and is equally manifest in literary and political realms.
Charlotte Roberts
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780198704836
- eISBN:
- 9780191789458
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198704836.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature, Prose (inc. letters, diaries)
Edward Gibbon’s presentation of character in both the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and in his posthumously published Memoirs demonstrates a prevailing interest in the values of ...
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Edward Gibbon’s presentation of character in both the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and in his posthumously published Memoirs demonstrates a prevailing interest in the values of transcendent heroism and individual liberty, but also an insistent awareness of the dangers these values pose to coherence and narrative order. In this study, Dr Roberts demonstrates how these dynamics also inform the ‘character’ of the Decline and Fall: in which ironic difference confronts enervating uniformity; oddity counters specious lucidity, and revision combats repetition. Edward Gibbon and the Shape of History explores the Decline and Fall as a work of scholarship and of literature, tracing both its expansive outline and its expressive details. A close examination of each of the three instalments of Gibbon’s history reveals an intimate relationship between the style of Gibbon’s narrative and the overall shape of his historiographical composition. The constant interplay between the particular details of composition and the larger patterns of argument and narrative informs every aspect of Gibbon’s work: from his reception of established and innovative historiographical conventions to the expression of his narrative voice. Through a combination of close reading and larger literary and scholarly analysis, Dr Roberts conveys a sense of the Decline and Fall as a work more complex and conflicted, in its tone and structure, than has been appreciated by previous scholars, without losing sight of the grand contours of Gibbon’s superlative achievement.Less
Edward Gibbon’s presentation of character in both the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and in his posthumously published Memoirs demonstrates a prevailing interest in the values of transcendent heroism and individual liberty, but also an insistent awareness of the dangers these values pose to coherence and narrative order. In this study, Dr Roberts demonstrates how these dynamics also inform the ‘character’ of the Decline and Fall: in which ironic difference confronts enervating uniformity; oddity counters specious lucidity, and revision combats repetition. Edward Gibbon and the Shape of History explores the Decline and Fall as a work of scholarship and of literature, tracing both its expansive outline and its expressive details. A close examination of each of the three instalments of Gibbon’s history reveals an intimate relationship between the style of Gibbon’s narrative and the overall shape of his historiographical composition. The constant interplay between the particular details of composition and the larger patterns of argument and narrative informs every aspect of Gibbon’s work: from his reception of established and innovative historiographical conventions to the expression of his narrative voice. Through a combination of close reading and larger literary and scholarly analysis, Dr Roberts conveys a sense of the Decline and Fall as a work more complex and conflicted, in its tone and structure, than has been appreciated by previous scholars, without losing sight of the grand contours of Gibbon’s superlative achievement.
Sarah Tindal Kareem
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- December 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199689101
- eISBN:
- 9780191802027
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199689101.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature, Prose (inc. letters, diaries)
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 fiction brims ...
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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 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 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 relocation from the supernatural realm to the empirical world, providing a reevaluation not only of how we look back at the Enlightenment, but also of how we read today.Less
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 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 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 relocation from the supernatural realm to the empirical world, providing a reevaluation not only of how we look back at the Enlightenment, but also of how we read today.
Henry Power
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780198723875
- eISBN:
- 9780191791178
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198723875.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature, Prose (inc. letters, diaries)
This book looks at Henry Fielding’s adaptation of classical epic in the context of what he called the ‘Trade of … authoring’. Fielding stressed that his novels were modelled on classical literature. ...
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This book looks at Henry Fielding’s adaptation of classical epic in the context of what he called the ‘Trade of … authoring’. Fielding stressed that his novels were modelled on classical literature. Equally, he was fascinated by—and wrote at length about—the fact that they were objects to be consumed. He recognized that he wrote in an age when an author had to consider himself ‘as one who keeps a public Ordinary, at which all persons are welcome for their Money’. In describing his work, he alludes both to Homeric epic and to contemporary cookery books. This tension between Fielding’s commitment to a classical tradition and his immersion in a print culture in which books were consumable commodities has gone unexplored. Fielding’s interest in the place of the ancients in a world of consumerism was inherited from the previous generation of satirists. The ‘Scriblerians’—among them Jonathan Swift, John Gay, and Alexander Pope—repeatedly suggest in their work that classical values are at odds with modern tastes and appetites. Fielding developed many of their satiric routines in his own writing. This book contains fresh readings of works by Swift, Gay, and Pope, and of Fielding’s major novels. It looks at Fielding’s engagement with various Scriblerian themes primarily the consumption of literature, but also the professionalization of scholarship, and the status of the author—and shows ultimately that Fielding broke with the Scriblerians in acknowledging and celebrating the influence of the marketplace on his work.Less
This book looks at Henry Fielding’s adaptation of classical epic in the context of what he called the ‘Trade of … authoring’. Fielding stressed that his novels were modelled on classical literature. Equally, he was fascinated by—and wrote at length about—the fact that they were objects to be consumed. He recognized that he wrote in an age when an author had to consider himself ‘as one who keeps a public Ordinary, at which all persons are welcome for their Money’. In describing his work, he alludes both to Homeric epic and to contemporary cookery books. This tension between Fielding’s commitment to a classical tradition and his immersion in a print culture in which books were consumable commodities has gone unexplored. Fielding’s interest in the place of the ancients in a world of consumerism was inherited from the previous generation of satirists. The ‘Scriblerians’—among them Jonathan Swift, John Gay, and Alexander Pope—repeatedly suggest in their work that classical values are at odds with modern tastes and appetites. Fielding developed many of their satiric routines in his own writing. This book contains fresh readings of works by Swift, Gay, and Pope, and of Fielding’s major novels. It looks at Fielding’s engagement with various Scriblerian themes primarily the consumption of literature, but also the professionalization of scholarship, and the status of the author—and shows ultimately that Fielding broke with the Scriblerians in acknowledging and celebrating the influence of the marketplace on his work.
Denis Sampson
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198752998
- eISBN:
- 9780191816000
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198752998.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory, Prose (inc. letters, diaries)
The five essays in this book investigate a key work early in the careers of V.S. Naipaul, Alice Munro, J.M. Coetzee, Mavis Gallant and William Trevor. Each of these major writers of fiction found ...
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The five essays in this book investigate a key work early in the careers of V.S. Naipaul, Alice Munro, J.M. Coetzee, Mavis Gallant and William Trevor. Each of these major writers of fiction found what they variously called ‘the writing voice’, ‘the voice in my head’, ‘the voice of the mind’ ‘[my] own voice’, or a ‘true voice’. Their mature achievement as artists depended on that earlier period of creative synthesis that led to an unprecedented kind of articulation. The circumstances of creation are reconstructed for Naipaul’s writing of Miguel Street, Coetzee’s Dusklands, Gallant’s Green Water, Green Sky, Trevor’s Mrs Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel and related stories, and for certain stories by Alice Munro in Dance of the Happy Shades and Lives of Girls and Women. Each essay is focused on illuminating how and why the particular work marked a crucial turning point. In a sense, what followed, what grew out of this work, provides as much insight as what came before. The later autobiographical essays and fictions of Naipaul and Coetzee, and occasional interviews and essays by Munro, Trevor, and Gallant illuminate the convergence of needs and aesthetic ends in each case. Many of these writers refer to instinct, to curiosity, and to writing as a site of discovery, as if their trust in hidden processes is key. Using biographical and literary critical means, the essays bring the reader close to such a process. Even if there cannot be definitive conclusions, it intrigues many readers and, in particular, beginning writers. The writers’ own expression, ‘finding a voice’, provides an opening for understanding this process.Less
The five essays in this book investigate a key work early in the careers of V.S. Naipaul, Alice Munro, J.M. Coetzee, Mavis Gallant and William Trevor. Each of these major writers of fiction found what they variously called ‘the writing voice’, ‘the voice in my head’, ‘the voice of the mind’ ‘[my] own voice’, or a ‘true voice’. Their mature achievement as artists depended on that earlier period of creative synthesis that led to an unprecedented kind of articulation. The circumstances of creation are reconstructed for Naipaul’s writing of Miguel Street, Coetzee’s Dusklands, Gallant’s Green Water, Green Sky, Trevor’s Mrs Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel and related stories, and for certain stories by Alice Munro in Dance of the Happy Shades and Lives of Girls and Women. Each essay is focused on illuminating how and why the particular work marked a crucial turning point. In a sense, what followed, what grew out of this work, provides as much insight as what came before. The later autobiographical essays and fictions of Naipaul and Coetzee, and occasional interviews and essays by Munro, Trevor, and Gallant illuminate the convergence of needs and aesthetic ends in each case. Many of these writers refer to instinct, to curiosity, and to writing as a site of discovery, as if their trust in hidden processes is key. Using biographical and literary critical means, the essays bring the reader close to such a process. Even if there cannot be definitive conclusions, it intrigues many readers and, in particular, beginning writers. The writers’ own expression, ‘finding a voice’, provides an opening for understanding this process.
Oliver Herford
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198734802
- eISBN:
- 9780191799310
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198734802.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory, Prose (inc. letters, diaries)
This book examines Henry James’s engagement with the writing of the recent past across the last twenty-five years of his life and analyses the changes his style underwent as he gradually turned from ...
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This book examines Henry James’s engagement with the writing of the recent past across the last twenty-five years of his life and analyses the changes his style underwent as he gradually turned from the observation of contemporary manners to biographical commemoration and autobiographical reminiscence, and as the balance of his literary output shifted correspondingly from fiction to non-fiction. James’s ‘late personal writings’ are a retrospective non-fictional works: commemorative essays and obituary tributes, textual revisions and accounts of revisiting familiar places, cultural and literary criticism, biography and autobiography, and family memoir. The book proposes that we understand these apparently heterogeneous writings as an imaginatively coherent sequence that enacts a principled commitment on James’s part to personal, historical, and stylistic continuity, and reflects the innovative dynamism of his newly discovered sense for the literary possibilities of non-fiction. On this basis the book offers a revisionist account of the way style itself challenges and preoccupies the very late James. Interlinked close readings take the major works of this period in chronological order, 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 in analyses of James’s late work. Henry James’s Style of Retrospect asks what it means for a great novelist to embrace a different literary mode in late life, and shows how we may begin to reconfigure our understanding of late Jamesian aesthetics accordingly.Less
This book examines Henry James’s engagement with the writing of the recent past across the last twenty-five years of his life and analyses the changes his style underwent as he gradually turned from the observation of contemporary manners to biographical commemoration and autobiographical reminiscence, and as the balance of his literary output shifted correspondingly from fiction to non-fiction. James’s ‘late personal writings’ are a retrospective non-fictional works: commemorative essays and obituary tributes, textual revisions and accounts of revisiting familiar places, cultural and literary criticism, biography and autobiography, and family memoir. The book proposes that we understand these apparently heterogeneous writings as an imaginatively coherent sequence that enacts a principled commitment on James’s part to personal, historical, and stylistic continuity, and reflects the innovative dynamism of his newly discovered sense for the literary possibilities of non-fiction. On this basis the book offers a revisionist account of the way style itself challenges and preoccupies the very late James. Interlinked close readings take the major works of this period in chronological order, 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 in analyses of James’s late work. Henry James’s Style of Retrospect asks what it means for a great novelist to embrace a different literary mode in late life, and shows how we may begin to reconfigure our understanding of late Jamesian aesthetics accordingly.
J. A. Garrido Ardila (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- June 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780199641925
- eISBN:
- 9780191800443
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199641925.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature, Prose (inc. letters, diaries)
This book traces the development of Spanish prose fiction, thus providing a comprehensive and detailed account of this important literary tradition. It opens with an introductory chapter that ...
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This book traces the development of Spanish prose fiction, thus providing a comprehensive and detailed account of this important literary tradition. It opens with an introductory chapter that examines the evolution of the novel in Spain, with particular attention to the emergence of the novel as a genre during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the bearing of Golden-Age fiction in later novelists of all periods. The introduction contextualizes the Spanish novel in the circumstances and milestones of Spain’s history and in the wider setting of European literature. The volume is comprised of chapters presented diachronically, from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries, in addition to others devoted to specific novelistic traditions (the chivalric romance, the picaresque, the modernist novel, the avant-gardist novel) and to some of the most salient authors (Cervantes, Zayas, Pardo Bazán, Galdós, and Baroja). This book takes the reader across the centuries to reveal the captivating life of the Spanish novel tradition and its phenomenal contribution to Western literature.Less
This book traces the development of Spanish prose fiction, thus providing a comprehensive and detailed account of this important literary tradition. It opens with an introductory chapter that examines the evolution of the novel in Spain, with particular attention to the emergence of the novel as a genre during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the bearing of Golden-Age fiction in later novelists of all periods. The introduction contextualizes the Spanish novel in the circumstances and milestones of Spain’s history and in the wider setting of European literature. The volume is comprised of chapters presented diachronically, from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries, in addition to others devoted to specific novelistic traditions (the chivalric romance, the picaresque, the modernist novel, the avant-gardist novel) and to some of the most salient authors (Cervantes, Zayas, Pardo Bazán, Galdós, and Baroja). This book takes the reader across the centuries to reveal the captivating life of the Spanish novel tradition and its phenomenal contribution to Western literature.
Marie d`Agoult
The Siege of Malta and Bizarro
