Daniel Lea
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780719081491
- eISBN:
- 9781526121097
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719081491.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
This chapter explores the writing of Ali Smith from the late 1990s to the publication of How to be Both (2014). It concentrates primarily on her novels and short stories, though some attention is ...
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This chapter explores the writing of Ali Smith from the late 1990s to the publication of How to be Both (2014). It concentrates primarily on her novels and short stories, though some attention is paid to her occasional writings. The chapter is broken into two broad generic sections, the first addressing her short stories together, the second her novels in chronological order. Each text is given close analytical study through formal, stylistic, and thematic critique, building to an overview of an author whose moral sense of duty for the care of the other is paradoxically set against her confusion at the impenetrability of that other’s being.Less
This chapter explores the writing of Ali Smith from the late 1990s to the publication of How to be Both (2014). It concentrates primarily on her novels and short stories, though some attention is paid to her occasional writings. The chapter is broken into two broad generic sections, the first addressing her short stories together, the second her novels in chronological order. Each text is given close analytical study through formal, stylistic, and thematic critique, building to an overview of an author whose moral sense of duty for the care of the other is paradoxically set against her confusion at the impenetrability of that other’s being.
Mark Currie
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748624249
- eISBN:
- 9780748652037
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748624249.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This book brings together ideas about time from narrative theory and philosophy. It argues that literary criticism and narratology have approached narrative primarily as a form of retrospect, and ...
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This book brings together ideas about time from narrative theory and philosophy. It argues that literary criticism and narratology have approached narrative primarily as a form of retrospect, and demonstrates through a series of arguments and readings that anticipation and other forms of projection into the future offer new analytical perspectives to narrative criticism and theory. The book offers an account of ‘prolepsis’ or ‘flashforward’ in the contemporary novel that retrieves it from the realm of experimentation and places it at the heart of a contemporary mode of being, both personal and collective, which experiences the present as the object of a future memory. With reference to some of the most important recent developments in the philosophy of time, it aims to define a set of questions about tense and temporal reference in narrative that make it possible to reconsider the function of stories in contemporary culture. The text also reopens traditional questions about the difference between literature and philosophy in relation to knowledge of time. In the context of these questions, it offers analyses of a range of contemporary fiction by writers such as Ali Smith, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Graham Swift.Less
This book brings together ideas about time from narrative theory and philosophy. It argues that literary criticism and narratology have approached narrative primarily as a form of retrospect, and demonstrates through a series of arguments and readings that anticipation and other forms of projection into the future offer new analytical perspectives to narrative criticism and theory. The book offers an account of ‘prolepsis’ or ‘flashforward’ in the contemporary novel that retrieves it from the realm of experimentation and places it at the heart of a contemporary mode of being, both personal and collective, which experiences the present as the object of a future memory. With reference to some of the most important recent developments in the philosophy of time, it aims to define a set of questions about tense and temporal reference in narrative that make it possible to reconsider the function of stories in contemporary culture. The text also reopens traditional questions about the difference between literature and philosophy in relation to knowledge of time. In the context of these questions, it offers analyses of a range of contemporary fiction by writers such as Ali Smith, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Graham Swift.
Monica Germanà
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748637645
- eISBN:
- 9780748652259
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748637645.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Women's Literature
This chapter focuses on the topic of witches in contemporary fantastic writings of Scottish women. It analyses Ellen Galford's Queendom Come, Alice Thompson's Pandora's Box and Ali Smith's The ...
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This chapter focuses on the topic of witches in contemporary fantastic writings of Scottish women. It analyses Ellen Galford's Queendom Come, Alice Thompson's Pandora's Box and Ali Smith's The Accidental. The chapter suggests that the witch in these works is a simultaneous embodiment of female marginalisation and feminist subversion, and that the dangerous woman characters challenge binary oppositions between gender and the established hierarchical order.Less
This chapter focuses on the topic of witches in contemporary fantastic writings of Scottish women. It analyses Ellen Galford's Queendom Come, Alice Thompson's Pandora's Box and Ali Smith's The Accidental. The chapter suggests that the witch in these works is a simultaneous embodiment of female marginalisation and feminist subversion, and that the dangerous woman characters challenge binary oppositions between gender and the established hierarchical order.
Monica Germanà
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748637645
- eISBN:
- 9780748652259
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748637645.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Women's Literature
This chapter considers the revenant motif in fantastic writings of Scottish women. It explains that this motif serves as the paradoxical site of theoretical discourses about corporeality and ...
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This chapter considers the revenant motif in fantastic writings of Scottish women. It explains that this motif serves as the paradoxical site of theoretical discourses about corporeality and ethereality, life and death, and seen and unseen. The chapter offers an interpretation of Elspeth Barker's O Caledonia, A.L. Kennedy's So I Am Glad and Ali Smith's Hotel World, suggesting that the ghost in twentieth-century writings signifies the overcoming of structuralist dualism.Less
This chapter considers the revenant motif in fantastic writings of Scottish women. It explains that this motif serves as the paradoxical site of theoretical discourses about corporeality and ethereality, life and death, and seen and unseen. The chapter offers an interpretation of Elspeth Barker's O Caledonia, A.L. Kennedy's So I Am Glad and Ali Smith's Hotel World, suggesting that the ghost in twentieth-century writings signifies the overcoming of structuralist dualism.
Daniel Lea
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780719081491
- eISBN:
- 9781526121097
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719081491.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
This study explores the landscape of contemporary British fiction through detailed analysis of five authors that have emerged to critical prominence in the 21st century. The authors addressed - Ali ...
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This study explores the landscape of contemporary British fiction through detailed analysis of five authors that have emerged to critical prominence in the 21st century. The authors addressed - Ali Smith, Andrew O’Hagan, Tom McCarthy, Sarah Hall, and Jon McGregor – have all established themselves through popular and critical success, but have received significantly less attention than some of their peers. This book does not seek to thrust these authors into a putative canon of 21st century literary writing, but rather to explore through close attention to the resonances, continuities, elisions, and frictions across their works the temper of the contemporary moment as it is expressed by a group of writers. Each is devoted a chapter that analyses their creative output to-date within the frame of their stylistic and thematic development, as well as drawing comparisons across their writing and that of their peers. The intention is never to provide the kind of synoptical overview that a period-study might suggest, instead Twenty-First Century Fiction: Contemporary British Voices seeks to juxtapose critical readings within a constellation of contemporary literary concerns to examine what cultural energies and flows are emerging in the new century. In doing so, it identifies three recurrent areas of concern that might be said to infiltrate our times; these are Materiality, Connectivity, and Authenticity. In many forms and through many articulations, these issues emerge as insistent – if inchoate – questions about how current literary practice is responding to the challenge of the post-millennial world.Less
This study explores the landscape of contemporary British fiction through detailed analysis of five authors that have emerged to critical prominence in the 21st century. The authors addressed - Ali Smith, Andrew O’Hagan, Tom McCarthy, Sarah Hall, and Jon McGregor – have all established themselves through popular and critical success, but have received significantly less attention than some of their peers. This book does not seek to thrust these authors into a putative canon of 21st century literary writing, but rather to explore through close attention to the resonances, continuities, elisions, and frictions across their works the temper of the contemporary moment as it is expressed by a group of writers. Each is devoted a chapter that analyses their creative output to-date within the frame of their stylistic and thematic development, as well as drawing comparisons across their writing and that of their peers. The intention is never to provide the kind of synoptical overview that a period-study might suggest, instead Twenty-First Century Fiction: Contemporary British Voices seeks to juxtapose critical readings within a constellation of contemporary literary concerns to examine what cultural energies and flows are emerging in the new century. In doing so, it identifies three recurrent areas of concern that might be said to infiltrate our times; these are Materiality, Connectivity, and Authenticity. In many forms and through many articulations, these issues emerge as insistent – if inchoate – questions about how current literary practice is responding to the challenge of the post-millennial world.
Robert Mills
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- September 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780226169125
- eISBN:
- 9780226169262
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226169262.003.0002
- Subject:
- History, European Medieval History
This chapter considers the benefits of filtering medieval ideas of unnatural sex through the postmodern category transgender. It begins by engaging with conceptions of transgender time in recent ...
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This chapter considers the benefits of filtering medieval ideas of unnatural sex through the postmodern category transgender. It begins by engaging with conceptions of transgender time in recent historiography. This is followed by a detailed analysis of passages on cross-gendered performance and illicit sex in Hildegard of Bingen’s Scivias, which demonstrate the inextricability of concepts of gender and sexuality in the Middle Ages. The remainder of the chapter focuses on the Ovidian myth of Iphis and Ianthe, a sex change narrative mediated in the Middle Ages via a number of moralized retellings of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. These retellings, which include a translation of the prose Ovide moralisé by William Caxton, variously confront and suppress the Iphis story’s “lesbian” implications. In conclusion, the chapter explores other, alternative responses to the myth of Iphis and Ianthe, including retellings by the fifteenth-century poet and intellectual Christine de Pizan and by the contemporary British novelist Ali Smith.Less
This chapter considers the benefits of filtering medieval ideas of unnatural sex through the postmodern category transgender. It begins by engaging with conceptions of transgender time in recent historiography. This is followed by a detailed analysis of passages on cross-gendered performance and illicit sex in Hildegard of Bingen’s Scivias, which demonstrate the inextricability of concepts of gender and sexuality in the Middle Ages. The remainder of the chapter focuses on the Ovidian myth of Iphis and Ianthe, a sex change narrative mediated in the Middle Ages via a number of moralized retellings of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. These retellings, which include a translation of the prose Ovide moralisé by William Caxton, variously confront and suppress the Iphis story’s “lesbian” implications. In conclusion, the chapter explores other, alternative responses to the myth of Iphis and Ianthe, including retellings by the fifteenth-century poet and intellectual Christine de Pizan and by the contemporary British novelist Ali Smith.
Mark Currie
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748624249
- eISBN:
- 9780748652037
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748624249.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter considers Ali Smith's The Accidental and Ian McEwan's Saturday. These novels serve as interesting examples in which the problems of knowledge, fictional knowledge of internal ...
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This chapter considers Ali Smith's The Accidental and Ian McEwan's Saturday. These novels serve as interesting examples in which the problems of knowledge, fictional knowledge of internal time-consciousness and critical knowledge of this fictional knowledge, interact with each other. The Accidental and Saturday seem to link a certain preoccupation of time with the spirit of the times, and they both deal with the intrusion into the life of a family of an outsider. Saturday differs from The Accidental in the sense that the former maintains an entirely implicit self-knowledge in its dramatisation of reflections upon literature, whereas the latter develops its self-knowledge in an explicit way, principally through its anti-realistic frame-breaking.Less
This chapter considers Ali Smith's The Accidental and Ian McEwan's Saturday. These novels serve as interesting examples in which the problems of knowledge, fictional knowledge of internal time-consciousness and critical knowledge of this fictional knowledge, interact with each other. The Accidental and Saturday seem to link a certain preoccupation of time with the spirit of the times, and they both deal with the intrusion into the life of a family of an outsider. Saturday differs from The Accidental in the sense that the former maintains an entirely implicit self-knowledge in its dramatisation of reflections upon literature, whereas the latter develops its self-knowledge in an explicit way, principally through its anti-realistic frame-breaking.
