John Mullan
- Published in print:
- 1990
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198122524
- eISBN:
- 9780191671449
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198122524.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
With the rise of the novel in the mid-18th century came the rise of sentimentalism. While the fondness for sentiment embarrassed later literary critics, it originally legitimized a morally suspect ...
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With the rise of the novel in the mid-18th century came the rise of sentimentalism. While the fondness for sentiment embarrassed later literary critics, it originally legitimized a morally suspect phenomenon: the novel. This book describes that legitimation, yet it looks beyond the narrowly literary to the lives and expressed philosophies of some of the major writers of the age, showing the language of feeling to be a resource of philosophers like David Hume and Adam Smith, as much as novelists like Samuel Richardson and Laurence Sterne.Less
With the rise of the novel in the mid-18th century came the rise of sentimentalism. While the fondness for sentiment embarrassed later literary critics, it originally legitimized a morally suspect phenomenon: the novel. This book describes that legitimation, yet it looks beyond the narrowly literary to the lives and expressed philosophies of some of the major writers of the age, showing the language of feeling to be a resource of philosophers like David Hume and Adam Smith, as much as novelists like Samuel Richardson and Laurence Sterne.
Ros Ballaster
- Published in print:
- 1998
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198184775
- eISBN:
- 9780191674341
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198184775.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature, 17th-century and Restoration Literature
Historicist and feminist accounts of the ‘rise of the novel’ have neglected the phenomenon of the professional woman writer in England prior to the advent of the sentimental novel in the 1740s. This ...
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Historicist and feminist accounts of the ‘rise of the novel’ have neglected the phenomenon of the professional woman writer in England prior to the advent of the sentimental novel in the 1740s. This book explores the means by which the three leading Tory women novelists of the late 17th and early 18th centuries challenged and reworked both contemporary gender ideologies and generic convention. The seduction plot provided Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, and Eliza Haywood with a vehicle for dramatizing their own appropriation of the ‘masculine’ power of fiction-making. Seduction is employed in these fictions as a metaphor for both novelistic production (the seduction of the reader by the writer) and party political machination (the seduction of the public by the politician). The book also explores the debts early prose fiction owed to French 17th-century models of fiction-writing and argues that Behn, Manley, and Haywood succeed in producing a distinctively ‘English’ and female ‘form’ for the amatory novel.Less
Historicist and feminist accounts of the ‘rise of the novel’ have neglected the phenomenon of the professional woman writer in England prior to the advent of the sentimental novel in the 1740s. This book explores the means by which the three leading Tory women novelists of the late 17th and early 18th centuries challenged and reworked both contemporary gender ideologies and generic convention. The seduction plot provided Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, and Eliza Haywood with a vehicle for dramatizing their own appropriation of the ‘masculine’ power of fiction-making. Seduction is employed in these fictions as a metaphor for both novelistic production (the seduction of the reader by the writer) and party political machination (the seduction of the public by the politician). The book also explores the debts early prose fiction owed to French 17th-century models of fiction-writing and argues that Behn, Manley, and Haywood succeed in producing a distinctively ‘English’ and female ‘form’ for the amatory novel.
Marilyn Butler
- Published in print:
- 1988
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198129684
- eISBN:
- 9780191671838
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198129684.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This book shows that the novels of Jane Austen's day, hers included, were full of signs that conveyed opinions. This was not to be one of those undifferentiated and necessarily very selective ...
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This book shows that the novels of Jane Austen's day, hers included, were full of signs that conveyed opinions. This was not to be one of those undifferentiated and necessarily very selective accounts of the ‘background’ that generalize about the workings of power or hegemony if they are in the Marxist tradition, or describe the Zeitgeist or spirit of the age if they are not. This book argues that the practices of novelists in the late eighteenth century were less aesthetic, less separate from society, than modern critics are in the habit of insisting on. One can speak of Austen's participation, without hazardous speculation about her personal opinions, because she chose to write novels of a particular pre-existent type, and chose to publish them.Less
This book shows that the novels of Jane Austen's day, hers included, were full of signs that conveyed opinions. This was not to be one of those undifferentiated and necessarily very selective accounts of the ‘background’ that generalize about the workings of power or hegemony if they are in the Marxist tradition, or describe the Zeitgeist or spirit of the age if they are not. This book argues that the practices of novelists in the late eighteenth century were less aesthetic, less separate from society, than modern critics are in the habit of insisting on. One can speak of Austen's participation, without hazardous speculation about her personal opinions, because she chose to write novels of a particular pre-existent type, and chose to publish them.
David Kurnick
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691151519
- eISBN:
- 9781400840090
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691151519.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
According to the dominant tradition of literary criticism, the novel is the form par excellence of the private individual. This book challenges this consensus by re-examining the genre's development ...
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According to the dominant tradition of literary criticism, the novel is the form par excellence of the private individual. This book challenges this consensus by re-examining the genre's development from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century and exploring what has until now seemed an anomaly—the frustrated theatrical ambitions of major novelists. Offering new interpretations of the careers of William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, Henry James, James Joyce, and James Baldwin—writers known for mapping ever-narrower interior geographies—this book argues that the genre's inward-looking tendency has been misunderstood. Delving into the critical role of the theater in the origins of the novel of interiority, the book reinterprets the novel as a record of dissatisfaction with inwardness and an injunction to rethink human identity in radically collective and social terms. Exploring neglected texts in order to reread canonical ones, the book shows that the theatrical ambitions of major novelists had crucial formal and ideological effects on their masterworks. The book establishes the theatrical genealogy of some of the signal techniques of narrative interiority by investigating a key stretch of each of these novelistic careers. In the process, it illustrates how the novel is marked by a hunger for palpable collectivity, and argues that the genre's discontents have been a shaping force in its evolution. A groundbreaking rereading of the novel, this book provides new ways to consider the novelistic imagination.Less
According to the dominant tradition of literary criticism, the novel is the form par excellence of the private individual. This book challenges this consensus by re-examining the genre's development from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century and exploring what has until now seemed an anomaly—the frustrated theatrical ambitions of major novelists. Offering new interpretations of the careers of William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, Henry James, James Joyce, and James Baldwin—writers known for mapping ever-narrower interior geographies—this book argues that the genre's inward-looking tendency has been misunderstood. Delving into the critical role of the theater in the origins of the novel of interiority, the book reinterprets the novel as a record of dissatisfaction with inwardness and an injunction to rethink human identity in radically collective and social terms. Exploring neglected texts in order to reread canonical ones, the book shows that the theatrical ambitions of major novelists had crucial formal and ideological effects on their masterworks. The book establishes the theatrical genealogy of some of the signal techniques of narrative interiority by investigating a key stretch of each of these novelistic careers. In the process, it illustrates how the novel is marked by a hunger for palpable collectivity, and argues that the genre's discontents have been a shaping force in its evolution. A groundbreaking rereading of the novel, this book provides new ways to consider the novelistic imagination.
Ros Ballaster
- Published in print:
- 1998
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198184775
- eISBN:
- 9780191674341
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198184775.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature, 17th-century and Restoration Literature
This introductory chapter sets out the purpose of the book, which is to give an account of the conditions that enabled some women writers in the late 17th and early 18th century to ‘profit’, both ...
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This introductory chapter sets out the purpose of the book, which is to give an account of the conditions that enabled some women writers in the late 17th and early 18th century to ‘profit’, both materially and ideologically, from the narcissistic strategies that Aphra Behn's heroine learns through the course of the novel. An overview of the subsequent chapters is presented.Less
This introductory chapter sets out the purpose of the book, which is to give an account of the conditions that enabled some women writers in the late 17th and early 18th century to ‘profit’, both materially and ideologically, from the narcissistic strategies that Aphra Behn's heroine learns through the course of the novel. An overview of the subsequent chapters is presented.
Leah Price
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691114170
- eISBN:
- 9781400842186
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691114170.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter examines reading. For scholars as for the secular novelists discussed in the next two chapters, reading is harder to document than handling—let alone than writing. Even as literary ...
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This chapter examines reading. For scholars as for the secular novelists discussed in the next two chapters, reading is harder to document than handling—let alone than writing. Even as literary critics shifted their focus from the authorial exception to the readerly rule, reader-response theorists and reception historians alike continued to study the text as a linguistic structure, at the expense of the book as a material thing. Indeed, mental actions prove harder to track than manual gestures—human traces that are not intentional, let alone textual, let alone literary. From evidence of reading to nonevidence of reading to evidence of nonreading: those bodily acts that both accompany and replace reading, whether licking a page or turning down a corner, should provide historians of the book with more than a consolation prize.Less
This chapter examines reading. For scholars as for the secular novelists discussed in the next two chapters, reading is harder to document than handling—let alone than writing. Even as literary critics shifted their focus from the authorial exception to the readerly rule, reader-response theorists and reception historians alike continued to study the text as a linguistic structure, at the expense of the book as a material thing. Indeed, mental actions prove harder to track than manual gestures—human traces that are not intentional, let alone textual, let alone literary. From evidence of reading to nonevidence of reading to evidence of nonreading: those bodily acts that both accompany and replace reading, whether licking a page or turning down a corner, should provide historians of the book with more than a consolation prize.
David Kurnick
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691151519
- eISBN:
- 9781400840090
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691151519.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. The book considers the contribution of writers' theatrical ambitions to their invention of what by many accounts are among ...
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This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. The book considers the contribution of writers' theatrical ambitions to their invention of what by many accounts are among the most “novelistic,” and thus reputedly individualizing, of novels. It demonstrates that the novel's interior spaces are lined with longing references to the public worlds they would seem to have left behind. The book considers four would-be playwrights noted for their antitheatricality. From William Makepeace Thackeray's hatred of pretense and George Eliot's suspicion of vain women to Henry James's early diagnoses of the culture of publicity and James Joyce's contempt for Buck Mulligan's performative flourishes, these writers are capable of rhetorically employing “theater” as a synonym for everything they most despise.Less
This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. The book considers the contribution of writers' theatrical ambitions to their invention of what by many accounts are among the most “novelistic,” and thus reputedly individualizing, of novels. It demonstrates that the novel's interior spaces are lined with longing references to the public worlds they would seem to have left behind. The book considers four would-be playwrights noted for their antitheatricality. From William Makepeace Thackeray's hatred of pretense and George Eliot's suspicion of vain women to Henry James's early diagnoses of the culture of publicity and James Joyce's contempt for Buck Mulligan's performative flourishes, these writers are capable of rhetorically employing “theater” as a synonym for everything they most despise.
David Kurnick
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691151519
- eISBN:
- 9781400840090
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691151519.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
James Baldwin is not only one of the more notable Anglophone twentieth-century novelists to attempt continually and with minimal success to enter the theater. He is also one of the major inheritors ...
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James Baldwin is not only one of the more notable Anglophone twentieth-century novelists to attempt continually and with minimal success to enter the theater. He is also one of the major inheritors of the aesthetic and political problematic we have repeatedly encountered in the course of this book. Baldwin is perhaps the most important twentieth-century novelist to seriously explore what it means to make interiority the bearer of collective desire. This chapter argues that the novel of interiority reaches an impasse and a breakthrough in the work of Baldwin precisely when the contradictions inherent in the attempt to think collective problems through sexual interiority becomes unavoidably insistent—and does so through Baldwin's negotiation with the generic difference of the theater. His career makes clear that if the novel relentlessly personalizes collective issues, its theatrical preoccupation constitutes a record of the political costs of that reduction, one that demands to be read at the level of form.Less
James Baldwin is not only one of the more notable Anglophone twentieth-century novelists to attempt continually and with minimal success to enter the theater. He is also one of the major inheritors of the aesthetic and political problematic we have repeatedly encountered in the course of this book. Baldwin is perhaps the most important twentieth-century novelist to seriously explore what it means to make interiority the bearer of collective desire. This chapter argues that the novel of interiority reaches an impasse and a breakthrough in the work of Baldwin precisely when the contradictions inherent in the attempt to think collective problems through sexual interiority becomes unavoidably insistent—and does so through Baldwin's negotiation with the generic difference of the theater. His career makes clear that if the novel relentlessly personalizes collective issues, its theatrical preoccupation constitutes a record of the political costs of that reduction, one that demands to be read at the level of form.
Dorothy Stringer
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780823231478
- eISBN:
- 9780823241088
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823231478.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature
This book highlights references to nineteenth-century U.S. slavery and anti-Black racism in literary and photographic projects begun during the late 1920s and early 1930s, including novels by William ...
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This book highlights references to nineteenth-century U.S. slavery and anti-Black racism in literary and photographic projects begun during the late 1920s and early 1930s, including novels by William Faulkner and Nella Larsen, and portraits by Carl Van Vechten. These texts share a representational crisis, in which distinctions between present, quotidian racism and a massive, fully racialized historical trauma disappear. All identify persistent historical traumatization with intense subjective states (including madness, religious ecstasy, narcissism, and fetishistic enjoyment), and each explores the conservative, even coercive social character of such links between psyche and history. When the past of enslavement is not even past, narration freezes, black and white women lose their capacity to question or resist social and domestic violence, and racial politics fail. Anticipating contemporary trauma studies by decades, these disparate modernists' works constitute not an expounded or avowed but an interstitial trauma theory, which finds its shape in the spaces left by conventional public discourse. Their works parallel important essays by psychoanalytic thinkers of the same era, including Joan Riviere, Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, and Walter Benjamin, and their joint explication of relationships among psyche, history, and race offers important resources for psychoanalytic approaches to racial difference today. Despite their analytic acuity, however, Faulkner, Larsen, and Van Vechten also themselves carry the traumatic past forward into the future. Indeed, the two novelists' tragic depictions of a triumphant color line and the photographer's insistence on an idiom of black primitivism lent support to white supremacy in the twentieth century.Less
This book highlights references to nineteenth-century U.S. slavery and anti-Black racism in literary and photographic projects begun during the late 1920s and early 1930s, including novels by William Faulkner and Nella Larsen, and portraits by Carl Van Vechten. These texts share a representational crisis, in which distinctions between present, quotidian racism and a massive, fully racialized historical trauma disappear. All identify persistent historical traumatization with intense subjective states (including madness, religious ecstasy, narcissism, and fetishistic enjoyment), and each explores the conservative, even coercive social character of such links between psyche and history. When the past of enslavement is not even past, narration freezes, black and white women lose their capacity to question or resist social and domestic violence, and racial politics fail. Anticipating contemporary trauma studies by decades, these disparate modernists' works constitute not an expounded or avowed but an interstitial trauma theory, which finds its shape in the spaces left by conventional public discourse. Their works parallel important essays by psychoanalytic thinkers of the same era, including Joan Riviere, Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, and Walter Benjamin, and their joint explication of relationships among psyche, history, and race offers important resources for psychoanalytic approaches to racial difference today. Despite their analytic acuity, however, Faulkner, Larsen, and Van Vechten also themselves carry the traumatic past forward into the future. Indeed, the two novelists' tragic depictions of a triumphant color line and the photographer's insistence on an idiom of black primitivism lent support to white supremacy in the twentieth century.
Carol Bonomo Jennngs and Christine Palamidessi Moore
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780823231751
- eISBN:
- 9780823241286
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823231751.003.0031
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
Arno Press has published an impressive and valuable array of materials on Italian Americans in the United States with its thirty-nine-volume series, The Italian American Experience. The series is as ...
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Arno Press has published an impressive and valuable array of materials on Italian Americans in the United States with its thirty-nine-volume series, The Italian American Experience. The series is as diverse as the community it depicts. In view of the current interest in women's history and women's roles, it is unfortunate that the Arno series contains few works dealing with women. Not one of the thirty-nine volumes is devoted exclusively to women. Despite this neglect, the careful reader can uncover a wealth of information on Italian women scattered throughout the Arno series. Most Italian women who worked outside the home were blue collar or industrial workers. Some of the most useful insights about Italian women are those of novelists. While women do not figure prominently in many academic studies in the Arno series, they are very prominent in virtually every novel, indicating their central importance in the “real,” world.Less
Arno Press has published an impressive and valuable array of materials on Italian Americans in the United States with its thirty-nine-volume series, The Italian American Experience. The series is as diverse as the community it depicts. In view of the current interest in women's history and women's roles, it is unfortunate that the Arno series contains few works dealing with women. Not one of the thirty-nine volumes is devoted exclusively to women. Despite this neglect, the careful reader can uncover a wealth of information on Italian women scattered throughout the Arno series. Most Italian women who worked outside the home were blue collar or industrial workers. Some of the most useful insights about Italian women are those of novelists. While women do not figure prominently in many academic studies in the Arno series, they are very prominent in virtually every novel, indicating their central importance in the “real,” world.
Paul Wake
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719074905
- eISBN:
- 9781781701256
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719074905.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This book provides a rigorous investigation of one of the more intriguing characters in English literature, looking at how the character is constructed and is then read against the main literary ...
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This book provides a rigorous investigation of one of the more intriguing characters in English literature, looking at how the character is constructed and is then read against the main literary theorists. It illustrates how ‘Marlow’ is inextricably bound up in both the storytelling and the emergence of meaning. Joseph Conrad is still seen as one of the first Modernists and one of the finest twentieth-century novelists, and his ‘Marlow’ incorporates all of the most popular novels.Less
This book provides a rigorous investigation of one of the more intriguing characters in English literature, looking at how the character is constructed and is then read against the main literary theorists. It illustrates how ‘Marlow’ is inextricably bound up in both the storytelling and the emergence of meaning. Joseph Conrad is still seen as one of the first Modernists and one of the finest twentieth-century novelists, and his ‘Marlow’ incorporates all of the most popular novels.
Sylvia Jenkins Cook
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- May 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780195327809
- eISBN:
- 9780199870547
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195327809.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
This chapter explores the later decades of the 19th century, when women's factory labor was no longer a novelty, and industrial and class tensions were becoming increasingly the focus of reforming ...
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This chapter explores the later decades of the 19th century, when women's factory labor was no longer a novelty, and industrial and class tensions were becoming increasingly the focus of reforming writers. While working women continued to seek lives that satisfied the needs of body and spirit, middle-class women novelists and male fiction writers for the Knights of Labor offered them literary models of religious sublimation rather than the more secular salvation of intellectual culture. Educated and more affluent women, like Rebecca Harding Davis, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Louisa May Alcott — who sympathized keenly with working women's material deprivation, and who struggled to vindicate their own creative ambitions — nevertheless recommended Christianity and its otherworldly rewards rather than the mental and artistic subjectivity they were themselves trying to assert. One notable exception to the consolations of religion was Marie Howland's utopian and communitarian novel, The Familistere (1874), which challenged not only religious piety as a female virtue but also conventional attitudes towards sexuality, capitalism, and private property. In doing so, she anticipated some of the more radical working-class attitudes of the generation of immigrant women who followed her.Less
This chapter explores the later decades of the 19th century, when women's factory labor was no longer a novelty, and industrial and class tensions were becoming increasingly the focus of reforming writers. While working women continued to seek lives that satisfied the needs of body and spirit, middle-class women novelists and male fiction writers for the Knights of Labor offered them literary models of religious sublimation rather than the more secular salvation of intellectual culture. Educated and more affluent women, like Rebecca Harding Davis, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Louisa May Alcott — who sympathized keenly with working women's material deprivation, and who struggled to vindicate their own creative ambitions — nevertheless recommended Christianity and its otherworldly rewards rather than the mental and artistic subjectivity they were themselves trying to assert. One notable exception to the consolations of religion was Marie Howland's utopian and communitarian novel, The Familistere (1874), which challenged not only religious piety as a female virtue but also conventional attitudes towards sexuality, capitalism, and private property. In doing so, she anticipated some of the more radical working-class attitudes of the generation of immigrant women who followed her.
Philip Tew
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719069123
- eISBN:
- 9781781701232
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719069123.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
Jim Crace is one of the most imaginative of contemporary novelists. The author of nine novels, he has received great public and intellectual acclaim across the UK, Europe, Australia and the United ...
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Jim Crace is one of the most imaginative of contemporary novelists. The author of nine novels, he has received great public and intellectual acclaim across the UK, Europe, Australia and the United States, and was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Fiction prize (USA) for Being Dead in 2000. This study is an extended critical examination of Crace's oeuvre based on extensive interviews with the novelist, including discussions of his work from his first worldwide bestseller, Continent (1986), up to The Pesthouse (2007). Its treatment of themes, contexts and narrative strategies illuminates the literary and critical contexts within which Crace operates, situating him as one of the most adventurous and challenging of Britain's twenty-first century authors.Less
Jim Crace is one of the most imaginative of contemporary novelists. The author of nine novels, he has received great public and intellectual acclaim across the UK, Europe, Australia and the United States, and was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Fiction prize (USA) for Being Dead in 2000. This study is an extended critical examination of Crace's oeuvre based on extensive interviews with the novelist, including discussions of his work from his first worldwide bestseller, Continent (1986), up to The Pesthouse (2007). Its treatment of themes, contexts and narrative strategies illuminates the literary and critical contexts within which Crace operates, situating him as one of the most adventurous and challenging of Britain's twenty-first century authors.
Kenneth Millard
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748621736
- eISBN:
- 9780748651740
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748621736.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This book explores the ways in which a range of recent American novelists have handled the genre of the ‘coming-of-age’ novel, or the Bildungsroman. Novels of this genre characteristically dramatise ...
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This book explores the ways in which a range of recent American novelists have handled the genre of the ‘coming-of-age’ novel, or the Bildungsroman. Novels of this genre characteristically dramatise the vicissitudes of growing up and the trials and tribulations of young adulthood, often presented through depictions of immediate family relationships and other social structures. The book considers a variety of different American cultures (in terms of race, class and gender) and a range of contemporary coming-of-age novels, so that aesthetic judgements about the fiction might be made in the context of the social history that fiction represents. A series of questions are asked: Does the coming-of-age moment in these novels coincide with an interpretation of the ‘fall’ of America?; What kind of national commentary does it therefore facilitate?; Is the Bildungsroman a quintessentially American genre?; What can it usefully tell us about contemporary American culture? Although the focus is on the contemporary period, this is placed in the context of reference to earlier novels and criticism of the genre, as well as historical changes in the status of the family, and the adolescent within it.Less
This book explores the ways in which a range of recent American novelists have handled the genre of the ‘coming-of-age’ novel, or the Bildungsroman. Novels of this genre characteristically dramatise the vicissitudes of growing up and the trials and tribulations of young adulthood, often presented through depictions of immediate family relationships and other social structures. The book considers a variety of different American cultures (in terms of race, class and gender) and a range of contemporary coming-of-age novels, so that aesthetic judgements about the fiction might be made in the context of the social history that fiction represents. A series of questions are asked: Does the coming-of-age moment in these novels coincide with an interpretation of the ‘fall’ of America?; What kind of national commentary does it therefore facilitate?; Is the Bildungsroman a quintessentially American genre?; What can it usefully tell us about contemporary American culture? Although the focus is on the contemporary period, this is placed in the context of reference to earlier novels and criticism of the genre, as well as historical changes in the status of the family, and the adolescent within it.
Dominic Head
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719066566
- eISBN:
- 9781781701027
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719066566.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
In this survey, Ian McEwan emerges as one of those rare writers whose works have received both popular and critical acclaim. His novels grace the bestseller lists, and he is well regarded by critics, ...
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In this survey, Ian McEwan emerges as one of those rare writers whose works have received both popular and critical acclaim. His novels grace the bestseller lists, and he is well regarded by critics, both as a stylist and as a serious thinker about the function and capacities of narrative fiction. McEwan's novels treat issues that are central to our times: politics, and the promotion of vested interests; male violence and the problem of gender relations; science and the limits of rationality; nature and ecology; love and innocence; and the quest for an ethical worldview. Yet he is also an economical stylist: McEwan's readers are called upon to attend, not just to the grand themes, but also to the precision of his spare writing. Although McEwan's later works are more overtly political, more humane, and more ostentatiously literary than the early work, this book uncovers the continuity as well as the sense of evolution through the oeuvre. It makes the case for McEwan's prominence—pre-eminence, even—in the canon of contemporary British novelists.Less
In this survey, Ian McEwan emerges as one of those rare writers whose works have received both popular and critical acclaim. His novels grace the bestseller lists, and he is well regarded by critics, both as a stylist and as a serious thinker about the function and capacities of narrative fiction. McEwan's novels treat issues that are central to our times: politics, and the promotion of vested interests; male violence and the problem of gender relations; science and the limits of rationality; nature and ecology; love and innocence; and the quest for an ethical worldview. Yet he is also an economical stylist: McEwan's readers are called upon to attend, not just to the grand themes, but also to the precision of his spare writing. Although McEwan's later works are more overtly political, more humane, and more ostentatiously literary than the early work, this book uncovers the continuity as well as the sense of evolution through the oeuvre. It makes the case for McEwan's prominence—pre-eminence, even—in the canon of contemporary British novelists.
Bruce Woodcock
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719043604
- eISBN:
- 9781781700532
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719043604.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
Peter Carey is one of the most respected novelists currently writing. Since the original edition of this book, his fiction has reached a far wider international audience: he won the Booker Prize for ...
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Peter Carey is one of the most respected novelists currently writing. Since the original edition of this book, his fiction has reached a far wider international audience: he won the Booker Prize for the second time with True History of the Kelly Gang, while Oscar and Lucinda has been made into a successful feature film. This revised and expanded critical study now includes detailed readings of the recent novels, Jack Maggs and True History of the Kelly Gang, seeing them as the finest productions of a writer who continues to surprise and delight his readers with inventive creations and unique imagination.Less
Peter Carey is one of the most respected novelists currently writing. Since the original edition of this book, his fiction has reached a far wider international audience: he won the Booker Prize for the second time with True History of the Kelly Gang, while Oscar and Lucinda has been made into a successful feature film. This revised and expanded critical study now includes detailed readings of the recent novels, Jack Maggs and True History of the Kelly Gang, seeing them as the finest productions of a writer who continues to surprise and delight his readers with inventive creations and unique imagination.
Andrew Teverson
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719070501
- eISBN:
- 9781781701225
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719070501.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
Salman Rushdie is one of the world's most important writers of politicised fiction. He is a self-proclaimed controversialist, capable of exciting radically divergent viewpoints; a novelist of ...
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Salman Rushdie is one of the world's most important writers of politicised fiction. He is a self-proclaimed controversialist, capable of exciting radically divergent viewpoints; a novelist of extraordinary imaginative range and power; and an erudite, and often fearless, commentator upon the state of global politics today. This critical study examines the intellectual, biographical, literary and cultural contexts from which Rushdie's fiction springs, in order to help the reader make sense of the often complex debates that surround the life and work of this major contemporary figure. It also offers detailed critical readings of all Rushdie's novels, from Grimus through to Shalimar the Clown.Less
Salman Rushdie is one of the world's most important writers of politicised fiction. He is a self-proclaimed controversialist, capable of exciting radically divergent viewpoints; a novelist of extraordinary imaginative range and power; and an erudite, and often fearless, commentator upon the state of global politics today. This critical study examines the intellectual, biographical, literary and cultural contexts from which Rushdie's fiction springs, in order to help the reader make sense of the often complex debates that surround the life and work of this major contemporary figure. It also offers detailed critical readings of all Rushdie's novels, from Grimus through to Shalimar the Clown.
Patrick Parrinder
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199264858
- eISBN:
- 9780191698989
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199264858.003.0016
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Immigration novels became the most vital form of English fiction in the 20th century. Issues of national self-identification and adoption came to be an important theme of the works of Priestly, Ford, ...
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Immigration novels became the most vital form of English fiction in the 20th century. Issues of national self-identification and adoption came to be an important theme of the works of Priestly, Ford, and Fowles. In these immigration novels, a distinction between the first and second generation novelists are discussed in the chapter. Despite the differences among the two generations, a sense of spatial confinement is what is shared among them both. These immigration novels emphasise the creation of a new national identity from the changing circumstances.Less
Immigration novels became the most vital form of English fiction in the 20th century. Issues of national self-identification and adoption came to be an important theme of the works of Priestly, Ford, and Fowles. In these immigration novels, a distinction between the first and second generation novelists are discussed in the chapter. Despite the differences among the two generations, a sense of spatial confinement is what is shared among them both. These immigration novels emphasise the creation of a new national identity from the changing circumstances.
Anne Whitehead
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748618576
- eISBN:
- 9780748651726
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748618576.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
The literary potential of trauma is examined in this book, bringing trauma theory and literary texts together to focus on the ways in which contemporary novelists explore the theme of trauma and ...
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The literary potential of trauma is examined in this book, bringing trauma theory and literary texts together to focus on the ways in which contemporary novelists explore the theme of trauma and incorporate its structures into their writing. It provides readings of texts by Pat Barker, Jackie Kay, Anne Michaels, Toni Morrison, Caryl Phillips, W. G. Sebald and Binjamin Wilkomirski. The book also considers the ways in which trauma has affected fictional form, exploring how novelists have responded to the challenge of writing traumatic narratives and identifying the key stylistic features associated with the genre. In addition, it introduces the reader to key critics in the field of trauma theory such as Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman and Geoffrey Hartman. The linking of trauma theory and literary texts not only sheds light on works of contemporary fiction, it also points to the inherent connections between trauma theory and the literary, which have often been overlooked. The distinction between literary theme and style in the book opens up major questions regarding the nature of trauma itself. Trauma, like the novels discussed, is shown to take an uncertain but productive place between content and form.Less
The literary potential of trauma is examined in this book, bringing trauma theory and literary texts together to focus on the ways in which contemporary novelists explore the theme of trauma and incorporate its structures into their writing. It provides readings of texts by Pat Barker, Jackie Kay, Anne Michaels, Toni Morrison, Caryl Phillips, W. G. Sebald and Binjamin Wilkomirski. The book also considers the ways in which trauma has affected fictional form, exploring how novelists have responded to the challenge of writing traumatic narratives and identifying the key stylistic features associated with the genre. In addition, it introduces the reader to key critics in the field of trauma theory such as Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman and Geoffrey Hartman. The linking of trauma theory and literary texts not only sheds light on works of contemporary fiction, it also points to the inherent connections between trauma theory and the literary, which have often been overlooked. The distinction between literary theme and style in the book opens up major questions regarding the nature of trauma itself. Trauma, like the novels discussed, is shown to take an uncertain but productive place between content and form.
Jane de Gay
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748623495
- eISBN:
- 9780748651849
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748623495.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This book explores Virginia Woolf's preoccupation with the literary past and its profound impact on the content and structure of her novels. It analyses Woolf's reading and writing practices via her ...
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This book explores Virginia Woolf's preoccupation with the literary past and its profound impact on the content and structure of her novels. It analyses Woolf's reading and writing practices via her essays, diaries and reading notebooks, and presents chronological studies of eight of her novels, exploring how Woolf's intensive reading surfaced in her fiction. The book sheds light on Woolf's varied and intricate use of literary allusions; examines ways in which Woolf revisited and revised plots and tropes from earlier fiction; and looks at how she used parody as a means both of critical comment and homage. It offers fresh insights into individual works, and provides a challenging and provocative new perspective on Woolf's art as a novelist.Less
This book explores Virginia Woolf's preoccupation with the literary past and its profound impact on the content and structure of her novels. It analyses Woolf's reading and writing practices via her essays, diaries and reading notebooks, and presents chronological studies of eight of her novels, exploring how Woolf's intensive reading surfaced in her fiction. The book sheds light on Woolf's varied and intricate use of literary allusions; examines ways in which Woolf revisited and revised plots and tropes from earlier fiction; and looks at how she used parody as a means both of critical comment and homage. It offers fresh insights into individual works, and provides a challenging and provocative new perspective on Woolf's art as a novelist.
