Oxford English Monographs – serie
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163 produkter
163 produkter
1 255 kr
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Reading Veganism: The Monstrous Vegan, 1818 to Present focuses on the iteration of the trope 'the monstrous vegan' across two hundred years of Anglophone literature. Explicating, through such monsters, veganism's relation to utopian longing and challenge to the conceptual category of the 'human,' the book explores ways in which ethical identities can be written, represented, and transmitted. Reading Veganism proposes that we can recognise and identify the monstrous vegan in relation to four key traits. First, monstrous vegans do not eat animals, an abstinence that generates a seemingly inexplicable anxiety in those who encounter them. Second, they are hybrid assemblages of human and nonhuman animal parts, destabilising existing taxonomical classifications. Third, monstrous vegans are sired outside of heterosexual reproduction, the product of male acts of creation. And finally, monstrous vegans are intimately connected to acts of writing and literary creation. The principle contention of the book is that understandings of veganism, as identity and practice, are limited without a consideration of multiplicity, provisionality, failure, and insufficiency within vegan definition and lived practice. Veganism's association with positivity, in its drive for health and purity, is countered by a necessary and productive negativity generated by a recognition of the horrors of the modern world. Vegan monsters rehearse the key paradoxes involved in the writing of vegan identity.
1 364 kr
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To write about the sea in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was to do so against a vast accretion of past deeds, patterns of thought, and particularly patterns of expression, many of which had begun to feel not just settled but exhausted. The Victorian Novel and the Problems of Marine Language takes up this circumstance, showing how prose writers in this period grappled with the super-conventionalized nature of the sea as a setting, as a shaper of plot and character, as a structuring motif, and as a source of metaphor. But while writing about the sea required careful negotiation of multiple andsometimes conflicting associations, the sea's multiplicity and freight function not just as impediments to thought or expression but as sources of intellectual and expressive possibilities. The Victorian Novel and the Problems of Marine Language treats a provocatively diverse group of key authors spanning from the 1830s to the 1930s and including both those inextricably associated with the sea (Frederick Marryat, Joseph Conrad) and those whose writings are less obviously marine, such as Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Virginia Woolf. What these writers share, among other things, is that they simultaneously register and turn to account the difficulties that attend writing about, and writing with, the sea. In the process, their sea-writing sheds new light on the value of marginalized representational techniques including repetition, cliché, and imprecision.
Modernist Parody
Imitation, Origination, and Experimentation in Early Twentieth-Century Literature
Inbunden, Engelska, 2023
1 286 kr
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Parody often stands accused of producing derivative art deficient in taste and skill. But in the hands of writers such as Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, and Virginia Woolf, the mode engendered revolutionary self-reflexive, critical, and creative practices that were crucial to the development of truly modern art. This book contends that the jauntiness, verve, and daring of high modernism is fundamentally parodic. It argues that parody is central to the whole modernist project, even to supposedly earnest movements such as Imagism, and not just to the extreme avant-garde antics of Dada. As a literary technique, parody provided the means for modernists of many stripes to learn their craft, sharpen their historical sense, define themselves as post-Victorians, and respond to sources of inspiration while composing. It offered a ready method to laugh at folly, amuse friends, criticize opponents, spike enemies, and transgress conventions. Being double-coded, parody proved a powerful weapon in the culture wars, enabling modernists to present and simultaneously challenge prevailing ideologies in all their historically determined complexity. Its fundamentally dialogic and palimpsestual form exposed the limitations of naïve mimesis, insisting that literature is always language in unstable play, while simultaneously foregrounding the relational structures that underwrote the modernists' paradoxical claims to originality and modernity. As a principle of continual genesis-and a spur to the production of yet more forcefully experimental art-parody therefore became the modernists' primary reflex as they negotiated their position in literary culture and made it new.
1 364 kr
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This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.Middle English Medical Recipes and Literary Play, 1375-1500 is the first detailed, book-length study of Middle English medical recipes in their literary, imaginative, social, and codicological contexts. Analysing recipe collections in over seventy late medieval manuscripts, this book explores how the words and structures of recipes could contribute to those texts' healing purpose, but could also confuse, impede, exceed, and redefine that purpose. The study therefore presents a challenge to recipes' traditional reputation as mundane, unartful texts written and read solely for the sake of directing practical action. Crucially, it also relocates these neglected texts and overlooked manuscripts within the complex networks forming medieval textual culture, demonstrating that--though marginalized in modern scholarship--medical recipes were actually linguistically, formally, materially, and imaginatively interconnected with many other late medieval discourses, including devotional writings, romances, fabliaux, and Chaucerian poetry. The monograph thus models for readers modes of analysis and close reading that might be deployed in relation to recipes in order to understand better their allusive, fragmentary, and playful qualities as well as their wide-ranging influence on medieval imaginations.
1 219 kr
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What is the difference between the ‘I’ of a poem--the lyric subject-- and the liberal subject of rights? Lyric and Liberalism in the Age of American Empire uses this question to re-examine the work of five major American poets, changing our understanding of their writing and the field of post-war American poetry. Through extended readings of the work of Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Amiri Baraka, John Ashbery, and Jorie Graham, Hugh Foley shows how poets have imagined liberalism as a problem for poetry.Foley's book offers a new approach to ongoing debates about the nature of lyric by demonstrating the entanglement of ideas about the lyric poem with the development of twentieth-century liberal discussions of individuality. Arguing that the nature of American empire in this period--underpinned by the discourse of individual rights--forced poets to reckon with this entanglement, it demonstrates how this reckoning helped to shape poetry in the post-war period. By tracing the ways a lyric poem performs personhood, and the ways that this person can be distinguished from the individual envisioned by post-war liberalism, Foley shows how each poet stages a critique of liberalism from inside the standpoint of ‘lyric'>. This book demonstrates the capacities of poetry for rethinking its own relation to history and politics, providing a new perspective on a vital era of American poetry.
1 078 kr
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Is poetry a visual art? Why do the pages of nineteenth-century poetry look so different to those of twentieth-century verse? Exploiting the expressive possibilities of print--from spacing and indentation to alignment and typeface--is one of the defining ways in which poetry was modernized in the twentieth century. While the visual experiments of European poets have been well documented, the typographical explorations of poets writing in English have been largely neglected. This volume confronts a major unanswered question: why did British and American poets, from the beginning of the twentieth century right up to the present day, choose to experiment with the design and lay-out of the printed page?This book aims to provide the first detailed account of this lineage of literary style, examining the poetry and criticism of figures such as Ezra Pound, Hope Mirrlees, William Carlos Williams, E.E. Cummings, Marianne Moore, David Jones, Denise Levertov, Charles Olson, Frances Motz Boldereff, and J.H. Prynne. It draws on unpublished archival materials to show how poets began to draft, sketch, and compose in new and eccentric ways as they annexed the roles of book designer and printer. Typography, it argues, was instrumental in debates about metre, free verse, and the nature of poetry as poems morphed into scores, slogans, maps, and signs. It investigates how the typography of poetry was animated by musicology, psychophysics, linguistics, politics, ophthalmology, cartography, and advertising.
1 078 kr
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British Modernism and the Anthropocene: Experiments with Time assesses the environmental politics of modernism in relation to the idea of the Anthropocene—a proposed geological epoch in which humans have fundamentally changed the Earth System. The early twentieth century was marked by environmental transformations that were so complex and happened on such great scales that they defied representation. Modernist novelists responded with a range of innovative narrative forms that started to make environmental crisis on a planetary scale visible. Paradoxically, however, it is their failures to represent such a crisis that achieve the greatest success.David Shackleton explores how British modernists employed types of narrative breakdown—including fragmentation and faltering passages devoid of events—to expose the limitations of human schemes of meaning, negotiate the relationship between different scales and types of time, produce knowledge of ecological risk, and register various forms of non-human agency. Situating modernism in the context of fossil fuel energy systems, plantation monocultures, climate change, and species extinctions, Shackleton traces how H.G. Wells, D.H. Lawrence, Olive Moore, Virginia Woolf, and Jean Rhys undertook experiments with time in their novels that refigure history and the historical situations into which they were thrown. Ultimately, British Modernism and the Anthropocene shows how modernist novels provide rich resources for rethinking the current environmental crisis, and cultivating new structures of environmental care and concern.
Samuel Beckett and the Theatre of the Witness
Pain in Post-War Francophone Drama
Inbunden, Engelska, 2022
1 255 kr
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Samuel Beckett and the Theatre of the Witness explores Beckett's representation of physical pain in his theatre plays in the long aftermath of World War II, emphasising how the issues raised by this staging of pain speak directly to matters lying at the heart of his work: the affective power of the human body; the doubtful capacity of language as a means of communication; the aesthetic and ethical functioning of the theatre medium; and the vexed question of intersubjective empathy. Alongside the wartime and post-war plays of fellow Francophone writers Albert Camus, Eugène Ionesco, Pablo Picasso, and Marguerite Duras, this study resituates Beckett's early plays in a new conceptualising of le théâtre du témoin or a 'theatre of the witness'. These are plays concerned with the epistemological and ethical uncertainties of witnessing another's pain, rather than with the sufferer's own direct experience. They raise troubling questions about our capacity to comprehend and respond to another being's pain. Drawing on an interdisciplinary framework of extant criticism, recorded historical audience response, theatre and affect theory, and medical understandings of bodily pain, Hannah Simpson argues that these plays do not offer any easily negotiable encounter with physical suffering, pushing us to recognise the very 'otherness' of another being's pain, even as it invades our own affective sphere. In place of any comforting transcendence or redemption of endured pain, they offer a starkly sceptical, even pessimistic probing of what it is to witness another's suffering.
1 248 kr
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English Humanism and the Reception of Virgil c. 1400-1550 reassesses how the spread of Renaissance humanism in England impacted the reception of Virgil. It begins with the first signs of humanist influence in the fifteenth century, and ends at the height of the English Renaissance during the mid-Tudor period. This period witnessed the first extant English translations of Virgil's Aeneid, by William Caxton (1490), Gavin Douglas (1513), and the Earl of Surrey (c. 1543). It also marked the first printings of Virgil's works in England by Richard Pynson (c. 1515) and Wynkyn de Worde (1510s-1520s). Through a fine-grained analysis of surviving manuscripts and early printed editions, Matthew Day questions how and to what extent Renaissance humanism impacted readers' and translators' approaches to Virgil. Building on current scholarship in the fields of book history, classical reception, and translation studies, it draws attention to substantial continuities between the medieval and humanist reception of Virgil's works. Humanist study of Virgil, and indeed of classical poetry more generally, continued to draw many of its aims, methods, and conventions from well-established medieval traditions of learning. In emphasizing the very gradual pace of humanist development and the continuous influence of medieval scholarship, the book comes to a more qualified view of how humanism did and (just as importantly) did not affect Virgilian reading and translation. While recognizing humanist innovations and discoveries, it gives due attention to the understudied, yet far more numerous examples of consistency and traditionalism.
1 458 kr
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Irish Modernism and the Politics of Sexual Health explores the politicized role of sexual health as a concept, discourse, and subject of debate within Irish literary culture from 1880 to 1960. Combining perspectives from Irish Studies, Modernist Studies, and the Social History of Medicine, it traces the ways in which authors, politicians, and activists in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ireland harnessed debates over sexual hygiene, venereal disease, birth control, fertility, and eugenics to envisage competing models of Irish identity, culture, and political community. Analyzing the work of canonical authors (Yeats, Synge, Shaw, Joyce, Beckett, Flann O'Brien) and less often discussed figures (George Moore, Oliver Gogarty, Signe Toksvig, Kate O'Brien) in conversation with medical, scientific, and legal writing on sexual health, it charts how the medicalization and politicization of sex informed the emergence and development of modernism in Ireland. At the same time, by reading this literary material alongside the polemical and journalistic writing of figures such as Arthur Griffith, Maud Gonne, and Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, it also reveals the ways in which key events in Irish cultural and political history - the Parnell Split, the Limerick Pogrom, the Playboy riots, the passage of the Censorship of Publications Act - were shaped by ongoing debates and dilemmas in the field of sexual health. This book will benefit students, researchers, and readers interested in the history of sex and its regulation in modern Ireland, the impact of sex and medicine on Irish political history, and the nature of modernism's engagement with sex, health, and the body.
1 255 kr
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Complicating Articulation in Art Cinema argues that art cinema draws attention to its disjointed, multi-parted form, but that criticism has too frequently sought to explain this complexity away by stitching the parts together in totalizing readings. This stitching together has often relied on the assumption that the solution to art cinema's puzzles lies in interpreting each film as the expression of a focalizing character's internal disturbance. This book challenges this assumption. It argues that the attempt to explain formal complexity through this character-centric approach reduces formal achievements and enigmatic characters to inadequate approximations of one another. Reference to character cannot fully tame unschematic and unpredictable combinations of - and collisions between - contradictory levels of narration, clashing styles, discontinuously edited shots, jarring allusions, dislocated genre signifiers, and intermedial elements. Through close analyses of films by Roberto Rossellini, Robert Bresson, Luis Buñuel, Terence Davies, Peter Greenaway, and Kelly Reichardt, Complicating Articulation in Art Cinema offers an ethics of criticism that suggests that the politics of art cinema's eccentric form are limited by character-centred readings. Each of the featured films presents inarticulate characters, whose emotional and intellectual lives are unknowable, further complicating the relationship between character and form. This book argues that, by acknowledging this resistance to interpretation, critics can think in new ways about art cinema's interrogation of the possibilities of knowledge.
1 255 kr
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This volume argues that aphorism represents a tool for the social management of emotion. Rhetorically corralled into a slick, collectable shape, the aphorism promises arresting and instantaneous epiphany. However, the accomplished elegance which positions the aphorism's message as self-evidently true in fact works to repel further enquiry, and ultimately ensures that it will be forgotten or bypassed in favour of another aphorism: no less eagerly embraced for the earlier disappointment. Aphorism, therefore, is a form in which dangerous ideas and emotions can be safely displayed and, simultaneously, effaced. Because aphorism's style defuses the imperative to act on what is clearly known, writers like Stevie Smith can use the form to stage a withdrawal from the burden of making an impact on the world.This book finds that Smith's use of aphorism and its related forms (proverb, epitaph, caption, and fragment) offers a route into her texts. With her disconcerting pen-and-ink drawings, dark comedy, and social ventriloquism which stops short of satire, the rhetorical force of Smith's poetry fascinates and arrests its readers, but nevertheless leaves them unable to react coherently or identify the use-value which her writing appears to promise. Drawing on hitherto unpublished archival material, this project argues that Smith's texts resist analysis because, like the aphorisms embedded throughout them, they offer and exemplify a mode of clearly-declared revelation which, at the same time, makes itself unusable.
335 kr
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Although there are many books on Johnson's moral and religious thought, none has provided a detailed analysis of his relationship with the ethics and theology of the eighteenth century. This study fills the gap, examining the background to Johnson's views on a wide range of issues debated by the philosophers and divines of his age. Avoiding deceptive generalizations concerning the overall character of the century, Nicholas Hudson emphasizes the ambivalence and contradiction inherent in the orthodoxy which Johnson espoused. Yet this book also challenges the assumption that Johnson's religious beliefs were unstable and filled with anxiety. Whatever the weakness of his positions, he gleaned strength and confidence from the belief that he upheld an eminent tradition in Christian philosophy.
The Godwinian Novel
The Rational Fictions of Godwin, Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley
Inbunden, Engelska, 1993
1 259 kr
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The Godwinian Novel is a pioneering analysis of the school of fiction inaugurated by William Godwin, and developed in the works of his principal followers, Charles Brockden Brown and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.In the first study of these authors as a historically specific group, Pamela Clemit argues for a greater unity between Godwin's fictional techniques and his radical political philosophy than has been perceived. Her analysis of the works of Brown and Mary Shelley, moreover, reveals how these writers modified, reshaped, and redefined Godwin's distinctive themes and techniques in response to shifting ideological pressures in the post-revolutionary period.Examining prose ficiton in a period traditionally seen as dominated by poetry, Clemit stresses the necessity for a revised view of British Romanticism. Uncovering the links between Godwin's fictional analysis of sujective experience and his progressive political philosophy, The Godwinian Novel paves the way for a reappraisal of the apparently quietistic and introspective concerns of other writers of the period.
2 522 kr
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This powerful and unusual study examines the relations between the textual organization of Ulysses and the notions of time, language, and poetics implicit in the novel. Making use of recent developments in philosophy and literary theory, Udaya Kumar takes issue with those who, like Richard Ellmann, see Ulysses as a fully coherent text. Instead, he argues that the novel is a complex transitional text involving various degrees of mediation between opposing impulses such as naturalism and schematism, unification and detotalization.The book begins with an examination of the pervasive use of repetition in Ulysses and shows that this results in a disruption of linear time and creates a `textual memory'. This argument is further developed in relation to the question of time and the sign, where Ulysses is shown to display a differentiated and heterogeneous temporal experience. Finally, examining Joyce's early theories, it is argued that Ulysses implies a radical notion of tradition as the site of difference and of the work of art as the reperformance of elements from tradition. The concluding chapter clarifies this idea in relation to other strands in modernism and postmodernism.
3 660 kr
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Legitimate Histories is an innovative reading of Walter Scott's Waverley Novels in the context of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gothic.Most critics have treated these two forms of historical narrative as though they were completely unrelated, but Fiona Robertson's detailed study places Scott's work in the context of Gothic fictions from Walpole to Maturin. In so doing, she highlights their shared techniques of narrative deferral, fantasies of origin and originality, and strategies of authenticity and authority. The book takes in the whole range of Waverley Novels, and includes analyses of such neglected works as The Fortunes of Nigel, Peveril of the Peak, and Woodstock, as well as the more frequently studied Rob Roy, The Heart of Midlothian, and Redgauntlet.Offering fresh insight into the variety and complexity of Scott's novels, and into the traditions of criticism which have so often obscured them, Legitimate Histories makes an important contribution to the study of Romanticism, the novel, and to current theoretical debates concerning historical fiction and historiographic authority.
1 322 kr
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Radical Satire and Print Culture 1790-1822 focuses on the work produced collaboratively between 1816 and 1822 by the poet and radical journalist William Hone and the brilliant young graphic satirist George Cruikshank.Dr Wood provides a much needed analytical framework for Regency radical satire uncovering a set of new sources and previously unknown cultural contexts for Hone and Cruikshank's work, which is shown to combine modernity and tradition in thrilling ways. Hone fused the literary and political inheritance of eighteenth-century satire with contemporary developments in advertising , popular publishing and mass marketing; Cruikshank combined the sophisticated conventions of the political print with the most up-to-date methods of advertizing, politics and propaganda.Entertaining and original, this is an important contribution to the study of radical satire, which sheds new light on the relations between popular political authors and graphic artists and the major Romantic writers of the period.
788 kr
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The Cave of Making The Poetry of Louis MacNeice
The Tremulous Hand of Worcester
A Study of Old English in the Thirteenth Century
Inbunden, Engelska, 1991
3 273 kr
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The shaky handwriting of the thirteenth-century scribe known as `the tremulous hand of Worcester' appears in at least twenty manuscripts dating from the late ninth to the twelfth century, glossing perhaps 50,000 Old English words, sometimes into Middle English, but much more often into Latin. This book examines the full range of the scribe's work and addresses some important questions, such as which of the Worcester glosses may be attributed to him, why he glossed the words he did, what the purpose of the glossing may have been, and how well he knew or came to know Old English. Christine Franzen argues that the scribe went through a methodical learning process, one step of which was the preparation of a first-letter alphabetical English-Latin word list, the earliest known in the English language. This first full-scale study of the Worcester glosses is important for the wealth of information it provides about the work methods of the tremulous scribe, the English language at a transitional point in its history, and about the ability to read Old English in the thirteenth century.
2 235 kr
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The Dragon and the Dove makes the original and controversial claim that Thomas Dekker, the author of plays blending satire, hagiography, and propaganda, was a militant Protestant. This study, whilst carefully analysing seven of his plays, takes The Whore of Babylon to be his central work and the definitive militant Protestant play. Militant Protestants were uncompromising in their beliefs and frequently came into conflict with the policies of the Crown. Apocalyptic ideas, and a vision of the international True Church struggling against the dragon of Rome, provide the key to understanding all Dekker's work. This book takes a completely fresh view of Dekker and presents him as a bold, pugnacious dramatist, writing for the London public, not merely the Court, and constantly experimenting with form in order to find a vehicle for his strong convictions.
2 271 kr
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Shakespeare's Romans are intensely concerned with being `constant'. But, as Geoffrey Miles shows, that virtue is far more ambiguous than is often recognized.Miles begins by showing how the Stoic principle of being `always the same' was shaped by two Roman writers into very different ideals: Cicero's Roman actor, playing an appropriate role with consistent decorum, and Seneca's Stoic hero, unmoved as a rock despite having been battered by adversity. Miles then traces the controversial history of these ideals through the Renaissance, focusing on the complex relationship between constancy and knowledge. Montaigne's sympathetic but devastating critique of Stoicism is examined in detail. Building on this genealogy of constancy, the final chapters read Shakespeare's Roman plays as his reworking of a triptych of figures found in Plutarch: the constant Brutus, the inconstant Antony, and the obstinate Coriolanus. The tragedies of these characters, Miles demonstrates, act out the attractions, flaws, and self-contradictions of constancy, and the tragi-comic failure of the Roman hope that `were man/But constant, he were perfect'.
2 572 kr
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The origins of many of the Icelandic sagas have long been the subject of critical speculation and controversy. This book demonstrates that an investigation of the relationship between verse and prose in saga narrative can be used to reconstruct how Icelandic sagas were composed; to this end it provides a detailed analysis of Kormaks saga, whose hero Kormakr is one of the most celebrated of Icelandic poets. Over sixty of his passionate, cryptic skaldic stanzas are quoted in the saga, and the way they and the saga prose are fitted together reveals that Kormaks saga, far from being a seamless narrative of either pre-Christian oral tradition or later medieval fiction, is in fact a patchwork of different kinds of literary materials. This book offers an original and productive way of understanding not only the compositional method and distinctive aesthetic qualities of Kormaks saga, but also the genesis of many other Icelandic saga narratives.
2 508 kr
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A study which relates Conrad's work to the crisis of modernity in the late nineteenth century, this book discusses 'faultlines' - ambiguities and apparent aesthetic ruptures - in nine of the major novels and novellas. These faultlines are diagnosed as the symptoms of an unresolved tension between Conrad's temperamental affinity with the Nietzschean outlook and his fierce ideological rejection of its ultimate implications. Presenting Conrad as 'a modernist at war with modernity', the author studies the perpetual tug-of-war between the artistic will to meaning and the writer's susceptibility to the modern temper, both as a theme and as a structuring principle in his work. The modes of this struggle are defined as the 'failure of myth', the 'failure of metaphysics', and the 'failure of textuality'. This continuously forceful and original inquiry draws on the work of Nietzsche, Vaihinger, Bakhtin, Heller, and MacIntyre, amongst others, to present the ethical and epistemological issues which are interwoven with Conrad's aesthetics.
Ungoverned Imaginings
James Mill's The History of British India and Orientalism
Inbunden, Engelska, 1992
2 572 kr
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Drawing on contemporary critical work on colonialism and the cross-cultural encounter, this is a study of the emergence of Utilitarianism as a new political language in Britain in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, and focuses on the relationship between this language and the complexities of British Imperial experience in India at the time. Examining the work of Mill and Sir William Jones, and also that of the poets Robert Southey and Thomas Moore, Javed Majeed highlights the role played by aesthetic and linguistic attitudes in the formulation of British views on India, and reveals how closely these attitudes were linked to the definition of cultural identities. To this end, Mill's utilitarian study of India is shown to function both as an attack on the conservative orientalism of the period, and as part of a larger critique of British society itself. In so doing, Majeed demonstrates how complex British attitudes to India were in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and how this might be explained in the light of domestic and imperial contexts.
688 kr
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The funeral elegy is in some important ways the quintessential English Renaissance genre. This book demonstrates how it developed into a kind of laboratory in which writers could put theories of composition into practice. The hospitality of elegy to different styles and modes together with its primary formal obligation to fit the poem decorously to the subject, gave a special value to ingenuity, to virtuosity. Melodious Tears charts the history of the elegy from the time in the mid-sixteenth century when it was exclusively the province of professional writers, the balladeers and chroniclers, up to the 1630s, by which time the fashion for the vernacular elegy had spread throughout the literate classes. Detailed studies of the works of major elegists, particularly Spenser, Sidney, Donne, and Milton are combined with full examination of the range and variety of elegies generated in response to the deaths of Sidney (1586), Queen Elizabeth I (1603), and Prince Henry (1612). A series of appendices contains texts of a number of elegies which survive only in manuscript.
A Store of Common Sense
Gnomic Theme and Wisdom in Old Icelandic and Old English Wisdom Poetry
Inbunden, Engelska, 1993
2 522 kr
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A Store of Common Sense is the first comparative study in English of Old Icelandic and Old English wisdom poetry. It examines problems of form, unity, and coherence, and how the genre responds to social change, both reflecting and shaping the thinking of the communities which originate it. Carolyne Larrington analyses the differences between the pagan wisdom of Norse, ranging through everyday practical advice, rune magic, and spells, and the Christian, socially oriented ideals of Old English wisdom poetry, strongly rooted in Christian concepts of `natural' order and hierarchy in God's Creation. Close reading in primary texts, both runic and magical, lays bare the skilful, structural integration of pragmatic, social wisdom with other kinds of knowledge.The book explores the possibility of Christian influence on Norse texts and demonstrates the impact of Christian learning on the ancient pagan genre. The existence of a gnomic `key' in Norse and English narrative verse is also shown.Far from being platitudinous moralizing, the wisdom poets of the two literatures reveal themselves as comic, ironic, dramatic, and grandiose by turns, exploring a gamut of themes unequalled in any other genre of the period.
2 171 kr
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This is a study of Henry James's changing attitudes to history as a narrative model, tracing the development from his early interest in `scientific' historiography to the radically anti-historical character of his late works.James's use of the term `history' was influenced by developments in nineteenth-century historiography, but was also embedded in the complex of defensive manoeuvres through which Victorian culture sought to control its anxiety about the power of fiction. Reading James's novels in the light of contemporary debates about the morality and authorship and the politics of reading, Dr Jolly finds that fiction develops from being history's censored `other' in the early works to being a valued mode of problem-solving in the later fiction. This shift may be seen as the product of James's increasing engagement with the reading practices of groups marginalized by high Victorian culture: women, the working class, other cultures, and the avant-garde. The book ends with a consideration of the challenge posed to James's radical anti-historical epistemology by the unprecedented violence of twentieth-century history.Drawing on contemporary narrative theory, and providing illuminating readings of a large number of James's novels, Roslyn Jolly had written a sophisticated and persuasive analysis of James's shifting definitions of history and fiction.
2 973 kr
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Mary Leapor (1722-1746), a Northamptonshire kitchen maid, produced a substantial body of exceptional poetry which was only published after her early death at the age of twenty-four. This is a timely examination of the work of a poet who has remained almost forgotten for 200 years.Leapor is one of many gifted poets, mainly women and labourers, whose work stands outside the traditional canon of eighteenth-century verse. Richard Greene draws on extensive primary research to present substantial new information about Leapor's life. He discusses her protests against the injustices suffered by women and the poor, her attempts to gain an education, and the influence that illness and the expectation of an early death had upon her writing.Throughout, Leapor is seen in relation to both the mainstream poets of her time and to those whom literary history has considned to obscurity. Mary Leapor: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Women's Poetry thus provides insight not only into the work of a single neglected woman poet, but offers a sometimes surprising perspective on the literary history of the "Ages of Pope and Johnson".
Elizabethan Fictions
Espionage, Counter-espionage, and the Duplicity of Fiction in Early Elizabethan Prose Narratives
Inbunden, Engelska, 1997
1 434 kr
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In Elizabethan Fictions, Robert Maslen argues that English writers of prose fiction from the 1550s to the 15570s produced some of the most daringly innovative publications of the sixteenth century. Through close examination of a number of key texts, from William Baldwin's satircal fable Beware the Cat to George Gascoigne's mock-romance he Adventures of Master F.J. and John Lyly's immensely popular Euphues books, he sets out to demonstrate the courage as well as the considerable skills which these undervalued authors brought to their work. They wrote at a time when the Elizabethan censorship system was growing increasingly rigorous in response to the perceived threat of infiltration from Catholic Europe, yet they chose to write books of a kind that was specifically associated with Catholic Italy and France. Their topics were the secrets, lies, and acts of petty treason which vitiated the private lives of the contemporary ruling classes, and their vigorous experiments with style and form marked out prose fiction for years to come as shifty and perilous literary territory. These writers presented themselves as masters of the arts of duplicity, whose talents made them emminently suitable for employment as informers or spies, whether for the government or for its most deadly ideological opponents. Their sophisticated narratives of sexual intrigue had a profound effect on the development of the complex poetry and drama which sprung up towards the end of the century, as well as of the modern novel. This book provides a much-needed reappraisal of their achievements.
2 822 kr
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A radical re-examination of Oscar Wilde's plays, Revising Wilde challenges long-established views of the writer as a dilettante and dandy, revealing him instead as a serious philosopher and social critic who used his plays to subvert the traditional values of Victorian literature and society. By tracing Wilde's painstaking revisions and redrafting of his plays, Sos Eltis uncovers themes subsequently concealed in successive versions which demonstrate that Wilde was in fact an anarchist, a socialist and a feminist.Wilde borrowed plots and incidents from numerous contemporary French and English plays, but he then subtly rewrote his plagiarized material in order to mock the conventions he imitated. By analysing previously unconsidered manuscript drafts, and comparing the finished plays with their sources, Eltis displays a surprising depth and complexity to Wilde's work. The little-known early play, Vera; or, The Nihilists is revealed as a politically radical drama, the society plays are shown to challenge Victorian sexual and social mores, and The Importance of Being Earnest is interpreted as an anarchic farce, which reflects the Utopian vision of Wilde's political essay, `The Soul of Man Under Socialism'. Taking into account the more recent scholarship and criticism, this accessible study will be of interest to Wilde specialists and enthusiasts alike.