This book explores the intersections of gender with class and race in the construction of national and imperial ideologies and their fluid transformation from the Romantic to the Victorian period and beyond, exposing how these cultural constructions are deeply entangled with the family metaphor. For example, by examining the re-signification of the “angel in the house” and the deviant woman in the context of unstable or contingent masculinities and across discourses of class and nation, the volume contributes to a more nuanced understanding of British cultural constructions in the long nineteenth century. The central idea is to unearth the historical roots of the family metaphor in the construction of national and imperial ideologies, and to uncover the interests served by its specific discursive formation. The book explores both male and female stereotypes, enabling a more perceptive comparison, enriched with a nuanced reflection on the construction and social function of class.
This critical Reader is the essential companion to any course in twentieth-century literature. Drawing upon the work of a wide range of key writers and critics, the selected extracts provide: a literary-historical overview of the twentieth century insight into theoretical discussions around the purpose, value and form of literature which dominated the century closer examination of representative texts from the period, around which key critical issues might be debated. Clearly conveying the excitement generated by twentieth-century literary texts and by the provocative critical ideas and arguments that surrounded them, this reader can be used alongside the two volumes of Debating Twentieth-Century Literature or as a core text for any module on the literature of the last century. Texts examined in detail include: Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, Mansfield's Short Stories, poetry of the 1930s, Gibbon's Sunset Song, Eliot's Prufrock, Brecht's Galileo, Woolf's Orlando, Okigbo's Selected Poems, du Maurier's Rebecca, poetry by Ginsburg and O'Hara, Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Puig's Kiss of the Spiderwoman, Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Heaney's New Selected Poems 1966-1987, Gurnah's Paradise and Barker's The Ghost Road.
Through chapters dedicated to specific writers and texts, Writings of Persuasion and Dissonance in the Great War is a collection of essays examining literary responses to the Great War, particularly the confrontation of two distinct languages. One of these reflects nineteenth-century ideals of war as a noble sacrifice; the other portrays the hopeless, brutal reality of the trenches. The ultimate aim of this volume is to convey and reinforce the notion that no explicit literary language can ever be regarded as the definitive language of the Great War, nor can it ever hope to represent this conflict in its entirety. The collection also uncovers how memory constantly develops, triggering distinct and even contradictory responses from those involved in the complex process of remembering. Contributors: Donna Coates, Brian Dillon, Monique Dumontet, Dorothea Flothow, Elizabeth Galway, Laurie Kaplan, Sara Martín Alegre, Silvia Mergenthal, Andrew Monnickendam, David Owen, Andrew Palmer, Bill Phillips, Cristina Pividori, Esther Pujolrás-Noguer, Richard Smith
Set against an informed account of James Leslie Mitchell's life and times, this study provides a comprehensive appraisal of the canon of a combative writer who, as Lewis Grassic Gibbon, has attained a popularity unparalleled in his native Scotland, finally offering a fresh analysis of the unique achievement of a modernist writer whose verve and trenchancy firmly establish him as one of the foremost fiction writers of his time.
Textbook introduction to key debates from the early twentieth century to modernisms emerging between First and Second World Wars. Examines in detail texts by Chekhov, Mansfield, Gibbon, Eliot, Woolf, Brecht and Okigbo.
In the summer of 2008, the twelfth in a series of biennial conferences on the Literature of Region and Nation was held at Aberdeen University in the North-East of Scotland. Over fifty scholars, representing no fewer than twenty different countries, convened for the occasion; and twenty-two of the papers presented are included in this volume. As at previous conferences in the series, the papers range widely in approach, in subject-matter and in geographical coverage: readers of this book will find explorations of literature from all five continents. The papers are arranged thematically: the central concepts of region and nation are examined in the first section; and subsequent sets of papers go on to consider literary and pictorial representations of places and peoples, literature of diaspora and exile (a keynote topic of the conference), the use of language (particularly non-standard languages) in literary texts, and artistic interactions between cultures. All the papers have been peer-reviewed, and some extensively revised. The collection demonstrates the vitality of scholarship in the field of regional literary studies.
This innovative book proposes the expansion of the existing idea of an interwar Scottish Renaissance movement to include its international significance as a Scottish literary modernism interacting with the intellectual and artistic ideas of European modernism as well as responding to the challenges of the Scottish cultural and political context. Topics range from the revitalisation of the Scots vernacular as an avant-garde literary language in the 1920s and the interaction of literature and politics in the 1930s to the fictional re-imagining of the Highlands, the response of women writers to a changing modern world and the manifestations of a late modernism in the 1940s and 1950s. Writers featured include Hugh MacDiarmid, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Neil M. Gunn, Edwin and Willa Muir, Catherine Carswell, Sydney Goodsir Smith and Sorley MacLean.