Decapitation and Disgorgement. The Female Body's Text in Early Modern English Drama and Poetry
Decapitation and Disgorgement. The Female Body's Text in Early Modern English Drama and Poetry

Author: Melanie A Hanson

Publisher: ibidem-Verlag / ibidem Press

Published: 2012-02-13

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 3838256050

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This book brings the ideas of French feminist Hélène Cixous to bear on a number of Early Modern English texts. The female characters of Mariam from Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam, Lavinia from William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus as well as John Milton’s Eve in Paradise Lost and the poetic voice of Isabella Whitney are investigated through the application of Cixous’s theories of figurative decapitation and disgorgement. The author examines the creation of a unique discourse through the blending of what is stereotypically referred to as “female text” with “male discourse,” which results in what Cixous would call “bisexual discourse.”

Excess and Embodiment in Contemporary Women's Writing
Excess and Embodiment in Contemporary Women's Writing

Author: Zeynep Atayurt

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2011-08-01

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 389821978X

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The 'obese' female body has often been portrayed as the 'other' to the slender body. However, this process of 'othering', or viewing as different, has created a repressive discourse, where 'excess' has increasingly come to be studied as a 'physical abnormality' or a signifier of a 'personality defect' in contemporary Western society. This book engages with the multifarious re-imaginings of the 'excessive' embodiment in contemporary women's writing, drawing specifically on the construction of this form of embodiment in the works of Fay Weldon, Jeanette Winterson, Margaret Atwood, Claude Tardat, and Judith Moore, whose texts offer a distinct literary response to the rigidly homogeneous and limiting representations of fatness, while prompting heterogeneous approaches to reading the 'excessive' female embodiment.

Decadences - Morality and Aesthetics in British Literature
Decadences - Morality and Aesthetics in British Literature

Author: Paul Fox

Publisher: ibidem-Verlag / ibidem Press

Published: 2014-05-01

Total Pages: 431

ISBN-13: 3838266234

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This revised and expanded volume examines the intersections of aesthetics and morality and asks what Decadence means to art and society at various moments in British literature. As time passes, the definition of what it takes to be D/decadent changes. The decline from a higher standard, social malaise, aesthetic ennui – all these ideas presume certain facts about the past, the present, and the linear nature of time itself. To reject the past as a given, and to relish the subtleties of present nuance, is the beginning of Decadence. The conflict underlying the contributions to this collection is that of society's moral contempt vis-a-vis the focus on the fleeting present on part of the purportedly decadent artists; who in turn thought the truly decadent to be the stranglehold society maintained on individual interpretation and the interpretation of oneself.

New Readings in the Literature of British India, c. 1780-1947
New Readings in the Literature of British India, c. 1780-1947

Author: Shafquat Towheed

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2007-10-01

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 389821673X

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The contributions to this book amply demonstrate the richness, vitality, and complexity of the colonial transactions between Britain and India over the last two centuries, and they do so by approaching the topic from a specific perspective: by interpreting the rubric 'new readings' as broadly, creatively, and productively as possible. They cover a wide range of literary responses and genres: eighteenth-century drama, the gothic novel, verse, autobiography, history, religious writing, journalism, women's memoirs, travel writing, popular fiction, and the modernist novel. Brought together in one volume, these essays offer a small, but representative sample of the multifaceted literary and cultural traffic between Britain and India in the colonial period. In the richness and diversity of the various contributors' strategies and interpretations, these new readings urge us to return once again to texts that we think we know, as well as to explore those that we do not, with a freshly renewed sense of their complexity, immediacy, and relevance.

Ob-scene Spaces in Australian Narrative. An Account of the Socio-topographic Construction of Space in Australian Literature
Ob-scene Spaces in Australian Narrative. An Account of the Socio-topographic Construction of Space in Australian Literature

Author: Pablo Armellino

Publisher: ibidem-Verlag / ibidem Press

Published: 2012-02-27

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 3838258738

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Ob-scene Spaces in Australian Narrative is an exhaustive survey of Australian literature proposing itself as a journey through time and space. With a careful selection of texts which recount Australian history from the early days of white colonization to the present, this study endeavours to cast light on the process of socio-topographic construction that the settlers imposed upon the continent.As suggested by the title, the textual inquiry conducted in this book is driven by the stimulating ambiguity that lies between physical space and its discursive construction. A selection of canonical and non-canonical texts by authors ranging from Henry Lawson to Christos Tsiolkas aims to reveal the relationship between the space of the city (the scene) and the outback (the ob-scene space beyond the metropolitan area) and its role in the process of spatial construction that, through the last two centuries, has shaped Australia.Pablo Armellino’s distinctive approach to Australian literature makes Ob-scene Spaces in Australian Narrative a very interesting work. Using a carefully selected range of novels, linked together using social and literary theory, it recounts the history of colonization in Australia in a particularly approachable manner. Through the analysis of each text the reader seamlessly learns about the expansion of the frontier, the creation of an ob-scene space beyond it and the use the Discourse makes of this mechanism. These characteristics would appeal to both an academic audience, which would appreciate the detailed text analysis, and a general audience, which would enjoy the historical and thematic aspect of the book.– Professor Carmen Concilio and Professor Pietro Deandrea, Facoltà di Lingue, Università di Torino

Too Far for Comfort
Too Far for Comfort

Author: Rana Tekcan

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2014-08-01

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 3838267354

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The dynamic between the biographer and the subject is, perhaps, one of the most fascinating aspects of biography as a genre. How does the biographer stage the illusion that is the narrative life, the illusion that the subject assumes a living form through words? In contrast to purely fictional forms, biography writing does not allow total freedom to the biographer in this creative act. Ideally, a biography's backbone is structured by accurate historical facts. But its spirit lies elsewhere. The way a biographer captures the spirit of a subject is intriguingly shaped by the historical distance between the two. We find three types of distance in biographical narrative: First, where the biographer and the subject personally know one another; second, where the biographer is a near contemporary of the subject; and third, where biographer and subject are distinctly separated; in some cases, by hundreds of years.In this revised and expanded edition, Rana Tekcan explores how some of the most accomplished biographers manage to recreate "life" across time and space. She looks at their illusionary art through the narrative strategies in Samuel Johnson's Life of Savage, James Boswell's Life of Johnson, Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians, Michael Holroyd's Lytton Strachey, Park Honan's Jane Austen, and Andrew Motion's Keats.

Aspects of the Orange Revolution I
Aspects of the Orange Revolution I

Author: Paul D'Anieri

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2007-11-22

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 3838256980

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Ukraine's 2004 presidential election was falsified, spurring the Orange Revolution. To many observers, the Orange Revolution was a shock, and the stolen election a recent development. However, both the election fraud and the effort to topple the government of Leonid Kuchma emerged from political dynamics that had appeared in earlier Ukrainian elections.In this path breaking volume, leading scholars place Ukraine's 2004 Orange Revolution in the longer perspective of Ukraine's post-Soviet electoral politics. Covering both presidential and parliamentary elections over the entire post-Soviet period, the chapters clarify the manner in which earlier elections had emerged as part of the battle for power in Ukraine well before 2004. The opposition that came to power in 2004 had also won the 2002 elections and had developed its strategies during opposition protests that had been catalyzed by the Kuchmagate crisis in 2000. The evolution of the dynamics that led to the fraudulent 2004 election reveals that the events of 2004 represented continuity as well as change. By placing the 2004 elections within a longer trajectory, the volume enriches our understanding of the Orange Revolution and helps us to understand the difficulties faced in consolidating Ukraine's democratic breakthrough following the Orange Revolution.The volume contains an introduction to "Aspects of the Orange Revolution I-VI" by Andreas Umland, followed by eight chapters by Robert K. Christensen, Edward R. Rakhimkulov and Charles Wise, Paul D'Anieri, Robert Kravchuk and Victor Chudowsky, Paul Kubicek, Taras Kuzio, Lucan Way, and Anna Makhorkina. These authors bring complex and varied perspectives that situate Ukraine's post-Soviet elections in economic reforms, constitutional law, foreign policy objectives of integrating into Europe, as well as in the broader context of the rough and tumble competition for political control of Ukraine.

The Biographer and the Subject
The Biographer and the Subject

Author: Rana Tekcan

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2010-03-01

Total Pages: 177

ISBN-13: 3838259955

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A good biography is a well-staged illusion. It creates -- on paper -- a vivid, rounded, and immediate sense of lived life. In contrast to purely fictional forms, biography writing does not allow total freedom to the biographer in the creative act. Ideally, a biography's backbone is formed by accurate historical facts. But its soul lies elsewhere. Since the concern is life, something more is needed: Nothing dry, cold or dead, but a vibrant impression of life that is left in the air after one turns over the last page. But how does a biographer do it? The way a biographer creates a subject is largely dictated by the historical distance between them. There are three types of distance in biographical writing: First, where the biographer and the subject personally know one another; second, where the biographer is a near contemporary of the subject; and third, where biographer and subject are distinctly separated, in some cases by hundreds of years. Tekcan explores how some of the most accomplished biographers manage to "recreate life" across time and space. She closely examines Samuel Johnson's "Life of Mr. Richard Savage", James Boswell's "Life of Samuel Johnson", Lytton Strachey's "Eminent Victorians", Michael Holroyd's "Lytton Strachey", Park Honan's "Jane Austen", and Andrew Motion's "Keats".

James Joyce and the Mythology of Modernism
James Joyce and the Mythology of Modernism

Author: Daniel Shea

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2006-04-09

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 3898215741

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"James Joyce and the Mythology of Modernism" examines anew how myth exists in Joyce's fiction. Using Joyce's idiosyncratic appropriation of the myths of Catholicism, this study explores how the rejected religion still acts as a foundational aesthetic for a new mythology of the Modern age starting with "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" and maturing within "Ulysses". Like the mythopoets before him—Homer, Dante, Milton, Blake—Joyce consciously sets out to encapsulate his vision of a splintered and rapidly changing reality into a new aesthetic which alone is capable of successfully rendering the fullness of life in a meaningful way. Already reeling from the humanistic implications of an impersonal Newtonian universe, the Modern world now faced an Einsteinian one, a re-evaluation which includes Stephen's awakening from the "nightmare" of history, a re-definition of deity, and Bloom's urban identity. Written with both the experienced Joycean and the beginner in mind, this book tells how the Joycean myth is our own conception of the human being, and our place in the universe becomes (re)defined as definitively Modernist, yet still, through Molly Bloom's final affirmation, profoundly human.