Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel
Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel

Author: John J. Su

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2005-11-24

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 1139448536

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Images of loss and yearning played a crucial role in literary texts written in the later part of the twentieth century. Despite deep cultural differences, novelists from Africa, the Caribbean, Great Britain, and the United States share a sense that the economic, social, and political forces associated with late modernity have evoked widespread nostalgia within the communities in which they write. In this original and wide-ranging study, John J. Su explores the relationship between nostalgia and ethics in novels across the English-speaking world. He challenges the tendency in literary studies to characterise memory as positive and nostalgia as necessarily negative. Instead, this book argues that nostalgic fantasies are crucial to the ethical visions presented by topical novels. From Jean Rhys to Wole Soyinka and from V. S. Naipaul to Toni Morrison, Su identifies nostalgia as a central concern in the twentieth-century novel.

Imagination and the Contemporary Novel
Imagination and the Contemporary Novel

Author: John J. Su

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2011-05-26

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 1139497545

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Imagination and the Contemporary Novel examines the global preoccupation with the imagination among literary authors with ties to former colonies of the British Empire since the 1960s. John Su draws on a wide range of authors including Peter Ackroyd, Monica Ali, Julian Barnes, André Brink, J. M. Coetzee, John Fowles, Amitav Ghosh, Nadine Gordimer, Hanif Kureishi, Salman Rushdie and Zadie Smith. This study rehabilitates the category of imagination in order to understand a broad range of contemporary Anglophone literature. The responses of such literature to shifts in global capitalism have often been misunderstood by the dominant categories of literary studies, the postmodern and the postcolonial. As both an insightful critique into the themes that drive a range of today's best novelists and a bold restatement of what the imagination is and what it means for contemporary culture, this book breaks new ground in the study of twenty-first-century literature.

Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature
Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

Author: L. Wakamiya

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2009-12-21

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 0230102034

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This innovative study examines the work of exiles from the Soviet Union who returned to a reformed post-Soviet Russia to initiate narrative processes of self-definition oriented toward a readership and nation seeking self-identity, all at a time of social, political and cultural transition within Russia itself.

Modernity and the English Rural Novel
Modernity and the English Rural Novel

Author: Dominic Head

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017-04-07

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 1108158323

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This book examines the persistence of the rural tradition in the English novel into the twentieth century. In the shadow of metropolitan literary culture, rural writing can seem to strive for a fantasy version of England with no compelling social or historical relevance. Dominic Head argues that the apparent disconnection is, in itself, a response to modernity rather than a refusal to engage with it, and that the important writers in this tradition have had a significant bearing on the trajectory of English cultural life through the twentieth century. At the heart of the discussion is the English rural regional novel of the 1920s and 1930s, which reveals significant points of overlap with mainstream literary culture and the legacies of modernism. Rural writers refashioned the conventions of the tradition and the effects of literary nostalgia, to produce the swansong of a fading genre with resonances that are still relevant today.

Postcolonial Nostalgias
Postcolonial Nostalgias

Author: Dennis Walder

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2010-11-17

Total Pages: 215

ISBN-13: 1136891218

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This book offers an original and informed critique of a widespread yet often misunderstood condition — nostalgia, a pervasive human emotion connecting people across national and historical as well as personal boundaries. Often seen as merely escapist, nostalgia also offers solace and self-understanding for those displaced by the larger movements of our time. Walder analyses the writings of some of those entangled in the aftermath of empire, tracing the hidden connections underlying their yearnings for a common identity and a homeland, and their struggles to recover their histories. Through a series of comparative reflections upon the representation in literary and related cultural forms of memory, he shows how admitting the past into the present through nostalgia enables former colonial or diasporic subjects to gain a deeper understanding of the networks of power within which they are caught in the modern world — and beyond which it may yet be possible to move. Considering authors as varied as V.S Naipaul, J.G. Ballard, Doris Lessing, W.G. Sebald, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, as well as versions of ‘Bushman’ song, Walder pursues the often wayward, ambiguous paths of nostalgia as it has been represented beyond, but also within, Europe, so as to identify some of those processes of communal and individual experience that constitute the present and, by implication, the future.

Modernism and the Aristocracy
Modernism and the Aristocracy

Author: Adam Parkes

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023-07-13

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 019286629X

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During a modern age that saw the expansion of its democracy, the fading of its empire, and two world wars, Britain's hereditary aristocracy was pushed from the centre to the margins of the nation's affairs. Widely remarked on by commentators at the time, this radical redrawing of the social and political map provoked a newly intensified fascination with the aristocracy among modern writers. Undone by history, the British aristocracy and its Anglo-Irish cousins were remade by literary modernism. Modernism and the Aristocracy: Monsters of English Privilege is about the results of that remaking. The book traces the literary consequences of the modernist preoccupation with aristocracy in the works of Elizabeth Bowen, Ford Madox Ford, Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, Rebecca West, and others writing in Britain and Ireland in the first half of the twentieth century. Combining an historical focus on the decades between the two world wars with close attention to the verbal textures and formal structures of literary texts, Adam Parkes asks: What did the decline of the British aristocracy do for modernist writers? What imaginative and creative opportunities did the historical fate of the aristocracy precipitate in writers of the new democratic age? Exploring a range of feelings, affects, and attitudes that modernist authors associated with the aristocracy in the interwar period--from stupidity, boredom, and nostalgia to sophistication, cruelty, and kindness--the book also asks what impact this subject-matter has on the form and style of modernist texts, and why the results have appealed to readers then and now. In tackling such questions, Parkes argues for a reawakening of curiosity about connections between class, status, and literature in the modernist period.

Branding Berlin
Branding Berlin

Author: Katrina Sark

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-07-21

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 1000914216

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This book is a cultural history of post-Wall urban, social, political, and cultural transformations in Berlin. Branding Berlin: From Division to the Cultural Capital of Europe presents a cultural analysis of Berlin’s cultural production, including literature, film, memoirs and non-fiction works, art, media, urban branding campaigns, and cultural diversity initiatives put forth by the Berlin Senate, and allows readers to understand the various changes that transformed the formerly divided city of voids into a hip cultural capital. The book examines Berlin’s branding, urban-economic development, and its search for a post-Wall identity by focusing on manifestations of nostalgic longing in documentary films and other cultural products. Building on the sociological research of urban branding and linking it with an interpretive analysis of cultural products generated in Berlin during that time, the author examines the intersections and tensions between the nostalgic views of the past and the branded images of Berlin’s present and future. This insightful and innovative work will interest scholars and students of cultural and media studies, branding and advertising, urban communication, film studies, visual culture, tourism, and cultural memory.

The Cambridge History of the English Novel
The Cambridge History of the English Novel

Author: Robert L. Caserio

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-01-12

Total Pages: 1006

ISBN-13: 1316175103

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The Cambridge History of the English Novel chronicles an ever-changing and developing body of fiction across three centuries. An interwoven narrative of the novel's progress unfolds in more than fifty chapters, charting continuities and innovations of structure, tracing lines of influence in terms of themes and techniques, and showing how greater and lesser authors shape the genre. Pushing beyond the usual period-centered boundaries, the History's emphasis on form reveals the range and depth the novel has achieved in English. This book will be indispensable for research libraries and scholars, but is accessibly written for students. Authoritative, bold and clear, the History raises multiple useful questions for future visions of the invention and re-invention of the novel.

Fiction Across Borders
Fiction Across Borders

Author: Shameem Black

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2010-01-12

Total Pages: 349

ISBN-13: 0231520611

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Theorists of Orientalism and postcolonialism argue that novelists betray political and cultural anxieties when characterizing "the Other." Shameem Black takes a different stance. Turning a fresh eye toward several key contemporary novelists, she reveals how "border-crossing" fiction represents socially diverse groups without resorting to stereotype, idealization, or other forms of imaginative constraint. Focusing on the work of J. M. Coetzee, Amitav Ghosh, Jeffrey Eugenides, Ruth Ozeki, Charles Johnson, Gish Jen, and Rupa Bajwa, Black introduces an interpretative lens that captures the ways in which these authors envision an ethics of representing social difference. They not only offer sympathetic portrayals of the lives of others but also detail the processes of imagining social difference. Whether depicting the multilingual worlds of South and Southeast Asia, the exportation of American culture abroad, or the racial tension of postapartheid South Africa, these transcultural representations explore social and political hierarchies in constructive ways. Boldly confronting the orthodoxies of recent literary criticism, Fiction Across Borders builds upon such seminal works as Edward Said's Orientalism and offers a provocative new study of the late twentieth-century novel.