Modernism, Narrative and Humanism
Modernism, Narrative and Humanism

Author: Paul Sheehan

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2002-08-01

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 1139434616

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In Modernism, Narrative and Humanism, Paul Sheehan attempts to redefine modernist narrative for the twenty-first century. For Sheehan modernism presents a major form of critique of the fundamental presumptions of humanism. By pairing key modernist writers with philosophical critics of the humanist tradition, he shows how modernists sought to discover humanism's inhuman potential. He examines the development of narrative during the modernist period and sets it against, among others, the nineteenth-century philosophical writings of Schopenhauer , Darwin and Nietzsche. Focusing on the major novels and poetics of Conrad, Lawrence, Woolf and Beckett, Sheehan investigates these writers' mistrust of humanist orthodoxy and their consequent transformations and disfigurations of narrative order. He reveals the crucial link between the modernist novel's narrative concerns and its philosophical orientation in a book that will be of compelling interest to scholars of modernism and literary theory.

Modernism, Narrative, and Humanism
Modernism, Narrative, and Humanism

Author: Paul Sheehan

Publisher:

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 9780511045622

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In Modernism, Narrative and Humanism, Paul Sheehan attempts to redefine Modernist narrative for the twenty first century. He reveals the crucial link between the Modernist novel's narrative concerns and its philosophical orientation in a book that will be of interest to scholars of Modernism and literary theory.

Succeeding Postmodernism
Succeeding Postmodernism

Author: Mary K. Holland

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2013-04-25

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 1441159347

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

While critics collect around the question of what comes "after postmodernism," this book asks something different about recent American fiction: what if we are seeing not the end of postmodernism but its belated success? Succeeding Postmodernism examines how novels by DeLillo, Wallace, Danielewski, Foer and others conceptualize threats to individuals and communities posed by a poststructural culture of mediation and simulation, and possible ways of resisting the disaffected solipsism bred by that culture. Ultimately it finds that twenty-first century American fiction sets aside the postmodern problem of how language does or does not mean in order to raise the reassuringly retro question of what it can and does mean: it finds that novels today offer language as solution to the problem of language. Thus it suggests a new way of reading "antihumanist" late postmodern fiction, and a framework for understanding postmodern and twenty-first century fiction as participating in a long and newly enlivened tradition of humanism and realism in literature.

Narrative Humanism
Narrative Humanism

Author: Moss-Wellington Wyatt Moss-Wellington

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2019-09-13

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 1474454348

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book attempts to clarify the narrative conditions of humanism, asking how we can use stories to complicate our understanding of others, and questioning the ethics and efficacy of attempts to represent human social complexity in fiction. With case studies of films like Parenthood (1989), American Beauty (1999), Little Miss Sunshine (2006) and The Kids Are All Right (2010), this original study synthesises leading discourses on media and cognition, evolutionary anthropology, literature and film analysis into a new theory of the storytelling instinct.

Modernism and the Aesthetics of Violence
Modernism and the Aesthetics of Violence

Author: Paul Sheehan

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2013-06-24

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 1107355621

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The notion that violence can give rise to art - and that art can serve as an agent of violence - is a dominant feature of modernist literature. In this study Paul Sheehan traces the modernist fascination with violence to the middle decades of the nineteenth century, when certain French and English writers sought to celebrate dissident sexualities and stylized criminality. Sheehan presents a panoramic view of how the aesthetics of transgression gradually mutates into an infatuation with destruction and upheaval, identifying the First World War as the event through which the modernist aesthetic of violence crystallizes. By engaging with exemplary modernists such as Joyce, Conrad, Eliot and Pound, as well as lesser-known writers including Gautier, Sacher-Masoch, Wyndham Lewis and others, Sheehan shows how artworks, so often associated with creative well-being and communicative self-expression, can be reoriented toward violent and bellicose ends.

Bloomsbury, Beasts and British Modernist Literature
Bloomsbury, Beasts and British Modernist Literature

Author: Derek Ryan

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-12-15

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 100919254X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Bloomsbury, Beasts and British Modernist Literature reveals how the Bloomsbury group's fascination with beasts – from pests to pets, tiny insects to big game – became an integral part of their critique of modernity and conceptualisation of more-than-human worlds. Through a series of close readings, it argues that for Leonard Woolf, David Garnett, Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster, profound shifts in interspecies relations were intimately connected to questions of imperialism, race, gender, sexuality and technology. Whether in their hunting narratives, zoo fictions, canine biographies or (un)entomological aesthetics, these writers repeatedly test the boundaries between, and imagine transformations of, human and nonhuman by insisting that we attend to the material contexts in which they meet. In demonstrating this, the book enrichens our understanding of British modernism while intervening in debates on the cultural significance of animality from the turn of the twentieth century to the Second World War.

The Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel
The Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel

Author: Morag Shiach

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2007-04-19

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1107495180

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The novel is modernism's most vital and experimental genre. In this 2007 Companion leading critics explore the very significant pleasures of reading modernist novels, but also demonstrate how and why reading modernist fiction can be difficult. No one technique or style defines a novel as modernist. Instead, these essays explain the formal innovations, stylistic preferences and thematic concerns which unite modernist fiction. They also show how modernist novels relate to other forms of art, and to the social and cultural context from which they emerged. Alongside chapters on prominent novelists such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, as well as lesser-known authors such as Dorothy Richardson and Djuna Barnes, themes such as genre and geography, time and consciousness are discussed in detail. With a chronology and guide to further reading, this is the most accessible and informative overview of the genre available.

The International Reception of Samuel Beckett
The International Reception of Samuel Beckett

Author: Mark Nixon

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2011-10-27

Total Pages: 669

ISBN-13: 1441160027

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Over the last decade, Samuel Beckett's popularity has rocketed around the world and he is increasingly recognised as one of the most important and influential writers of the twentieth century but there has been very little scholarly work on Beckett's reception outside Europe. This comprehensive volume brings together essays from leading critics on Beckett's international critical reception. Due to Beckett's linguistic and artistic abilities, he was intimately involved in the translation and production of his writings in German, French, English and Spanish; and consequently countries using these languages have sophisticated critical traditions. However, many other countries have adopted Beckett as their own, from places where he lived for lengthy periods of his life (England, France, Ireland and Germany), to those finding directly applicable political messages in his work (such as ex-Soviet states including the Czech Republic and Romania), and those countries whose national literary traditions bear heavily upon his work (e.g. Norway and Italy). This fascinating volume reveals Beckett's evolving critical reception from contemporary reviews to the present.

Abortion Ecologies in Southern African Fiction
Abortion Ecologies in Southern African Fiction

Author: Caitlin E. Stobie

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2023-01-12

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1350250198

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Focusing on texts from the late 1970s to the 1990s which document both changing attitudes to terminations of pregnancy and dramatic environmental, medical, and socio-political developments during southern Africa's liberation struggles, this book examines how four writers from Botswana, South Africa, and Zimbabwe address the ethics of abortion and reproductive choice. Viewing recent fiction through the lens of new materialist theory – which challenges conventional, individual-based notions of human rights by asserting that all matter holds agency – this book argues that southern African women writers anticipate and exceed current feminist revivals of materialist thought. Not only do the authors question contemporary discourse framing abortion as either a confirmation of a woman's 'right to choose' or an unethical termination of human life, but they challenge conventional understandings of development, growth, and time. Through close readings of both literal gestation in the selected texts and the metaphorical reproduction of the post/colonial nation, this study advances the concept of reproductive agency, creating a range of queer ecocritical alternatives to tropes such as those of 'the Mother Country', 'Mother Africa', or 'the birth of a nation'. This study situates abortion narratives by Wilma Stockenström (translated by J. M. Coetzee), Zoë Wicomb, Yvonne Vera, and Bessie Head alongside contemporary postcolonial feminist theories, melding traditional beliefs with materialist views to reconsider the future of reproductive health matters in southern Africa. Merging queer ecocritical perspectives from materialism and postcolonialism, this study will appeal to students and researchers in the medical humanities, new materialisms, and postcolonial studies.

Eliot and Beckett's Low Modernism
Eliot and Beckett's Low Modernism

Author: Rick de Villiers

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2021-11-24

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 1474479065

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

<h4>Explores the relation between humility and humiliation in the works of T. S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett</h4>

<ul><li>Offers the first book-length comparative study of T. S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett</li>
<li>Develops a literary theory of humility and humiliation – concepts whose definitions have largely been determined by philosophy and theology</li>
<li>Explores the relation between negative affect, ethics and aesthetics</li></ul>

<p>Humility and humiliation have an awkward, often unacknowledged intimacy. Humility may be a queenly, cardinal or monkish virtue, while humiliation points to an affective state at the extreme end of shame. Yet a shared etymology links the words to lowliness and, further down, to the earth. As this study suggests, like the terms in question, T. S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett share an imperfect likeness. Between them is a common interest in states of abjection, shame and suffering – and possible responses to such states. Tracing the relation between negative affect, ethics, and aesthetics, <i>Eliot and Beckett’s Low Modernism</i> demonstrates how these two major modernists recuperate the affinity between humility and humiliation – concepts whose definitions have largely been determined by philosophy and theology.</p>