The New Pastoral in Contemporary British Writing
The New Pastoral in Contemporary British Writing

Author: Deborah Lilley

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-10-10

Total Pages: 169

ISBN-13: 0429686528

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This book identifies a major turn in contemporary British literature in response to environmental crisis. It argues that the pastoral is emerging as a new critical framework in which to explore the understanding of people and place in this context. The New Pastoral in Contemporary British Writing explores how the pastoral tradition has transformed as authors respond to our changing relationships with place in this period. Analysing the features common to new pastoral writing, it brings together a corpus of works from major authors including Ali Smith, Jim Crace, John Burnside, Kathleen Jamie, and Robert Macfarlane. This book argues that crises such as pollution and climate change have shifted our understandings of the key relationships of pastoral and the terms upon which they are based, giving new senses to its older oppositions between the human and the natural, the urban and the rural, and the past and the present. Furthermore, it shows that the versions of pastoral that ensue align with current ecocritical arguments produced by thinking through the individual, cultural, and ecological implications of environmental crisis. As a result, pastoral emerges as the crucial strategy in the re-imagining of the environment underway in contemporary British writing, the resurgence of interest in nature writing, the increasing attention towards place in literary fiction, and the development of ecological or ‘climate’ fiction. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of English as well as those concerned with the interdisciplinary topics of the environmental humanities, including literary geographies, new nature writing, cultures of climate change and the Anthropocene, and ecologically-oriented theory.

The New Pastoral in Contemporary British Writing
The New Pastoral in Contemporary British Writing

Author: DEBORAH. LILLEY

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-06-30

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13: 9781032088006

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This book identifies a major turn in contemporary British literature in response to environmental crisis. It argues that the pastoral is emerging as a new critical framework in which to explore the understanding of people and place in this context. The New Pastoral in Contemporary British Writing explores how the pastoral tradition has transformed as authors respond to our changing relationships with place in this period. Analysing the features common to new pastoral writing, it brings together a corpus of works from major authors including Ali Smith, Jim Crace, John Burnside, Kathleen Jamie, and Robert Macfarlane. This book argues that crises such as pollution and climate change have shifted our understandings of the key relationships of pastoral and the terms upon which they are based, giving new senses to its older oppositions between the human and the natural, the urban and the rural, and the past and the present. Furthermore, it shows that the versions of pastoral that ensue align with current ecocritical arguments produced by thinking through the individual, cultural, and ecological implications of environmental crisis. As a result, pastoral emerges as the crucial strategy in the re-imagining of the environment underway in contemporary British writing, the resurgence of interest in nature writing, the increasing attention towards place in literary fiction, and the development of ecological or 'climate' fiction. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of English as well as those concerned with the interdisciplinary topics of the environmental humanities, including literary geographies, new nature writing, cultures of climate change and the Anthropocene, and ecologically-oriented theory.

The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction
The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction

Author: Daniel O'Gorman

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-01-15

Total Pages: 629

ISBN-13: 1134743777

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The study of contemporary fiction is a fascinating yet challenging one. Contemporary fiction has immediate relevance to popular culture, the news, scholarly organizations, and education – where it is found on the syllabus in schools and universities – but it also offers challenges. What is ‘contemporary’? How do we track cultural shifts and changes? The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction takes on this challenge, mapping key literary trends from the year 2000 onwards, as the landscape of our century continues to take shape around us. A significant and central intervention into contemporary literature, this Companion offers essential coverage of writers who have risen to prominence since then, such as Hari Kunzru, Jennifer Egan, David Mitchell, Jonathan Lethem, Ali Smith, A. L. Kennedy, Hilary Mantel, Marilynne Robinson, and Colson Whitehead. Thirty-eight essays by leading and emerging international scholars cover topics such as: • Identity, including race, sexuality, class, and religion in the twenty-first century; • The impact of technology, terrorism, activism, and the global economy on the modern world and modern literature; • The form and format of twenty-first century literary fiction, including analysis of established genres such as the pastoral, graphic novels, and comedic writing, and how these have been adapted in recent years. Accessible to experts, students, and general readers, The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction provides a map of the critical issues central to the discipline, as well as uncovering new perspectives and new directions for the development of the field. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the past, present, and future of contemporary literature.

Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Pastoral Tradition
Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Pastoral Tradition

Author: Donna L. Potts

Publisher: University of Missouri Press

Published: 2011-12-30

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 0826219438

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Intro -- Contents -- Preface -- Introduction -- Chapter 1: A Lost Pastoral Rhythm: The Poetry of John Montague -- Chapter 2: "The God in the Tree" : Seamus Heaney and the Pastoral Tradition -- Chapter 3: "Love Poems, Elegies: I am losing my place " : Michael Longley's Environmental Elegies -- Chapter 4: Learning the Lingua Franca of a Lost Land: Eavan Boland's Suburban Pastoral -- Chapter 5: "In My Handerkerchief of a Garden" : Medbh McGuckian's Miniature Pastoral Retreats -- Chapter 6: "When Ireland Was Still under a Spell" : Miraculous Transformations in the Poetry of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill -- Conclusion: The Future of Pastoral -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.

Post-Romantic Aesthetics in Contemporary British and Irish Poetry
Post-Romantic Aesthetics in Contemporary British and Irish Poetry

Author: Stefanie John

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-06-24

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 1000397750

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This book demonstrates the legacies of Romanticism which animate the poetry and poetics of Eavan Boland, Gillian Clarke, John Burnside, and Kathleen Jamie. It argues that the English Romantic tradition serves as a source of inspiration and critical contention for these Irish, Welsh, and Scottish poets, and it relates this engagement to wider concerns with gender, nation, and nature which have shaped contemporary poetry in Britain and Ireland. Covering a substantial number of works from the 1980s to the 2010s, the book discusses how Boland and Clarke, as women poets from the Republic of Ireland and Wales, react to a male-dominated and Anglocentric lyric tradition and thus rework notions of the Romantic. It examines how Burnside and Jamie challenge, adopt, and revise Romantic aesthetics of nature and environment. The book is the first in-depth study to read Boland, Clarke, Burnside, and Jamie as post-Romantics. By disentangling the aesthetic and critical conceptions of Romanticism which inform their inheritance, it develops an innovative approach to the understanding of contemporary poetry and literary influence.

Crisis in Contemporary British Fiction
Crisis in Contemporary British Fiction

Author: Anastasia Logotheti

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2023-10-30

Total Pages: 108

ISBN-13: 152755175X

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This collection of critical essays explores how contemporary British authors engage with the theme of crisis in their fiction. Of interest to scholars and students of literary and cultural studies, this volume investigates crisis as a complex phenomenon: not only as a cultural concept involving sociopolitical systems but also as a mode of challenge to established power structures and modes of representation across narrative traditions. Through the examination of a variety of leading authors such as Kazuo Ishiguro, and award-winning texts like Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending (2011), this collection foregrounds the theme of crisis as a critical commonality emerging among vastly different stylistic expressions of local and global concerns. Bringing together a variety of scholars from Germany, Italy, Greece, the UK and the US, this collection provides diverse disciplinary perspectives and highlights the significance of social and ethical concerns in contemporary British fiction through the investigation of the theme of crisis.

The Poetics and Ethics of Attention in Contemporary British Narrative
The Poetics and Ethics of Attention in Contemporary British Narrative

Author: Jean-Michel Ganteau

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-12-27

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 100083204X

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This book uses attention as a prism through which to interrogate the literary text. It starts from analyses of the changes that the mediasphere and communication technologies have brought for the contemporary subject, submitting him/her to the tyranny of a new attention economy. My point is that the contemporary novel and memoir resist such influences and evince a great deal of resilience by promoting an “ecology of attention” (Citton) based on poetic options whose pragmatic effect is to develop an ethics of the particularist type. To do this, I draw on critical and theoretical literature hailing from various fields: psychology, but also more prominently phenomenology, political philosophy, and analytical philosophy (essentially Ordinary Language Philosophy), alongside the ethics of care and vulnerability. By using a selection of fictional and non-fictional narratives, I address such issues as social invisibilities, climate change, AI and cognitive disability and end up drafting a poetics of attention.

Haunted Spaces in Twenty-First Century British Nature Writing
Haunted Spaces in Twenty-First Century British Nature Writing

Author: Anneke Lubkowitz

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2020-06-08

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 3110678616

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This study investigates the figure of haunting in the New Nature Writing. It begins with a historical survey of nature writing and traces how it came to represent an ideal of ‘natural’ space as empty of human history and social conflict. Building on a theoretical framework which combines insights from ecocriticism and spatial theory, the author explores the spatial dimensions of haunting and ‘hauntology’ and shows how 21st-century writers draw on a Gothic repertoire of seemingly supernatural occurrences and spectral imagery to portray ‘natural’ space as disturbed, uncanny and socially contested. Iain Sinclair and Robert Macfarlane are revealed to apply psychogeography’s interest in ‘hidden histories’ and haunted places to spaces associated with ‘wilderness’ and ‘the countryside’. Kathleen Jamie’s allusions to the Gothic are put in relation to her feminist re-writing of ‘the outdoors’, and John Burnside’s use of haunting is shown to dismantle fictions of ‘the far north’. This book provides not only a discussion of a wide range of factual and fictional narratives of the present but also an analysis of the intertextual dialogue with the Romantic tradition which enfolds in these texts.

The Literature and Politics of the Environment
The Literature and Politics of the Environment

Author: John Parham

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2023-08-22

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 1843846977

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Essays exploring interrelated strands of material ecologies, past and present British politics, and the act of writing, through a rich variety of case studies.Much as the complexities of climate change and the Anthropocene have queried the limits and exclusions of literary representation, so, too, have the challenges recently presented by climate activism and intersectional environmentalism, animal rights, and even the power of material forms, such as oil, plastic, and heavy metals. Social and protest movements have revived the question of whether there can be such a thing as an activist ecocriticism: can such an approach only concern itself with consciousness, or might it politicise literary criticism in a new way? Attempting to respond, this volume coalesces around three interrelated strands: material ecologies, past and present British politics, and the act of writing itself. Contributors consider the ways in which literary form has foregrounded the complexities of both matter (in essays on water, sugar, and land) and political economics (from empire and nationalism to environmental justice movements and local and regional communities). The volume asks how life writing, nature writing, creative nonfiction, and autobiography - although genres entrenched in capitalist political realities - can also confront these by reinserting personal experience. Can we bring a more sustainable planet into being by focusing on those literary forms which have the ability to imagine the conditions and systems needed to do so? and land) and political economics (from empire and nationalism to environmental justice movements and local and regional communities). The volume asks how life writing, nature writing, creative nonfiction, and autobiography - although genres entrenched in capitalist political realities - can also confront these by reinserting personal experience. Can we bring a more sustainable planet into being by focusing on those literary forms which have the ability to imagine the conditions and systems needed to do so? and land) and political economics (from empire and nationalism to environmental justice movements and local and regional communities). The volume asks how life writing, nature writing, creative nonfiction, and autobiography - although genres entrenched in capitalist political realities - can also confront these by reinserting personal experience. Can we bring a more sustainable planet into being by focusing on those literary forms which have the ability to imagine the conditions and systems needed to do so? and land) and political economics (from empire and nationalism to environmental justice movements and local and regional communities). The volume asks how life writing, nature writing, creative nonfiction, and autobiography - although genres entrenched in capitalist political realities - can also confront these by reinserting personal experience. Can we bring a more sustainable planet into being by focusing on those literary forms which have the ability to imagine the conditions and systems needed to do so?o?