Theme Parks, Rainforests and Sprouting Wastelands
Theme Parks, Rainforests and Sprouting Wastelands

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2022-05-16

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 9004454942

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This lively and fascinating new collection of European essays on contemporary Anglophone fiction has arisen out of the ESSE/3 Conference, which was held in Glasgow in September 1995. The contributors live and work in University English Departments in Bulgaria, Croatia, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, The Netherlands, Portugal and Spain, as well as in the United Kingdom itself. Essays on general theoretical aspects of the subject head and conclude the collection, and there are also essays on individual writers or groups of writers, such as John Fowles, A.S. Byatt, Charles Palliser, Peter Ackroyd, William Golding, Doris Lessing, Daphne du Maurier, Angela Carter and Christina Stead. The performative aspect of the subject-matter of these essays is balanced by a locational aspect, including utopian and dystopian writing in authors as diverse as Michael Crichton, Jenny Diski and Salman Rushdie, and the travel literature of Bruce Chatwin. These essays show theoretical alertness, but no single theoretical position is privileged. The aim of the collection is to provide an indication of the range of work being carried out throughout European academe on Anglophone (mainly British) writing today.

The Storyteller's Memory Palace
The Storyteller's Memory Palace

Author: Hanne Bewernick

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 9783631604700

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Storytelling and remembering rely on similar practices: they both arrange images in an ordered structure. A story is initially memorised by the author in a mental structure which is transferred to the page via the author's choice of location, organisation and imagery. An interpretation that emphasises these features enhances the natural capacity for comprehension by mimicking the memory process. This study describes and uncovers memory systems (including the memory palace and the memory journey) in medieval texts. The ancient memory techniques are compared to cognitive psychology and used to interpret four modern novels. A practical method of interpretation is devised which provides the reader with direct access to a story by opening the door into the storyteller's memory palace.

Resistance and the City
Resistance and the City

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2018-07-17

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 9004369317

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The contributions collected in the second volume of Resistance and the City are devoted to the three markers of identity that cultural studies has recognised as paramount for our understanding of difference, inequality, and solidarity in modern societies: race, class, and gender. These categories, tightly linked to the mechanics of power, domination and subordination, have often played an eminent role in contemporary struggles and clashes in urban space. The confluence of people from diverse ethnic, social, and sexual backgrounds in the city has not only raised their awareness of a variety of life concepts and motivated them to negotiate their own positions, but has also encouraged them to develop strategies of resistance against patterns of social and spatial exclusion. Contributors: Oliver von Knebel Doeberitz, Barbara Korte, Anna Lienen, Gill Plain, Frank Erik Pointner, Katrin Röder, Ingrid von Rosenberg, Mark Schmitt, Ralf Schneider, Christoph Singer, Sabine Smith, Merle Tönnies, Ger Zielinski

John Fowles
John Fowles

Author: Jonathan Noakes

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2012-02-29

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 1448137268

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The French Lieutenant's Woman, The Magus, A MaggotIn Vintage Living Texts, teachers and students will find the essential guide to the works of John Fowles. Vintage Living Texts is unique in that it offers an in-depth interview with John Fowles, relating specifically to the texts under discussion. This guide deals with Fowles's themes, genre and narrative technique, and a close reading of the texts will provide a rich source of ideas for intelligent and inventive ways of approaching the novels. Also included in this guide are detailed reading plans for all three novels, questions for essays and discussion, contextual material, suggested texts for complementary and comparative reading, extracts from reviews, a critical overview, a biography, bibliography and a glossary of literary terms.

Narrating Motherhood(s), Breaking the Silence
Narrating Motherhood(s), Breaking the Silence

Author: Silvia Caporale-Bizzini

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 184

ISBN-13: 9783039107896

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Feminist theory on motherhood has successfully transformed mothers into subjects of their own discourse, recognized the historical, heterogeneous and socially constructed origins of their life experience while, at the same time, widening our understanding of the notion of mothering. This collection combines a literary and a wider cultural perspective from which to look at the topic of the representation of other or forgotten motherhoods. Mothers who have been forced to live exiled and away from their children, women who after trying to conceive, get pregnant but discover they cannot bear to become mothers, or even literary characters based on an autobiographical experience of a sexually abusive mother. The essays critically point out how writing becomes a tool to think and write about the many aspects of motherhood such as an idealized maternal experience versus the real one or the accepted stereotypes of the good mother and the bad mother.

The Still Life in the Fiction of A. S. Byatt
The Still Life in the Fiction of A. S. Byatt

Author: Elizabeth Hicks

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2010-08-11

Total Pages: 215

ISBN-13: 1443824607

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This book explores the ways in which English writer A. S. Byatt’s visual still lifes (descriptions of real or imagined artworks) and what are termed “verbal still lifes” (scenes such as laid tables, rooms and market stalls) are informed by her veneration of both realism and writing. It examines Byatt’s adoption of the Barthesian concept of textual pleasure, showing how her ekphrastic descriptions involve consumption and take time to unfold for the reader, thereby highlighting the limitations of painting. It also investigates the ways in which Byatt’s still lifes demonstrate her debts to English modernist author Virginia Woolf, French writer Marcel Proust, and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of nineteenth-century Britain. A number of Byatt’s verbal still lifes are read as semiotic markers of her characters, particularly with regard to economic status and class. Further, her descriptions uniting food and sexuality are perceived as part of her overall representation of pleasure. Finally, Byatt’s employment of vanitas iconography in many of her portrayals of death is discussed showing how her recurring motif of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” teases out the still life’s inherent tension between living passion and “cold” artwork.

A. S. Byatt
A. S. Byatt

Author: Jonathan Noakes

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2012-05-31

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1448138922

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In Vintage Living Texts teachers, students and any lover of literature will find the essential guide to the major works of A. S. Byatt. Also included is an exclusive in-depth interview with A. S. Byatt relating specifically to the novels under discussion. A. S. Byatt's themes, genre and narrative techniques are put under scrutiny and the emphasis is on providing a rich source of ideas for intelligent and inventive ways of approaching the novels. Amongst many other features you'll find inspirational reading plans and contextual material, suggested complementary and comparative reading and an indispensable glossary. Featured texts: Possession, Angels & Insects, and A Whistling Woman.

Doris Lessing
Doris Lessing

Author: Alice Ridout

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2011-10-20

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 1441192646

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Despite winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, Doris Lessing has received relatively little critical attention. One of the reasons for this is that Lessing has spent much of her lifetime and her long published writing career crossing both national and ideological borders. This essay collection reflects and explores the incredible variety of Lessing's border crossings and positions her writing in its various social and cultural contexts. Lessing crosses literal national borders in her life and work, but more controversial have been her crossings of genre borders into sci-fi and "space fiction", and her crossing of ideological borders such as moving into and out of the Communist Party and from a colonial into a post-colonial world. This timely collection also considers a number of the most interesting recent critical and theoretical approaches to Lessing's writing, including work on maternity and abjection in relation to The Fifth Child and The Grass is Singing, eco-criticism in Lessing's 'Ifrakan' novels, and postcolonial re-writings of landscape in her African Stories.

Contextualized Stylistics
Contextualized Stylistics

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-10-18

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 9004487395

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The articles in Contextualized Stylistics, written especially to honour the work of Peter Verdonk, one of the leading figures in the field of stylistics over the last twenty years, represent the state of the art in literary linguistics. A wide range of approaches, from traditional stylistic analysis to innovative new directions, is to be found here in literary contexts as varied as the writings of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne, Pope, Sterne, Browning, Yeats, Auden, Joyce, British surrealist poetry, urban and political graffiti, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jane Gardam, contemporary Anglo-Irish fiction, modern comic satire and Flann O'Brien. Among the contributors are some of the foremost theorists and practitioners working in the field today: Walter Nash, Peter Stockwell, Willie van Peer, Keith Green, Tony Bex, Michael Burke, Mick Short, Jonathan Culpeper, Elena Semino, Michael Toolan, Jean-Jacques Weber, Gerard Steen, Henry Widdowson, and Paul Simpson. Olga Fischer and Katie Wales contribute a Foreword, and Ronald Carter an Afterword. A number of Professor Verdonk's colleagues have also contributed articles from a more literary perspective. This book is an essential addition to the personal library of any researcher interested in the interface and connections between language and literature, and it would make an excellent course reader for undergraduate students in both literary and linguistic studies.

Epistolary Encounters in Neo-Victorian Fiction
Epistolary Encounters in Neo-Victorian Fiction

Author: K. Brindle

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2014-01-24

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 1137007168

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Neo-Victorian writers invoke conflicting viewpoints in diaries, letters, etc. to creatively retrace the past in fragmentary and contradictory ways. This book explores the complex desires involved in epistolary discoveries of 'hidden' Victorians, offering new insight into the creative synthesising of critical thought within the neo-Victorian novel.