Until now, most teaching has focused on the novel as the most useful way of raising issues of gender, ethnicity, theory, nationality, politics and social class. In The Twentieth Century in Poetry Peter Childs places literature in a wider social context and demonstrates that all poetry is historically produced and consumed and is part of our understanding of society and identity. This student-friendly critical survey includes chapters on: * the Georgians * First World War poetry * Eliot * Yeats * the thirties * post-war poetry * contemporary anthologies * women's poetry * Northern Irish and black British poets It builds a narrative not of poetry in the twentieth century, but of the twentieth century in poetry.
"Early in the twentieth century, Americans and other English-speaking nations began to regard adolescence as a separate phase of life. Associated with uncertainty, inwardness, instability, and sexual energy, adolescence acquired its own tastes, habits, subcultures, slang, economic interests, and art forms." "The first comprehensive study of adolescence in twentieth-century poetry, The Forms of Youth recasts the history of how English-speaking cultures began to view this phase of life as a valuable state of consciousness, if not the very essence of a Western identity."--BOOK JACKET.
Undecidability is a fundamental quality of literature and constitutive of what renders some works appealing and engaging across time and in different contexts. This book explores the essential literary notion and its role, function and effect in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and literary theory. The book traces the notion historically, providing a map of central theories addressing interpretative challenges and recalcitrance in literature and showing ‘theory of uncertainty’ to be an essential strand of literary theory. While uncertainty is present in all literature, and indeed a prerequisite for any stabilisation of meaning, the Modernist period is characterised by a particularly strong awareness of uncertainty and its subforms of undecidability, ambiguity, indeterminacy, etc. With examples from seminal Modernist works by Woolf, Proust, Ford, Kafka and Musil, the book sheds light on undecidability as a central structuring principle and guiding philosophical idea in twentieth-century literature and demonstrates the analytical value of undecidability as a critical concept and reading-strategy. Defining undecidability as a specific ‘sustained’ and ‘productive’ kind of uncertainty and distinguishing it from related forms, such as ambiguity, indeterminacy and indistinction, the book develops a systematic but flexible theory of undecidability and outlines a productive reading-strategy based on the recognition of textual and interpretive undecidability.
The ten topics contained in Twentieth-Century Literary Theory reflect contemporary theoretical interests and guide the reader through fundamental questions, from the formation to the uses of theory, and from the construction to the interpretation of literature. The selected essays cover a wealth of scholarship from both the United States and Europe. They go beyond traditional categories by focusing on issues rather than writers or critical movements, thus providing a forum for the continuing discussion of what theory is and does.
This critical Reader is the essential companion to any course in twentieth-century literature. Drawing upon the work of a wide range of key writers and critics, the selected extracts provide: a literary-historical overview of the twentieth century insight into theoretical discussions around the purpose, value and form of literature which dominated the century closer examination of representative texts from the period, around which key critical issues might be debated. Clearly conveying the excitement generated by twentieth-century literary texts and by the provocative critical ideas and arguments that surrounded them, this reader can be used alongside the two volumes of Debating Twentieth-Century Literature or as a core text for any module on the literature of the last century. Texts examined in detail include: Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, Mansfield's Short Stories, poetry of the 1930s, Gibbon's Sunset Song, Eliot's Prufrock, Brecht's Galileo, Woolf's Orlando, Okigbo's Selected Poems, du Maurier's Rebecca, poetry by Ginsburg and O'Hara, Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Puig's Kiss of the Spiderwoman, Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Heaney's New Selected Poems 1966-1987, Gurnah's Paradise and Barker's The Ghost Road.
Reader's Guide Literature in English provides expert guidance to, and critical analysis of, the vast number of books available within the subject of English literature, from Anglo-Saxon times to the current American, British and Commonwealth scene. It is designed to help students, teachers and librarians choose the most appropriate books for research and study.
By applying recent trends in literary and language theory to a range of 20th Century fiction, the contributors to this text make new theoretical insights available to student readers. The analytical and interpretive strategies examined in this book are not intended to be prescriptive, rather they are presented in such a way as to facilitate critical reading and evaluation. The essays, which are arranged into three groups and which focus on the textual level, narrative and context, look at a wide range of Twentieth Century authors including Fowles, Foster, Lessing and Woolf. In addition, this student-friendly text includes a detailed subject index, a full glossary and helpful suggestions for further reading. Aimed at beginning students of English Language and Literature and Applied Linguistics, and advanced students of English as a Foreign or Second Language, 20th Century Fiction provides an essential introduction to the subject which is both sensitive and enabling.
This critical Reader is the essential companion to any course in twentieth-century literature. Drawing upon the work of a wide range of key writers and critics, the selected extracts provide: a literary-historical overview of the twentieth century insight into theoretical discussions around the purpose, value and form of literature which dominated the century closer examination of representative texts from the period, around which key critical issues might be debated. Clearly conveying the excitement generated by twentieth-century literary texts and by the provocative critical ideas and arguments that surrounded them, this reader can be used alongside the two volumes of Debating Twentieth-Century Literature or as a core text for any module on the literature of the last century. Texts examined in detail include: Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, Mansfield's Short Stories, poetry of the 1930s, Gibbon's Sunset Song, Eliot's Prufrock, Brecht's Galileo, Woolf's Orlando, Okigbo's Selected Poems, du Maurier's Rebecca, poetry by Ginsburg and O'Hara, Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Puig's Kiss of the Spiderwoman, Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Heaney's New Selected Poems 1966-1987, Gurnah's Paradise and Barker's The Ghost Road.