Writing Within / Without / About Sri Lanka
Writing Within / Without / About Sri Lanka

Author: Paolo Brusasco

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2010-12-01

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 3838200756

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Paola Brusasco's study offers an original insight into Sri Lankan literature in English and an exploration of cultural, social, and linguistic issues at the basis of the country's ethnic conflict. By focussing on two distinctive and representative writers, both Burghers, yet with different personal histories, Brusasco confronts issues of cartography, history, and language, all contributing to a specific definition of identity. Both Ondaatje and Muller are outsiders, the former because of his diasporic existence, the latter because of his excentricity within the reality of a divided country where the legacy of British colonialism and the process of redefinition following independence in 1948, as well as matters of geography and history, become crucial to writers.

Writing Within / Without / About Sri Lanka
Writing Within / Without / About Sri Lanka

Author: Paolo Brusasco

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2010-12-01

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 3838260759

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Paola Brusasco's study offers an original insight into Sri Lankan literature in English and an exploration of cultural, social, and linguistic issues at the basis of the country's ethnic conflict. By focussing on two distinctive and representative writers, both Burghers, yet with different personal histories, Brusasco confronts issues of cartography, history, and language, all contributing to a specific definition of identity. Both Ondaatje and Muller are outsiders, the former because of his diasporic existence, the latter because of his excentricity within the reality of a divided country where the legacy of British colonialism and the process of redefinition following independence in 1948, as well as matters of geography and history, become crucial to writers.

Writing Sri Lanka
Writing Sri Lanka

Author: Minoli Salgado

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2007-01-24

Total Pages: 357

ISBN-13: 1134220189

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Focusing on ways in which cultural nationalism has influenced both the production and critical reception of texts, Salgado presents a detailed analysis of eight leading Sri Lankan writers - Michael Ondaatje, Romesh Gunasekera, Shyam Selvadurai, A. Sivanandan, Jean Arasanayagam, Carl Muller, James Goonewardene and Punyakante Wijenaike – to rigorously challenge the theoretical, cultural and political assumptions that pit ‘insider’ against ‘outsider’, ‘resident’ against ‘migrant’ and the ‘authentic’ against the ‘alien’. By interrogating the discourses of territoriality and boundary marking that have come into prominence since the start of the civil war, Salgado works to define a more nuanced and sensitive critical framework that actively reclaims marginalized voices and draws upon recent studies in migration and the diaspora to reconfigure the Sri Lankan critical terrain.

James Joyce: Developing Irish Identity
James Joyce: Developing Irish Identity

Author: Thomas Halloran

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2009-01-23

Total Pages: 169

ISBN-13: 3838255712

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"James Joyce: Developing Irish Identity" follows the increasing focus on Irish identity in Joyce's major works of prose. This book traces the development of the idea of Ireland, the concept of Irishness, the formation of a national identity and the need to deconstruct a nationalistic self-conception of nation in Joyce's work. Through close reading of "Dubliners", "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man", "Stephen Hero" and "Ulysses", Joyce articulates the problems that colonialism poses to a nation-state that cannot create its identity autonomously. Furthermore, this reading uncovers Joyce's conception of national identity as increasingly sophisticated and complicated after Irish independence was won. From here, Halloran argues that Joyce presents his readers with ideas and suggestions for the future of Ireland. As Irish studies become increasingly imbricated with postcolonial discourse, the need for re-examination of classic texts becomes necessary."James Joyce: Developing Irish Identity" provides a new approach for understanding the dramatic development of Joyce's oeuvre by providing a textual analysis guided by postcolonial theory.

The Biographer and the Subject
The Biographer and the Subject

Author: Rana Tekcan

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2010-03-01

Total Pages: 177

ISBN-13: 3838259955

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A good biography is a well-staged illusion. It creates -- on paper -- a vivid, rounded, and immediate sense of lived life. In contrast to purely fictional forms, biography writing does not allow total freedom to the biographer in the creative act. Ideally, a biography's backbone is formed by accurate historical facts. But its soul lies elsewhere. Since the concern is life, something more is needed: Nothing dry, cold or dead, but a vibrant impression of life that is left in the air after one turns over the last page. But how does a biographer do it? The way a biographer creates a subject is largely dictated by the historical distance between them. There are three types of distance in biographical writing: First, where the biographer and the subject personally know one another; second, where the biographer is a near contemporary of the subject; and third, where biographer and subject are distinctly separated, in some cases by hundreds of years. Tekcan explores how some of the most accomplished biographers manage to "recreate life" across time and space. She closely examines Samuel Johnson's "Life of Mr. Richard Savage", James Boswell's "Life of Samuel Johnson", Lytton Strachey's "Eminent Victorians", Michael Holroyd's "Lytton Strachey", Park Honan's "Jane Austen", and Andrew Motion's "Keats".

Time, History, and Philosophy in the Works of Wilson Harris
Time, History, and Philosophy in the Works of Wilson Harris

Author: Gianluca Delfino

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2012-11-01

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 3838262654

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Gianluca Delfino's study is based on the assumption that Wilson Harris' works as a whole show a remarkable unity of thought rooted in their author's complex imagination. As a valuable contribution to Caribbean Literature and Philosophy, Harris' imaginative approach to reality is discussed in relation to the categories of history and time with reference to several novels, from "Palace of The Peacock" to "The Mask of the Beggar", with a special focus on "The Infinite Rehearsal", "Jonestown" and "The Dark Jester", spanning more than forty years of his vast literary production, encompassing critical perspectives ranging from African philosophy to Jungian readings through historiography and anthropology. As a result, the cross-cultural quality of Harris' thought emerges as a healing outcome of the traumatic colonial encounter, bringing together elements of Amerindian, African and European origin in an ongoing dialogue with time, nature, and the psyche. The outcome of an extensive research into Harris' world, Delfino's study stands in the tradition of the late Hena Maes-Jelinek's critical enterprise by expanding philosophical and psychological readings, with the addition of anthropological perspectives that appeal to those who were captured by Harris' intricacy and rescued by Maes-Jelinek's illuminating interpretations. The attempt to reconstruct a unifying frame around Harris' body of work suggests a new way of looking at one of the Caribbean's most controversial authors.

New Readings in the Literature of British India, c. 1780-1947
New Readings in the Literature of British India, c. 1780-1947

Author: Shafquat Towheed

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2007-10-01

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 389821673X

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The contributions to this book amply demonstrate the richness, vitality, and complexity of the colonial transactions between Britain and India over the last two centuries, and they do so by approaching the topic from a specific perspective: by interpreting the rubric 'new readings' as broadly, creatively, and productively as possible. They cover a wide range of literary responses and genres: eighteenth-century drama, the gothic novel, verse, autobiography, history, religious writing, journalism, women's memoirs, travel writing, popular fiction, and the modernist novel. Brought together in one volume, these essays offer a small, but representative sample of the multifaceted literary and cultural traffic between Britain and India in the colonial period. In the richness and diversity of the various contributors' strategies and interpretations, these new readings urge us to return once again to texts that we think we know, as well as to explore those that we do not, with a freshly renewed sense of their complexity, immediacy, and relevance.

Decapitation and Disgorgement. The Female Body's Text in Early Modern English Drama and Poetry
Decapitation and Disgorgement. The Female Body's Text in Early Modern English Drama and Poetry

Author: Melanie A Hanson

Publisher: ibidem-Verlag / ibidem Press

Published: 2012-02-13

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 3838256050

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This book brings the ideas of French feminist Hélène Cixous to bear on a number of Early Modern English texts. The female characters of Mariam from Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam, Lavinia from William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus as well as John Milton’s Eve in Paradise Lost and the poetic voice of Isabella Whitney are investigated through the application of Cixous’s theories of figurative decapitation and disgorgement. The author examines the creation of a unique discourse through the blending of what is stereotypically referred to as “female text” with “male discourse,” which results in what Cixous would call “bisexual discourse.”

Decadences - Morality and Aesthetics in British Literature
Decadences - Morality and Aesthetics in British Literature

Author: Paul Fox

Publisher: ibidem-Verlag / ibidem Press

Published: 2012-02-10

Total Pages: 412

ISBN-13: 3838255739

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This collection seeks to examine the intersections of aesthetics and morality, of what Decadence means to art and society at various moments in British literature. The inclination toward either the artistic or social perspective in each essay has been rendered more straightforwardly by employing capitalization for aesthetic Decadence, and the lower-case to illustrate moral decadence.Both artistic and social values are inflected by their histories, and, as time passes, so the definition of what it means to be D/decadent alters. The very ideas of the decline from a higher standard, of social malaise, of aesthetic ennui, all presume certain facts about the past, the present, and the linear nature of time itself. To reject the past as a given, and to relish the subtleties of present nuance, is the beginning of Decadence. Purportedly decadent artists focused upon the fleeting present, ascribed value to experiencing the aesthetic moment in its purest form, and it was precisely due to this focus upon living in, and for, the moment that society often responded by expressing moral contempt for the perceived hedonism of art. The aesthetic rejection of contemporary value added to the conflict between the literary and social inflections of Decadent interpretation. The truly decadent was condemned by artists as the stranglehold society maintained on individual interpretation and the interpretation of oneself. This conflict underlies the range of essays in the collection.

Aspects of the Orange Revolution I
Aspects of the Orange Revolution I

Author: Paul D'Anieri

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2007-11-22

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 3898216985

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Ukraine's 2004 presidential election was falsified, spurring the Orange Revolution. To many observers, the Orange Revolution was a shock, and the stolen election a recent development. However, both the election fraud and the effort to topple the government of Leonid Kuchma emerged from political dynamics that had appeared in earlier Ukrainian elections.In this path breaking volume, leading scholars place Ukraine's 2004 Orange Revolution in the longer perspective of Ukraine's post-Soviet electoral politics. Covering both presidential and parliamentary elections over the entire post-Soviet period, the chapters clarify the manner in which earlier elections had emerged as part of the battle for power in Ukraine well before 2004. The opposition that came to power in 2004 had also won the 2002 elections and had developed its strategies during opposition protests that had been catalyzed by the Kuchmagate crisis in 2000. The evolution of the dynamics that led to the fraudulent 2004 election reveals that the events of 2004 represented continuity as well as change. By placing the 2004 elections within a longer trajectory, the volume enriches our understanding of the Orange Revolution and helps us to understand the difficulties faced in consolidating Ukraine's democratic breakthrough following the Orange Revolution.The volume contains an introduction to "Aspects of the Orange Revolution I-VI" by Andreas Umland, followed by eight chapters by Robert K. Christensen, Edward R. Rakhimkulov and Charles Wise, Paul D'Anieri, Robert Kravchuk and Victor Chudowsky, Paul Kubicek, Taras Kuzio, Lucan Way, and Anna Makhorkina. These authors bring complex and varied perspectives that situate Ukraine's post-Soviet elections in economic reforms, constitutional law, foreign policy objectives of integrating into Europe, as well as in the broader context of the rough and tumble competition for political control of Ukraine.