"Hours like bright sweets in a jar"

Author: Sonia Front

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2014-10-16

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 144386918X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The papers gathered in the present collection investigate time and temporality from a number of interdisciplinary perspectives: literary or film studies, postcolonial theory, physics, philosophy, psychology, urban studies, history and gender studies. This wide spectrum of scholarly approaches encompasses chapters dealing with the convergences of time and the human psyche; time and the body; time and memory; time and trauma; time and change; time and cultural reproduction; time and language; time and the city; and time and identity. It transpires that the imaginary refigurations of time more often than not constitute resistance against the linearity of chronometric time, represented by institutions, capitalism, government and power, and attempts to colonize the human psyche. In attempting to assault this hegemony of linear time, literary, cinematographic and cultural practice enacts exploding temporalities to reflect the multifacetedness and multidirectionality of the human experience of time.

King Richard ll
King Richard ll

Author: William Shakespeare

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-12-06

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 1108534430

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In this updated edition of King Richard II, Claire McEachern provides a fresh introductory section in which she discusses the most important productions and scholarly criticism of recent years. Paying particular attention to the focus on religion in contemporary interpretations of the play, McEachern also analyses the increasing number of performances on stage and screen. Andrew Gurr's acclaimed introduction guides the reader through the play's action and politics, providing a thorough and engaging grounding in its structure, language and staging. An updated reading list completes the edition.

Shapes of Time in British Twenty-First Century Quantum Fiction
Shapes of Time in British Twenty-First Century Quantum Fiction

Author: Sonia Front

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2015-09-04

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13: 1443882038

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book addresses the notion of time and temporality and its various conceptualizations in the theories of the new physics, utilized as a thematic and formal framework in the British novel of the twenty-first century. As the Newtonian conception of reality does not provide a reliable framework within which to situate human experience and generate meaning, fiction writers have recognized quantum mechanics as a potent source from which to draw in search of new metaphors. The quantum has become a part of the understanding of reality, and its concepts and assumptions have been absorbed into the textual structure and content of literary fiction. Shapes of Time in British Twenty-First Century Quantum Fiction examines human temporality as mediated by the timeshapes imagined within the context of the new physics, and explores the philosophical implications for human temporality and identity of situating an individual within the realm of physical time. Its chapters deal with various concepts of the new physics connected with temporality, and their appropriation in a selected novel: parallel universes in Andrew Crumey’s Sputnik Caledonia (2008), eternal recurrence and Poincaré’s theorem in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), chaos theory in Samantha Harvey’s The Wilderness (2009), and the end of time in Scarlett Thomas’s The End of Mr. Y (2006). Each of them corresponds to a different conceptual shape of time: tree, concertina, spiral and snapshot, respectively, which is enacted on the formal level. Analyzing the new time constructs in a narrative, this book thus uncovers passages between scientific and humanistic standpoints, and reveals quantum fiction to be an effective tool for visualizing the subjective non-homogenous experience of private time.

California and the Melancholic American Identity in Joan Didion’s Novels
California and the Melancholic American Identity in Joan Didion’s Novels

Author: Katarzyna Nowak McNeice

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-12-07

Total Pages: 359

ISBN-13: 0429655312

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

California and the Melancholic American Identity in Joan Didion’s Novels: Exiled from Eden focuses on the concept of Californian identity in the fiction of Joan Didion. This identity is understood as melancholic, in the sense that the critics following the tradition of both Sigmund Freud and Walter Benjamin use the word. The book traces the progress of the way Californian identity is portrayed in Joan Didion’s novels, starting with the first two in which California plays the central role, Run River and Play It As It Lays, through A Book of Common Prayer to Democracy and The Last Thing He Wanted, where California functions only as a distant point of reference, receding to the background of Didion’s interests. Curiously enough, Didion presents Californian history as a history of white settlement, disregarding whole chapters of the history of the region in which the Californios and Native Americans, among other groups, played a crucial role: it is this reticence that the monograph sees as the main problem of Didion’s fiction and presents it as the silent center of gravity in Didion’s oeuvre. The monograph proposes to see the melancholy expressed by Didion’s fiction organized into four losses: of Nature, History, Ethics, and Language; around which the main analytical chapters are constructed. What remains unrepresented and silenced comes back to haunt Didion’s fiction, and it results in a melancholic portrayal of California and its identity – which is the central theme this monograph addresses.

Interrogating Popular Music and the City
Interrogating Popular Music and the City

Author: Shane Homan

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-06-03

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 1040031145

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

How does popular music influence the culture and reputation of a city, and what does a city do to popular music? Interrogating Popular Music and the City examines the ways in which urban environments and music cultures intersect in various locales around the globe. Music and cities have been partners in an often clumsy, sometimes accidental but always exciting dance. Heritage and immigration, noise and art, policy and politics are some of the topics that are addressed in this critical examination of relationships between cities and music. The book draws upon an international array of researchers, encompassing hip hop in Beijing; the city favelas of Brazil; from Melbourne bars to European parliaments; to heritage and tourism debates in Salzburg and Manchester. In doing so, it interrogates the different agendas of audiences, musicians and policy-makers in distinct urban settings.

Moon Tiger
Moon Tiger

Author: Penelope Lively

Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Published: 2007-12-01

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 080219737X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

“A powerful, moving and beautifully wrought novel about the ways in which lives are molded by personal memory and the collective past.” —The Boston Globe Winner of the Man Booker Prize Elderly, uncompromising Claudia Hampton lies in a London hospital bed with memories of life fluttering through her fading consciousness. An author of popular history, Claudia proclaims she’s carrying out her last project: a history of the world. This history turns out to be a mosaic of her life, her own story tangled with those of her brother, her lover and father of her daughter, and the center of her life, Tom, her one great love found and lost in war-torn Egypt. Always the independent woman, often with contentious relationships, Claudia’s personal history is complex and fascinating. As people visit Claudia, they shake and twist the mosaic, changing speed, movement, and voice, to reveal themselves and Claudia’s impact on their world. “Emotionally, Moon Tiger is kaleidoscopic, deeply satisfying. The all too brief encounter between Claudia and Tom will surely rate as one of the most memorable of contemporary fictional affairs. This is one of the best novels I have read for years.” —The London Sunday Telegraph “It pulls us in; it engages us and saddens us. It is also unexpectedly funny . . . It leaves its traces in the air long after you’ve put it away.” —The New York Times Book Review “One of the very best Booker winners . . . it asks hard questions about memory and history and personal legacy; it’s stylistically demanding and inventive . . . a wonderful book.” —The Guardian

Penelope Lively
Penelope Lively

Author: Molly Hurley Moran

Publisher: New York : Twayne Publishers ; Toronto : Maxwell Macmillan Canada ; New York : Maxwell Macmillan International

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Lively's fiction - particularly Moon Tiger, winner of the prestigious Booker Prize in 1987, and City of the Mind, published in 1991 - "belies the conventional view that the postwar British novel has reacted against the experimentation of the modernist period," Moran writes. The surface quaintness of Lively's novels, which are infused with her passion for architectural and colloquial history and can be reminiscent of "the village and vicars" school of British novelists, can be peeled back to reveal a fictional world laden with the psychological complexities of modern life: agnosticism and existential anxiety, lack of belief in an objective reality, consciousness of the tenuous nature of such constructs as language and linear time. Key to the thematic and technical composition of Lively's work, Moran argues, is her view of the subjective nature of reality and the fluidity of time, particularly the way individual memory can permeate the present.

Curated Fiction
Curated Fiction

Author: Cameron Hindrum

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-02-23

Total Pages: 173

ISBN-13: 1040024602

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Curated Fiction presents a new theory and methodology for developing, drafting and refining creative writing. At the intersection of literary studies and creative writing, this book develops a new theory for analysing how novelists use narrative point-of-view to direct readers’ trust. The book defines the parameters and practice of one possible approach to the creative development of a work of long-form fiction. The value underpinning this approach will be drawn from the theories that inform it, such as Irene Kacandes’s work on Talk Fiction, Bakhtinian concepts of polyphony and Gerald Prince’s concept of the Disnarrated. Offering critical analyses of existing literary works, such as Waterland and As I Lay Dying, Curated Fiction will afford examination of theory in practice, in differing literary forms and contexts before making practical connections with the craft of writing through the analysis of an original short story, 'Foxes'.