This volume explores the varieties of the short form in American literature, art, and culture as well as different ideas and aesthetics of simplicity, plainness, and brevity from the 19th century to the present. The contributors discuss how these ideas were translated into widely diverging practices, serving an equally broad spectrum of cultural and political functions. The essays survey a range of media and genres, including short fiction, plays, popular rhetoric, songs, photography, film, and Twitter.
The final volume of the New Perspectives in Edward Albee Studies series expands the analyses of Edward Albee’s theatre beyond Anglophone countries. Ranging from academic essays, performance reviews, and interviews, the selected contributions examine different socio-political contexts, cultural dynamics, linguistic communities, and aesthetic traditions, from the 1960s to our contemporary days. Albee Abroad gladly brings together varied voices from Czech Republic, People’s Republic of China, Brazil, Iran, Germany, Spain, and Greece, thus enriching Albee scholarship with more plural tones.
For more than a century, the word 'Kailyard' has been a focal point of Scottish literary and cultural debate. Originally a term of literary criticism, it has come to be used, often pejoratively, across a whole range of academic and popular discourse. Historians, politicians and critics of Scottish film and media have joined literary scholars in using the term to set out a diagnosis of Scottish culture. This is the first comprehensive study of the subject. Andrew Nash traces the origins of the Kailyard diagnosis in the nineteenth century and considers the critical concerns that gave rise to it. He then provides a full reassessment of the literature most commonly associated with the term – the fiction of J.M. Barrie, S.R. Crockett and Ian Maclaren. Placing this work in more appropriate contexts, he considers the literary, social and religious imperatives that underpinned it and discusses the impact of these writers in the publishing world. These chapters are succeeded by detailed analysis of the various ways in which the term has been used in wider discussions of Scottish literature and culture. Discussing literary criticism, film studies, and political and sociological analyses of Scotland, Nash shows how Kailyard, as a critical term, helps expose some of the key issues in Scottish cultural debate in the twentieth century, including discussions over national representation, popular culture and the parochialism of Scottish culture.
Preliminary material /Editors Ethics and Trauma in Contemporary British Fiction -- INTRODUCTION /JEAN-MICHEL GANTEAU and SUSANA ONEGA -- READING TRAUMA IN PAT BARKER'S REGENERATION TRILOGY /LENA STEVEKER -- THE ETHICAL CLOCK OF TRAUMA IN EVA FIGES' WINTER JOURNEY /SILVIA PELLICER-ORTÍN -- “NOBODY'SMEAT”: REVISITING RAPE AND SEXUAL TRAUMA THROUGH ANGELA CARTER /CHARLEY BAKER -- “A NEW ALGEBRA”: THE POETICS AND ETHICS OF TRAUMA IN J.G. BALLARD'S THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION /JAKOB WINNBERG -- TRAUMA AS THE NEGATION OF AUTONOMY: MICHAEL MOORCOCK'S MOTHER LONDON /JEAN-MICHEL GANTEAU -- WHERE MADNESS LIES: HOLOCAUST REPRESENTATION AND THE ETHICS OF FORM IN MARTIN AMIS' TIME'S ARROW /MARÍA JESÚS MARTÍNEZ-ALFARO -- WORLDWAR II FICTION AND THE ETHICS OF TRAUMA /GERD BAYER -- A TERRIBLE BEAUTY: ETHICS, AESTHETICS AND THE TRAUMA OF GAYNESS IN ALAN HOLLINGHURST'S THE LINE OF BEAUTY /JOSÉ M. YEBRA -- “THE ETERNAL LOOP OF SELF-TORTURE”: ETHICS AND TRAUMA IN IANMCEWAN'S ATONEMENT /GEORGES LETISSIER -- CONJUNCTURES OF UNEASINESS: TRAUMA IN FAY WELDON'S THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY AND IN IAN MCEWAN'S ON CHESIL BEACH /ANGELA LOCATELLI -- REPRESENTING THE CHILD SOLDIER: TRAUMA, POSTCOLONIALISM AND ETHICS IN DELIA JARRETTMACAULEY'SMOSES, CITIZEN AND ME /ANNE WHITEHEAD -- THE TRAUMA PARADIGM AND THE ETHICS OF AFFECT IN JEANETTE WINTERSON'S THE STONE GODS /SUSANA ONEGA -- NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS /Editors Ethics and Trauma in Contemporary British Fiction -- INDEX /Editors Ethics and Trauma in Contemporary British Fiction.
This is a guide to the main developments in the history of British and Irish literature, charting some of the main features of literary language development and highlighting key language topics.
Peter Carey is one of the most richly awarded and critically acclaimed novelists of the present day. Most of his fictions relate to questions of Australian history and identity. Rewriting History argues that taken together Carey’s novels make up a fictional biography of Australia. The reading proposed here considers both key events in the life of the subject of Carey’s biography (such as the exploration of the interior of the continent, the dispossession of the Aborigines, the convict experience, the process of Australia’s coming of age as a postcolonial country) as well as its identity. Rewriting History demonstrates how Carey exposes the lies and deceptions that make up the traditional representations of Australian history and supplants them with a new national story – one that because of its fictional status is not bound to the rigidities of traditional historical discourse. At a time of momentous cultural change, when Australia is being transformed from a “New Britannia in another world” to a nation not merely in, but actually of the Asia-Pacific region, Carey’s fiction, this book argues, calls for the construction of a postcolonial national identity that acknowledges the wrongs of the past and gives Australians a sense of cultural orientation between their British past and their multicultural present.
Widely acknowledged as a contemporary classic that has introduced thousands of readers to American literature, From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature brilliantly charts the fascinating story of American literature from the Puritan legacy to the advent of postmodernism. From realism and romanticism to modernism and postmodernism it examines and reflects on the work of a rich panoply of writers, including Poe, Melville, Fitzgerald, Pound, Wallace Stevens, Gwendolyn Brooks and Thomas Pynchon. Characterised throughout by a vibrant and engaging style it is a superb introduction to American literature, placing it thoughtfully in its rich social, ideological and historical context. A tour de force of both literary and historical writing, this Routledge Classics edition includes a new preface by co-author Richard Ruland, a new foreword by Linda Wagner-Martin and a fascinating interview with Richard Ruland, in which he reflects on the nature of American fiction and his collaboration with Malclolm Bradbury. It is published here for the first time.
