What makes someone an evil person? How are evil people different from merely bad people? Do evil people really exist? Can we make sense of evil people if we mythologize them? Do evil people take pleasure in the suffering of others? Can evil people be redeemed? Peter Brian Barry answers these questions by examining a wide range of works from renowned authors, including works of literature by Kazuo Ishiguro, Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Oscar Wilde alongside classic works of philosophy by Nietzsche and Aristotle. By considering great texts from literature and philosophy, Barry examines whether evil is merely a fiction. The Fiction of Evil explores how the study of literature can contribute to the study of metaphysics and ethics and it is essential reading for those studying the concept of evil or philosophy of literature at undergraduate level.
This book is an insightful work on Abdulrazak Gurnah’s fiction, and explores the different valences of oppression and agency, subjectivity, memory, race, gender, place, solidarity, class, and crime. It is an expansive study of Gurnah’s work and lays down foundations for a varied study on the author. It approaches Gurnah’s fiction from multiple angles, and takes it beyond the postcolonial perspective into varied and vast arenas of literary theory.
The Book Projects Ernest Hemingway As An Artist With A Broader Vision Than He Is Generally Understood. This Vision Highlights The Profound Sympathy For Women And For Those Who Suffer In Indifferent Rather Hostile Society. The Author Has Tried To Attribute That Divine Love To Hemingway S Artistic Vision Often Denoted By The Greek Word Agape. This Make Hemingway Not Only A Great Modernist Artist, But Also A Sage Speaking For The Entire Humanity.That Hemingway Has Obsessively Dealt With Such Violent Themes, As War, Is True. It Is Nonetheless True That By Doing So He Has Exposed The Futility And Destructiveness Associated With It. The Hemingway S Hero Is A Defeated Man But Never Crestfallen. He Is Able To Retain His Dignity Even In The Face Of Crisis. His Tragedy Is The Result Of Love, Which For Him Is An Alternate God, And Ultimately Of Labor, Which He Puts In As A Matter Of Profound Faith. The Book Demonstrates This Effectively, And Should Be A Unique Contribution To The Hemingway Scholarship In India And Abroad.
This book examines the way in which the fictional writings of C.S. Lewis reveal much about the man himself and his quest for psychological and spiritual wholeness. There is new material dealing with C.S. Lewis's political writings, especially the correspondences between his thriller, That Hideous Strength and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and some new insights into Lewis's attitudes to women.
This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.
Having emerged as one the leading contemporary British writers, David Mitchell is rapidly taking his place amongst British novelists with the gravitas of an Ishiguro or a McEwan. Written for a wide constituency of readers of contemporary literature, A Temporary Future: The Fiction of David Mitchell explores Mitchell's main concerns-including those of identity, history, language, imperialism, childhood, the environment, and ethnicity-across the six novels published so far, as well as his protean ability to write in multiple and diverse genres. It places Mitchell in the tradition of Murakami, Sebald, and Rushdie-writers whose works explore narrative in an age of globalization and cosmopolitanism. Patrick O'Donnell traces the through-lines of Mitchell's work from ghostwritten to The Bone Clocks and, with a chapter on each of the six novels, charts the evolution of Mitchell's fictional project.
Dismemberment in the Fiction of Toni Morrison is a multifaceted study of Toni Morrison’s fiction. It investigates racism and the concomitant experiences of dismemberment in Morrison’s fiction from multiple perspectives, including history, psychology, and culture. Looking at dismemberment from multiple perspectives, rather than the more generic and abstract expression of fragmentation, likens the impact of racism on individuals to the splitting of bodies, amputation, phantom limbs and traumatic memories, and in more concrete and visceral terms. Morrison’s art of story-telling involves an interactive conversation from multiple perspectives, demanding more attentive participation from her readers in deconstructing the meaning of her narratives. Studying her fiction from multiple perspectives suggests various ways of examining the pernicious impact of racism which produces various forms of dismemberment in her characters. This investigation does this without giving prominence to one perspective at the expense of other equally relevant modes of interpretation. Morrison’s depiction of the trauma of racism on the psyche of her characters and the concomitant experiences of dismemberment has its roots in the historical and social realities of African Americans. The psychological impact of racism on Morrison’s characters requires viewing through the lens of the historical and social realities that play a significant role. Morrison enacts racial alienation and dismemberment as complex processes; it is consequently important to look at her project from multiple perspectives. Examining the lived reality of African Americans from only one perspective ignores dismemberment in the light of the socio-political and historical realities of African American experience in the United States, and entails reconsideration of the physical, historical, social and psychological realities. This investigation argues for the importance of combining these historical and psychological, as well as sociocultural, analyses of Morrison’s fiction in order to acquire a more rounded understanding of racism and its debilitating effects on the psyche. By situating Morrison’s fiction within a variety of discourses, this study offers a multifaceted, highly interdisciplinary framework for a more rewarding analysis of her fiction.
Literature often reflects societal change, but it can also effect change by inspiring people to think in new ways. Four authors who encourage readers to question traditional boundaries are Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes, Jeanette Winterson and Angela Carter. This book takes an in-depth look at the works of these authors with specific emphasis on how they challenge religion (especially in its fundamentalist forms) and its intersections with history, politics, gender and sexuality. The study notes both differences and similarities among the four authors, whose writings broadly represent the major themes in contemporary British literature. Divided into two primary sections, the volume first takes a look at Rushdie and Barnes and their stance regarding historical and political issues. The second section concentrates on gender and sexuality in the writings of Winterson and Carter. Among the works examined are Rushdie's The Satanic Verses and Midnight's Children; Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot and A History of the World in 10 1⁄2 Chapters; Winterson's Boating for Beginners and Written on the Body; and Carter's The Passion of New Eve and Heroes and Villains. The final chapter includes a brief survey of other significant figures in postmodern British literature, including Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, D.M. Thomas, Fay Weldon and Emma Tennant.
Ian McEwan is one of Britain's most established, and controversial, writers. This book introduces students to a range of critical approaches to McEwan's fiction. Criticism is drawn from selections in academic essays and articles, and reviews in newspapers, journals, magazines and websites, with editorial comment providing context, drawing attention to key points and identifying differences in critical perspectives. The book features selections from published interviews with Ian McEwan and covers all of the writer's novels to date, including his latest novel Saturday.
This book studies culture in terms of myths and how they function to construct the identity of communities. It focuses on myth formation in the fiction of Chinua Achebe and Amitav Ghosh, two major twentieth century authors from Nigeria and India respectively. The book analyses how these two authors use myth in their works to study the cultural mores of the societies they represent. Achebe represents the Igbo community of Nigeria and Amitav Ghosh represents various communities in India in both the pre-colonial and postcolonial phases, ranging from Bihar to Sundarbans in south Bengal. The book focuses on the area of myth studies in the postcolonial area of study, delving into a comparative study between the two authors and how they contribute to myth studies through their fiction.
