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A reevaluation of Swift's masterpiece and a test of the usefulness of examining a text through the perspective of genre. Gulliver is explored from the standpoint of picaresque, history, novel, children's literature, illustrated book, scientific prose, science fiction, philosophical treatise, and satire.
Presents a collection of essays analyzing Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's travels, including a chronology of the author's works and life.
In this study of the Canadian novelist Margaret Laurence, recent narratological models provide the theoretical framework for a textual analysis that aims at complementing previous thematic critiques. The chief focus is on The Stone Angel and The Diviners, which the conclusion then presents in the context of the other novels in Laurence's Manawaka cycle. Consideration of the published works is rounded off with genetic comparison of the novelist's typescript drafts and an evaluation of the manuscript notes kept in the archives of McMaster and York Universities. The central structural principle of The Stone Angel is its dovetailing of past and present scenes. Temporal arrangement, reflecting th...
"As readers of medieval and Renaissance literature know, etymologists associate "adventure" with chance: with that which happens surprisingly - "at" a "venture" - through an unexpected confluence of unpredictable events. Reading the whole history of the word, however, reveals that the long eighteenth century presided over the modernization of the term and its underlying idea. Happenstance fell into the background, while grandeur, risk, and novelty entered the spotlight. One could even plan an adventure, and by the time of Defoe, Catesby, Charlevoix, and Humboldt, adventure was already linked to significant prestige and robust standards: one needed plenty of gusto, at least a little money, a ...
'A Self-Conscious Art' deals with the formal complexities of Modiano's work, by reading 'against the grain' of his self-professed ingenuousness. A detailed examination of his narratives shows the deeply postmodern nature of his writing. Parodying precursors such as Proust or the nouveau romanciers, his narratives are built around a profound lack of faith in the ability of writing to retrieve the past through memory, and this failure is acknowledged in the discreet playfulness that characterises his novels.
Written against the background of the gross social disadvantage suffered by most looked-after children in England, this book compares European policy and approaches and compares these to the care system in England. It asks how different policies and practice can affect young people in residential homes.
In literature the very act of narration often constitutes a theme: everyone is familiar with narration that interrupts the story, that provides an ironic gloss on the action, that exposes the narrator, that serves to deceive. In Narrative as Theme Gerald Prince offers the first book-length study of the theme of narrative and of the relationshipøbetween narrative and truth in fiction. In the first part, theoretical in nature, Prince considers the notion of theme as well as the theme of narrative itself, surveys the research that has come out of that notion, and isolates starting points for the investigation of narrative as theme. Of particular interest to narratologists will be his discussio...
How has Europe shaped British literature and culture – and vice versa – since the Middle Ages? This volume offers nuanced answers to this question. From the High Renaissance to haute cuisine, from the Republic of Letters to the European Union, from the Black Death to Brexit -- the reader gains insights into the main geographical zones of influence, shared intellectual movements, indicative modes of cultural transfer and more recent conflicts that have left their mark on the British-European relationship. The story that emerges from this long history of cultural interactions is much more complex than its most recent political episode might suggest. This volume offers indispensable contexts to the manifold and longstanding connections between British and European literature and culture. This book suggests that, however the political landscape develops, we will do well to bear this exceptionally rich history in mind.
The essays in this volume offer fresh and innovative considerations both of how children interacted with the world of print, and of how childhood circulated in the literary cultures of the eighteenth century. They engage with not only the texts produced for the period’s newly established children’s book market, but also with the figure of the child as it was employed for a variety of purposes in literatures for adult readers. Embracing a wide range of methodological and disciplinary perspectives and considering a variety of contexts, these essays explore childhood as a trope that gained increasing cultural significance in the period, while also recognizing children as active agents in the worlds of familial and social interaction. Together, they demonstrate the varied experiences of the eighteenth-century child alongside the shifting, sometimes competing, meanings that attached themselves to childhood during a period in which it became the subject of intensified interest in literary culture.
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