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"Many fictional works have real, historical authors as characters. Great national literary icons like Virgil and Shakespeare have been fictionalized in novels, plays, poems, movies, and operas. This fashion might seem typically postmodern, the reverse side of the contention that the Author is Dead; but this collection of essays shows that the representation of historical authors as characters can boast of a considerable history, and may well constitute a genre in its own right. This volume brings together a collection of articles on appropriations of historical authors, written by experts in a wide range of major Western literatures."--BOOK JACKET.
This study deals with the postmodern philosophy of language as developed mainly by French authors as R. Barthes, J. Derrida and J.-F. Lyotard. The four chapters of the first part are theoretical and relate the literary concepts of postmodernity, poststructuralism and deconstruction to the practice of biblical exegesis. One of the important conclusions is that deconstruction affects both diachronic and synchronic approaches of texts. Each chapter closes with -not suggestions but- implications for a postmodern, deconstructive strategy of reading. The four chapters of the second part apply this postmodern, deconstructive strategy of reading to the Fourth Gospel as a whole (chapter five), to John 6 (chapter six), to John 17 (chapter seven) and to John 21, 24-25 (chapter eight). This deconstructive reading shows the differential and apophatic character of Saint John's Gospel.
All The Essays In This Anthology Reflect The Growing Importance Of Literature And Cultures That Might Once Have Been Regarded As Marginal. This Book Affirms The Importance And Interest Of A Wide Variety Of Literatures Sharing A Language But Reflecting A Rich And Provocative Diversity Of Histories, Experiences And Attitudes To The Shared World Which Still Divides Us. Couple Of The Essays Look Into The Work Of Anita Desai And Salman Rushdie.
The relationship of myth to literature has largely been overshadowed in contemporary theory by perspectives of a linguistic or sociological orientation and by relativist, sometimes negatory, stances on all searches for meaning. This book attempts to show that myth criticism and critical theories of more recent provenance are not irreconcilable. While taking into consideration some of the more influential tenets of structuralist, post-structuralist, Marxist and feminist theory, it applies a post-Jungian ('archetypal') approach to illustrating the perennial nature of a particular myth (the Fall of Man) in two main traditions (Mesopotamian and Christian) and in the contemporary novel in English...
Raja Rao, one of the founding figures of Indian English literature, is re-examined in this comprehensive study of his fiction, which offers a fresh critical investigation into both his short stories and his novels. Powerfully contradicting the long-held perception of Raja Rao as a mere metaphysical writer and the true bard of quintessential Indianness, projected by many critics of the first Commonwealth generation over three decades, Stefano Mercanti posits Rao’s fiction in terms of its dialogic interaction – the ‘partnership’ – between Western and Eastern cultural traditions and demonstrates how it evolves during the course of his oeuvre on both the philosophical and the political...
Do You Feel It Too? explores a new sense of self that is becoming manifest in experimental fiction written by a generation of authors who can be considered the 'heirs' of the postmodern tradition. It offers a precise, in-depth analysis of a new, post-postmodern direction in fiction writing, and highlights which aspects are most acute in the post-postmodern novel. Most notable is the emphatic expression of feelings and sentiments and a drive toward inter-subjective connection and communication. The self that is presented in these post-postmodern works of fiction can best be characterized asrelational. To analyze this new sense of self, a new interpretational method is introduced that offers a...
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Why do so many contemporary British novels revert to the Victorian tradition in order to find a new source of inspiration? What does it mean from an ideological point of view to build a modern form of art by resurrecting and recycling an art of the past? From a formal point of view what are the aesthetic priorities established by these postmodernist novels? Those are the main questions tackled by this study intended for anybody interested in the aesthetic and ideological evolution of very recent fiction. What this analysis ultimately proposes is a reevaluation and a redefinition of postmodernism such as it is illustrated by the British novels which paradoxically both praise and mock, honour and debunk, imitate and subvert their Victorian models. Unashamedly opportunistic and deliberately exploiting the spirit of the time, this late form of postmodernism cannibalizes and reshapes not only Victorianism but all the other previous aesthetic movements - including early postmodernism.
The contributors to the present volume, in espousing and extending the programme of such writers as Edward Said, Benedict Anderson, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Spivak, lay bare the genealogy of 'writing' empire (thereby, in a sense, 'un-writing' it). One focus is the Caribbean: the retrograde agenda of francophone créolité; the re-writing of empire in the postmodern disengagement of Edouard Glissant; resistance to post-colonial allegiances, and the dissolving of binary categories, in contemporary West Indian writing. Essays on India, Malaysia, and Indonesia explore various aspects of cultural self-understanding in Asia: un-writing high culture through hybrid 'shopping' among Western styles; t...