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'Intrigue' examines the tradition of the spy narrative in the 20th century, setting the historical contexts for the main themes of the genre, such as the Cambridge spy ring & the Profumo Affair. Hepburn offers a systematic theory of the conventions & attractions of espionage fiction.
Enchanted Objects investigates the relationship between visual art and contemporary fiction, addressing the problems that arise when paintings, deluxe books, porcelains, or statues are represented in contemporary novels. The distinction between objects and art objects depends on aesthetics. While some objects are authenticated through museum exhibits, others are hidden, broken, neglected, coveted, hoarded, or salvaged. Allan Hepburn asks four broad questions about aesthetics and value: What is a detail in visual art? Is all art ornamental? Does the value of an object increase because it is fragile? What defines ugliness? Contemporary novels, such as Tracy Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring, Barry Unsworth's Stone Virgin, and Bruce Chatwin's Utz offer implicit answers to these questions while critiquing museums and the determination to invest objects with value through display. Addressing current debates in museum studies, cultural studies, art history, and literary criticism, Enchanted Objects develops an extensive theory of how contemporary literature engages with and relates to aesthetic objects.
Last wills and testaments create tensions between those who inherit and those who imagine that they should inherit. As Victorian, modern, and contemporary novels amply demonstrate, seldom is more energy expended than at the reading of a will. Whether inheritances bring disappointment or jubilation, they create a pattern for the telling of stories, stories that involve the transmission of legacies - cultural, political, and monetary - from one generation to the next. Troubled Legacies examines these narratives of inheritance in British and Irish fiction from 1800 to the present. The essays in this collection set out to juxtapose legal and novelistic discourse. This reading of literature again...
This volume explores how religion influenced the works of mid-century writers and how authors used Christian ideas for social and political ends in the 1940s and 1950s.
Near the end of the Second World War, new ideas about citizenship, national identity, belonging, and rights emerged as the atrocities of the war – coupled with the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – spurred writers and citizens around the world to think about their responsibilities to their fellow man. Covering British authors and contemporary fiction by migrant writers publishing at mid-century, as well as some photography from the era, Around 1945 is a collection of essays that reveals how literary texts and cultural events modeled human rights issues such as dignity, freedom, sovereignty, and responsibility. Unified by an investigation of the human and cultural aspec...
Drawing upon a wealth of previously unexplored architectural criticism by British authors, this book reveals how arguments about architecture led to innovations in literature, as well as to redesigns in the concept of modernism itself.
This volume brings together the previously uncollected stories of this exceptional modernist writer, from fairy tale to fable and social drama.Covering a range of situations--broken engagements, encounters with ghosts, brushes with crime--these previously uncollected stories demonstrate the virtuosity that characterizes all of Elizabeth Bowen's writing."The Lost Hope" ranks with the best of her war stories. Shattering the lives of soldiers and civilians alike, the war cancels the promise shown by the generation that came of age in the 1940s. Yet the war also clears a path to the future, as happens in "Comfort and Joy" and "The Last Bus." Humour in these tales ranges from the sardonic to the light-hearted. In the title story, "The Bazaar," Captain Winch begs everyone for pins and ends up stealing some. With this collection, Bowen, gifted with keen social observation, justifies her place in the company of D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce.
During a modern age that saw the expansion of its democracy, the fading of its empire, and two world wars, Britain's hereditary aristocracy was pushed from the centre to the margins of the nation's affairs. Widely remarked on by commentators at the time, this radical redrawing of the social and political map provoked a newly intensified fascination with the aristocracy among modern writers. Undone by history, the British aristocracy and its Anglo-Irish cousins were remade by literary modernism. Modernism and the Aristocracy: Monsters of English Privilege is about the results of that remaking. The book traces the literary consequences of the modernist preoccupation with aristocracy in the wor...
Nation and Citizenship in the Twentieth-Century British Novel charts how novelists imagined changing forms of citizenship in twentieth-century Britain. This study offers a new way of understanding the constitution of the nation-state in terms of the concept of citizenship. Through close readings, it reveals how major authors such as E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Sam Selvon, Buchi Emecheta, Salman Rushdie, and Monica Ali presented political struggles over citizenship during key historical moments: the advent of democracy, the emancipation of women, the rise of social-welfare provision, the institution of the security state during World War II, and the emergence of multicultural citizenship during postwar immigration. This serves as the first full-length monograph to map the interrelations between literary production and public debates about citizenship that shaped Britain in the twentieth century.