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Scott's Shadow is the first comprehensive account of the flowering of Scottish fiction between 1802 and 1832, when post-Enlightenment Edinburgh rivaled London as a center for literary and cultural innovation. Ian Duncan shows how Walter Scott became the central figure in these developments, and how he helped redefine the novel as the principal modern genre for the representation of national historical life. Duncan traces the rise of a cultural nationalist ideology and the ascendancy of Scott's Waverley novels in the years after Waterloo. He argues that the key to Scott's achievement and its unprecedented impact was the actualization of a realist aesthetic of fiction, one that offered a socia...
This critical study of the literary magazines, underground newspapers, and small press publications that had an impact on Charles Bukowski's early career, draws on archives, privately held unpublished Bukowski work, and interviews to shed new light on the ways in which Bukowski became an icon in the alternative literary scene in the 1960s.
Whilst Shakespearean drama provides eloquent calls to war, more often than not these are undercut or outweighed by compelling appeals to peaceful alternatives conveyed through narrative structure, dramatic context and poetic utterance. Placing Shakespeare's works in the history of pacifist thought, Robert White argues that Shakespeare's plays consistently challenge appeals to heroism and revenge and reveal the brutal futility of war. White also examines Shakespeare's interest in the mental states of military officers when their ingrained training is tested in love relationships. In imagery and themes, war infiltrates love, with problematical consequences, reflected in Shakespeare's comedies, histories and tragedies alike. Challenging a critical orthodoxy that military engagement in war is an inevitable and necessary condition, White draws analogies with the experience of modern warfare, showing the continuing relevance of Shakespeare's plays which deal with basic issues of war and peace that are still evident.
Literary theory has become such a central part of the study of literature, particularly at university level, that a solid familiarity with its basic ideas is now essential. This book will appeal to students who may find the many theoretical approaches that they encounter to be complex, highly demanding, and difficult to incorporate into their own work, and will also be of interest to teachers who are trying to guide their students towards a clear and constructive understanding of this ambit. Through focus on a single study text, discussed from the perspective of eighteen distinct theories that are presented and explained in a consistent manner throughout, readers are given a practical and comprehensible insight into the ideas and beliefs that underpin critical interpretation.
If queer theorists have agreed on anything, it is that for queer thought to have any specificity at all, it must be characterized by becoming, the constant breaking of habits. Queer Times, Queer Becomings explores queer articulations of time and becoming in literature, philosophy, film, and performance. Whether in the contexts of psychoanalysis, the nineteenth-century discourses of evolution and racial sciences, or the daily rhythms of contemporary, familially oriented communities, queerness has always been marked by a peculiar untimeliness, by a lack of proper orientation in terms of time as much as social norms. Yet it is the skewed relation to the temporal norm that also gives queerness its singular hope. This is demonstrated by the essays collected here as they consider the ways in which queer theory has acknowledged, resisted, appropriated, or refused divergent models of temporality.
The notion of citizenship is part of a national collective memory and a memory of individuals belonging to a specific geographical, historical and cultural context. The volume seeks to investigate the importance of women's relationship with citizenship and nationality from a diachronic perspective analysing different forms of writing in various European contexts. Many themes intersect in the different essays that comprise the volume, including the construction of female identity through religious ideology, the importance of translation and cultural studies as a source of feminine knowledge, and the relationship between public life and private domain within the multiculturalism of Europe. The intersection between national identity, women's writings and cultural difference surfaces in many essays and demonstrates how the notion of a necessary translation between cultures has been central for women authors since the seventeenth century.
Robert Burns in Global Culture is a collection which breaks new ground in treating Burns' poetry and influence in an international context. Widely recognized as poet of global significance in the nineteenth century, Burns' reputation has suffered from the critical turns in Romanticism since 1945 and is only now beginning to be seen in its proper context. Following on from the celebrations across the world to mark Burns' 250th anniversary in 2009, this collection asks questions concerning the nature of Burns' global influence in the United States, Europe and the Commonwealth, examines the extraordinary ways in which his writing combines a distinctively progressive agenda with deceptively traditional styles, and emplaces his reputation at the heart of questions of American exceptionalism, European democracy, British imperial identities, Italian politics, French literary history, questions of desire and sexuality, the Burns Supper and the extraordinary cult of Burns statues. 'Robert Burns in Global Culture' combines literary criticism, history, cultural theory and comparative literature to create a set of powerful, new and unique directions in the study of this major Romantic poet.
Before the rise of private homes as we now understand them, the realm of personal, private, and local relations in England was the parish, which was also the sphere of poverty management. Between the 1740s and the 1790s, legislators, political economists, reformers, and novelists transferred the parish system’s functions to another institution that promised self-sufficient prosperity: the laborer’s cottage. Expanding its scope beyond the parameters of literary history and previous studies of domesticity, Be It Ever So Humble posits that the modern middle-class home was conceived during the eighteenth century in England, and that its first inhabitants were the poor. Over the course of the...