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From early medieval times to the present, this diverse collection of thirty-one essays sets literary texts in their historical contexts.
Literature, Performance, and Somaesthetics views textual and extra-textual worlds as intimately connected, as forming a continuum, in fact. The essays – on literature, philosophy and the arts – gathered here derive their theoretical inspirations from two realms where embodiment and agency are particularly stressed: namely, from philosophical somaesthetics, a discipline proposed by Richard Shusterman in 1999, and from performance studies, remarkable for its current expansion. In most general terms, the point of convergence for somaesthetics and performativity is their stressing the agency of the embodied and sentient human self. The contributors explore the question of agency in its vario...
The book contains a selection of papers focusing on the idea of crossing boundaries in literary and cultural texts composed in English. The authors come from different methodological schools and analyse texts coming from different periods and cultures, trying to find common ground (the theme of the volume) between the apparently generically and temporarily varied works and phenomena. In this way, a plethora of perspectives is offered, perspectives which represent a high standard both in terms of theoretical reflection and in-depth analysis of selected texts. Consequently, the volume is addressed to a wide scope of both scholars and students working in the field of English and American literary and cultural studies; furthermore, it will be of interest also to students interested in theoretical issues linked with investigations into literature and culture.
The nature of the self is an important point at which philosophy and literature intersect. Text, Body and Indeterminacy acknowledges this connection by forging a link between the philosophical concept of the self and the category of the literary character. The philosophical horizon of Text, Body and Indeterminacy is delineated by the neo-pragmatist debate on selfhood. The book entwines the ideas of Richard Rorty and Richard Shusterman by stressing similarity in their aestheticizing of ethics and by showing the difference in their understanding of the self as textual or bodily. The characters created by Pater and Wilde are freshly assessed within this dual philosophical perspective. Their dop...
We Speak a Different Tongue: Maverick Voices and Modernity 1890-1939 challenges the critical practice of privileging modernism. In so doing, the volume makes a significant contribution to contemporary debates about re-visioning literary modernism, questioning its canon, and challenging its aesthetic parameters. By utilizing the term "modernity" rather than "modernism", the 16 essays housed in this volume foreground the writers who have been marginalised by both their contemporary modernist writers and literary scholars, while exploring the way in which these authors responded to the tensions,
Put simply, refraction describes a change in the direction of light or sound due to a change in the medium the light or sound goes through. Writing a Bachelor’s or Master’s thesis means changing the direction of light shed on a particular text or topic, as the theses collected in this volume conclusively show: A dystopian novel is shown to hinge on questions of animal rights; a complex novelistic structure is revealed to have its origins in scientific discourses; a clearly Gothic novel has its foundation in aesthetic Christianity, to outline just some of the topics. All these papers have in common that they take a well-known text or idea and change the angle through which it is read and analysed – and suddenly a rainbow of new insights is created.
This book brings a new lens to the work of Agatha Christie through a series of close readings which challenge the official solutions by Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. This book's approach interweaves two core ideas: first, it explores the importance of French critic Pierre Bayard’s self-styled ‘detective criticism’; second, it takes detective criticism in a new direction by refocusing on the beginnings of Agatha Christie’s novels. In this way, the book counters the end-orientation that has traditionally dominated the reading experience of, and critical response to, detective fiction by exploring the potential of the beginning to host other interpretations and stories. Offering a new way of reading detective fiction, this book is a mixture of narratology and detective criticism, and deploys it in the form of radical new readings of a number of Christie’s most famous works. This illuminating text will interest students and scholars of crime and detective fiction, literary studies and comparative literature.
The volume offers a variety of new interpretations of a selection of well-known and culturally established works of verbal and visual culture. It demonstrates how the two spheres of literature and broadly understood art, as well as the two qualities of old and new, interfuse, affect, re-shape, and complement each other. The focus here is particularly directed towards the perception of the canonical texts of culture by the modern, often young, addressee. Who are the Old Masters? Are contemporary works of art influenced by them? Is it possible to create ‘new classics’ without reference to the established conventions? These basic questions serve as a starting point for a stimulating academic discussion and a vibrant intellectual exchange.
Walter Pater's European Imagination addresses Pater's literary cosmopolitanism as the first in-depth study of his fiction in dialogue with European literature. Pater's short pieces of fiction, the so-called 'imaginary portraits', trace the development of the European self over a period of some two thousand years. They include elements of travelogue and art criticism, together with discourses on myth, history, and philosophy. Examining Pater's methods of composition, use of narrative voice, and construction of character, the book draws on all of Pater's oeuvre and includes discussions of a range of his unpublished manuscripts, essays, and reviews. It engages with Pater's dialogue with the vis...
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