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An Insatiable Dialectic
This book includes studies by leading philosophers and cultural critics from Asia, Europe, and the Americas. The essays represent different philosophical traditions and contrasting cultural viewpoints in the arts, literature, architecture, philosophy, and the global politics of today. In spite of their discrepancies, the authors of these essays agree on one fundamental point: critical forums of this scope are crucial and thus necessary as we enter the twenty-first century. After two World Wars and the rise of Western and Eastern forms of totalitarianism, these core features of Western civilization – critique, modernity, and humanism – have been contested and dismissed as areas of mere ac...
American Fiction in Transition
American Fiction in Transition is a study of the observer-hero narrative, a highly significant but critically neglected genre of the American novel. Through the lens of this transitional genre, the book explores the 1990s in relation to debates about the end of postmodernism, and connects the decade to other transitional periods in US literature. Novels by four major contemporary writers are examined: Philip Roth, Paul Auster, E. L. Doctorow and Jeffrey Eugenides. Each novel has a similar structure: an observer-narrator tells the story of an important person in his life who has died. But each story is equally about the struggle to tell the story, to find adequate means to narrate the transitional quality of the hero's life. In playing out this narrative struggle, each novel thereby addresses the broader problem of historical transition, a problem that marks the legacy of the postmodern era in American literature and culture.
The Ironist and the Romantic
At the time of his death in 2007, Richard Rorty was widely acclaimed as one of the world's most influential contemporary thinkers. Stanley Cavell, who has been a leading intellectual figure from the 1960s to the present, has been just as philosophically influential as Rorty though perhaps not as politically divisive. Both philosophers have developed from analytic to post-analytical thought, both move between philosophy, literature and cultural politics, and both re-establish American philosophical traditions in a new and nuanced key. The Ironist and the Romantic: Reading Richard Rorty and Stanley Cavell finds the sound of Rorty's cheerful pragmatism strikingly at odds with the anxious romanticism of Cavell. Beginning from this tonal discord, and moving through comprehensive comparative analysis on the topics of scepticism, American philosophy, literature, writing style and politics, this book presents the work of its central figures in a novel and mutually illuminating perspective. Áine Mahon's unique and original comparative reading will be of interest not only to those working on Rorty and Cavell but to anyone concerned with the current state of American philosophy.
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction, 3 Volume Set
This Encyclopedia offers an indispensable reference guide to twentieth-century fiction in the English-language. With nearly 500 contributors and over one million words, it is the most comprehensive and authoritative reference guide to twentieth-century fiction in the English language. Contains over 500 entries of 1000-3000 words written in lucid, jargon-free prose, by an international cast of leading scholars Arranged in three volumes covering British and Irish Fiction, American Fiction, and World Fiction, with each volume edited by a leading scholar in the field Entries cover major writers (such as Saul Bellow, Raymond Chandler, John Steinbeck, Virginia Woolf, A.S. Byatt, Samual Beckett, D....
Characters of Blood
Across the centuries, the acts and arts of black heroism have inspired a provocative, experimental, and self-reflexive intellectual, political, and aesthetic tradition. In Characters of Blood, Celeste-Marie Bernier illuminates the ways in which six iconic men and women--Toussaint Louverture, Nathaniel Turner, Sengbe Pieh, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman--challenged the dominant conceptualizations of their histories and played a key role in the construction of an alternative visual and textual archive. While these figures have survived as symbolic touchstones, Bernier contends that scholars have yet to do justice to their complex bodies of work or their multifaceted li...
Popular Ghosts
Located in the ambivalent realm between life and death, ghosts have always inspired cultural fascination as well as theoretical consideration.
Political Animal
The late Gore Vidal occupied a unique position within American letters. Born into a political family, he ran for office several times, but was consistently critical of his nation’s political system and its leaders. A prolific writer in several genres, he was also widely known – particularly in the United States – on the basis of his frequent appearances in the various electronic media. In this groundbreaking work examining the central theme of power throughout Vidal’s writings, Heather Neilson focuses primarily on Vidal’s historical fiction. In his novels depicting American history and those set in ancient times, Vidal evokes a world in which deliberately propagated falsehood – ‘disinformation’ – becomes established as truth. Neilson engages with Vidal’s representations of political and religious leaders, and with his deeply ambivalent fascination with the increasingly inescapable influence of the media. She asserts that Vidal’s oeuvre has a Shakespearean resonance in its persistent obsession with the question of what constitutes legitimate power and authority.
