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This book investigates literary representations and self-representations of people with cosmopolitan identities arising from mobile global childhoods which transcend categories of migrancy and diaspora.
Studies of the English gentleman have tended to focus mainly on the nineteenth century, encouraging the implicit assumption that this influential literary trope has less resonance for twentieth-century literature and culture. Christine Berberich challenges this notion by showing that the English gentleman has proven to be a remarkably adaptable and relevant ideal that continues to influence not only literature but other forms of representation, including the media and advertising industries. Focusing on Siegfried Sassoon, Anthony Powell, Evelyn Waugh and Kazuo Ishiguro, whose presentations of the gentlemanly ideal are analysed in their specific cultural, historical, and sociological contexts...
Making a strong case for a revaluation of Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957), this collection argues that significant aspects of Lewis's writing, painting, and thinking have not yet received the attention they deserve. The contributors explore Lewis's contributions to the production and circulation of modernism and assess the links between Lewis's writing and painting and the work of other key contemporary figures, to position Lewis not only as one of the first twentieth-century cultural critics but also as one who anticipated the work of the Frankfurt School and other social theorists. Familiar topics and themes such as Vorticism receive fresh appraisals, and Lewis's significance as a philosopher-critic, novelist, and artist becomes fully realized in the context of his associations with important figures such as John Rodker, Charlie Chaplin, Evelyn Waugh, Naomi Mitchison, and Rebecca West. Lewis emerges as a figure whose writings on politics, corporate patronage, shell shock, anthropology, art, and cinema extend their influence into the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Compiled on the occasion of Evelyn Waugh's centenary in 2003, this collection of essays shows a renewed critical interest in the author extended by scholars from both sides of the Atlantic. The contributions go back to an international symposium held at La Rioja University, 15-17 May 2003. Apart from traditional debate over questions of fact and interpretation, the book contains innovative approaches to Waugh's oeuvre, some of which make use of theories of discourse and media studies and denote an increasingly sophisticated awareness of his religious, political, and social contexts. Beginning with those essays presenting overviews of Waugh's life and work, and continuing with discussions of particular books in chronological order, this volume deals with a wide variety of aspects that confirm Waugh's rising status as a major twentieth-century classic.
Spiritual themes are common in movies: The unconventional savior. The hero’s journey. The redemption tale. The balance of creation. Journalist John A. Zukowski reflects on twelve major spiritual themes in the world of cinema, discussing films from Dead Man Walking to Bruce Almighty, from Groundhog Day to Chariots of Fire, and many more. See them all—read them all—before you die!
Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966) is one of the twentieth century’s great prose stylists and the author of a suite of devastating satires on modern English life, from his first unforgettably funny novel Decline and Fall, to his last work of fiction, “Basil Seal Rides Again.” Evelyn Waugh’s Satire: Texts and Contexts renews scholarly debates central to Waugh’s work: the forms of his satire, his attitudes towards modernity and modernism, his place in the literary culture of the interwar period, and his pugnacious (mis)reading of literary and other texts. This study offers new exegetical accounts of the forms and figures of Waugh’s satire, linking original readings of Waugh’s texts to the literary-historical contexts that informed them. Posing fresh readings of familiar works and affording attention to more neglected texts, Evelyn Waugh’s Satire: Texts and Contexts offers readers and scholars a timely opportunity to return to the rich, dark art of this master of prose satire.
Arguing against the critical commonplace that Evelyn Waugh’s post-war fiction represents a decline in his powers as a writer, D. Marcel DeCoste offers detailed analyses of Waugh's major works from Brideshead Revisited to Unconditional Surrender. Rather than representing an ill-advised departure from his true calling as an iconoclastic satirist, DeCoste suggests, these novels form a cohesive, artful whole precisely as they explore the extent to which the writer’s and the Catholic’s vocations can coincide. For all their generic and stylistic diversity, these novels pursue a new, sustained exploration of Waugh’s art and faith both. As DeCoste shows, Waugh offers in his later works an under-remarked meditation on the dangers of a too-avid devotion to art in the context of modern secularism, forging in the second half of his career a literary achievement that both narrates and enacts a contrary, and Catholic, literary vocation.
This volume about the modernist writer and artist Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) presents him as a radical figure in twentieth-century modernism. The authors rediscover aspects of Lewis's work which show how his fiction challenges modernist norms, and how his acute and wide-ranging critique of culture has a vital contemporary relevance. Lewis's range is extraordinary - it covers Nietzsche as well as classic cinema, Renaissance art and English classicism. Being politically conservative, he had nonetheless a place on the political left, and he can be seen as a postmodernist before his time. These essays by leading Spanish and British specialists reveal Lewis as one of the key modernists of our time.
This book explores the intersections between dreaming and the literary imagination, in light of the findings of recent neurocognitive and empirical research, with the aim to lay a groundwork for an empirically informed aesthetics of dreaming. Drawing on perspectives from literary theory, philosophy of mind and dream research, this study investigates dreaming in relation to creativity and waking states of imagination such as writing and reading stories. Exploring the similarities and differences between the 'language' of dreams and the language of literature, it analyses the strategies employed by writers to create a sense of dream in literary fiction as well as the genres most conducive to this endeavour. The book closes with three case studies focusing on texts by Kazuo Ishiguro, Clare Boylan and John Banville to illustrate the diverse ways in which writers achieve to 'translate' the experience and 'language' of the dream.
It is a commonplace belief that history is written by the victorious. However, less recognised but equally common is the idea that the defeated also write history, even if their particular account is rather different. This collection looks at these matters from a novel and distinct perspective. It essentially presents the idea that victors often perceive themselves as defeated, by examining the ways in which the idea of defeat comes to dominate the victors’ own sense of superiority and achievement, thereby undermining the certainties that victory is conventionally thought to create. The contributions here discuss fiction (mostly UK and US) published since the First World War. Through the frameworks of experience, memory and post-memory, they examine this subliminal defeat, basically as seen in conflict itself, in the societies that it affects, and in the individual lives of those who it destroys. The result is an innovative literary account of the victorious-yet-somehow-defeated.