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Professing Darkness
"Professing Darkness: Cormac McCarthy's Catholic Critique of American Enlightenment establishes the centrality of Catholic thought, imagery, and sacrament both to the spiritual outlook of the McCarthy corpus and, more specifically, to its critique of Enlightenment values and their realization in American history. To this end, D. Marcel DeCoste surveys McCarthy's fiction from both his Tennessee and southwestern periods, with chapters devoted to eight of his published novels-from Outer Dark to The Road-and an introduction and coda that offer analyses of two of his dramatic works, along with his final novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris. The argument advanced by DeCoste is twofold. First, hi...
The Vocation of Evelyn Waugh
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.
Mastering the Game of Thrones
George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series is a worldwide phenomenon, and the world of Westeros has seen multiple adaptations, from HBO's acclaimed television series to graphic novels, console games and orchestral soundtracks. This collection of new essays investigates what makes this world so popular, and why the novels and television series are being taught in university classrooms as genre-defining works within the American fantasy tradition. This volume represents the first sustained scholarly treatment of George R.R. Martin's groundbreaking work, and includes writing by experts involved in the production of the HBO show. The contributors investigate a number of compelling areas, including the mystery of the shape-shifting wargs, the conflict between religions, the origins of the Dothraki language and the sex lives of knights. The significance of fan cultures and their adaptations is also discussed.
The Vocation of Evelyn Waugh
Arguing against the critical commonplace that Evelyn Waugh’s post-war fiction represents a decline in his writerly powers, D. Marcel DeCoste analyzes Waugh's major works from Brideshead Revisited to Unconditional Surrender. As DeCoste shows, Waugh offers in these later works an under-remarked meditation on the dangers of aestheticism in the context of modern secularism, forging in the second half of his career a literary achievement that both narrates and enacts a more Catholic literary vocation.
Evelyn Waugh’s Satire
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.
Worlds Gone Awry
Dystopian fiction captivates us by depicting future worlds at once eerily similar and shockingly foreign to our own. This collection of new essays presents some of the most recent scholarship on a genre whose popularity has surged dramatically since the 1990s. Contributors explore such novels as The Lord of the Flies, The Heart Goes Last, The Giver and The Strain Trilogy as social critique, revealing how they appeal to the same impulse as utopian fiction: the desire for an idealized yet illusory society in which evil is purged and justice prevails.
Literature and the Conservative Ideal
Responding in part to the postmodernist turn in literary study, Literature and the Conservative Ideal examines the ways in which conservatism has been depicted in literature, as well as how its tendencies might restore literature's potential as an artistic reflection of the universal human condition.
"A Handful of Mischief"
A Handful of Mischief: New Essays on Evelyn Waugh is a collection of essays based on presentations at the Evelyn Waugh Centenary Conference at Hertford College, Oxford, in 2003. There are twelve different essays by authors from various countries, including Australia, Canada, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The essays cover a wide range of material, from Waugh's early novel Black Mischief (1932) to his last travel book, A Tourist in Africa (1960). In addition to essays on well-known novels such as Scoop (1938), Brideshead Revisited (1945), and Helena (1950), the collection includes papers on Waugh's library, his changing conception of Oxford, his writing about religious conversion, and his role in the British evacuation of Crete in 1941. The authors approach Waugh and his work in various ways, and innovative essays explore sovereignty, post-colonialism, and adaptation for radio. Contributors: Baron Alder, Peter G. Christensen, Robert Murray Davis, Marcel DeCoste, Patrick Denman Flanery, Donat Gallagher, Irina Kabanova, Dan S. Kostopulos, Lewis MacLeod, John W. Mahon, Richard W. Oram, Ann Pasternak Slater, John Howard Wilson.
Big-Time Shakespeare
Shakespeare has made the big time. No less than the Beatles or Liberace, Elvis Presley or Mick Jagger, Shakespeare is big-time in the idiomatic sense of cultural success and widespread notoriety. Not only has he achieved canonical status, Shakespeare is a contemporary celebrity. His artistic distinction and aptitude for controversy constantly keeps his name in the public eye. Bristol debates Shakespeare's cultural authority, and clarifies the semantics of his name in our culture. Big-Time Shakespeare suggests his plays represent the pathos of our civilisation with extraordinary force and clarity. Shakespeare's contradictory understanding of the social and cultural past is also examined with close analysis of The Winter's Tale, Othello, and Hamlet.
Systems from Hell
This book approaches contemporary fiction as a medium for policy advocacy, one whose narrative devices both link it to, and distinguish it from, other forms of public discourse. Using the framework of political agenda setting, David A. Rochefort analyzes the rhetorical function of problem definition played by literary works when they document and characterize social issues while sounding the call for systemic reform. Focusing on a group of noteworthy realist novels by American authors over the past twenty years, this study maintains that fictional narrative is a potentially influential instrument of "empathic policy argument." The book closes by examining the agenda-setting dynamics through which a social problem novel can contribute to the process of policy change.
