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The human condition in rural, provincial locations is once again gaining status as a subject of European 'high fiction', after several decades in which it was dismissed on aesthetic and ideological grounds. This volume is one of the first attempts to investigate perspectives on local cultures, values and languages both systematically and in a European context. It does so by examining the works of a variety of authors, including Hugo Claus, Llamazares, Bergounioux and Millet, Buffalino and Consolo, and also several Soviet authors, who paint a grim picture of a collectivized - and thus ossified - rurality. How do these themes relate to the ongoing trend of globalization? How do these works, which are often experimental, connect - in their form, topics, language and ideological subtext - to the traditional rural or regional genres? Far from naively celebrating a lost Eden, most of these 'new Georgics' reflect critically on the tensions in contemporary, peripheral, rural or regional cultures, to the point of parodying the traditional topoi and genres. This book is of interest to those wishing to reflect on the dynamics and conflicts in contemporary European rural culture.
In Beyond Return, Lucas Hollister examines the political orientations of fictions which 'return' to forms that have often been considered sub-literary, regressive, outdated or decadent, and suggests new ways of reading contemporary adventure novels, radical noir novels, postmodernist mysteries, war novels and dystopian fictions.
The idea of the 'project' crosses generic, disciplinary and cultural frontiers. At a time when writers and artists are increasingly describing their practices as 'projects', remarkably little critical attention has been paid to the actual idea of the 'project'. This collection of essays responds to an urgent need by suggesting a framework for evaluating the notion of the project in the light of various modernist and postmodernist cultural practices, drawn mainly but not exclusively from the French-speaking domain. The overview offered by this volume promises to makes an original and thought-provoking contribution to contemporary literary, artistic and cultural criticism.
At the end of French colonization in Algeria, four categories of people held French citizenship or had strong ties with France: European settlers, Jews, mixed-race individuals, and Harkis. The end of the War of Independence exiled most of them from Algeria, traumatized them in various ways, and transferred many to metropolitan France. Remnants of the Franco-Algerian Rupture: Archiving Postcolonial Minorities examines the legacies of these transnational identities through narratives that dissent from official histories, both in France and Algeria. This literature takes particular stories of exile and loss and constructs a memory around a Mosaic father figure embodying the native land, Algeria. Mona El Khoury argues that these filiation narratives create a postcolonial archive: a discursive foundation that makes historical minorities visible,while disrupting French and Algerian hegemonies. El Khoury questions the power of literature to repair history while contending that these literary strategies seek to do justice to the dead Algerian father, even as they valorize enduring minority identifications.
Conrad Steel shows how the history of poetry has always been bound with our changing logistics of macroscale representation. This history takes us back to the years before the First World War in Paris, where the poet Guillaume Apollinaire claimed to have invented a new mode of poetry large enough to take on the challenges of the coming twentieth century. The Poetics of Scale follows Apollinaire's ideas across the Atlantic and examines how and why his work became such a vital source of inspiration for American poets through the era of intensive American economic expansion and up to the present day.
This book finds its origin partly in the International Colloquium on French and Francophone Literature in the 1990's at Dalhousie University, September 1998. number of the papers, since reworked, take their place here alongside other studies subsequently invited. They form a broad and varyingly focused set of cogent and pertinent appraisals of very recent French, and francophone, poetic practice and its shifting, becoming conceptual underpinnings.
The intrinsic ambivalence of eating and drinking often goes unrecognised. In Leftovers, Cruickshank’s new theoretical approach reveals how representations of food, drink and their consumption proliferate with overlooked figurative, psychological, ideological and historical interpretative potential. Case studies of novels by Robbe-Grillet, Ernaux, Darrieussecq and Houellebecq demonstrate the transferrable potential of re-thinking eating and drinking.
Literary Representations of Precarious Work, 1840 to the Present sheds new light on literary representations of precarious labor from 1840 until the present. With contributions by experts in American, British, French, German and Swedish culture, this book examines how literature has shaped the understanding of socio-economic precarity, a concept that is mostly used to describe living and working conditions in our contemporary neoliberal and platform economy. This volume shows that authors tried to develop new poetic tools and literary techniques to translate the experience of social regression and insecurity to readers. While some authors critically engage with normative models of work by zooming in on the physical and affective backlash of being a precarious worker, others even find inspiration in their own situations as writers trying to survive. Furthermore, this volume shows that precarity is not an exclusively contemporary phenomenon and that literature has always been a central medium to (critically) register forms of social insecurity. By retrieving parts of that archive, this volume paves the way to a historically nuanced view on contemporary regimes of precarious work.
Women Taking Risks in Contemporary Autobiographical Narratives explores the nature and effects of risk in self-narrative representations of life events, and is an early step towards confronting the dearth of analysis on this subject. The collection focuses on risk-taking as one of women’s articulations of authorial agency displayed in literary, testimonial, photographic, travel and film documentary forms of autobiographical expression in French. Among many themes, the book fosters discussion on matters of courage, strength, resilience, freedom, self-fulfillment, political engagement, compassion, faith, and the envisioning of unconventional alliances that follow a woman’s stepping out of ...
Exile and Post-1946 Haitian Literature provides readers with an excellent introduction to recent Haitian literature, one of the richest literary traditions in the Americas. Martin Munro focuses on works written after 1946, a period in which exile has become the dominant theme in Haitian literature. Using this notion of Haitian writing as a literature of exile, Munro analyzes key novels by the most important figures of each generation of the past sixty years, including Jacques Stephen Alexis, René Depestre, Émile Ollivier, Dany Laferrière, and Edwidge Danticat.