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Beginning in the 1890s, reaching its first full realization by modernist writers in the 1920s, and brought to its heyday during the Canadian Renaissance starting in the 1960s, the short story has become Canada's flagship genre. It continues to attract the country's most accomplished and innovative writers today, among them Margaret Atwood, Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro, Carol Shields, and many others. Yet in contrast to the stature and popularity of the genre and the writers who partake in it, surprisingly little literary criticism and theory has been devoted to the Canadian short story. This collection redresses that imbalance by providing the first collection of critical interpretations of a ...
This volume focusses on the rarely discussed reverse side of traditional, ‘given’ objects of studies, namely absence rather than presence (of text) and silence rather than sound. It does so from the bifocal and interdisciplinary perspective which is a hallmark of the book series Word and Music Studies. The twelve contributors to the main subject of this volume approach it from various systematic and historical angles and cover, among others, questions such as to what extent absence can become significant in the first place or iconic (silent) functions of musical scores, as well as discussions of fields ranging from baroque opera to John Cage’s 4’33’’. The volume is complemented by two contributions dedicated to further surveying the vast field of word and music studies. The essays collected here were originally presented at the Ninth International Conference on Word and Music Studies held at London University in August 2013 and organised by the International Association for Word and Music Studies. They are of relevance to scholars and students of literature, music and intermediality studies as well as to readers generally interested in phenomena of absence and silence.
This book explores the relationship between words and music in contemporary texts, examining, in particular, the way that new technologies are changing the literature-music relationship. It brings an eclectic and novel range of interdisciplinary theories to the area of musico-literary studies, drawing from the fields of semiotics, disability studies, musicology, psychoanalysis, music psychology, emotion and affect theory, new media, cosmopolitanism, globalization, ethnicity and biraciality. Chapters range from critical analyses of the representation of music and the musical profession in contemporary novels to examination of the forms and cultural meanings of contemporary intermedia and mult...
Precarious Domesticity and the British Novel: Space, Gender, and Empire investigates the ways domesticity shapes and threatens female characters in British fiction from the 1750s to the 1850s. Going far beyond the well-trod ground of the marriage plot, women writers in this period explored complicated issues such as sexual abuse, grief, and the way coverture and inheritance laws challenged women’s survival. The author argues that women writers used the novel as a space where they could confront anxieties about the precarity of domesticity and the implicit threat of homelessness many women of the middle ranks faced. Precarious Domesticity explores the way female characters subvert these dynamics by reordering domestic space to enact ingenious and creative resistances to their marginalization in Jane Collier, Sarah Scott, Frances Burney, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Charlotte Brontë. The author also explores the implications of British imperialism’s impact on domestic ideology, both in the consumer products imported into England and the wealth derived from plantation slavery and global trade made possible by enslaved labor.
This book examines the role of music in British-South Asian postcolonial literature, asking how music relates to the construction of postcolonial identity. It focuses on novels that explore the postcolonial condition in India, Pakistan, and the United Kingdom: Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy, Amit Chaudhuri's Afternoon Raag, Suhayl Saadi's Psychoraag, Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album, and Salman Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet, with reference to other texts, such as E.M. Forster's A Passage to India and Vikram Seth's An Equal Music. The analyzed novels feature different kinds of music, from Indian classical to non-classical traditions, and from Western classical...
Winner of the 2010 Margaret Atwood Society Best Book Prize. In Engendering Genre, renowned Margaret Atwood scholar Reingard M. Nischik analyzes the relationship between gender and genre in Atwood’s works. She approaches Atwood’s oeuvre by genre – poetry, short fiction, novels, criticism, comics, and film – and examines them individually. She explores how Atwood has developed her genres to be gender-sensitive in both content and form and argues that gender and genre are inherently complicit in Atwood’s work: they converge to critique the gender-biased designs of traditional genres. This combination of gender and genre results in the recognizable Atwoodian style that shakes and extends the boundaries of conventional genres and explores them in new ways. The book includes the first in-depth treatment of Atwood’s cartoon art as well as the first survey of her involvement with film, and concludes with an interview with Margaret Atwood on her career “From Survivalwoman to Literary Icon.”
Whether in the street or the microcosm of the home, the life of things conjoins human subjects and inanimate objects. This material culture has long played a vital role in the American literary imagination, yet scholars in literary and cultural studies have only recently (re)discovered the object world as a subject of critical inquiry. Engaging a great range of American literature--from Harriet Beecher Stowe and Edith Wharton to Vladimir Nabokov and Jonathan Franzen--The Literary Life of Things illuminates scenes of animation that disclose the aesthetic, affective, and ethical dimensions of our entanglement with the material world.
In extending the traditional field of Word and Music Studies to include research on film and other forms of moving visualizations, this volume focuses on innovative discussions of artistic works showing relationships between three individual communicative media. This trifocal, interdisciplinary perspective is reflected in seventeen essays that cover the historical space from the 19th to the 21st centuries and discuss a wide variety of individual genres in the represented media. These range from Parisian cabaret to ‘revolutionary’ Peking opera, from silent film to Holocaust narration, from documentary propaganda movies to opera film interludes, and more. The investigation of historical cases is broadened by reflections on theoretical and functional issues, primarily in film music, which show a remarkable breadth of technical and perceptual varieties. The essays here collected are of relevance to scholars and students of film studies, musicology, and literature, as well as readers generally interested in Intermediality Studies.
Incompletion is an essential condition of cultural history, and particularly the idea of the fragment became a central element of Romantic art which continued being of high relevance to the various strands of modernist and contemporary aesthetics.
This new study of the intersection of romance novels with vocal music records a society on the cusp of modernisation, with a printing industry emerging to serve people’s growing appetites for entertainment amidst their changing views of religion and the occult. No mere diversion, fiction was integral to musical culture and together both art forms reveal key intellectual currents that circulated in the early nineteenth-century British home and were shared by many consumers. Roger Hansford explores relationships between music produced in the early 1800s for domestic consumption and the fictional genre of romance, offering a new view of romanticism in British print culture. He surveys romance...