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'It happen'd one Day about Noon going towards my Boat, I was exceeding surpriz'd with the Print of a Man's naked Foot on the Shore, which was very plain to be seen in the Sand: I stood like one Thunder-struck ...' Robinson Crusoe (1719) is one of the most famous adventure stories ever written. The account of a sailor shipwrecked on a desert island for twenty-eight years, it is also a tale of mythic proportions, an allegory, and a spiritual autobiography.L
This volume brings together nineteen essays that marked the bicentenary of Jane Austen's birth and reflect twentieth-century critical attitudes.
The first full length biography of the international rock star is beautifully illustrated with over 50 photographs, 22 of which are in full colour and many of which have never before been published. Carefully researched, filled with numerous anecdotes collected from fans and with insights gathered from Etheridge's friends, colleagues and family, OUR LITTLE SECRET also features a useful bibliography of over 250 sources and a comprehensive discography.
This study examines Defoe’s three-volume Robinson Crusoe series in the light of the ‘banter’ style he developed as a pamphleteer. That heavily ironic style had brought him renown but also put him in the pillory. The present study explores for the first time Defoe’s complaint that readers and pirate abridgers misread his tale of the would-be trader Robinson Crusoe. Using Discourse Analysis and Relevance Theory to examine the early abridgements of Volume I and Defoe’s subsequent two volumes, this study argues that Defoe’s greatest success is also a peculiar failure.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, popular works of literature attracted--as they attract today--sequels, prequels, franchises, continuations, and parodies. Sequels of all kinds demonstrate the economic realities of the literary marketplace. This represents something fundamental about the way human beings process narrative information. We crave narrative closure, but we also resist its finality, making such closure both inevitable and inadequate in human narratives. Many cultures incorporate this fundamental ambiguity towards closure in the mythic frameworks that fuel their narrative imaginations. New Testaments: Cognition, Closure and the Figural Logic of the Sequel, 1660-1740 exa...
This volume offers a critical yet empathic exploration of the ancient myth of Medea as immortalized by early Greek and Roman dramatists to showcase the tragic forces afoot when relational suffering remains unresolved in the lives of individuals, families and communities. Medea as a tragic figure, whose sense of isolation and betrayal interferes with her ability to form healthy attachments, reveals the human propensity for violence when the agony of unresolved grief turns to vengeance against those we hold most dear. However, metaphorically, her life story as an emblem for existential crisis serves as a psychological touchstone in the lives of early twentieth-century female authors, who struggled to find their rightful place in the world, to resolve the sorrow of unrequited love and devotion, and to reconcile experiences of societal abandonment and neglect as self-discovery.
Evaluates the foundational idea of progress from many perspectives
This collection of twelve essays by colleagues, students, and friends of Everett Zimmerman treats four topics that Zimmerman explored during his career: the representation of the self in narratives, the early British novel and related forms, their epistemological and generic borders, and their intellectual and cultural contexts. The collection is divided into two sections: Boundaries and Forms. The essays in Boundaries explore how epistemological and narrative distinctions between history and fiction meet or overlap in the novel's relationship to other forms, including providential history, travel narratives, uptopias, autobiography, and visual art. In Forms, the contributors investigate fic...
The essays in Cutting Edges examine English satire of the eighteenth century from various theory-based postmodern perspectives. Some examine little-known works that postmodern concerns, such as the role of women and the problems of authorship, have rendered especially interesting; others reconsider familiar works in terms of the latest critical issues. The justification for these investigations is that both satire and postmodern methods are extremely skeptical and acutely aware that language is always ironic - always pointing to the gap between signifier and signified. The approaches in this book include those associated with deconstruction, reception theory, Marxist criticism, the new historicism, and various feminist criticisms, and with such theorists as Derrida, Bakhtin, Goux, and Luhmann. While most of the major figures of eighteenth-century satire - Butler, Rochester, Swift, Pope, Gay, Fielding, Sterne, and Johnson - are represented here, so too are many other interesting writers - Thomas Shadwell, Fannie Burney, Mary Davys, and Elizabeth Hamilton, to name but a few.
This volume contains nineteen essays — eighteen here presented for the first time — exploring the question of subjectivity as seen from an ethical perspective. Part I concerns the phenomenological development of Cartesianism and the concept of narrative identity, with essays addressing Levinas' idea of the Other, Ricoeur's Christianisation of Levinas, and Dennet's concept of folk psychology. Part II concerns the experience of reading ethically, as mediated through genealogy and psychoanalysis. The essays address the discourses of philosophy, psychoanalysis, film and literature, and are informed by Nietzsche, Freud, Foucault and Lacan among others. The volume will interest philosophers and critical theorists. Karl Simms provides comprehensive introductions to each of the parts, making the book accessible to informed general readers with an interest in cultural studies.