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Dramatic Realism, since its birth in the hectic late years of the nineteenth century, gave theatrical and thematic energy to the interaction between a play’s text and the way that it looked on the stage. Characters began to find themselves in rooms and settings that played an active and changing role in the drama, and their dialogue and reactions evolved in time with these changes. As life itself became more elaborate during the 20th Century, so these rooms were invaded and then defined by the outside world. Fred Miller Robinson’s enjoyable and stimulating essays on this enduring genre tackle the dreams and anxieties of the middles classes of the Industrial Revolution – dreams of domestic comfort and refuge, and anxieties about how entrapping that comfort could be. Moving from Ibsen to Chekhov and onwards into later plays in which the reality of ‘Realism’ comes under scrutiny, this is a book to dip into before a performance or to study during a class.
The author analyses how the Surrealists utilised the tactics of documentary and how Surrealist ideas in turn influenced the development of documentary photography. This is a study of what Louis Aragon called 'surrealist realism': the exploration of the real-life surreality of the city.
Man in the Bowler Hat: His History and Iconography
Dramatic Realism, since its birth in the hectic late years of the nineteenth century, gave theatrical and thematic energy to the interaction between a play’s text and the way that it looked on the stage. Characters began to find themselves in rooms and settings that played an active and changing role in the drama, and their dialogue and reactions evolved in time with these changes. As life itself became more elaborate during the 20th Century, so these rooms were invaded and then defined by the outside world. Fred Miller Robinson’s enjoyable and stimulating essays on this enduring genre tackle the dreams and anxieties of the middles classes of the Industrial Revolution – dreams of domestic comfort and refuge, and anxieties about how entrapping that comfort could be. Moving from Ibsen to Chekhov and onwards into later plays in which the reality of ‘Realism’ comes under scrutiny, this is a book to dip into before a performance or to study during a class.
A case for literary critics and other humanists to stop wallowing in their aestheticized helplessness and instead turn to poetry, comedy, and love. Literary criticism is an agent of despair, and its poster child is Walter Benjamin. Critics have spent decades stewing in his melancholy. What if, instead, we dared to love poetry, to choose comedy over Hamlet’s tragedy, or to pursue romance over Benjamin’s suicide on the edge of France, of Europe, and of civilization itself? Paul A. Bové challenges young lit critters to throw away their shades and let the sun shine in. Love’s Shadow is his three-step manifesto for a new literary criticism that risks sentimentality and melodrama and eschew...
The first extended study of the renowned artists’ collective Fluxus, Corporate Imaginations examines the group as it emerged on three continents from 1962 to 1978 in its complexities, contradictions, and historical specificity. The collective’s founder, George Maciunas, organized Fluxus like a multinational corporation, simulating corporate organization and commodity flows, yet it is equally significant that he imagined critical art practice in this way at that time. For all its avant-garde criticality, Fluxus also ambivalently shared aspects of the rising corporate culture of the day. In this book, Mari Dumett addresses the “business” of Fluxus and explores the larger discursive iss...
The Muse of Abandonment examines personal and cultural forms of abandonment in the poetry of Charles Wright, Russell Edson, Jean Valentine, James Tate, and Louise Gluck. These poets register the tremors of the post-modern exhaustion of universals and a conflicted desire for authenticating presences. The first book to study these poets as members of a generation, The Muse of Abandonment analyses the poets' recasting of confessional and surrealistic legacies and discusses their reflections on coercion of thought and behavior, and an atmosphere in contemporary culture that would trivialize private sensibility.
Lewis draws on both humor theories and research, arguing for the development of interdisciplinary methodologies in the study of literary humor. He demonstrates that the sociologist of humor and the comic playwright approach the same subject--humor in and between groups--with different tools, that writers of Bildungsromane and developmental psychologists share a common interest in the role of humor in maturation, and that the monsters that haunt the psyches of professional comedians can be useful in understanding the odd minglings of humor and fear in Gothic fiction. His treatment of writers who differ widely in their use of humor suggests that the complexity and diversity of humor make it a richly variable determinant of character, genre, and writer.
In Becoming Modern in Toronto, Keith Walden shows how the Toronto Industrial Exhibition, from its founding, in 1879, to 1903 (when it was renamed the Canadian National Exhibition), influenced the shaping and ordering of the emerging urban culture.
Praise for the earlier edition: "Students of modern American literature have for some years turned to Fifteen Modern American Authors (1969) as an indispensable guide to significant scholarship and criticism about twentieth-century American writers. In its new form--Sixteenth Modern American Authors--it will continue to be indispensable. If it is not a desk-book for all Americanists, it is a book to be kept in the forefront of the bibliographical compartment of their brains."--American Studies