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Nicholas Royle provides detailed readings of all Forster's novels, as well as of critical writings such as his Aspects of the Novel.
Examine Lytton Strachey’s struggle to create a new homosexual identity and voice through his life and work!This study of Lytton Strachey, one of the neglected voices of early twentieth-century England, uses his life and work to re-evaluate early British modernism and the relationship between Strachey’s sexual rebellion and literature.A perfect ancillary textbook for courses in history, literature, and women’s studies, Lytton Strachey and the Search for Modern Sexual Identity: The Last Eminent Victorian contributes to the expanding field of queer studies from an historian’s perspective. It looks at homosexuality through the eyes of Lytton Strachey as opposed to the too-often analyzed ...
The first chronological overview of O'Connor criticism from the publication of her first novel, Wise Blood, in 1952 to the present.
Why does passion bewilder and torment so many Victorian protagonists? And why do so many literary characters experience moments of ecstasy before their deaths? In this original study, Christopher Lane shows why Victorian fiction conveys both the pleasure and anguish of intimacy. Examining works by Bulwer-Lytton, Swinburne, Schreiner, Hardy, James, Santayana, and Forster, he argues that these writers struggled with aspects of psychology that were undermining the utilitarian ethos of the Victorian age. Lane discredits the conservative notion that Victorian literature expresses only a demand for repression and moral restraint. But he also refutes historicist and Foucauldian approaches, arguing that they dismiss the very idea of repression and end up denouncing psychoanalysis as complicit in various kinds of oppression. These approaches, Lane argues, reduce Victorian literature to a drama about politics, power, and the ego. Striving instead to reinvigorate discussions of fantasy and the unconscious, Lane offers a clear, often startling account of writers who grapple with the genuine complexities of love, desire, and friendship.
Provides an examination of the use of human sexuality in classic literary works.
Nathaniel Wallace’s Scanning the Hypnoglyph chronicles a contemporary genre that exploits sleep’s evocative dimensions. While dreams, sleeping nudes, and other facets of the dormant state were popular with artists of the early twentieth century (and long before), sleep experiences have given rise to an even wider range of postmodern artwork. Scanning the Hypnoglyph first assesses the modernist framework wherein the sleeping subject typically enjoys firm psychic grounding. As postmodernism begins, subjective space is fragmented, the representation of sleep reflecting the trend. Among other topics, this book demonstrates how portrayals of dormant individuals can reveal imprints of the self. Gender issues are taken up as well. “Mainstream,” heterosexual representations are considered along with depictions of gay, lesbian, and androgynous sleepers.
This collection of essays, each one by a recognized expert, provides lively and innovative readings of every aspect of Forster's wide-ranging career. It includes substantial chapters dedicated to his two major novels, Howards End and A Passage to India, and further chapters focus on A Room With a View and Maurice. Forster's connections with the values of Bloomsbury and the lure of Greece and Italy in his work are assessed, as is his vexed relationship with Modernism. Other essays investigate his role as a literary critic, the status of his work within the genres of the novel and the short story, his treatment of sexuality and his attitude to and representation of women. This was the most comprehensive study of Forster's work to be published for many years, providing an invaluable source of comment on and insight into his writings.
By shifting the centre of gravity from author to reader, Roland Barthes had certainly prepared us for a Copernican turn in aesthetics, yet Michael J. Pearce’s Art in the Age of Emergence still sounds unfamiliar two years after its publication. While acknowledging the existence of homologies among the art objects of a cultural phase, the Californian academic also launches an explanatory hypothesis:”I realized that in order to understand art, instead of looking for the similarities between the paintings and the sculptures we have to look at the similarities between the people looking at them. Art is better explained by looking at how the mind works than by looking at the products of mind....
This collection of essays analyzes global depictions of the devil from theological, Biblical, and literary perspectives, spanning the late Middle Ages to the 21st century. The chapters explore demonic representations in the literary works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Dante Alighieri, Charles Baudelaire, John Milton, H.P. Lovecraft, and Cormac McCarthy, among others. The text examines other media such as the operas Orfeo and Erminia sul Giordano and the television shows Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, and Mad Men. The Hermeneutics of Hell, featuring an international set of established and up-and-coming authors, masterfully examines the evolution of the devil from the Biblical accounts of the Middle Ages to the individualized presence of the modern world.
This anthology interrogates two salient concepts in studying the black experience. Ushered in with the age of New World encounters, modernity emerged as brutal and complex, from its very definition to its manifestations. Equally challenging is blackness, which is forever dangling between the range of uplifting articulations and insidious degradation. The essays in Western Fictions address the conflicting confluences of these two terms. Questioning Eurocentric and mainstream American interpretations, they reveal the diverse meanings of modernities and blackness from a wide range of milieus of the black experience. Interdisciplinary and wide-ranging in thematic and epochal scope, they use theoretical and empirical studies of a range of subjects to demonstrate that, indeed, blackness is relevant for understanding modernities and vice versa.