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Reading Without Maps?
Among the intellectual debates of the last forty years, the critique of cultural canons has attracted the highest share of public attention, stirring academic, educational, and media controversies on both sides of the Atlantic. Postmodernism, feminism, postcolonialism, and multiculturalism have refashioned the attitudes of educators and audiences towards cultural memory, opening up curricula to subjects and traditions previously excluded from the humanities. Predictably, these new critical practices have triggered heated responses from commentators fearing that culture and education might thereby be deprived of their capacity to provide audiences and learners with proper groundings and landm...
Family Dysfunction in Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie
Tennessee Williams' 1944 play The Glass Menagerie centers around a family of three, Tom, Laura, and Amanda Wingfield, exploring what it means to share a household with people whose individual psychological eccentricities threaten to overwhelm the whole. Told retroactively in the format of a memory play, the protagonist, Tom, an aspiring poet by night and warehouse worker by night, introduces the audience to the conditions which led him to abandon his family in pursuit of his independence. This informative edition explores the themes of family dysfunction in Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie, providing readers with a critical look at the intersection of literature and sociology. The book includes an examination of Williams' life and influences and takes a hard look at key ideas related to the play, such as the role of guilt in family relationships and the breakdown of the American dream. Readers are also offered contemporary perspectives on family dysfunction through the discussion of toxic or overbearing parents and the effects of alcoholism on families.
Rethinking Literary Biography
This work is both a meditation on the theory of literary biography and an examination of the relationship between Tennessee Williams and the texts attributed to him.
Carol Shields and the Writer-Critic
Throughout her literary and critical career, Canadian writer Carol Shields (1935–2003) resisted simple categorization. Her novels are elegant puzzles that confront the reader with the ambiguity of meaning and narrative, yet their position within Shields’ critical feminist project has, until now, been obscured. In Carol Shields and the Writer-Critic, Brenda Beckman-Long illuminates that project through the study of Shields’ extensive oeuvre, including her fiction and criticism. Beckman-Long brings depth to her analysis through close readings of six novels, including the award-winning The Stone Diaries. Elliptical, open-ended, and concerned with women writing about women, these novels reveal Shields’ critique of dominant masculine discourses and her deep engagement with the long tradition of women’s life writing. Beckman-Long’s original archival research attests to Shields’ preoccupation with the changing efforts of waves of feminist activism and writing. A much needed reappraisal of Shields’s innovative work, Carol Shields and the Writer-Critic contributes to the scholarship on life writing and autobiography, literary criticism, and feminist and critical theory.
Edward Albee : The Absurdist Perspective In His Plays
Edward Albee (b. 1928) is recognized as one of the major American dramatists of our time. He is considered the most powerful and controversial writer of America after the eras of O’Neill, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. Critical assessments of his work as a playwright vary from passionate applause to downright denigration. He has occasioned critical responses proving himself an enigma for critics, scholars and reviewers who have failed to reach a consensus on him as a playwright. Robert Brustein, one of America’s leading theatrical observers, displayed an arbitrary mentality of astounding presumptuousness in a review of The Zoo Story printed in Seasons of Discontent (1966) and hint...
The Labyrinth of Universality
Wilson Harris, many times nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, is a British writer of Guyanese origin, one of the most original novelists and critics of the twentieth century, and probably the first to use and interpret the aesthetically fruitful notion of cross-culturalism. Harris's insights into the profound symbiosis between history, culture and artistic expression were initially inspired by his encounters with Amerindians in the Guyanese rainforest interior, where he led many surveying expeditions. These encounters aroused his interest in pre-Columbian peoples, who figure prominently in many of his novels and stories. His perception of the Guyanese landscape is the source of his unique narrative rhetoric, richly metaphoric language, and philosophy of existence: i.e. the epistemological and phenomenological interrelatedness between man, animal life, and nature. The present study offers magisterial, in-depth interpretations of Harris's exhilaratingly complex and shape-shifting fictional worlds.
John Osborne
For British playwright, John Osborne, there are no brave causes; only people who muddle through life, who hurt, and are often hurt in return. This study deals with Osborne's complete oeuvre and critically examines its form and technique; the function of the gaze; its construction of gender; and the relationship between Osborne's life and work. Gilleman has also traced the evolution of Osborne's reception by turning to critical reviews at the beginning of each chapter.
American Culture in the 1970s
The 1970s was one of the most culturally vibrant periods in American history. This book discusses the dominant cultural forms of the 1970s - fiction and poetry; television and drama; film and visual culture; popular music and style; public space and spectacle - and the decade's most influential practitioners and texts: from Toni Morrison to All in the Family, from Diane Arbus to Bruce Springsteen, from M.A.S.H. to Taxi Driver and from disco divas to Vietnam protesters. In response to those who consider the seventies the time of disco, polyester and narcissism, this book rewrites the critical engagement with one of America's most misunderstood decades.Key Features*Focused case studies featuring key texts and influential writers, artists, directors and musicians*Chronology of 1970s American Culture*Bibliographies for each chapter and a general bibliography on 1970s Culture*14 black-and-white illustrations
Visions of Alterity
Visions of Alterity: Representation in the Works of John Banville offers detailed and original readings of the work of the Irish author John Banville, one of the foremost figures in contemporary European literature. It investigates one of the fundamental concerns of Banville’s novels: mediating the gap between subject and object or self and world in representation. By drawing on the rich history of the problem of representation in literature, philosophy and literary theory, this study provides a thorough insight into the rich philosophical and intertextual dimension of Banville’s fiction. In close textual analyses of Banville’s most important novels, it maps out a thematic development ...
Tennessee Williams
This Literary Life draws extensively from the playwright's correspondences, notebooks, and archival papers to offer an original angle to the discussion of Williams's life and work, and the times and circumstances that helped produce it.
