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The Flash of Weathercocks: New and Collected Poems is a collection with a difference. Old meets new in The Flash of Weathercocks; an anthology comprising poems that have been previously printed as well as some that are unseen, arranged in fifteen thematic sections, containing landscape poems, portraits of people, love poems, satires, humorous poems, personal memories, etc. In a wide variety of styles, forms and moods, they were written by a man in middle life, and reflect the changes in contemporary beliefs and the tension between society as it was in the mid-twentieth century and the social habits and presuppositions experienced at the end of it. Taken as a whole, the collection reveals an interplay of contrasting responses to the frustrations, hazards and delights of human existence, each poem qualifying others in a manner that by implication converts monolithic attitudes into complementary relativities – a function of poetry that can, in Samuel Johnson’s phrase, enable responsive readers ‘the better to enjoy life and the better to endure it’. The Flash of Weathercocks intends to do just that.
This book is the first ever to describe and discuss all the principal English writers who have handled the subject of the supernatural. Among those included in Glen Cavaliero's absorbing study are James Hogg, Sheridan Le Fanu, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, Walter de la Mare, M. R. James, John Cowper Powys, William Golding, Iris Murdoch, and Muriel Spark. As well as analysing the senses in which the supernatural may be understood, he relates them to different kinds of fiction, such as the Gothic novel, the occultist romance, the ghost story, novels of paranormal psychology, nature mysticism, and late twentieth-century uses of allegory and fable. He examines the impact of supernaturalist themes upon naturalistic writers, and discusses the relevance of the supernatural to the question of the truthfulness of fiction, and to contemporary literary theory and its ideological accompaniments.
An examination of the figures of Jew and woman in the works of three British male authors written between 1929 and 1945. Basing her interpretations on biographical information and on the close analysis of a large body of fiction by each author, Loewenstein reconstructs the psychological system through which each one envisions the world, showing how Jews and women function in the texts, and in each individual psychopathology, as a representation of the Other. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Humour is a key feature, laughter a central element, disrespect a vital textual strategy of postcolonial transcultural practice. Devices such as irony, parody, and subversion, can be subsumed under an interventionist stance and have accordingly received some critical attention. But literary and cultural postcolonial criticism has been marked by a restraint verging on the pious towards the wider significance and functions of laughter. This collection transcends such orthodoxies: laughter can constitute an intervention – but it can also function otherwise. The essays collected here take an interest in the strategic use of what can loosely be termed laughter – in all its manifestations. Exa...
Who could have been so cruel as to do away with poor Vivian Lambert? And why oh why couldn’t she just stay dead? In a rustic, idyllic English village, on a summer’s day, in the midst of a carefree tennis party, a fragile, needy child, left too much on her own, vanishes from her family’s front garden. Years pass and the mystery persists: an enduring torment for the teenage Christine Gray, the last person to see Vivian alive. Perhaps if she’d shown the girl a little kindness, and seen her safely home, Vivian might still be with them? Yet when someone claiming to be a grown-up Vivian returns to the land of the living, the enigma seems only to deepen, threatening to consume the wicked and innocent alike. Equal parts The Turn of the Screw, Picnic at Hanging Rock, and gothic thriller, Twice Lost was admired by such authors as Elizabeth Bowen, Rebecca West, and John Cowper Powys—yet the strange, haunting novels of Phyllis Paul are themselves a mystery with no simple solution. Virtually lost to time even before her death, her novels have been out of print for more than fifty years, and fetch fantastic prices in the rare book trade.
About half the essays consider Williams's fiction. They explore the theological roots of his theory of imagery; the rhetorical implications of his belief that language is inherently meaningful; his methods of creating "subjective correlatives" for heightened states of consciousness; and, in individual works of fiction, his revisionary use of time-travel and ghost-story conventions, his rhetorical application of Blakean "contraries," aspects of his diction and syntax, and his call to pursue integrity of speech as an ideal.
Considers four regional writers and their complex relationship with concepts of space and place at a time of seismic social change. >
Thisis the first book focused on Forster's Maurice and its legacies in modernand contemporary fiction, film and new media. Ground-breaking essays by leadingscholars offernew readings by exploring overlooked contexts including: feminism and the'social purity' movement; anti-Fascism; religion and allegory; and earlytwentieth-century contestations over body-soul relation.
Esotericism and Narrative: The Occult Fiction of Charles Williams situates the life and fiction of the Inkling Charles Williams in the network of modern occultism, with special focus on his initiatory experiences in A.E. Waite’s Fellowship of the Rosy Cross. Aren Roukema evaluates fictional projections of magic, kabbalah, alchemy and ritual experience in Williams’s seven novels of supernatural fantasy. From this specific analysis, he develops more broadly applicable approaches to the serious expression of religious experience in fiction. Roukema shows that esoteric knowledge has frequently been blurred into fiction because of its inherent narrativity and adaptability, particularly by authors already attracted to the syncretism, multivalence and lived fantasy of the modern occult experience.
From William Morris to Oscar Wilde to George Orwell, left-libertarian thought has long been an important but neglected part of British cultural and political history. In Anarchist Seeds beneath the Snow, David Goodway seeks to recover and revitalize that indigenous anarchist tradition. This book succeeds as simultaneously a cultural history of left-libertarian thought in Britain and a demonstration of the applicability of that history to current politics. Goodway argues that a recovered anarchist tradition could—and should—be a touchstone for contemporary political radicals. Moving seamlessly from Aldous Huxley and Colin Ward to the war in Iraq, this challenging volume will energize leftist movements throughout the world.