You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Portable Prose: The Novel and the Everyday examines the novel as a privileged site for representing the everyday, as well as a physical object that occupies public and private space. This collection interrogates the relationships between these differing aspects of the novel’s existence, negotiating the boundaries between the material world, subjective experience, and strategies of representation. This collection offers a wide array of innovative novelistic explorations—with a focus ranging from nineteenth-century fiction to contemporary literary theory—and explores the portability of novels as both physical things and virtual hermeneutic devices. While mimetic qualities of prose remain an integral consideration for literary interpretation, this collection argues for more diverse frameworks—ones that see aesthetic components of the novel in close connection with reading practices, shared structures of feeling, and the corporeal. In this capacity, this volume will argue for readings of texts that consider the capacity for literary culture to move through the world, but also to make it or re-make it new.
This book demonstrates how Fredric Jameson’s understanding of the novel form has heavily influenced his work as a critical theorist. It contends that Jameson’s idiosyncratic engagements with the literary canon have had a major impact on his theoretical frameworks, particularly in his sense of historical change. The book investigates Jameson’s predominant literary interests in chapters focusing on realism, modernism, postmodernism and genre fiction. These readings provide fresh perspectives on Jameson’s career, ones that look beyond his most famous contributions to cultural theory and interpretive practice. Through this work, the book also rethinks the criticism that has surrounded Jameson, while suggesting ways in which his literary interpretation remains useful for contemporary reading practices.
"The sweeping vantages that typify American landscape painting from the nineteenth century by Thomas Cole and other members of the Hudson School are often interpreted for their geopolitical connotations, as visual attempts to tame the wild, alleviating fears of a savage frontier through views that subdue the landscape to the eye. Zachary Tavlin's "Glancing Visions" challenges the long-standing assumption that visuality in nineteenth-century art and literature was inherently imperialistic or possessive. While there is much to be said for both material, economic, and theological impulses to clear the wilderness, superimpose a national identity, and usher in a Puritanical idyll, many literary f...
Born in Asheville, North Carolina, Thomas Wolfe (1900–1938) was one of the most influential southern writers, widely considered to rival his contemporary, William Faulkner—who believed Wolfe to be one of the greatest talents of their generation. His novels— including Look Homeward, Angel (1929); Of Time and the River (1935); and the posthumously published The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can’t Go Home Again (1940)—remain touchstones of U.S. literature. In Look Abroad, Angel, Jedidiah Evans uncovers the “global Wolfe,” reconfiguring Wolfe’s supposedly intractable homesickness for the American South as a form of longing that is instead indeterminate and expansive. Instead of promoting and reinforcing a narrow and cloistered formulation of the writer as merely southern or Appalachian, Evans places Wolfe in transnational contexts, examining Wolfe’s impact and influence throughout Europe. In doing so, he de-territorializes the response to Wolfe’s work, revealing the writer as a fundamentally global presence within American literature.
Este libro examina la problemática combinación de autorreferencialidad literaria, revisionismo histórico y pensamiento utópico en varias novelas producidas en Hispanoamérica y los Estados Unidos durante la primera mitad de los años setenta. Los cuatro autores incluidos (Carlos Fuentes, Ishmael Reed, Julio Cortázar y E. L. Doctorow) ejemplifican la forma autoconsciente y amalgamante en que el postmodernismo se vale de la documentación histórica. Aunque se describe aquí la evolución de sus carreras desde el punto de vista de la metaficción y la historiografía, el énfasis recae en aquellas obras que tratan con mayor extensión el conocimiento histórico y su representación: ‘Te...
"Filming the city" brings together the work of film-makers, architects, designers, video artists, and media specialists to provide three distinct prisms through which to examine the medium of film in the context of the city. The book presents commentaries on particular films and their social and urban relevance, offering contemporary criticisms of both film and urbanism from conflicting perspectives, and documenting examples of how to actively use the medium of film in the design of our cities, spaces and buildings. Bringing a diverse set of contributors to the collection, editors Edward M. Clift, Mirko Guaralda and Ari Mattes offer readers a new approach to understanding the complex, multi-layered interaction of urban design and film."--Page 4 of cover.
Representing Capital, Fredric Jameson’s first book-length engagement with Marx’s magnum opus, is a unique work of scholarship that records the progression of Marx’s thought as if it were a musical score. The textual landscape that emerges is the setting for paradoxes and contradictions that struggle toward resolution, giving rise to new antinomies and a new forward movement. These immense segments overlap each other to combine and develop on new levels in the same way that capital itself does, stumbling against obstacles that it overcomes by progressive expansions, which are in themselves so many leaps into the unknown.
"John Steinbeck's Salinas Valley. Richard Wright's Chicago. Leslie Marmon Silko's New Mexico. Readers often have strong connections with literary places like these. And some works of literature can even change our understanding of the world we live in. But can place also change our view of literature? Site-Reading advances a place-based approach to literature, reading classic texts through the twin lenses of geographical awareness and environmental thought. This book highlights recent developments in ecocriticism and geocriticism to argue for a theory of "ecospatiality" with nature, space, and story as the three elements of place. Site-Reading reconsiders well-known works of twentieth-centur...
The Novel Now is an intelligent and engaging survey ofcontemporary British fiction. Discusses familiar names such as Martin Amis, Ian McEwan,Salman Rushdie, and Angela Carter and compares them with morerecent authors, including David Mitchell, Ali Smith, A.L. Kennedy,Matt Thorne, Nicola Barker, and Toby Litt Incorporates original coverage of subgenres such as chick lit,lad lit, gay fiction, crime fiction, and the historical novel Discusses the ways in which notions of regional identity andtribalist views have surfaced in UK and Irish fiction, and howpost-Imperial sensibility has become a feature of the‘British’ novel Situates contemporary fiction within its socio-cultural andliterary contexts.
Portable Prose: The Novel and the Everyday explores issues related to objecthood, the everyday, and portability within the novel. The scope of this wide-ranging collection includes nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, contemporary postmodern literature and science fiction, as well as broader theories of the novel and the nature of reading.