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Fitting Sentences is an analysis of writings by prisoners from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in North America, South Africa, and Europe. Jason Haslam examines the ways in which these writers reconfigure subjectivity and its relation to social power structures, especially the prison structure itself, while also detailing the relationship between prison and slave narratives. Specifically, Haslam reads texts by Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Jacobs, Oscar Wilde, Martin Luther King, Jr., Constance Lytton, and Breyten Breytenbach to find the commonalities and divergences in their stories. While the relationship between prison and subjectivity has been mapped by Michel Foucault and defined ...
From the contents: N.M. Petersen and the case of Denmark (Annelies van Hees). - Henrik Schueck as historiographer of Swedish literature (Egil Tornqvist). - Germanistik and nation in the 19th century (Klaus F. Gille). - Literary historiography in the Northern and Southern Netherlands between 1800 and 1830 (George Vis). - Jan Frans Willems: a literary history for a new nation (D. van der Horst). - A la recherche d'une litterature perdue: literary history, Irish identity and Douglas Hyde (Joep Leerssen).
Joyce's methods of composition have only recently begun to be examined in a rigorous fashion. Already the work done on the genesis of Joyce's texts has fostered both new insights and new questions regarding the overall status of his oeuvre. The conference Genitricksling Joyce, held at Antwerp in 1997, testified to the variety and vitality of genetic investigations into Joyce's work. We have tried to recreate this vitality in the present volume with a double purpose, or double trick. First, the essays collected in Genitricksling Joyce are not only indicative of the growing body of genetic scholarship, they also signify methodological and theoretical changes among its practitioners towards a more open form of discussion and understanding. Second, we hope that these essays will clearly demonstrate the relevance of genetic criticism to current critical and cultural concerns in Joyce studies.
This book carefully examines the work of Primo Levi, one of the premier survivor-writers of the Holocaust and one of the outstanding Italian writers of the twentieth century. Artists, writers, and educators have all turned to Levi's writing as a source of inspiration and wisdom in coping with the tragedy of the Holocaust. Until recently, however, there have been few book-length works in English on Levi. This collection of essays from an international group of writers aims to bring greater critical attention to Levi's work by exploring all aspects of his oeuvre, including his science-fiction writings and his poetry, as well as his fictional and nonfictional writings about the Holocaust. Interdisciplinary in nature, this collection includes literary, psychoanalytic, linguistic, and historical approaches to Levi's work.
For Walt Whitman, living and working in Washington, D.C., after the Civil War, Reconstruction meant not only navigating these tumultuous years alongside his fellow citizens but also coming to terms with his own memories of the war. Just as the work of national reconstruction would continue long past its official end in 1877, Whitman’s own reconstruction would continue throughout the remainder of his life as he worked to revise his poetic project—and his public image—to incorporate the disasters that had befallen the Union. In this innovative and insightful analysis of the considerable poetic and personal reimagining that is the hallmark of these postwar years, Martin Buinicki reveals t...
Metaphors of Confinement: The Prison in Fact, Fiction, and Fantasy offers a historical survey of imaginings of the prison as expressed in carceral metaphors in a range of texts about imprisonment from Antiquity to the present as well as non-penal situations described as confining or restrictive. These imaginings coalesce into a 'carceral imaginary' that determines the way we think about prisons, just as social debates about punishment and criminals feed into the way carceral imaginary develops over time. Examining not only English-language prose fiction but also poetry and drama from the Middle Ages to postcolonial, particularly African, literature, the book juxtaposes literary and non-liter...
This is a book about the enormous changes that took place at Baylor University from 1991 to 2003, as seen through the perceptive eyes of its provost at the time, Donald D. Schmeltekopf. On the front end was the charter revision, a change that permanently restructured the legal governance of the university. On the back end was Baylor 2012, a grand vision for the university issued by the Board of Regents on September 21, 2001. There were several critical crossroads along the way to what has now been created at Baylor, a Christian research university, one of a kind among church-related universities in the Protestant orbit. These memoirs tell the story of this transformation from the perspective of one who was leading at the crossroads.
A number of their mental anatomies reflect the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions and his conceptions of mental transparency, sincerity, and environmental conditioning. Because his primary focus is on Godwinian and Shelleyan perspectives on the mind and its operations, Brewer avoids twentieth-century psychological terminology and ideas in his discussions of their fiction."
Revised Lives examines self-representation in U.S. culture from the American Revolution through the nineteenth century. Drawing on studies of the history of the book, Pierre Bourdieu's sociology, and ethnic and gender revisionism, this book focuses on the processes of national development, the self-construction of authorial personae, and the appropriation of the personae by interpretive communities. Special emphasis is given to Walt Whitman, but other figures are treated at length: P. T. Barnum, Edward Carpenter, Frederick Douglass, Benjamin Franklin, and Edgar Allan Poe. This study contributes to the understanding of selfhood in nineteenth-century American culture, the development of autobiography as a genre, and the dynamics of literary reception.
This book revisits Oscar Wilde's major writings through the field of performance studies. Wilde wrote about performance as a cultural dialectic, as a form of serious and critical play, and as the basis of a subversive poetics. In his studies at Oxford University, his famous lecture tour of the United States and Canada, his friendships with famous actresses Sarah Bernhardt and Lillie Langtry, the writing of his critical essays, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Salome, and his society comedies, and culminating in his post-prison writings De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol, Wilde develops a rich theory of performance that addresses aesthetics, ethics, identity and individualism. This book also traces Wilde's often-troubled relationship with late-Victorian society in terms of its attempts to define his public performances by stereotyping him as both irrelevant and dangerous, from the early newspaper caricatures to its later description of him as a sexual monster.