Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Allegory
Indispensable to an understanding of Medieval and Renaissance texts and a topic of controversy for the Romantic poets, allegory remains a site for debate and controversy in the twenty-first-century. In this useful guide, Jeremy Tambling: presents a concise history of allegory, providing numerous examples from Medieval forms to the present day considers the relationship between allegory and symbolism analyses the use of allegory in modernist debate and deconstruction, looking at critics such as Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man provides a full glossary of technical terms and suggestions for further reading. Allegory offers an accessible, clear introduction to the history and use of this complex literary device. It is the ideal tool for all those seeking a greater understanding of texts that make use of allegory and of the significance of allegorical thinking to literature.
Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, and the Dance of Death
This study of Nicholas Nickleby takes the Dickens novel which is perhaps the least critically discussed, though it is very popular, and examines its appeal and its significance, and finds it one of the most rewarding and powerful of Dickens’s texts. Nicholas Nickleby deals with the abduction and destruction of children, often with the collusion of their parents. It concentrates on this theme in a way which continues from Oliver Twist, describing such oppression, and the resistance to it, in the language of melodrama, of parody and comedy. With chapters on the school-system that Dickens attacks, and its grotesque embodiment in Squeers, and with discussion of how the novel reshapes eighteent...
Madmen and Other Survivors
Madmen and Other Survivors: Reading Lu Xun's Fiction puts the short stories written by this outstanding Chinese writer between 1918 and 1926 into a broad context of Modernism. The fiction of Lu Xun (1881–1936) deals with the China moving beyond the 1911 Revolution. He asks about the possibilities of survival, and what that means, even considering the possibility that madness might be a strategy by which that is possible. Such an idea calls identity into question, and Lu Xun is read here as a writer for whom that is a wholly problematic concept. The book makes use of critical and cultural theory to consider these short stories in the context of not only Chinese fiction, but in terms of the art of the short story, and in relation to literary modernism. It attempts to put Lu Xun into as wide a perspective as possible for contemporary reading. To make his work widely accessible, he is treated here in English translation.
Literature and psychoanalysis
Literature and Psychoanalysis is an exciting, and compulsive working through of what Freud really said, and why it is so important, with a chapter on Melanie Klein and object relations theory, and two chapters on Lacan, and his work on the unconscious as structured like a language. Investigating different forms of literature through a careful examination of Shakespeare, Blake, the Sherlock Holmes stories, and many other examples from literature, the book makes the argument for taking literature and psychoanalysis together, and essential to each other. The book places both literature and psychoanalysis into the context of all that has been said about these subjects in recent debates in the theory of Derrida and Foucault and Žižek, and into the context of gender studies and queer theory.
Dickens and the City
Dickens's relationship to cities is part of his modernity and his enduring fascination. How he thought about, grasped and conceptualised the rapidly expanding and anonymous urban scene are all fascinating aspects of a critical debate which, starting virtually from Dickens's own time, has become more and more active and questioning of the significance of that new thing, the unknown and unknowable, city. Although Dickens was influenced by several European and American cities, the most significant city for Dickens was London, the city he knew as a boy in the 1820s and which developed in his lifetime to become the finance and imperial capital of the nineteenth-century. His sense of London as mon...
Wong Kar-wai's Happy Together
Wong Kar-wai's controversial film, Happy Together, was released in Hong Kong just before the handover of power in 1997. The film shows two Chinese gay men in Buenos Aires and reflects on Hong Kong's past and future by probing masculinity, aggression, identity, and homosexuality. It also gives a reading of Latin America, perhaps as an allegory of Hong Kong as another post-colonial society. Examining one single, memorable, and beautiful film, but placing it in the context of other films by Wong Kar-wai and other Hong Kong directors, this book illustrates the depth, as well as the spectacle and action, that characterizes Hong Kong cinema. Tambling investigates the possibility of seeing Happy To...
Blake's Night Thoughts
Blake's Night Thoughts discusses Blake as a poet and artist of night, considering night through graveyard poetry and Young in the eighteenth-century, urbanism in the nineteenth and Levinas and Blanchot's writings in the twentieth. Taking 'night' as the breakdown of rational progressive thought and of thought based on concepts of identity, the book reads the lyric poetry, some Prophetic works, including a chapter on The Four Zoas , the illustrations to Young, and Dante, and look's at Blake's writing of madness.
Henry James
Jeremy Tambling discusses James's importance as a theorist of the novel and argues for his importance as an American. He sees all James's work as a complex engagement with America.
RE: Verse
It seems that the existence of poetry needs justifying, and so does paying attention to it. Why should we read it? 'Re-Verse' discusses poetry in both older and modern forms, wanting to show why it should interest us.
On Reading the Will
On Reading the Will studies the will, will-power and wilfulness, the will to death or the will to power, as well as lack of will. It surveys many texts - from Augustine, Shakespeare, Dickens, Trollope, George Eliot and D.H. Lawrence - in order to analyse the history of its different meanings: whether these imply rational or irrational drives, or the sexual appetite, or the testamentary will. This last is a particularly interesting form of the will, in that it asserts the desire to control, and to have an identity beyond death. Drawing on philosophies of the will in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, the book studies music as the embodied will in Wagner and Verdi. Considering the law and its prohibi...
