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Dickens scholar Jerome Meckier's acclaimed Hidden Rivalries in Victorian Fiction examined fierce literary competition between leading novelists who tried to establish their credentials as realists by rewriting Dickens's novels. Here, Meckier argues that in Great Expectations, Dickens not only updated David Copperfield but also rewrote novels by Lever, Thackeray, Collins, Shelley, and Charlotte and Emily Brontë. He periodically revised his competitors' themes, characters, and incidents to discredit their novels as unrealistic fairy tales imbued with Cinderella motifs. Dickens darkened his fairy tale perspective by replacing Cinderella with the story of Misnar's collapsible pavilion from The Tales of the Genii (a popular, pseudo-oriental collection). The Misnar analogue supplied a corrective for the era's Cinderella complex, a warning to both Haves and Have-nots, and a basis for Dickens's tragicomic view of the world.
Throughout his writing career, and especially in the last thirty years of his life, Aldous Huxley exhibited a deep interest in human potentialities, which he often described as our greatest unused natural resource. The present volume is the first book to focus on this Huxleyan core concern. It is based on presentations given at the Sixth International Aldous Huxley Symposium held in 2017 at the University of Almería (Spain). This volume collects essays by eleven scholars from eight countries that discuss Huxley's concept of human potentialities from an interdisciplinary perspective. This is another innovative feature of this book, since today Huxley is mainly remembered as a novelist, altho...
Within the cycle that runs from Erewhon to Island, British literary utopias compete with one another to form the most persuasive picture of what the future might, or should, be like. At issue for Butler, Wells, Zamiatin, Orwell and others is whether utopia, be it positive or negative, is essentially prediction or hypothesis. Huxley contributed to this debate at roughly fifteen-year intervals, his three utopias becoming its key texts. In addition, Aldous Huxley and Utopia examines ironic cure scenes, the obsession with golf in the brave new world, attitudes towards death in Brave New World and Island, problems with names and history in the former, the role of islands in both, the detrimental impact of Madame Blavatsky and young Krishnamurti on the story of Pala, and the significance of a zoological conclusion of Island.
Volume 22 opens with two little-known Huxley writings, "A Lunndon Mountaineering Essay" (1914), edited by Gerhard Wagner, and Huxley's contributions in French at the Paris 1933 congress on the future of the European spirit, edited and translated into English by James Sexton. This section is followed by a further selection of papers from the Seventh International Aldous Huxley Symposium held at Toulon in October 2021, many of them devoted to a variety of neglected Huxley issues or to the second part of the Huxley Forum, entitled "Aldous Huxley's Controversial Philosophical Theories." An overview of the conference programme can be consulted on the Internet via https://sites.univ-tln.fr/huxley-toulon/en/program/. The volume closes with further articles on Huxley's concept of the ultimate revolution, on an aficionado's life-long personal experience with Huxley's works, and on Huxley's many-sided response to Charles Dickens.
Victorian fiction has been read and analyzed from a wide range of perspectives in the past century. But how did the novelists themselves read and respond to each other's creations when they first appeared? Jerome Meckier answers that intriguing question in this ground-breaking study of what he terms the Victorian realism wars. Meckier argues that nineteenth-century British fiction should be seen as a network of intersecting reactions and counteractions in which the novelists rethought and rewrote each other's novels as a way of enhancing their own credibility. In an increasingly relative world,
In 1842, Victorian England's foremost novelist visited America, naively expecting both a return to Eden and an ideal republic that would demonstrate progress as a natural law. Instead, Charles Dickens suffered a traumatic disappointment that darkened his vision of society and human nature for the remainder of his career. His second tour, in 1867-68, ostensibly more successful, proved no antidote for the first. Using new materials—letters, diaries, and publishers' records—Jerome Meckier enumerates the reasons for the failure of Dickens's American tours. During the first, an informal conspiracy of newspaper editors frustrated his call for copyright protection. More important, he grew less ...
American culture has literally become fixated on the body at the same time that the body has emerged as a key term within critical and cultural theory. Contributions thus address the body as a site of the cultural construction of various identities, which are themselves enacted, negotiated, or subverted through bodily practices. Contributions come from literary and cultural studies, film and media studies, history and sociology, and women studies, and are representative of many theoretical positions, hermeneutic, historical, structuralist, feminist, postmodernist. They deal with representations and discursifications of the body in a broad array of texts, in literature, the visual arts, theater, the performing arts, film and mass media, science and technology, as well as in various cultural practices.
Huxley's imaginatively futuristic novel, unprecedented at the time of its publication in 1932, warns of the dangers of sacrificing freedom and individuality for scientific progress and social stability.
This concise encyclopedic reference profiles more than 800 British poets
This nicely illustrated reference for junior high and high school students offers 20-page profiles of 93 of the world's most influential writers of the twentieth century. Arranged alphabetically, each profile provides facts about the writer's life and works as well as a commentary on his or her significance, discussion of political and social events that occurred during his or her lifetime, a reader's guide to major works, and events, beliefs or traditions that inspired the writer's works.