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This study pairs selected Irish and British women novelists of three periods, relating their voices to the women's movements in their respective nations. In the first wave, nationalist and militant ideologies competed with the suffrage fight in Ireland. Elizabeth Bowen's The Last September illustrates the melancholy of gender performance and confusion of ethnic identity in the dying Anglo-Irish Ascendancy class. In England, suffrage ideologies clashed with socialism and patriotism. Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway contains a political unconscious that links its characters across class and gender. In the second wave, heterosexual romantic relationships come under scrutiny. Edna O'Brien's Countr...
This study examines five modernists in different disciplines--biology, painting, drama, fiction, and anthropology--whose work on islands made them famous. Charles Darwin challenged every presumption of popular science with his theory of evolution by natural selection, derived from his study of the Galapagos Islands. Paul Gauguin found on Tahiti inspiration enough to break through the inhibiting traditions of the Parisian art world. John Millington Synge's experience on the Aran Islands off the coast of Ireland gave birth to a new style of drama that defied classic divisions between tragedy and comedy. D.H. Lawrence's life-long search for a utopian community culminated in his famous short sto...
In a postmodern and postcolonial age, how do we approach the writing of Margaret Laurence? Challenging Territory demands of the reader a re-evaluation of the basic assumptions that underlie their understanding of Laurence's life and writing by addressing the full range of her writing. Laurence is presented as Canadian, colonial and postcolonial subject; as feminist, humanist and political active individual; and as essayist, translator, journalist, memoir writer and fiction writer. The essays stake out a critical territory as well as offer a challenge to territory previously mapped by the criticism - in addition to charting critical space never before traced.
"Every Stranger a God: Hiking the English Moors is a travel book about an American woman's experiences and reflections while hiking northern England's Coast-to-Coast Trail. Each chapter covers one day's walk, and for each day, a literary classic provides the leitmotif. When she leaves her teaching job in May, she feels misanthropic like Gulliver. By the time she lands in England, interacts with locals, and absorbs the scenery, she begins to muse upon her resemblances to Frankenstein and his monster. The cast of characters includes Gollum, Harry Potter, Emily Dickinson, Jane Eyre, D.H. Lawrence, and others. Nature brings solace as the simple routine of hiking slows down her mind. She continues to ponder life's mysteries, but in a more entertaining vein. The hiker develops camaraderie with other walkers along the way, observing the characteristics and regional identities of the hikers and locals. In addition to human interactions and cultural stereotypes, the author reflects on women's changing identities as they age"--
Originally published in Italian as L'orizzonte mobile: spazio e luoghi nella narrativa di D.H. Lawrence in 1998, this critical study analyzes the work of D.H. Lawrence in light of new theories about space and location, or place and community. This approach is especially useful in examining Lawrence, as place and space are central aspects of all of his work. The introductory chapter explains the theoretical premises, drawing extensively from anthropology especially insofar as the relationship between culture and nature or community and place are concerned. This chapter also offers theories based on semiotics, sociological concerns and recent research in human geography and environmentalism. Succeeding chapters analyze functional aspects of place and space in D.H. Lawrence's work. Lawrence's major novels and stories provide the main focus of this book, but attention is also paid to lesser-known texts, both fiction and nonfiction. This work provides a new approach to studies on D.H. Lawrence, opening up new insights for both scholars and students alike.
Margaret Laurence's much admired Manawaka fiction - The Stone Angel, A Jest of God, The Fire-Dwellers, A Bird in the House, and The Diviners – has achieved remarkable recognition for its compassionate portrayal of the attempt to find meaning and peace in ordinary life. In Writing Grief, Christian Riegel argues that the protagonists in these books achieve resolution through acts of mourning, placing this fiction within the larger tradition of writing that explores the nuances and strategies of mourning. Riegel's analysis alludes to sociological and literary antecedants of the study of mourning, including the tradition of elegy, from Derrida and Lacan to Freud, van Gennep, and Milton. The "w...
Thom Gunn served as a mouthpiece for his time, illustrating the social, cultural, and historical transformations that have characterized western civilization from World War II until today. Starting with theoretical premises drawn from philosophy, anthropology, and sociology, this work examines Thom Gunn's entire poetic career. In Gunn's early poetry, the author argues, the predominant theme is the desire for freedom from the painful prison of the intellect and from the masks that the individual feels compelled to wear even in his sexual relationships. In Gunn's later poetry, the author notes a gradual opening to human relationships and to Nature, which is also Gunn's vindication and reevaluation of his own nature and the liberation of his long repressed and hidden homosexuality.
This edited volume focuses on Anglo-American modernist fiction, offering challenging perspectives that consider modernism in the instances in which it transcends itself, moving, broadly speaking, towards postmodernist self-irony. As such, the contributions here discuss issues such as being in creation; narrativizing being and creation; the relation between being and narrative; the situation of being in narrative time and space; the relation between authority and narrative; possible authority over narrative and the authority of narrative; interaction between narrative and the other; the authority of the other over and within the narrative; and the inter-referentiality of text and author. Divided into two parts, “Towards High Modernism” and “After Modernism”, the book allows the reader to chronologically follow how authors’ relations to literature in general evolved with the changing world and new perspectives on the nature of reality. This book offers an insightful contribution to the on-going discussion on the ambiguities inherent in the concepts of author, narrative, and being, and will stimulate intellectual confrontation and circulation of ideas within the field.
A pioneering scholarly collection of essays outlining D.H. Lawrence's reception and influence in Europe
In recent decades, critical and theoretical debate in the field of culture and literature has called into question many literary categories, has re-discussed the literary canon, and has totally renovated critical approaches in the wake of major changes in western society such as the irruption of new cultural identities, the disruption of the well-established Euro-centric conception, and the need to establish new world visions. D. H. Lawrence has been a focus for critical debate since his early publications in the first decades of the 20th century. The force of his thought, his courageous challenge against the most important values of western industrial society, his rejection of England and i...