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First Published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
The concept of a personal identity was a contentious issue in the early eighteenth century. John Locke’s philosophical discussion of personal identity in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding fostered a public debate upon the status of an immortal Christian soul. This book argues that Defoe, like many of this age, had religious difficulties with Locke’s empiricist analysis of human identity. In particular, it examines how Defoe explores competitive individualism as a social threat while also demonstrating the literary and psychological fiction of any concept of a separated, lone identity. This foreshadows Michel Foucault’s assertion that the idea of man is ‘a recent invention, a fi...
First published in 2006. Examining the constituting mechanism of the American wilderness myth in Modern American literature, Patricia Ross probes the various purposes for which 'wilderness' is constructed. Considering the work of Hemingway, Faulkner, and Cather, she states that the idea of wilderness is just that, an idea, and not a real entity or something that deserves to be wasted in the chasm of deconstruction. Discovering how literature can help us to understand how we can exert causative control of the myths we create about ourselves, this book is an important contribution to the field.
A survey of 25 major European novelists from Cervantes to Kundera, highlighting their contributions to the genre.
First Published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
In "Different Dispatches", David Humphries brings together in a new way a diverse group of well-known American writers of the inter-war period including: Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemmingway, Zora Neale Hurston, James Agee and Robert Penn Warren. He demonstrates how these writers engage journalism in creating innovative texts that address mass culture as well as underlying cultural conditions. The book will be of interest to readers approaching these well-known authors for the first time or for scholars grappling with larger issues of cultural production and reception.
Foreign Bodies investigates the relation between the notion of trauma and possible forms of representation within the necessary constraints that traumatic experience itself imposes. While many influential trauma theorists have focused on the notion of textual voice in their search for appropriate, effective, and adequate representational modes, the book argues that the act of narrating trauma cannot exclude corporeality as one of the central figures of this telling. One of the distinctive features of this book is, therefore, the attempt at tracing the indissoluble bond--detected in the work of a number of contemporary artists such as Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Dorothy Allison, and photographer Sally Mann--between voice and body, trauma and corporeality. In so doing, the book proposes a new direction within trauma studies, one that explicitly views the body as a medium of self-expression and, crucially, textual working through. By conceptually reading these narratives against the Freudian metaphor for traumatic memory that of a quasi-palpable foreign body the author attempts to increase or modify current knowledge on the relationship between expressive culture and trauma.
Overheard Voices examines poetic address and in particular apostrophe (the address of absent or inanimate others) in the work of four post-World War II American poets, with a focus on loss, desire, figuration, audience, and subjectivity. By approaching these crucial issues from an unexpected angle--through a study of the seldom-examined lyric "you"--Overheard Voices offers new insight into both contemporary lyric and the lyric genre more generally. The book offers detailed readings of Sylvia Plath, James Merrill, Louise Glück, and Frank Bidart.
Why shouldn't people who deplete our natural assets have to pay, and those who protect them reap profits? Conservation-minded entrepreneurs and others around the world are beginning to ask just that question, as the increasing scarcity of natural resources becomes a tangible threat to our own lives and our hopes for our children. The New Economy of Nature brings together Gretchen Daily, one of the world's leading ecologists, with Katherine Ellison, a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, to offer an engaging and informative look at a new "new economy" -- a system recognizing the economic value of natural systems and the potential profits in protecting them. Through engaging stories from around ...
This interdisciplinary study participates in the ongoing critical conversation about postwar American poetry and visual culture, while advancing that field into the arena of the museum. Turning to contemporary poems about the visual arts that foreground and interrogate a museum setting, the book demonstrates the particular importance of the museum as a cultural site that is both inspiration and provocation for poets. The study uniquely bridges the dual canon in contemporary poetry (and calls the lyric/avant-garde distinction into question) by analyzing museum-sponsored anthologies as well as poems by John Ashbery, Richard Howard, Kenneth Koch, Kathleen Fraser, Cole Swensen, Anne Carson, and ...