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This revised and expanded volume examines the intersections of aesthetics and morality and asks what Decadence means to art and society at various moments in British literature. As time passes, the definition of what it takes to be D/decadent changes. The decline from a higher standard, social malaise, aesthetic ennui – all these ideas presume certain facts about the past, the present, and the linear nature of time itself. To reject the past as a given, and to relish the subtleties of present nuance, is the beginning of Decadence. The conflict underlying the contributions to this collection is that of society's moral contempt vis-a-vis the focus on the fleeting present on part of the purportedly decadent artists; who in turn thought the truly decadent to be the stranglehold society maintained on individual interpretation and the interpretation of oneself.
This collection of essays brings together two major new developments in cultural memory studies: firstly, the shift away from static models of cultural memory, where the emphasis lies on cultural products, in the direction of more dynamic models where the emphasis lies instead on the cultural and social processes involved in the ongoing production of shared views of the past; and secondly, the growing interest in the role of the media, and their role beyond that of mere storage, within these dynamics. The specific concern of this collection is linking the use of media to the larger socio-cultural processes involved in collective memory-making. The focus rests in particular on two aspects of ...
This book explores the relationship between literary politics and the politics of place in fin-de-siècle travel and place-based literature.
The essays in this revised and expanded volume explore a variety of structuring taxonomies, the relationships between the aesthetic forms, styles and methodologies of detective and crime fiction in the late-Victorian and Edwardian period. The influences on the artists in the genre are as varied as the interests of the period in scientific method, forensics, archaeology, aesthetics, medicine, and the paranormal. But the formalizing tendencies of investigative process remain, and it is this adherence, in artist and detective alike, to seeing crime and its resolution as a stylistic imposition of structure on disorder that is under examination.
When the SS Empire Windrush berthed at Tilbury docks in 1948 with 492 ex-servicemen from the Caribbean, it marked the beginning of the post-war migrations to Britain that would form part of modern, multi-cultural Britain. A significant role in this social transformation would be played by the literary and non-literary output of writers from the Caribbean. These writers in exile were responsible not just for the establishment of the West Indian novel, but, by virtue of their location in the Mother Country, were also the pioneers of black writing in Britain. Over the next fifty years, this writing would come to represent an important body of work intimately aligned to the evolving and contenti...
Ukraine's 2004 presidential election was falsified, spurring the Orange Revolution. To many observers, the Orange Revolution was a shock, and the stolen election a recent development. However, both the election fraud and the effort to topple the government of Leonid Kuchma emerged from political dynamics that had appeared in earlier Ukrainian elections.In this path breaking volume, leading scholars place Ukraine's 2004 Orange Revolution in the longer perspective of Ukraine's post-Soviet electoral politics. Covering both presidential and parliamentary elections over the entire post-Soviet period, the chapters clarify the manner in which earlier elections had emerged as part of the battle for ...
These proceedings of the international 2006 symposium ‘The Theory and Practice of Life Writing: Auto/biography, Memoir and Travel Writing in Post/modern Literature’ at Haliç University, Istanbul, include the majority of contributions to this event, some of them heavily revised for publication. A first group, treatments of more comprehensive and/or theoretical aspects of life and travel writing, concerns genre history (Nazan Aksoy; Manfred Pfister), typology (Manfred Pfister; Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson), issues of narration (Gerald P. Mulderig; Rana Tekcan), the recent phenomenon of blogging (Leman Giresunlu), and therapeutic narrative (Wendy Ryden). A second group—whose concern of...
Gianluca Delfino’s study of one of the Caribbean’s most controversial authors paves the way for looking at Wilson Harris’s body of work in a new light. Harris’s imaginative approach to reality is discussed in relation to the categories of history and time with reference to several novels, with a special focus on The Infinite Rehearsal, Jonestown, and The Dark Jester, spanning more than forty years of his vast literary production. Delfino’s analysis, encompassing critical perspectives ranging from African philosophy to Jungian readings through historiography and anthropology, demonstrates that Harris’s works as a whole show a remarkable unity of thought rooted in their author’s complex imagination. As a result, the cross-cultural quality of Harris’s thought emerges as a healing outcome of the traumatic colonial encounter, bringing together elements of Amerindian, African, and European origin in an ongoing dialogue with time, nature, and the psyche.
The 'obese' female body has often been portrayed as the 'other' to the slender body. However, this process of 'othering', or viewing as different, has created a repressive discourse, where 'excess' has increasingly come to be studied as a 'physical abnormality' or a signifier of a 'personality defect' in contemporary Western society. This book engages with the multifarious re-imaginings of the 'excessive' embodiment in contemporary women's writing, drawing specifically on the construction of this form of embodiment in the works of Fay Weldon, Jeanette Winterson, Margaret Atwood, Claude Tardat, and Judith Moore, whose texts offer a distinct literary response to the rigidly homogeneous and limiting representations of fatness, while prompting heterogeneous approaches to reading the 'excessive' female embodiment.
This book brings the ideas of French feminist Hélène Cixous to bear on a number of Early Modern English texts. The female characters of Mariam from Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam, Lavinia from William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus as well as John Milton’s Eve in Paradise Lost and the poetic voice of Isabella Whitney are investigated through the application of Cixous’s theories of figurative decapitation and disgorgement. The author examines the creation of a unique discourse through the blending of what is stereotypically referred to as “female text” with “male discourse,” which results in what Cixous would call “bisexual discourse.”