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A novelist's candid and affectionate record of her life with the author of "The Magic Island" and "Asylum".
Autofiction, or works in which the eponymous author appears as a fictionalized character, represents a significant trend in postwar American literature, when it proliferated to become a kind of postmodern cliché. The Story of “Me” charts the history and development of this genre, analyzing its narratological effects and discussing its cultural implications. By tracing autofiction’s conceptual issues through case studies and an array of texts, Marjorie Worthington sheds light on a number of issues for postwar American writing: the maleness of the postmodern canon—and anxieties created by the supposed waning of male privilege—the relationship between celebrity and authorship, the in...
Short, unattractive, hobbling about Stalin's Moscow on a wooden leg, Walter Duranty was an unlikely candidate for the world's most famous foreign correspondent. Yet for almost twenty years his articles filled the front page of The New York Times with gripping coverage of the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. A witty, engaging, impish character with a flamboyant life-style, he was a Pulitzer Prize winner, the individual most credited with helping to win the U.S. recognition for the Soviet regime, and the reporter who had predicted the success of the Bolshevik state when all others claimed it was doomed. But, as S.J. Taylor reveals in this provocative biography, Walter Duranty played a key ...
Exploring the notion of tactility in dada and surrealism
Autofiction and Cultural Memory breaks new ground in autofiction research by showing how it gives postcolonial writers a means of bearing witness to past cultural or political struggles, and hence of contributing to new forms of cultural memory. Most discussion of autofiction has treated it as an individualistic form, dealing with the personal growth of its authors. In doing so, it privileges narratives of private development over those of social commitment and accords with Western concepts of ownership and authorship. By contrast, Hywel Dix shows how a variety of writers outside the Western world have used the techniques of autofiction in a different way, placing themselves on the side line...
A probing, generative analysis of Knausgård's My Struggle, with implications for our understanding of the novel form more broadly in the twenty-first century. Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård's six-volume, 3600-page autobiographical novel, My Struggle, has been widely hailed for its heroic exploration of selfhood, compulsive readability, and restless experimentation with form and genre. Knausgård and the Autofictional Novel explains why. Across four chapters, Claus Elholm Andersen shows how Knausgård confronts, challenges, and rejects the symbiotic relationship between novels and fiction, particularly via a technique of "auto-fictionalization." The fifth chapter then explores the further breakdown of this relationship in autofiction by Sheila Heti, Rachel Cusk, and Ben Lerner, taking readers to what Lerner called "the very edge of fiction."
This anthology explores the recurring trope of the dead or absent mother in Western cultural productions. Across historical periods and genres, this dialogue has been employed to articulate and debate questions of politics and religion, social and cultural change as well as issues of power and authority within the family. Åström seeks to investigate the many functions and meanings of the dialogue by covering extensive material from the 1200s to 2014 including hagiography, romances, folktales, plays, novels, children’s literature and graphic novels, as well as film and television. This is achieved by looking at the discourse both as products of the time and culture that produced the various narratives, and as part of an on-going cultural conversation that spans the centuries, resulting in an innovative text that will be of great interest to all scholars of gender, feminist and media studies.
Through a close reading of eight Venezuelan novels published between 2004 and 2012, this book reveals the enduring importance of the national in contemporary Venezuelan fiction, arguing that the novels studied respond to both the nationalist and populist cultural policies of the Bolivarian Revolution and Venezuela's literary isolation.
The second volume of Max Saunders's magisterial biography sees the publication of Ford's post-war masterpiece, Parade's End, and the founding of the Transatlantic Review, the influential literary magazine that published Hemingway, Ezra Pound, and Picasso. It also documents Ford's marriage to Janice Biala, with whom he lived until his death in 1939.
“Superb, scrupulously researched . . . a comprehensive narrative for understanding the changing reception of Little Women.” —Gregory Eiselein, coeditor of The Louisa May Alcott Encyclopedia The hit Broadway show of 1912. The lost film of 1919. Katharine Hepburn, as Jo, sliding down a banister in George Cukor’s 1933 movie. Mark English’s shimmering 1967 illustrations. Jo—this time played by Sutton Foster—belting “I'll be / astonishing” in the 2004 Broadway musical flop. These are only some of the markers of the afterlife of Little Women. There’s also the nineteenth-century child who wrote, “If you do not ...make Laurie marry Beth, I will never read another of your books ...