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A detailed study of Maggie Gee's work that illustrates how she is rewriting the mid-Victorian condition-of-England novel for 21st-century Britain.
(Eco)Anxiety in Nuclear Holocaust Fiction and Climate Fiction: Doomsday Clock Narratives demonstrates that disaster fiction— nuclear holocaust and climate change alike— allows us to unearth and anatomise contemporary psychodynamics and enables us to identify pretraumatic stress as the common denominator of seemingly unrelated types of texts. These Doomsday Clock Narratives argue that earth’s demise is soon and certain. They are set after some catastrophe and depict people waiting for an even worse catastrophe to come. References to geology are particularly important— in descriptions of the landscape, the emphasis falls on waste and industrial bric- a- brac, which is seen through the ...
In this book, scholars, students and aficionados of Jeanette Winterson will find ten analyses of time, space and narrative in her works. From her very first novel, Jeanette Winterson has made her characters move in time and in space, and she has always shown a sophisticated interest in narrative forms, and this is the first book to focus entirely on these central concerns. The writers of the essays provide different perspectives on the three subjects, from postmodernism to quantum physics, queer theory to genre studies and the uncanny to stylistics. In its section on time and narrative, the volume offers a fresh approach to Winterson's works, with a concentration on autobiographical elements...
Breaks new ground by analyzing four recent rewritings of the Noah myth not just as ideological statements but as literary artifacts and by contextualizing them within the wider crises of the Anthropocene.
Virginia Woolf, Jeanette Winterson, and Ali Smith share an ecological philosophy of the world as one highly interconnected entity comprised of multiple and equal, human and non-human participants. This study argues that these writers' texts have an ecological significance in fostering respect for and understanding of difference, human and nonhuman.
Putting forward a new theory of fetishism - alternative fetishism - this book provides an up-to-date examination of the work of Jeanette Winterson, offering fresh perspectives and new insights on the topics of gender, sexuality, and identity in her writing. Combining contemporary theories in psychoanalytical and cultural studies, it proposes that a rethinking of fetishism allows Winterson's works to be brought into sharper critical focus by repositioning fetishism as a daily practice in society. In so doing, it argues that Winterson's work challenges orthodox, normative, and contemporary views of fetishism to reveal her own alternative version. Containing the transcript of an email Q&A with ...
Bringing together leading international scholars of contemporary fiction and modern women writers, this book provides authoritative new critical readings of Angela Carter's work from a variety of innovative theoretical and disciplinary approaches. Angela Carter: New Critical Readings both evaluates Carter's legacy as feminist provocateur and postmodern stylist, and broaches new ground in considering Carter as, variously, a poet and a 'naturalist'. Including coverage of Carter's earliest writings and her journalism as well as her more widely studied novels, short stories and dramatic works, the book covers such topics as rescripting the canon, surrealism, and Carter's poetics.
This book explores Virginia Woolf’s afterlives in contemporary biographical novels and drama. It offers an extensive analysis of a wide array of literary productions in which Virginia Woolf appears as a fictional character or a dramatis persona. It examines how Woolf’s physical and psychological features, as well as the values she stood for, are magnified, reinforced or distorted to serve the authors’ specific agendas. Beyond general theoretical issues about this flourishing genre, this study raises specific questions about the literary and cultural relevance of Woolf’s fictional representations. These contemporary narratives inform us about Woolf’s iconicity, but they also mirror ...
Iris Murdoch, Philosopher Meets Novelist aims to gather some of the world’s present experts on Iris Murdoch, in an effort to promote dialogue between philosophy and literature. This is due not only to the nature of Iris Murdoch’s work itself, but also to our belief that within Humanistic Studies there is a constant need for breaking down disciplinarian barriers and reaching a deeper, fuller awareness of human thinking. Thus, the book brings together scholars from a variety of fields and places—Brazil, England, Iran, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Turkey, Taiwan, and the United States—and testifies to the interest that the work of Murdoch continues to inspire. The book is divided into two major sections: Part A, Reading Philosophies in Literature, includes articles focusing on Iris Murdoch’s philosophical concerns and their general influence in her work; Part B, Reading Literature through Philosophy, is intended as a sort of application ground, a series of case-studies wherein authors depart from novels to retrieve the underlying philosophical thinking.
Utopia, Equity and Ideology in Urban Texts: Fair and Unfair Cities explores the complex interrelations of three key critical topics across a diverse range of urban writing. Interrogating the links and tensions between aesthetic and political priorities in the representation and imagining of urban life, the volume engages with work from a wide variety of linguistic and cultural origins and across a range of textual practices having the urban phenomenon as a common framing concern. Individual contributions discussing genre and literary fiction, poetic writing, documentary and essayistic texts, planning manifestos and municipal communications materials serve to demonstrate that the nuanced treatments of urban experience and potential which may be gleaned from across this textual spectrum act as a pragmatic corrective to purely conceptual approaches. As such, the volume consolidates the emerging dialogue between the fields of utopian studies and literary urban studies, understanding these as complementary approaches to the reading of the city and its textual prolongations.