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Bill Brandt, the greatest of British photographers, who visually defined the English identity in the mid-twentieth century, was an enigma. Indeed, despite his assertions to the contrary, he was not in fact English at all. His life, like much of his work, was an elaborate construction. England was his adopted homeland and the English were his chosen subject. The England in which Brandt arrived in the Thirties was deeply polarized. He photographed both upstairs and downstairs, and recorded the industrial north as well as the society rounds of the affluent south. Although much of his work was for the new illustrated magazines, it was frequently influenced by surrealism and an eye for the slight...
George Orwell was asked to write a biography of George Gissing, having hailed him as 'perhaps the best novelist England has produced.' He had to refuse, and instead of a book like this one, Orwell wrote a novel, 1984. His closeness to Gissing can help draw the map of English literature from 1880 to 1950. Orwell was born in the year that Gissing died, 1903. Both of them lived 46 years and died of lung disease. It is likely that Orwell borrowed the first name of his pseudonym from Gissing. Orwell, though, chose to live among the poor to begin a lifelong commitment to leftist politics. Gissing became poor by bad luck and bad judgement; he came to believe that political solutions were unlikely t...
The essays in Hypermedia and Literary Studies discuss the theoretical and practical opportunities and challenges posed by the convergence of hypermedia systems and traditional written texts.Consider a work from Shakespeare. Imagine, as you read it, being able to call up instantly the Elizabethan usage of a particular word, variant texts for any part of the work, critical commentary, historically relevant facts, or oral interpretations by different sets of actors. This is the sort of richly interconnected, immediately accessible literary universe that can be created by hypertext (electronically linked texts) and hypermedia (the extension of linkages to visual and aural material). The essays i...
A Spiritual Bloomsbury is an exploration of how three English writers--Edward Carpenter, E.M. Forster, and Christopher Isherwood--sought to come to terms with their homosexuality by engagement with Hinduism. Copley reveals how these writers came to terms with their inner conflicts and were led in the direction of Hinduism by friendship or the influence of gurus. Tackling the themes of the guru-disciple relationship, their quarrel with Christianity, relationships with their mothers and the problematic feminine, the tensions between sexuality and society, and the attraction of Hindu mysticism; this fascinating work seeks to reveal whether Hinduism offered the answers and fulfillment these writers ultimately sought. Also included is a diary narrating Copley's quest to track down Carpenter's and Isherwood's Vendantism and Forster's Krishna cult on a journey to India.
For better or worse, postmodernism has become the master concept for thinking about the culture of our time. Vancouver: Representing the Postmodern City examines how Vancouver has been represented through literary and iconic narratives of power, morality, and ethnicity. Included are essays on the city and its representations in architecture, literature, visual art, and film. Also featured are over forty illustrations, many in colour. Contributors include Trevor Boddy, George Bowering, Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Jeff Derksen, Mike Hoolboom, Rosa Ho, and Bruce Serafin.
"Thirteen essays that aim to illuminate the achievement of one of England's greatest modern writers. Employing a variety of perspectives - historical, cultural, theoretical, feminist - the critics here assembled address concerns about Lawrence's work that have emerged in recent years: his attitudes toward the working class, art, women, Britain; his conceptions of male-female relationships, sexuality, education and knowledge; and his place in cultural history and the traditions of the English novel. All of the essays - from reassessments of Lawrence's position in the English literary tradition to analyses of his influence on recent American poetry - find renewed faith in the challenge of Lawrence's work, making this volume of interest to Lawrence scholars and students"--
This book offers an integrated interpretative analysis of the major thematic aspects of the English fourteenth-century romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The chief aim of author Piotr Sadowski is to look at the contents of the narrative in their entirety and to take full advantage of the poem's exceptional and widely praised harmony of structure and design. Within that design, Sadowski focuses on the poem's presentation of the main protagonist and his adventures, seen first of all as a generalized metaphor of the human life understood as a spiritual quest, and, in a more historical sense, as an expression and critique of certain ideals, values, and anxieties that characterized the late medieval institutions of the court, chivalry, and the Church. Sadowski built the interpretive framework of Sir Gawain from an eclectic theoretical base that he believes is most valuable and useful in approaching medieval literature. The main focus of the study remains the literary text itself, created by an author who communicates his view of the world through the poem.
A detailed account of the trajectory of Rupert Brooke’s life and the workings of his psychology.
This collection of essays studies the cultural and literary contexts of narrative texts produced in English Canada over the last forty years. It takes as its starting point the nationalist movement of the 1960s and 70s, when the supposed absence or weakness of a national sense became the touchstone for official discourses on the cultural identity of the country. That type of metaphor provided the nation with the distinctive elements it was looking for and contributed to the creation of a sense of tradition that has survived to the present. In the decades following the 1970s, however, critics, artists, and writers have repeatedly questioned such a model of national identity, still fragile and...
In 1896, author Arthur Morrison gained notoriety for his bleak and violent A Child of the Jago, a slum novel that captured the desperate struggle to survive among London’s poorest. When a reviewer accused Morrison of exaggerating the depravity of the neighborhood on which the Jago was based, he incited the era’s most contentious public debate about the purpose of realism and the responsibilities of the novelist. In his self-defense and in his wider body of work, Morrison demonstrated not only his investments as a formal artist, but also his awareness of social questions. As the first critical essay collection on Arthur Morrison and the East End, this book assesses Morrison’s contributi...