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Pain and pleasure are at the heart of human experiences and literary journeys. This book takes the title of Roland Barthes’s text on the pleasure of writing as a starting point for the discussion of other different wor(l)ds and cartographies of pain and pleasure. Set against the Aristotelian delineation of pleasure as the major principle that should govern a literary endeavor, this volume investigates alternative reflections on the themes of pleasure and pain. Thinking about the ways through which expressions of pain and pleasure may affect the writer and the reader as experiences of other pursuits of the human imagination can place or displace, soothe or enrage, and inspire or discourage the individual search for meaning. By engaging with different theories and expressions, it is possible to understand what pain and pleasure have done in the history of humanity, rather than merely looking at them as representations of others’ distant experiences. This volume entails new reflections on the expressions of pain and pleasure to create new meanings for these words in a world vying for expressions of power with and without bliss.
The aim of Recharting the Thirties is to revitalize the awareness of the reading public with regard to eighteen writers whose books have been largely ignored by publishers and scholars since their major works first appeared in the thirties. The selection is not based on a political agenda, but encompasses a wide and divergent range of philosophies; clearly, the contrasts between Empson and Upward, or between Powell and Slater, indicated the wide-ranging vision of the period. Women writers of the period have largely been marginalized, and the writings of Sackville-West and Burdekin, for example, not only present distinct feminine voices of the period, but also illuminate how much good literature has been forgotten.
It’s fatal making a fuss ... . -Jean Rhys, Quartet. Cathleen Maslen’s Ferocious Things: Jean Rhys and the Politics of Women’s Melancholia closely engages with the most obvious theme of Rhys’s writing: the speaking and inscription of feminine anguish. Maslen resists easy generalisations with respect to Rhys’s portrayal of women’s psychic pain, attending carefully to the nuances of sexual, cultural and ethnic displacement which inform the suffering of Rhys’s protagonists. Acknowledging the many fine recent critical engagements with Rhys’s unique corpus of novels, Maslen insists that Rhys’s particular articulation of women’s pain presents a significant literary transgression...
De-Scribing Empire is a stunning collection of first-class essays. Collectively they examine the formative role of books, writing and textuality in imperial control and the fashioning of colonial world-views. The volume as a whole puts forward strategies for understanding and neutralising that control, and as such is a major contribution to the field. It will be invaluable for students in post-colonialist criticism.
Preliminary Material -- The Concern for Self-Possession -- Self-Narration: Conditions, Representations, and Consequences -- The Female Self in Rhys and the Category of the Amateur -- Positioning Rhys's Heroines within Colonial Relations -- Narrative Responses to 'Exile From the English Family': The Zombie and the Mad Witch -- White Female Colonial Self-Articulation: Narrative of Displacement in Voyage in the Dark -- Colonial Creatures: The Community of Life-Stories in Good Morning, Midnight -- Quartet: The Making of the Amateur and Third-Person Self-Narration -- Intersubjectivity and Self-Arrangements in After Leaving Mr Mackenzie -- Membership in the Holy English Family and Mad-Witch Narration in Wide Sargasso Sea -- Conclusion: Self-Narratives for the Chorus Girl and the Horrid Colonial -- Works Cited -- Index.
A reader-based textual analysis of the work of Jean Rhys. The author generates new readings of two of the short stories and all five of the novels. By focusing on character, she disagrees with those critics who see each heroine as part of a single character, the "Rhys woman".
A student-friendly guide to the life, work, context and reception of the author of Wide Sargasso Sea.
This new study argues that modernist literature is characterised by a 'multilingual turn'. Examining the use of different languages in the fiction of a range of writers, including Lawrence, Richardson, Mansfield, Rhys, Joyce and Beckett, Taylor-Batty demonstrates the centrality of linguistic plurality to modernist forms of defamiliarisation.
Jean Rhys has long been central to debates in feminist, modernist, Caribbean, British and postcolonial writing. Elaine Savory's study, first published in 1999, incorporates and modifies previous critical approaches and is a critical reading of Rhys's entire oeuvre, including the stories and autobiography, and is informed by Rhys's own manuscripts. Designed both for the serious scholar on Rhys and those unfamiliar with her writing, Savory's book insists on the importance of a Caribbean-centred approach to Rhys, and shows how this context profoundly affects her literary style. Informed by contemporary arguments on race, gender, class and nationality, Savory explores Rhys's stylistic innovations - her use of colours, her exploitation of the trope of performance, her experiments with creative non-fiction and her incorporation of the metaphysical into her texts. This study offers a comprehensive account of the life and work of this most complex and enigmatic of writers.
The phenomenon of celebrity burst upon the world scene about a century ago, as movies and modern media brought exceptional, larger-than-life personalities before the masses. During the same era, modernist authors were creating works that defined high culture in our society and set aesthetics apart from the middle- and low-brow culture in which celebrity supposedly resides. To challenge this ingrained dichotomy between modernism and celebrity, Jonathan Goldman offers a provocative new reading of early twentieth-century culture and the formal experiments that constitute modernist literature's unmistakable legacy. He argues that the literary innovations of the modernists are indeed best underst...