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Death is a subject of increasing interest in virtually all academic disciplines, yet there is surprisingly little theoretical work on the representation of death in literary contexts. Death and Representation offers a unique collection of international and interdisciplinary essays, rich in cultural perspectives but sharing a relatively common vocabulary. It provides models for a number of interrelated approaches—including psychoanalytic, feminist, and historical—with essays by prominent and promising scholars. All the contirbutions combine theory with textual readings, whether of literature, paintings, historical sources, or—in one case—a passage from Freud. The essays in Death and R...
From the famous deathbed scene of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Little Eva to Mark Twain's parodically morbid poetess Emmeline Grangerford, a preoccupation with human finitude informs the texture of nineteenth-century US writing. This collection traces the vicissitudes of this cultural preoccupation with the subject of death and examines how mortality served paradoxically as a site on which identity and subjectivity were productively rethought. Contributors from North America and the United Kingdom, representing the fields of literature, theatre history, and American studies, analyze the sexual, social, and epistemological boundaries implicit in nineteenth-century America's obsession with death, while also seeking to give a voice to the strategies by which these boundaries were interrogated and displaced. Topics include race- and gender-based investigations into the textual representation of death, imaginative constructions and re-constructions of social practice with regard to loss and memorialisation, and literary re-conceptualisations of death forced by personal and national trauma.
Considering the trope of woman/death, the eroticizing of death, and the ways in which the gendered subject is represented in dialogue with the processes of death, dying, and grief, James shows how representations of death in young adult literature are invariably associated with issues of sexuality, gender, and power.
This original and compelling book places the body at the center of cinema's first decade of emergence and challenges the idea that for early audiences, the new medium's fascination rested on visual spectacle for its own sake. Instead, as Jonathan Auerbach argues, it was the human form in motion that most profoundly shaped early cinema. Situating his discussion in a political and historical context, Auerbach begins his analysis with films that reveal striking anxieties and preoccupations about persons on public display—both exceptional figures, such as 1896 presidential candidate William McKinley, and ordinary people caught by the movie camera in their daily routines. The result is a sharp, unique, and groundbreaking way to consider the turn-of-the-twentieth-century American incarnation of cinema itself.
Studies representations of women and death by women to see whether and how they differ from patriarchal versions.
How does one read the story of Sarah and Hagar, or Jezebel and Rahab today, if one is a woman reader situated in a postcolonial society? This is the question undergirding this work, which considers a selection of biblical texts in which women have significant roles. Employing both a gender and a postcolonial lens, it asks sharp questions both of the interests embedded in the texts themselves and of their impact upon contemporary women readers. Whereas most postcolonial studies have been undertaken from the perspective of the colonized this work reads the texts from the position of a settler descendant, and is an attempt to engage with the disquietening and challenging questions that reading from such a location raises. Letters from early settler women in New Zealand, contemporary fiction, and personal reminiscence become tools for the task, complementing those traditionally employed in critical biblical readings.
As a material link between body and culture, self and other, the voice has been endlessly fascinating to artists and critics. Yet it is the voices of women that have inspired the greatest fascination, as well as the deepest ambivalence, because the female voice signifies sexual otherness as well as sexual and cultural power. Embodied Voices explores cultural manifestations of female vocality in the light of current theories of subjectivity, the body and sexual difference. The fourteen essays collected here examine a wide spectrum of discourses, including myth, literature, music, film, psychoanalysis, and critical theory. Though diverse in their critical approaches, the essays are united in their attempt to articulate the compelling yet problematic intersections of gender, voice, and embodiment as they have shaped the textual representation of women and women's self-expression in performance.
An essential addition to the postcolonial debate which offers a challenging mode of `reading resistance' which destroys the stereotyped and sensationalised humanist image of the `third world woman' as victim.
Origins for Persuasion -- The reviser at work : MS chapter 10 to chapters X-XI (1818) -- At the White Hart : MS chapter 11 to chapter XII (1818) -- The history of Buonaparte -- Domestic virtues and national importance -- A critique on Walter Scott -- Prejudice on the side of ancestry -- The worth of Lyme -- The white glare of Bath -- Conclusion: Meaning to have spring again.