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How are we to define what is grotesque, in art or literature? Since the Renaissance the term has been used for anything from the fantastic to the monstrous, and been associated with many artistic genres, from the Gothic to the danse macabre. Shun-Liang Chao's new study adopts a rigorous approach by establishing contradictory physicality and the notion of metaphor as two keys to the construction of a clear identity of the grotesque. With this approach, Chao explores the imagery of Richard Crashaw, Charles Baudelaire, and Rene Magritte as individual exemplars of the grotesque in the Baroque, Romantic, and Surrealist ages, in order to suggest a lineage of this curious aesthetic and to cast light on the functions of the visual and of the verbal in evoking it.
This collection demonstrates the usefulness of approaching texts—verbal, visual and aural—through a framework of humour. Contributors offer in-depth discussions of humour in the West within a wider cultural historical context to achieve a coherent, chronological sense of how humour proceeds from antiquity to modernity. Reading humorously reveals the complexity of certain aspects of texts that other reading approaches have so far failed to reveal. Humour in the Arts explores humour as a source of cultural formation that engages with ethical, political, and religious controversies whilst acquainting readers with a wide range of humorous structures and strategies used across Western cultures.
The State of Stylistics contains a broad collection of papers that investigate how stylistics has evolved throughout the late 20th and early 21st centuries. In so doing, it considers how stylisticians currently perceive their own respective fields of enquiry. It also defines what stylistics is, and how we might use it in research and teaching.
Grotesque provides an invaluable and accessible guide to the use (and abuse) of this complex literary term. Justin D. Edwards and Rune Graulund explore the influence of the grotesque on cultural forms throughout history, with particular focus on its representation in literature, visual art and film. The book: presents a history of the literary grotesque from Classical writing to the present examines theoretical debates around the term in their historical and cultural contexts introduce readers to key writers and artists of the grotesque, from Homer to Rabelais, Shakespeare, Carson McCullers and David Cronenberg analyses key terms such as disharmony, deformed and distorted bodies, misfits and freaks explores the grotesque in relation to queer theory, post-colonialism and the carnivalesque. Grotesque presents readers with an original and distinctive overview of this vital genre and is an essential guide for students of literature, art history and film studies.
The Beloved Classic is Back in Print! A Sampling of Glowing Reviews Tell Why How to Cook and Eat in Chinese is a Classic "Each recipe (and there are hundreds) is lucidly written, the measurements and cooking times as accurate as any starched American home economist could wish for. . . . Having once cooked and eaten in Chinese with Mrs. Chao, one can easily understand why the authors of that great American cookbook, The Joy of Cooking, say, as they disparagingly present in their own book a recipe for Chop Suey, 'To get the feeling of true Chinese food, read Mrs. Buwei Yang Chao's delightful How to Cook and Eat in Chinese.'" -Michael Field, New York Review of Books "Something novel in the way ...
Roger Des Forges here examines the puzzle of Li Yan, a Chinese scholar who advised the rebel Li Zicheng (1605-1645), and helped him to overthrow the Ming, only to die at his hands. For more than three centuries, Li Yan’s identity and even existence were seriously questioned. Then, in 2004, there was discovered a genealogical manuscript which includes a Li Yan (1606-1644). He now appears to be the principal historical reality behind the Li Yan story, which became a powerful metaphor for the rise and fall of Li Zicheng’s rebellion. Offering a fresh theory of Chinese and world history, the author elucidates Li Yan’s historical significance by comparing and contrasting him with similar figures in other times and places around the globe.
Interrogations of materiality and geography, narrative framework and boundaries, and the ways these scholarly pursuits ripple out into the wider cultural sphere. Early medieval England as seen through the lens of comparative and interconnected histories is the subject of this volume. Drawn from a range of disciplines, its chapters examine artistic, archaeological, literary, and historical artifacts, converging around the idea that the period may not only define itself, but is often defined from other perspectives, specifically here by modern scholarship. The first part considers the transmission of material culture across borders, while querying the possibilities and limits of comparative an...
Simultaneously pervasive and evasive, rebellious and oppressive, transgressive and socially specific, humour is a vast and interdisciplinary field of research. Seeking to rethink this quintessentially human expression, this volume is bringing together established and emerging directions of medieval humour research. Each contribution explores different artistic expressions, receptions and functions of humour and identifies a series of problems in researching humour historically. Medieval Humour: Expressions, Receptions and Functions dissects humour in art and thought, literature and drama, society and culture, contributing to a deeper understanding of our cultural past.
William Faulkner continues to be an author who is widely read, studied, and admired. This book provides a new and interdisciplinary account of Faulkner's legacy, arguing that his fiction is just as relevant today as it was during his own time. Indeed, Faulkner's far-reaching critique of his Southern heritage speaks directly to the anti-racism discourse of our own time and engages the dire threat to subjecthood in a technologically saturated civilization. Combining literary critique with network and complexity science, this study offers a new reading of William Faulkner as a novelist for the information age. Over the course of his career, we find an artist struggling to articulate the threat to human wellbeing in rapidly scaling social systems and gradually developing a hard-won humanism that affirms the individual and interpersonal life as a source of novelty and social change.