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How people perform their sexual identities as athletes and spectators.
Though famed for his vivid depictions of nineteenth-century Paris, Honoré de Balzac devoted as much of his creative energy to the provinces. This book examines the way in which he combined a theatrical tradition of anti-provincial satire with a more open celebration of French provincial life in the post-Revolutionary period. Ranging widely over texts from both within and outside La Comédie humaine, the author analyses Balzac's determination to invest the Rousseauist nostalgia for country over city with an updated rationale. A champion of central authority and absolutist government, Balzac is seen here in an unfamiliar role as the guardian of regional culture, a novelist who sought to recor...
In more than ninety novels and novellas, Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) created a universe teeming with over two thousand characters. The Misfit of the Family reveals how Balzac, in imagining the dense, vividly rendered social world of his novels, used his writing as a powerful means to understand and analyze—as well as represent—a range of forms of sexuality. Moving away from the many psychoanalytic approaches to the novelist's work, Michael Lucey contends that in order to grasp the full complexity with which sexuality was understood by Balzac, it is necessary to appreciate how he conceived of its relation to family, history, economics, law, and all the many structures within which sex...
Gabrielle Roy and the creative ambivalence of bilingualism.
How do we make culture and how does culture make us? Canadian Cultural Poesis takes a comprehensive approach toward Canadian culture from a variety of provocative perspectives. Centred on the notion of culture as social identity, it offers original essays on cultural issues of urgent concern to Canadians: gender, technology, cultural ethnicity, and regionalism. From a broad range of disciplines, contributors consider these issues in the contexts of media, individual and national identity, language, and cultural dissent. Providing an excellent introduction to current debates in Canadian culture, Canadian Cultural Poesis will appeal not only to readers looking for an overview of Canadian culture but also to those interested in cultural studies and interdisciplinarity, as well as scholars in film, art, literature, sociology, communication, and womens studies. This book offers new insights into how we make and are made by Canadian culture, each essay contributing to this poetics, inventing new ways to welcome cultural differences of all kinds fo the Canadian cultural community.
This study addresses the question of artistic identity and the myth of the artist as it has been shaped by the artists themselves. While the term artist is to be understood in a broad sense, the focus of this study is the literature of the Romantic tradition. Identity is largely perceived as a construct, and a central hypothesis of this book concerns its aesthetic value and the ways it creates dominant narratives of self-perception that produce powerful myths. The construction of the artist’s identity, be it collective or personal, rests on a series of aesthetic praxes. Caught between the mythic idealisation of poetic genius and its social devaluation, the Romantic artist seeks to create a place for himself, and in doing so, he engages in his own mythmaking. This process is studied in an interdisciplinary perspective, approaching texts and writers from different traditions. The study analyses various typologies of the artist, numerous mythmaking strategies as well as several postural techniques; all of which have sketched major direct or indirect fictional self-portraits in the European tradition.
Realist novels are usually seen as verisimilar representations of the world, and even when that verisimilitude is critically examined (as it has been by Marxist and feminist critics), the criticism has referred to extra-literary matters, such as bourgeois ideology or defects in the portrayal of women. This book takes as its thesis that the point defining realism is the point at which the processes of representation break down, a sort of black hole of textuality, a rent in the tissue. The author argues that our notions of continuity, of readability, of representability, or our ideas about unity and ideological shift—or even our notions of what is hidden, occulted, or absent—all come from ...
The human condition in rural, provincial locations is once again gaining status as a subject of European 'high fiction', after several decades in which it was dismissed on aesthetic and ideological grounds. This volume is one of the first attempts to investigate perspectives on local cultures, values and languages both systematically and in a European context. It does so by examining the works of a variety of authors, including Hugo Claus, Llamazares, Bergounioux and Millet, Buffalino and Consolo, and also several Soviet authors, who paint a grim picture of a collectivized - and thus ossified - rurality. How do these themes relate to the ongoing trend of globalization? How do these works, which are often experimental, connect - in their form, topics, language and ideological subtext - to the traditional rural or regional genres? Far from naively celebrating a lost Eden, most of these 'new Georgics' reflect critically on the tensions in contemporary, peripheral, rural or regional cultures, to the point of parodying the traditional topoi and genres. This book is of interest to those wishing to reflect on the dynamics and conflicts in contemporary European rural culture.
The nineteenth century witnessed rapid economic and social developments, profound political and intellectual upheaval, and startling innovations in art and literature. As Europeans peered into an uncertain future, they drew upon the Renaissance for meaning, precedents, and identity. Many claimed to find inspiration or models in the Renaissance, but as we move across the continent's borders and through the century's decades, we find that the Renaissance was many different things to many different people. This collection brings together the work of sixteen authors who examine the many Renaissances conceived by European novelists and poets, artists and composers, architects and city planners, political theorists and politicians, businessmen and advertisers. The essays fall into three groups: "Aesthetic Recoveries of Strategic Pasts"; "The Renaissance in Nineteenth-Century Culture Wars"; and "Material Culture and Manufactured Memories."
Violence is one of the main themes in the novels of Hanore de Balza. Executions, muders, savagery and death accompany the conspiracies and the turbulence that characterise his post-Revolutionary times, from the terror to Napoleonic campaigns and then to the upheavals of 1830 and 1848. Despite the importance of violence in Balzac, this is the first book-length study of the topic. The book begins by tracing the links between violence and Balzac's approach to the novel, not merely in terms of violent content, but, equally importantly, in terms of the form associated with that content. From and content combine to perpetuate and naturalise violence and suffering. After charting examples of this c...