Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Narrative Dynamics
This anthology brings together essential essays on major facets of narrative dynamics, that is, the means by which "narratives traverse their often unlikely routes from beginning to end." It includes the most widely cited and discussed essays on narrative beginnings, temporality, plot and emplotment, sequence and progression, closure, and frames. The text is designed as a basic reader for graduate courses in narrative and critical theory across disciplines including literature, drama and theatre, and film. Narrative Dynamics includes such classic exponents as E. M. Forster on story and plot; Vladimir Propp on the structure of the folktale; R. S. Crane on plot; Boris Tomashevsky on story, plo...
Ambiguous Discourse
Carefully melding theory with close readings of texts, the contributors to Ambiguous Discourse explore the role of gender in the struggle for narrative control of specific works by British writers Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Anita Brookner, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, and Mina Loy. This collection of twelve essays is the first book devoted to feminist narratology--the combination of feminist theory with the study of the structures that underpin all narratives. Until recently, narratology has resisted the advances of feminism in part, as some contributors argue, because theory has replicated past assumptions of male authority and point of view in narrative. Feminist narratology, however, contextualizes the cultural constructions of gender within its study of narrative strategies. Nine of these essays are original, and three have been revised for publication in this volume. The contributors are Melba Cuddy-Keane, Denise Delorey, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Susan Stanford Friedman, Janet Giltrow, Linda Hutcheon, Susan S. Lanser, Alison Lee, Patricia Matson, Kathy Mezei, Christine Roulston, and Robyn Warhol.
Rape and Representation
Rape does not have to happen. The fact that it does--and in the United States a rape is reported every six minutes--indicates that we live in a rape-prone culture where rape or the threat of rape functions as a tool for enforcing sexual difference and hierarchy. Rape and Representation explores how cultural forms construct and reenforce social attitudes and behaviors that perpetuate sexual violence. The essays proceed from the observation that literature not only reflects but also contributes to what a society believes about itself. Fourteen essays by authors in the fields of English, American and African-American, German, African, Brazilian, Classical, and French literatures and film presen...
The Mother / Daughter Plot
Mothers and daughters -- the female figures neglected by classic psychoanalysis and submerged in traditional narrative -- are at the center of this book. The novels of nineteenth- and twentieth-century women writers from the Western European and North American traditions reveal that the story of motherhood remains the unspeakable plot of Western culture. Focusing on the feminine and, more controversially, on the maternal, this book alters our perception of both the familial structures basic to traditional narrative -- the Oedipus story -- and the narrative structures basic to traditional representations of the family -- Freud's family romance. Confronting psychoanalytic theories of subject-formation with narrative theories, Marianne Hirsch traces the emergence and transformation of female family romance patterns from Jane Austen to Marguerite Duras.
Writing Love
In this compelling new addition to Sandra M. Gilbert's Ad Feminam: Women and Literature series, Katharine Ann Jensen examines the cultural form of the love letter and its intersection with the novel in the works of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French women writers. Traditionally, French literary history has focused on eighteenth-century male writers Rousseau and Laclos as the master artists of the epistolary novel. That emphasis on one century, one gender, and one epistolary form--the novel--obscures the history of women's writing in France. In the seventeenth century, the love letter was viewed as a feminine literary form in which a woman's passionate and emotional "nature" found its...
Waiting for the End
Waiting for the End examines two dozen contemporary novels within the context of a half century of theorizing about the function of ending in narrative. That theorizing about ending generated a powerful dynamic a quarter-century ago with the advent of feminist criticism of masculinist readings of the role played by ending in fiction. Feminists such as Theresa de Lauretis in 1984 and more famously Susan Winnett in her 1991 PMLA essay, Coming Unstrung, were leading voices in a swelling chorus of theorist pointing out the masculinist bias of ending in narrative. With the entry of feminist readings of ending, it became inevitable that criticism of fiction would become gendered through the recognition of difference transcending a simple binary of female/male to establish a spectrum of masculine to feminine endings, regardless of the sex of the writer. Accordingly, Waiting for the End examines pairs of novels - one pair by Margaret Atwood and one by Ian McEwan - to demonstrate how a writer can offer endings at either end of the gender spectrum.
Reading Cultures
Molly Abel Travis unites reader theory with an analysis of historical conditions and various cultural contexts in this discussion of the reading and reception of twentieth-century literature in the United States. Travis moves beyond such provisional conclusions as "the text produces the reader" or "the reader produces the text" and considers the ways twentieth-century readers and texts attempt to constitute and appropriate each other at particular cultural moments and according to specific psychosocial exigencies. She uses the overarching concept of the reader in and out of the text both to differentiate the reader implied by the text from the actual reader and to discuss such in-and-out mov...
Strategies of Deviance
"Juxtaposing the narrative strategies of Freud, Wilde and Jarman; film pornography and Almodovar; and Dennis Cooper, Robert GlÃ1⁄4ck and Kevin Killian, Jackson offers a delightfully intelligent and inventive reappraisal of key issues in gay representation." -- Gay Times "A major event in gay cultural theory.... the feat of critical imagination is absolutely stunning in its scope and power. [This book] will be definitive in laying out the issues for subsequent writers in gay theory." -- David M. Halperin Earl Jackson examines visual and narrative texts from a variety of genres, including case histories, pornography, science fiction, and experimental prose.
Disturbing the Universe
The Young Adult novel is ordinarily characterized as a coming-of-age story, in which the narrative revolves around the individual growth and maturation of a character, but Roberta Trites expands this notion by chronicling the dynamics of power and repression that weave their way through YA books. Characters in these novels must learn to negotiate the levels of power that exist in the myriad social institutions within which they function, including family, church, government, and school. Trites argues that the development of the genre over the past thirty years is an outgrowth of postmodernism, since YA novels are, by definition, texts that interrogate the social construction of individuals. ...
The Nature of Narrative
For the past forty years The Nature of Narrative has been a seminal work for literary students, teachers, writers, and scholars. Countering the tendency to view the novel as the paradigm case of literary narrative, authors Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg in the original edition offered a compelling history of the genre narrative from antiquity to the twentieth-century, even as they carried out their main task of describing and analyzing the nature of narrative's main elements: meaning, character, plot, and point of view. Their history emphasized the broad sweep of literary narrative from ancient times to the contemporary period, and it included a chapter on the oral heritage of written nar...
