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For nearly three quarters of a century, the modernist way of reading has been the only way of reading Joyce - useful, yes, and powerful but, like all frameworks, limited. This book takes a leap across those limits into postmodernism, where the pleasures and possibilities of an unsuspected Joyce are yet to be found. Kevin J. H. Dettmar begins by articulating a stylistics of postmodernism drawn from the key texts of Roland Barthes, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Jean-Francois Lyotard. Read within this framework, Dubliners emerges from behind its modernist facade as the earliest product of Joyce's proto-post-modernist sensibility. Dettmar exposes these stories as tales of mystery, not mastery, despite th...
A Choice "Best Academic" book in its first edition, The Recorder remains an essential resource for anyone who wants to know about this instrument. This new edition is thoroughly redone, takes account of the publishing activity of the years since its first publication, and still follows the original organization.
The short story is one of the most difficult types of prose to write and one of the most pleasurable to read. From Boccaccio's Decameron to The Collected Stories ofReynolds Price, Charles May gives us an understanding of the history and structure of this demanding form of fiction. Beginning with a general history of the genre, he moves on to focus on the nineteenth-century when the modern short story began to come into focus. From there he moves on to later nineteenth-century realism and early twentieth-century formalism and finally to the modern renaissance of the form that shows no signs of abating. A chronology of significant events, works and figures from the genre's history, notes and references and an extensive bibliographic essay with recommended reading round out the volume.
Short Story Theories: A Twenty-First-Century Perspective problematizes different aspects of the renewal and development of the short story. The aim of this collection is to explore the most recent theoretical issues raised by the short story as a genre and to offer theoretical and practical perspectives on the form. Centering as it does on specific authors and on the wider implications of short story poetics, this collection presents a new series of essays that both reinterpret canonical writers of the genre and advance new critical insights on the most recent trends and contemporary authors. Theorizations about genre reflect on different aspects of the short story from a multiplicity of per...
This study places Djuna Barnes's early work in the context of symbolist ideas and practices. It presents Barnes not only as a woman writer, but also as an American writer, especially in her attention to the search for identity and to the conflict between individual values and those of society.
In discussions of American poetry since World War II, the work of John Berryman has become increasingly neglected and marginalized. Critics have overwhelmingly chosen to favour the notion that he is an academic, 'establishment' poet whose career can comfortably be described as a move from New Critical traditionalism towards self-absorbed confessionalism. This study shows how such a narrow understanding of Berryman's work is reflective of a broader critical inclination towards a codification of the literary canon as a duel between competing factions of a formalist, establishment 'mainstream' and an experimentalist, countercultural 'avant-garde'. By examining the extent to which Berryman's poe...
This readable, informed, and insightful book illustrates the effects Virginia Woolf's feminism had on her art. Woolf's committed feminism combined with her integrity as an artist and her ability to metamorphose ideology into art make her work particularly suitable for a study of the complex relationship of polemic to aesthetics. There is hardly a more crucial issue for the feminist artist today, who must seek a successful fusion of her principles with her art. For the student of this art Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Style provides a means to evaluate the success or failure of these strategies. While Woolf's essays reflect a strong if somewhat quirky feminism, she was highly critical of didacticism in fiction. For that reason her novels at first glance appear relatively free of polemic. Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Style reveals that her feminism is more accurately described as latent in the novels, having been merged into the aesthetic components of style, structure, point of view, and patterns of imagery.
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
New York, more than any other city, has held a special fascination for filmmakers and viewers. In every decade of Hollywood filmmaking, artists of the screen have fixated upon this fascinating place for its tensions and promises, dazzling illumination and fearsome darkness. The glittering skyscrapers of such films as On the Town have shadowed the characteristic seedy streets in which desperate, passionate stories have played out-as in Scandal Sheet and The Pawnbroker. In other films, the city is a cauldron of bright lights, technology, empire, egotism, fear, hunger, and change--the scenic epitome of America in the modern age. From Street Scene and Breakfast at Tiffany's to Rosemary's Baby, The Warriors, and 25th Hour, the sixteen essays in this book explore the cinematic representation of New York as a city of experience, as a locus of ideographic characters and spaces, as a city of moves and traps, and as a site of allurement and danger. Contributors consider the work of Woody Allen, Blake Edwards, Alfred Hitchcock, Gregory La Cava, Spike Lee, Sidney Lumet, Vincente Minnelli, Roman Polanski, Martin Scorsese, Andy Warhol, and numerous others.