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Now available in paper, The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter is the first book-length analysis of J. K. Rowling's work from a broad range of perspectives within literature, folklore, psychology, sociology, and popular culture. A significant portion of the book explores the Harry Potter series' literary ancestors, including magic and fantasy works by Ursula K. LeGuin, Monica Furlong, Jill Murphy, and others, as well as previous works about the British boarding school experience. Other chapters explore the moral and ethical dimensions of Harry's world, including objections to the series raised within some religious circles. In her new epilogue, Lana A. Whited brings this volume up to date by covering Rowling's latest book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
Contributions by Miranda A. Green-Barteet, Kathleen Kellett, Andrew McInnes, Joyce McPherson, Rebecca Mills, Cristina Rivera, Wendy Rountree, Danielle Russell, Anah-Jayne Samuelson, Sonya Sawyer Fritz, Andrew Trevarrow, and Richardine Woodall Home. School. Nature. The spaces children occupy, both physically and imaginatively, are never neutral. Instead, they carry social, cultural, and political histories that impose—or attempt to impose—behavioral expectations. Moreover, the spaces identified with childhood reflect and reveal adult expectations of where children “belong.” The essays in Containing Childhood: Space and Identity in Children’s Literature explore the multifaceted and d...
These days, we are ever more often confronted by overwhelming events. Searching for a way to understand them, we turn to mythic archetypes still present in our culture. The authors of these essays pose questions about the reliability of the archetypes found in tradition, history, and scattered mythologemes. The essays in this collection deal with the presence of mythic time in modern speculative fiction, such as fantasy and alternate histories, and discuss major mythologemes and their functions in popular literature and extra-literary reality. The authors show how mythopoeic fiction becomes a (genetically) modified mythic mirror in which we hope to see answers to vexing questions, or just a reality superior to the ordinary one. In the Mirror of the Past: Of Fantasy and History is a collection of seven essays by American and Polish authors, including Brian Attebery, Terri Doughty, and Marek Oziewicz, with Mircea Eliade’s concept of “return from history to History” as their underlying theme.
This book explains the conflicting feelings of anxiety and empowerment that women, historically excluded from masculine discourse, feel when they read and write, and it analyzes narrative strategies that reveal this ambivalence. Anxious Power draws upon feminist literary theory, narrative theory, and reader-response criticism to define women's ambivalence toward language. It is the first collection to address issues of ambivalence in narrative by women, to trace those issues from the medieval period to the present, and to outline a theoretical framework for understanding them. The contributors address a broad spectrum of female literary voices ranging from familiar British and American write...
Focusing on questions of space and locale in children’s literature, this collection explores how metaphorical and physical space can create landscapes of power, knowledge, and identity in texts from the early nineteenth century to the present. The collection is comprised of four sections that take up the space between children and adults, the representation of 'real world' places, fantasy travel and locales, and the physical space of the children’s book-as-object. In their essays, the contributors analyze works from a range of sources and traditions by authors such as Sylvia Plath, Maria Edgeworth, Gloria Anzaldúa, Jenny Robson, C.S. Lewis, Elizabeth Knox, and Claude Ponti. While maintaining a focus on how location and spatiality aid in defining the child’s relationship to the world, the essays also address themes of borders, displacement, diaspora, exile, fantasy, gender, history, home-leaving and homecoming, hybridity, mapping, and metatextuality. With an epilogue by Philip Pullman in which he discusses his own relationship to image and locale, this collection is also a valuable resource for understanding the work of this celebrated author of children’s literature.
A philosophical exploration of the entire seven-book Harry Potter series Harry Potter has been heralded as one of the most popular book series of all time and the philosophical nature of Harry, Hermione, and Ron's quest to rid the world of its ultimate evil is one of the many things that make this series special. The Ultimate Harry Potter and Philosophy covers all seven titles in J.K. Rowling's groundbreaking series and takes fans back to Godric's Hollow to discuss life after death, to consider what moral reasoning drove Harry to choose death, and to debate whether Sirius Black is a man or a dog. With publication timed to coincide with the release of the movie Harry Potter and the Deathly Ha...
Covering over a century's worth of debate, thinking and writing about literature, this is a unique guide to the lives and works of fifty theorists who have left an indelible mark on literary studies. Featuring theorists such as Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud and Edward Said, this accessible guide includes: a glossary of terms full cross-referencing for maximum ease of use authoritative guides to further reading on and by each theorist. An essential resource for all students of literature, Fifty Key Literary Theorists explores the gamut of critical debate, from the New Critics to the Deconstructionists, and from post-colonialism to post-Marxism and more.
Here Ekbert Faas examines the complex interrelationships among the fields of early psychiatry, poetry, and aesthetics through an in-depth study of the Victorian dramatic monologue and its Romantic antecedents. Discussing the work of over thirty major and minor poets, he focuses on what Victorian critics viewed as an unprecedented psychological school of poetry related to early psychiatry and rooted in the poetic "science of feelings" (Wordsworth). This broad historical perspective enables Faas to redefine our current terminology regarding the dramatic monologue and to document the extent to which early psychiatry shaped the poetry, poetics, and general frame of mind of the Victorians. "In th...
The first fifty years in the life of a great American poet.