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A comprehensive introduction to Hemingway and his works.
"Strychacz argues that writers such as Conrad, Hemingway, and Lawrence - often viewed as misogynist - actually represented masculinity in their works in terms of theatrical and rhetorical performances. They are theatrical in the sense that male characters keep staging themselves in competitive displays; rhetorical in the sense that these characters, and the very narrative form of the works in which they appear, render masculinity a kind of persuasive argument readers can and should debate.".
In Modernism, Romance and the Fin de Siècle Nicholas Daly explores the popular fiction of the 'romance revival' of the late Victorian and Edwardian years, focusing on the work of such authors as Bram Stoker, H. Rider Haggard and Arthur Conan Doyle. Rather than treating these stories as Victorian Gothic, Daly locates them as part of a 'popular modernism'. Drawing on work in cultural studies, this book argues that the vampires, mummies and treasure hunts of these adventure narratives provided a form of narrative theory of cultural change, at a time when Britain was trying to accommodate the 'new imperialism', the rise of professionalism, and the expansion of consumerist culture. Daly's wide-ranging study argues that the presence of a genre such as romance within modernism should force a questioning of the usual distinction between high and popular culture.
This collection of new essay examines how authors of the 20th and 21st centuries continue the use of sentimental forms and tropes of 19th century literature. Current literary and cultural critical consensus seems to maintain that Americans engaged in a turn-of-the-century refutation of the sentimental mode; an analysis of 20th and 21st century narratives, however, reveals an ongoing use of sentimental expression that draws upon its ability to instruct and influence readers through their emotions. While these later narratives employ aspects of the sentimental mode, many of them also engage in a critique of the failures of the sentimental, deconstructing 19th century perspectives on race, class and gender and the ways they are promoted by sentimental ideals.
The full story of modernism is yet to be written. This collection of essays provides an important page in this complex and inconclusive story of fluidities and hybridities by rendering problematical the linear sequence from modernism to postmodernism. This book explores the many facets of modernism in a variety of essays written by an international group of scholars. It deals with and puts in question the western literary tradition in many of its transcontinental and trans-hemispheric encounters. Criticism of 'high modernism' is put in perspective by discussions of German 'reactionary modernism', American 'social modernism' and 'minor arts', mid-twentieth-century 'Baudelairean modernity' and unprecedented expansions of the concepts of modernity and modernism themselves. Engaging in dialogue with the newest geographical, transnational, and global enlargements of the concept of modernism in time and space (from the 'Middle Passage' to emergent cultures of the twenty-first century, from Europe to America, Africa and Asia), the volume covers a wide range of translocal and transtemporal literary, artistic, cultural, and social fields and perspectives.
In this groundbreaking study, Jonathan Greenberg locates a satiric sensibility at the heart of the modern. By promoting an antisentimental education, modernism denied the authority of emotion to guarantee moral and literary value. Instead, it fostered sophisticated, detached and apparently cruel attitudes toward pain and suffering. This sensibility challenged the novel's humanistic tradition, set ethics and aesthetics into conflict and fundamentally altered the ways that we know and feel. Through lively and original readings of works by Evelyn Waugh, Stella Gibbons, Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Samuel Beckett and others, this book analyzes a body of literature - late modernist satire - that can appear by turns aloof, sadistic, hilarious, ironic and poignant, but which continually questions inherited modes of feeling. By recognizing the centrality of satire to modernist aesthetics, Greenberg offers not only a new chapter in the history of satire but a persuasive new idea of what made modernism modern.
Benjamin Schreier is suspicious of a simple equation of cynicism with quietism, nihilism, selfishness, or false consciousness, and he rejects the notion that modern cynicism represents something categorically different from the classical outlook of Diogenes. He proposes, instead, that cynicism names the difficult position of not being able to recognize the relevance of democratic social norms in the future and yet being nonetheless invested in the power of these norms to determine cultural identity and to regulate social practices. In his readings of Henry Adams’s Education, Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and Nathanael West’s Miss Lone...
The early twentieth century notoriously saw an unprecedented wave of experiment in the arts. So intense was this activity that one can without exaggeration speak of a will to experiment (to 'make it new'). Where did that will to experiment come from? Why did it so insistently take the forms ittook? Looking specifically at Modernism in England, David Trotter seeks answers in the careers of three novelists writing in the first decades of the century: Ford Madox Ford, D. H. Lawrence, and Wyndham Lewis. The context he proposes for their work is that of contemporary understandings of thefunction and value of expertise, and of the dilemmas peculiar to those possessing it. There is a certain madnes...
First published in 2006. Examining the constituting mechanism of the American wilderness myth in Modern American literature, Patricia Ross probes the various purposes for which 'wilderness' is constructed. Considering the work of Hemingway, Faulkner, and Cather, she states that the idea of wilderness is just that, an idea, and not a real entity or something that deserves to be wasted in the chasm of deconstruction. Discovering how literature can help us to understand how we can exert causative control of the myths we create about ourselves, this book is an important contribution to the field.
This critical volume explores the life and work of Ernest Hemingway, focusing particularly on the themes of war in his novel A Farewell to Arms. Readers are presented with a series of essays which lend context and expand upon the themes of the book, including viewpoints on the reasons for, and the aftereffects of, war. Contemporary perspectives on PTSD, foreign policy, and military spending allow readers to further connect the events of the book to the issues of today's world.