Reading Victorian Literature : Essays in Honour of J. Hillis Miller
Wolfreys, Julian;Szuba, Monika;Miller, J. Hillis;Wolfreys, Julian;Szuba, Mo...
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Reading Victorian Literature provides a critical commentary on major authors of the ni...
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Reading Victorian Literature : Essays in Honour of J. Hillis Miller
2019
Reading Victorian Literature provides a critical commentary on major authors of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries , from Dickens to Conrad.
Subject terms:
English literature--19th century--History and criticism - English literature--20th century--History and criticismContent provider:
eBook Collection (EBSCOhost)
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Reading Ideas in Victorian Literature : Literary Content As Artistic Experience
Patrick Fessenbecker;Patrick Fessenbecker
It is natural to assume that if works of literature are artistically valuable, it's no...
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Reading Ideas in Victorian Literature : Literary Content As Artistic Experience
2020
It is natural to assume that if works of literature are artistically valuable, it's not because of anything they say but because of what they are: beautiful. Works of art try to say nothing, to use their content only as matter for realizing the beauty of complex form. But what if appreciating the things a work of literature has to say is a way of appreciating it as a work of art? Often dismissed as too lengthy, messy, and preachy to qualify as genuine art, in fact Victorian narrative challenges our conceptions about what makes art worth engaging.
Subject terms:
English literature--19th century--History and criticismContent provider:
eBook Community College Collection (EBSCOhost)
Stefanie Markovits 1971- Born 1971. Yale University, B.A. (summa cum laude), 1994, Ph....
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Contemporary Authors. 2012, v. 322, p260-262.
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Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture
Deborah Lutz;Deborah Lutz
Nineteenth-century Britons treasured objects of daily life that had once belonged to t...
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Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture
Nineteenth -century Britons treasured objects of daily life that had once belonged to their dead. The love of these keepsakes, which included hair, teeth, and other remains, speaks of an intimacy with the body and death, a way of understanding absence through its materials, which is less widely felt today. Deborah Lutz analyzes relic culture as an affirmation that objects held memories and told stories. These practices show a belief in keeping death vitally intertwined with life - not as memento mori but rather as respecting the singularity of unique beings. In a consumer culture in full swing by the 1850s, keepsakes of loved ones stood out as non-reproducible, authentic things whose value was purely personal. Through close reading of the works of Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Thomas Hardy, and others, this study illuminates the treasuring of objects that had belonged to or touched the dead.
2015
Subject terms:
Death in literature - English literature--19th century--History and criticism - Literature and society--Great Britain--History--19th century - Relics in literatureContent provider:
eBook Collection (EBSCOhost)
Idleness and Aesthetic Consciousness, 1815–1900
Richard Adelman;Richard Adelman
Charting the failure of the Romantic critique of political economy, Richard Adelman ex...
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Idleness and Aesthetic Consciousness, 1815–1900
2018
Charting the failure of the Romantic critique of political economy, Richard Adelman explores the changing significances and the developing concepts of idleness and aesthetic consciousness during the nineteenth century . Through careful analysis of some of the period's most influential thinkers, including John Stuart Mill, George Eliot, John Ruskin and Karl Marx, Adelman weaves together evolving ideas across a range of intellectual discourses - political economy, meditative poetry, the ideology of the'gospel of work', cultural theory, the Gothic and psychoanalysis. In doing so, he reconstructs debates over passivity and repose and demonstrates their centrality to the cultural politics of the age. Arguing that hardened conceptions of aesthetic consciousness come into being at moments of civic unrest concerning political representation and that the fin-de-siècle witnesses the demonization of the once revolutionary category of aesthetic consciousness, the book demonstrates that late eighteenth-century positivity around human spirituality is comprehensively dismantled by the beginning of the twentieth century .
Subject terms:
Laziness in literature - Aesthetics in literature - English literature--19th century--History and criticism - Aestheticism (Literature)Content provider:
eBook Collection (EBSCOhost)
The Obsolete Empire : Untimely Belonging in Twentieth-Century British Literature
Philip Tsang;Philip Tsang
Modernist literature at the end of the British empire challenges conventional notions ...
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The Obsolete Empire : Untimely Belonging in Twentieth-Century British Literature
2021
Modernist literature at the end of the British empire challenges conventional notions of homeland, heritage, and community.Finalist of the MSA First Book Prize by The Modernist Studies AssociationThe waning British empire left behind an abundance of material relics and an inventory of feelings not easily relinquished. In The Obsolete Empire, Philip Tsang brings together an unusual constellation of writers—Henry James, James Joyce, Doris Lessing, and V. S. Naipaul—to trace an aesthetics of frustrated attachment that emerged in the wake of imperial decline. Caught between an expansive Britishness and an exclusive Englishness, these writers explored what it meant to belong to an empire that did not belong to them.Thanks to their voracious reading of English fiction and poetry in their formative years, all of these writers experienced a richly textured world with which they deeply identified but from which they felt excluded. The literary England they imagined, frozen in time and out of place with the realities of imperial decline, in turn figures in their writings as a repository of unconsummated attachments, contradictory desires, and belated exchanges. Their works arrest the linear progression from colonial to postcolonial, from empire to nation, and from subject to citizen. Drawing on a rich body of scholarship on affect and temporality, Tsang demonstrates how the British empire endures as a structure of desire that outlived its political lifespan. By showing how literary reading sets in motion a tense interplay of intimacy and exclusion, Tsang investigates a unique mode of belonging arising from the predicament of being conscripted into a global empire but not desired as its proper citizen. Ultimately, The Obsolete Empire asks: What does it mean to be inside or outside any given culture? How do large-scale geopolitical changes play out at the level of cultural attachment and political belonging? How does literary reading establish or unsettle narratives of who we are? These questions preoccupied writers across Britain's former empire and continue to resonate today.
Subject terms:
Belonging (Social psychology) in literature - English literature--20th century--History and criticism - Commonwealth literature (English)--History and criticism - Postcolonialism--Great Britain - Imperialism in literature - Literature and society--Commonwealth countriesContent provider:
eBook Collection (EBSCOhost)
Jane Austen and Comedy
Erin Goss;Erin Goss
Jane Austen and Comedy takes for granted two related notions. First, Jane Austen's boo...
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Jane Austen and Comedy
2019
Jane Austen and Comedy takes for granted two related notions. First, Jane Austen's books are funny; they induce laughter, and that laughter is worth attending to for a variety of reasons. Second, Jane Austen's books are comedies, understandable both through the generic form that ends in marriage after the potential hilarity of romantic adversity and through a more general promise of wish fulfillment. In bringing together Austen and comedy, which are both often dismissed as superfluous or irrelevant to a contemporary world, this collection of essays directs attention to the ways we laugh, the ways that Austen may make us do so, and the ways that our laughter is conditioned by the form in which Austen writes: comedy. Jane Austen and Comedy invites reflection not only on her inclusion of laughter and humor, the comic, jokes, wit, and all the other topics that can so readily be grouped under the broad umbrella that is comedy, but also on the idea or form of comedy itself, and on the way that this form may govern our thinking about many things outside the realm of Austen's work. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Subject terms:
Humor in literature - Comic, The, in literatureContent provider:
eBook Community College Collection (EBSCOhost)
Personal Business : Character and Commerce in Victorian Literature and Culture
Aeron Hunt;Aeron Hunt
In recent years the analysis of the intersection of literature and economics has gener...
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Personal Business : Character and Commerce in Victorian Literature and Culture
2014
In recent years the analysis of the intersection of literature and economics has generated a vibrant conversation in literary and cultural studies of the Victorian period. But Aeron Hunt argues that an emphasis on abstraction and impersonality as the crucial features of the Victorian economic experience has led to a partial and ultimately misleading vision of Victorian business culture. In contrast, she asserts that the key to understanding the relationship of literary writing to economic experience is what she calls'personal business'—the social and interpersonal relationships of Victorian commercial life in which character was a central mediating concept.Juxtaposing novels by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Margaret Oliphant with such nonfiction works as popular biographies, periodicals, and business handbooks, the author builds on and extends the insights of the'new economic criticism'by highlighting the embodied, interpersonal, and socially embedded interactions of everyday economic life.Hunt analyzes the productive and disciplinary roles that character played in the Victorian economy and traces the proliferation of different models of character as literary writing and commercial discourse responded to the challenges and opportunities presented by personal business. She suggests that the dynamic interchange between forms of character employed in the everyday practice of business and those imagined in literary writing helped shape character as a crucial mode of power in Victorian business culture and economic life. Ultimately, Personal Business provides new ways to understand both the history of the Victorian novel and its implications in middle-class culture and the turbulent experience of nineteenth -century capitalism.
Subject terms:
Economics and literature--Great Britain--History--19th century - English literature--19th century--History and criticism - Literature and society--Great Britain--History--19th century - Business in literature - Economics in literature - Finance, Personal--Great Britain--HistoryContent provider:
eBook Collection (EBSCOhost)
Thinking About Other People in Nineteenth -Century British Writing
Adela Pinch;Adela Pinch
Nineteenth-century life and literature are full of strange accounts that describe the ...
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Thinking About Other People in Nineteenth -Century British Writing
Nineteenth -century life and literature are full of strange accounts that describe the act of one person thinking about another as an ethically problematic, sometimes even a dangerously powerful thing to do. In this book, Adela Pinch explains why, when, and under what conditions it is possible, or desirable, to believe that thinking about another person could affect them. She explains why nineteenth -century British writers - poets, novelists, philosophers, psychologists, devotees of the occult - were both attracted to and repulsed by radical or substantial notions of purely mental relations between persons, and why they moralized about the practice of thinking about other people in interesting ways. Working at the intersection of literary studies and philosophy, this book both sheds new light on a neglected aspect of Victorian literature and thought, and explores the consequences of, and the value placed on, this strand of thinking about thinking.
2010; Vol. 00073
Subject terms:
Causation in literature - Idealism, English--History--19th century - Other (Philosophy) in literature - English literature--19th century--History and criticism - Thought and thinking in literatureContent provider:
eBook Collection (EBSCOhost)
Systems Failure : The Uses of Disorder in English Literature
Andrew Franta;Andrew Franta
How eighteenth-century writers stretched systems designed to explain social relations ...
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Systems Failure : The Uses of Disorder in English Literature
2019
How eighteenth-century writers stretched systems designed to explain social relations to their breaking point, showing the flaws in their design.The Enlightenment has long been understood—and often understood itself—as an age of systems. In 1759, Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, one of the architects of the Encyclopédie, claimed that'the true system of the world has been recognized, developed, and perfected.'In Systems Failure, Andrew Franta challenges this view by exploring the fascination with failure and obsession with unpredictable social forces in a range of English authors from Samuel Johnson to Jane Austen.Franta argues that attempts to extend the Enlightenment's systematic spirit to the social world prompted many prominent authors to reject the idea that knowledge is synonymous with system. In readings of texts ranging from novels by Sterne, Smollett, Godwin, and Austen to Johnson's literary biographies and De Quincey's periodical essays, Franta shows how writers repeatedly take up civil and cultural institutions designed to rationalize society only to reveal the weaknesses that inevitably undermine their organizational and explanatory power. Diverging from influential accounts of the rise of the novel, Systems Failure audaciously reveals that, in addition to representing individual experience and social reality, the novel was also a vehicle for thinking about how the social world resists attempts to explain or comprehend it. Franta contends that to appreciate the power of systems in the literature of the long eighteenth century , we must pay attention to how often they fail—and how many of them are created for the express purpose of failing. In this unraveling, literature arrives at its most penetrating insights about the structure of social life.
Subject terms:
Social systems in literature - English fiction--18th century--History and criticism - Enlightenment--England - Literature and society--England--History--18th centuryContent provider:
eBook Collection (EBSCOhost)
The Formation of the Victorian Literary Profession
Richard Salmon;Richard Salmon
Richard Salmon provides an original account of the formation of the literary professio...
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The Formation of the Victorian Literary Profession
2013; Vol. 00087
Richard Salmon provides an original account of the formation of the literary profession during the late Romantic and early Victorian periods. Focusing on the representation of authors in narrative and iconographic texts, including novels, biographies, sketches and portrait galleries, Salmon traces the emergence of authorship as a new form of professional identity from the 1820s to the 1850s. Many first-generation Victorian writers, including Carlyle, Dickens, Thackeray, Martineau and Barrett-Browning, contributed to contemporary debates on the'Dignity of Literature ', professional heroism, and the cultural visibility of the'man of letters'. This study combines a broad mapping of the early Victorian literary field with detailed readings of major texts. The book argues that the key model of professional development within this period is embodied in the narrative form of literary apprenticeship, which inspired such celebrated works as David Copperfield and Aurora Leigh, and that its formative process is the'disenchantment of the author'.
Subject terms:
Literature and society--England--History--19th century - English literature--19th century--History and criticism - Authors in literature - Authors, English--19th centuryContent provider:
eBook Collection (EBSCOhost)
China and the Victorian Imagination : Empires Entwined
Ross G. Forman;Ross G. Forman
What happens to our understanding of'orientalism'and imperialism when we consider Brit...
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China and the Victorian Imagination : Empires Entwined
2013
What happens to our understanding of'orientalism'and imperialism when we consider British-Chinese relations during the nineteenth century , rather than focusing on India, Africa or the Caribbean? This book explores China's centrality to British imperial aspirations and literary production, underscoring the heterogeneous, interconnected nature of Britain's formal and informal empire. To British eyes, China promised unlimited economic possibilities, but also posed an ominous threat to global hegemony. Surveying anglophone literary production about China across high and low cultures, as well as across time, space and genres, this book demonstrates how important location was to the production, circulation and reception of received ideas about China and the Chinese. In this account, treaty ports matter more than opium. Ross G. Forman challenges our preconceptions about British imperialism, reconceptualizes anglophone literary production in the global and local contexts, and excavates the little-known Victorian history so germane to contemporary debates about China's'rise'.
Subject terms:
English literature--19th century--History and criticism - English literature--Chinese influencesContent provider:
eBook Collection (EBSCOhost)
Ghost-Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists : Theories of Vision in Victorian Literature and Science
Srdjan Smajić;Srdjan Smajić
This book is a study of the narrative techniques that developed for two very popular f...
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Ghost-Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists : Theories of Vision in Victorian Literature and Science
2010; Vol. 00071
This book is a study of the narrative techniques that developed for two very popular forms of fiction in the nineteenth century - ghost stories and detective stories - and the surprising similarities between them in the context of contemporary theories of vision and sight. Srdjan Smajić argues that to understand how writers represented ghost-seers and detectives, the views of contemporary scientists, philosophers, and spiritualists with which these writers engage have to be taken into account: these views raise questions such as whether seeing really is believing, how much of what we'see'is actually only inferred, and whether there may be other (intuitive or spiritual) ways of seeing that enable us to perceive objects and beings inaccessible to the bodily senses. This book will make a real contribution to the understanding of Victorian science in culture, and of the ways in which literature draws on all kinds of knowledge.
Subject terms:
Ghost stories, English--History and criticism - Detective and mystery stories, English--History and criticism - Literature and science - English literature--19th century--History and criticism - Visual perception in literature - Vision in literatureContent provider:
eBook Collection (EBSCOhost)
Modernism's Metronome : Meter and Twentieth-Century Poetics
Ben Glaser;Ben Glaser
Despite meter's recasting as a rigid metronome, diverse modern poet-critics refused th...
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Modernism's Metronome : Meter and Twentieth-Century Poetics
2020
Despite meter's recasting as a rigid metronome, diverse modern poet-critics refused the formal ideologies of free verse through complex engagements with traditional versification.In the twentieth century , meter became an object of disdain, reimagined as an automated metronome to be transcended by new rhythmic practices of free verse. Yet meter remained in the archives, poems, letters, and pedagogy of modern poets and critics. In Modernism's Metronome, Ben Glaser revisits early twentieth-century poetics to uncover a wide range of metrical practice and theory, upending our inherited story about the'breaking'of meter and rise of free verse.
Subject terms:
Modernism (Literature)--United States - Poetics--History--20th century - English language--Versification - Rhythm in literature - American poetry--20th century--History and criticism - Modernism (Literature)--Great Britain - English poetry--20th century--History and criticismContent provider:
eBook Community College Collection (EBSCOhost)
The Late-Career Novelist : Career Construction Theory, Authors and Autofiction
Hywel Dix;Hywel Dix
The first scholarly study of the phenomenon of the'late-career novel', this book explo...
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The Late-Career Novelist : Career Construction Theory, Authors and Autofiction
2017
The first scholarly study of the phenomenon of the'late-career novel', this book explores the ways in which bestselling contemporary novelists look back and respond to their earlier successes in their subsequent writings. Exploring the work of major novelists such as Angela Carter, V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, A.S. Byatt and Graham Swift, The Late-Career Novelist draws for the first time on social psychology and career construction theory to examine how the dynamics of a literary career play out in the fictional worlds of our best-known novelists. From here, Hywel Dix develops and argues for a new mode of reading contemporary writing on the contexts of current literary culture.
Subject terms:
Authorship--History--20th century - Authorship--History--21st century - English fiction--20th century--History and criticism - English fiction--21st century--History and criticism - Literature publishing--History--21st century - Career development - Authorship--Psychological aspects - Literature publishing--History--20th centuryContent provider:
eBook Community College Collection (EBSCOhost)
Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece
Iain Ross;Iain Ross
From his boyhood Oscar Wilde was haunted by the literature and culture of ancient Gree...
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Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece
2012; Vol. 00082
From his boyhood Oscar Wilde was haunted by the literature and culture of ancient Greece, but until now no full-length study has considered in detail the texts, institutions and landscapes through which he imagined Greece. The archaeology of Celtic Ireland, explored by the young Wilde on excavations with his father, informed both his encounter with the archaeology of Greece and his conviction that Celt and Greek shared a hereditary aesthetic sensibility, while major works such as The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest maintain a dynamic, creative relationship with originary texts such as Aristotle's Ethics, Plato's dialogues and the then lost comedies of Menander. Drawing on unpublished archival material, Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece offers a new portrait of a writer whose work embodies both the late-nineteenth -century conflict between literary and material antiquity and his own contradictory impulses towards Hellenist form and the formlessness of desire.
Subject terms:
English literature--Irish authors--Greek influencesContent provider:
eBook Collection (EBSCOhost)
Critical Companion to Mary Shelley : A Literary Reference to Her Life and Work
Brackett, Virginia;Brackett, Virginia
Critical Companion to Mary Shelley : A Literary Reference to Her Life and Work
2012
Subject terms:
Women and literature--England--History--19th centuryContent provider:
eBook Community College Collection (EBSCOhost)
Surprise : The Poetics of the Unexpected From Milton to Austen
Christopher R. Miller;Christopher R. Miller
Today, in the era of the spoiler alert,'surprise'in fiction is primarily associated wi...
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Surprise : The Poetics of the Unexpected From Milton to Austen
2015
Today, in the era of the spoiler alert,'surprise'in fiction is primarily associated with an unexpected plot twist, but in earlier usage, the word had darker and more complex meanings. Originally denoting a military ambush or physical assault, surprise went through a major semantic shift in the eighteenth century : from violent attack to pleasurable experience, and from external event to internal feeling. In Surprise, Christopher R. Miller studies that change as it took shape in literature ranging from Paradise Lost through the novels of Jane Austen. Miller argues that writers of the period exploited and arbitrated the dual nature of surprise in its sinister and benign forms. Even as surprise came to be associated with pleasure, it continued to be perceived as a problem: a sign of ignorance or naïveté, an uncontrollable reflex, a paralysis of rationality, and an experience of mere novelty or diversion for its own sake. In close readings of exemplary scenes—particularly those involving astonished or petrified characters—Miller shows how novelists sought to harness the energies of surprise toward edifying or comic ends, while registering its underpinnings in violence and mortal danger. In the Roman poet Horace's famous axiom, poetry should instruct and delight, but in the early eighteenth century , Joseph Addison signally amended that formula to suggest that the imaginative arts should surprise and delight. Investigating the significance of that substitution, Miller traces an intellectual history of surprise, involving Aristotelian poetics, Cartesian philosophy, Enlightenment concepts of the passions, eighteenth-century literary criticism and aesthetics, and modern emotion theory. Miller goes on to offer a fresh reading of what it means to be'surprised by sin'in Paradise Lost, showing how Milton's epic both harks back to the symbolic functions of violence in allegory and looks ahead to the moral contours of the novel. Subsequent chapters study the Miltonic ramifications of surprise in the novels of Defoe, Haywood, Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne, as well as in the poems of Wordsworth and Keats. By focusing on surprise in its inflections as emotion, cognition, and event, Miller's book illuminates connections between allegory and formal realism, between aesthetic discourse and prose fiction, and between novel and lyric; and it offers new ways of thinking about the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of the novel as the genre emerged in the eighteenth century .
Subject terms:
Surprise in literature - English literature--18th century--History and criticismContent provider:
eBook Collection (EBSCOhost)
Women Writing Art History in the Nineteenth Century : Looking Like a Woman
Hilary Fraser;Hilary Fraser
This book sets out to correct received accounts of the emergence of art history as a m...
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Women Writing Art History in the Nineteenth Century : Looking Like a Woman
2014; Vol. 00095
This book sets out to correct received accounts of the emergence of art history as a masculine field. It investigates the importance of female writers from Anna Jameson, Elizabeth Eastlake and George Eliot to Alice Meynell, Vernon Lee and Michael Field in developing a discourse of art notable for its complexity and cultural power, its increasing professionalism and reach, and its integration with other discourses of modernity. Proposing a more flexible and inclusive model of what constitutes art historical writing, including fiction, poetry and travel literature , this book offers a radically revisionist account of the genealogy of a discipline and a profession. It shows how women experienced forms of professional exclusion that, whilst detrimental to their careers, could be aesthetically formative; how working from the margins of established institutional structures gave women the freedom to be audaciously experimental in their writing about art in ways that resonate with modern readers.
Subject terms:
Women art historians - Women art critics - Art--Historiography--History--19th century - Art criticism--History--19th century - Art--Historiography--19th centuryContent provider:
eBook Community College Collection (EBSCOhost)
Mind, Body, Motion, Matter : Eighteenth-Century British and French Literary Perspectives
Mary Helen McMurran;Alison Conway;Mary Helen McMurran;Alison Conway
Mind, Body, Motion, Matter investigates the relationship between the eighteenth centur...
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Mind, Body, Motion, Matter : Eighteenth-Century British and French Literary Perspectives
2016
Mind, Body, Motion, Matter investigates the relationship between the eighteenth century's two predominant approaches to the natural world – mechanistic materialism and vitalism – in the works of leading British and French writers such as Daniel Defoe, William Hogarth, Laurence Sterne, the third Earl of Shaftesbury and Denis Diderot. Focusing on embodied experience and the materialization of thought in poetry, novels, art, and religion, the literary scholars in this collection offer new and intriguing readings of these canonical authors. Informed by contemporary currents such as new materialism, cognitive studies, media theory, and post-secularism, their essays demonstrate the volatility of the core ideas opened up by materialism and the possibilities of an aesthetic vitalism of form.
Subject terms:
Materialism in literature - Vitalism in literature - Philosophy in literature - English literature--18th century--History and criticism - French literature--18th century--History and criticism - Aesthetics in literature - HistoryContent provider:
eBook Collection (EBSCOhost)
Radical Botany : Plants and Speculative Fiction
Natania Meeker;Antónia Szabari;Natania Meeker;Antónia Szabari
Winner, 2019 Science Fiction & Technoculture Studies Book PrizeRadical Botany excavate...
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Radical Botany : Plants and Speculative Fiction
2020
Winner, 2019 Science Fiction & Technoculture Studies Book PrizeRadical Botany excavates a tradition in which plants participate in the effort to imagine new worlds and envision new futures. Modernity, the book claims, is defined by the idea of all life as vegetal. Meeker and Szabari argue that the recognition of plants'liveliness and animation, as a result of scientific discoveries from the seventeenth century to today, has mobilized speculative creation in fiction, cinema, and art. Plants complement and challenge notions of human life. Radical Botany traces the implications of the speculative mobilization of plants for feminism, queer studies, and posthumanist thought. If, as Michael Foucault has argued, the notion of the human was born at a particular historical moment and is now nearing its end, Radical Botany reveals that this origin and endpoint are deeply informed by vegetality as a form of pre- and posthuman subjectivity. The trajectory of speculative fiction which this book traces offers insights into the human relationship to animate matter and the technological mediations through which we enter into contact with the material world. Plants profoundly shape human experience, from early modern absolutist societies to late capitalism's manipulations of life and the onset of climate change and attendant mass extinction.A major intervention in critical plant studies, Radical Botany reveals the centuries -long history by which science and the arts have combined to posit plants as the model for all animate life and thereby envision a different future for the cosmos.
Subject terms:
Speculative fiction--History and criticism - Plants in literature - Plants in motion picturesContent provider:
eBook Community College Collection (EBSCOhost)
Martin Paul Eve;Martin Paul Eve
This is a book about the power game currently being played out between two symbiotic c...
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2016
This is a book about the power game currently being played out between two symbiotic cultural institutions: the university and the novel. As the number of hyper-knowledgeable literary fans grows, students and researchers in English departments waiver between dismissing and harnessing voices outside the academy. Meanwhile, the role that the university plays in contemporary literary fiction is becoming increasingly complex and metafictional, moving far beyond the ‘campus novel'of the mid-twentieth century . Martin Paul Eve's engaging and far-reaching study explores the novel's contribution to the ongoing displacement of cultural authority away from university English . Spanning the works of Jennifer Egan, Ishmael Reed, Tom McCarthy, Sarah Waters, Percival Everett, Roberto Bolaño and many others, Literature Against Criticism forces us to re-think our previous notions about the relationship between those who write literary fiction and those who critique it.
Subject terms:
Criticism - Fiction--History and criticism--Theory, etcContent provider:
eBook Open Access (OA) Collection (EBSCOhost)
Before They Were Titans : Essays on the Early Works of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy
Elizabeth Cheresh Allen;Elizabeth Cheresh Allen
Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are the titans of Russian literature. As mature artists, they l...
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Before They Were Titans : Essays on the Early Works of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy
2015
Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are the titans of Russian literature . As mature artists, they led very different lives and wrote vastly different works, but their early lives and writings display provocative kinships, while also indicating the divergent paths the two authors would take en route to literary greatness. The ten new critical essays here, written by leading specialists in nineteenth -century , Russian literature , give fresh, sophisticated readings to works from the first decade of the literary life of each Russian author—for Dostoevsky, the 1840s; for Tolstoy, the 1850s. Collectively, these essays yield composite portraits of these two artists as young men finding their literary way. At the same time, they show how the early works merit appreciation for themselves, before their authors were Titans.
Subject terms:
Russian literature--19th century--Criticism and interpretationContent provider:
eBook Open Access (OA) Collection (EBSCOhost)
A Theory of Nonviolent Action : How Civil Resistance Works
Stellan Vinthagen;Stellan Vinthagen
In this ground-breaking and much-needed book, Stellan Vinthagen provides the first maj...
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A Theory of Nonviolent Action : How Civil Resistance Works
2015
In this ground-breaking and much-needed book, Stellan Vinthagen provides the first major systematic attempt to develop a theory of nonviolent action since Gene Sharp's seminal The Politics of Nonviolent Action in 1973.Employing a rich collection of historical and contemporary social movements from various parts of the world as examples - from the civil rights movement in America to anti-Apartheid protestors in South Africa to Gandhi and his followers in India - and addressing core theoretical issues concerning nonviolent action in an innovative, penetrating way, Vinthagen argues for a repertoire of nonviolence that combines resistance and construction. Contrary to earlier research, this repertoire - consisting of dialogue facilitation, normative regulation, power breaking and utopian enactment - is shown to be both multidimensional and contradictory, creating difficult contradictions within nonviolence, while simultaneously providing its creative and transformative force.An important contribution in the field, A Theory of Nonviolent Action is essential for anyone involved with nonviolent action who wants to think about what they are doing.
Subject terms:
Passive resistance - Nonviolence - Civil disobedienceContent provider:
eBook Community College Collection (EBSCOhost)
Anthropology, Film Industries, Modularity
Ramyar D. Rossoukh;Steven C. Caton;Ramyar D. Rossoukh;Steven C. Caton
From Bangladesh and Hong Kong to Iran and South Africa, film industries around the wor...
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Anthropology, Film Industries, Modularity
2021
From Bangladesh and Hong Kong to Iran and South Africa, film industries around the world are rapidly growing at a time when new digital technologies are fundamentally changing how films are made and viewed. Larger film industries like Bollywood and Nollywood aim to attain Hollywood's audience and profitability, while smaller, less commercial, and often state-funded enterprises support various cultural and political projects. The contributors to Anthropology, Film Industries, Modularity take an ethnographic and comparative approach to capturing the diversity and growth of global film industries. They outline how modularity—the specialized filmmaking tasks that collectively produce a film—operates as a key feature in every film industry, independent of local context. Whether they are examining the process of dubbing Hollywood films into Hindi, virtual reality filmmaking in South Africa, or on-location shooting in Yemen, the contributors'anthropological methodology brings into relief the universal practices and the local contingencies and deeper cultural realities of film production.Contributors. Steven C. Caton, Jessica Dickson, Kevin Dwyer, Tejaswini Ganti, Lotte Hoek, Amrita Ibrahim, Sylvia J. Martin, Ramyar D. Rossoukh
