Scale, Crisis, and the Modern Novel

Scale, Crisis, and the Modern Novel PDF Author: Aaron Rosenberg
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009271776
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 207

Book Description
An examination of how four industrial-age novelists confronted crises at new and unprecedented temporal, ecological and geographical scales.

Scale, Crisis, and the Modern Novel

Scale, Crisis, and the Modern Novel PDF Author: Aaron Rosenberg
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009271806
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 207

Book Description
At the turn of the twentieth century, novelists faced an unprecedented crisis of scale. While exponential increases in industrial production, resource extraction, and technological complexity accelerated daily life, growing concerns about deep time, evolution, globalization, and extinction destabilised scale's value as a measure of reality. Here, Aaron Rosenberg examines how four novelists moved radically beyond novelistic realism, repurposing the genres-romance, melodrama, gothic, and epic-it had ostensibly superseded. He demonstrates how H. G. Wells, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, and Virginia Woolf engaged with climatic and ecological crises that persist today, requiring us to navigate multiple temporal and spatial scales simultaneously. The volume shows that problems of scale constrain our responses to crisis by shaping the linguistic, aesthetic, and narrative structures through which we imagine it. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Biopolitics and Animal Species in Nineteenth Century Literature and Science

Biopolitics and Animal Species in Nineteenth Century Literature and Science PDF Author: Matthew Rowlinson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009409956
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Book Description
Centring on Darwin and on literature throughout the nineteenth century, this book documents a general crisis in the species concept.

Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature PDF Author: Hsuan L. Hsu
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521197066
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 271

Book Description
This book examines how literature represents different kinds of spaces, from the single-family home to the globe. It focuses on how nineteenth-century authors drew on literary tools including rhetoric, setting, and point of view to mediate between individuals and different spaces, and re-examines how local spaces were incorporated into global networks.

The Great Derangement

The Great Derangement PDF Author: Amitav Ghosh
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022652681X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 205

Book Description
Are we deranged? The acclaimed Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh argues that future generations may well think so. How else to explain our imaginative failure in the face of global warming? In his first major book of nonfiction since In an Antique Land, Ghosh examines our inability—at the level of literature, history, and politics—to grasp the scale and violence of climate change. The extreme nature of today’s climate events, Ghosh asserts, make them peculiarly resistant to contemporary modes of thinking and imagining. This is particularly true of serious literary fiction: hundred-year storms and freakish tornadoes simply feel too improbable for the novel; they are automatically consigned to other genres. In the writing of history, too, the climate crisis has sometimes led to gross simplifications; Ghosh shows that the history of the carbon economy is a tangled global story with many contradictory and counterintuitive elements. Ghosh ends by suggesting that politics, much like literature, has become a matter of personal moral reckoning rather than an arena of collective action. But to limit fiction and politics to individual moral adventure comes at a great cost. The climate crisis asks us to imagine other forms of human existence—a task to which fiction, Ghosh argues, is the best suited of all cultural forms. His book serves as a great writer’s summons to confront the most urgent task of our time.

Postmodern Geographies

Postmodern Geographies PDF Author: Edward W. Soja
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1844676692
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Book Description
Postmodern Geographies stands as the cardinal broadcast and defence of theory’s “spatial turn.” From the suppression of space in modern social science and the disciplinary aloofness of geography to the spatial returns of Foucault and Lefebvre and the construction of Marxist geographies alert to urbanization and global development, renowned geographer Edward W. Soja details the trajectory of this turn and lays out its key debates. An expanded critique of historicism and a refined grasp of materialist dialectics bolster Soja’s attempt to introduce geography to postmodernity, animating a series of engagements with Heidegger, Giddens, Castells, and others. Two exploratory essays on the postfordist landscapes of Los Angeles complete the book, offering a glimpse of Soja’s new geography carried into its highest register.

Faces of Crisis in 20th- and 21st-Century Prose

Faces of Crisis in 20th- and 21st-Century Prose PDF Author: Aleksandra Kamińska
Publisher:
ISBN: 9788323348818
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 168

Book Description
This book offers innovative readings of the motif of crisis as explored by twentieth- and twenty-first-century novelists, spanning personal and identity crisis, interpersonal relationships and family ties, and threats on a global scale.

NowHere

NowHere PDF Author: Roger Friedland
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520342097
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 451

Book Description
The fall of the Berlin wall, the uprising at Tiananmen Square, the war in the Persian Gulf, the conflict in Bosnia—such events have been fundamentally affected by modern technology. As we become instant spectators of war, famine, and revolution, time and space assume new global meanings. This provocative volume presents an eclectic group of contributors who attempt to make sense of the "now" and the "here" that define the modern age. The essays, by anthropologists, religionists, geographers, linguists, sociologists, and historians, explore the temporal and spatial facets of social life. Their range is remarkable and includes English landscape painting, talk in corporations, agoraphobic women, the ecological structure of Los Angeles, the cosmology of the Holocaust, and the ritual spaces of Buddhist Japan and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The editors' introduction addresses the diversity of these empirical concerns and positions them within a rapidly expanding theoretical landscape. David Hockney's striking painting on the book jacket captures the tension between somewhere and everywhere, between space and place, now and just a moment ago—hence "nowhere" or "now/here."

Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature

Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature PDF Author: Jean Albert Bédé
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231037174
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 932

Book Description
With more than 1800 critical entries on the writers and literatures of 33 languages, this work presents the entire range of modern European writing -- from the symbolist and modernist works rooted in the last decades of the nineteenth century; through the avant-garde and existentialist movement to Barthes, Blanchot, Breton, and continental thought pertinent today.

Landscapes

Landscapes PDF Author: John Berger
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1784785857
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Book Description
“Essential reading”—n+1 Creative and political art criticism on landscape works from the Renaissance to the present from a “master” storyteller (Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things) In this brilliant collection of diverse pieces—essays, short stories, poems, translations—which spans a lifetime’s engagement with art, John Berger reveals how he came to his own unique way of seeing. He pays homage to the writers and thinkers who influenced him, such as Walter Benjamin, Rosa Luxemburg and Bertolt Brecht. His expansive perspective takes in artistic movements and individual artists—from the Renaissance to the present—while never neglecting the social and political context of their creation. Berger pushes at the limits of art writing, demonstrating beautifully how his artist’s eye makes him a storyteller in these essays, rather than a critic. With “landscape” as an animating, liberating metaphor rather than a rigid definition, this collection surveys the aesthetic landscapes that have informed, challenged and nourished John Berger’s understanding of the world. Landscapes—alongside its companion Portraits—completes a tour through the history of art that will be an intellectual benchmark for many years to come.