The Play of Fictions PDF Download

Author: A. M. Keith
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472102747
Category : Fables, Latin
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
A lucid analysis of the characterization of Ovidian narrative

Author: Emily Hodgson Anderson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135838682
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
This study looks at developments in eighteenth-century drama that influenced the rise of the novel; it begins by asking why women writers of this period experimented so frequently with both novels and plays. Here, Eliza Haywood, Frances Burney, Elizabeth Inchbald, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen explore theatrical frames--from the playhouse, to the social conventions of masquerade, to the fictional frame of the novel itself—that encourage audiences to dismiss what they contain as feigned. Yet such frames also, as a result, create a safe space for self-expression. These authors explore such payoffs both within their work—through descriptions of heroines who disguise themselves to express themselves—and through it. Reading the act of authorship as itself a form of performance, Anderson contextualizes the convention of fictionality that accompanied the development of the novel; she notes that as the novel, like the theater of the earlier eighteenth century, came to highlight its fabricated nature, authors could use it as a covert yet cathartic space. Fiction for these authors, like theatrical performance for the actor, thus functions as an act of both disclosure and disguise—or finally presents self-expression as the ability to oscillate between the two, in "the play of fiction."

Author: Andrew M Feldherr
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400836549
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
This book offers a novel interpretation of politics and identity in Ovid's epic poem of transformations, the Metamorphoses. Reexamining the emphatically fictional character of the poem, Playing Gods argues that Ovid uses the problem of fiction in the text to redefine the power of poetry in Augustan Rome. The book also provides the fullest account yet of how the poem relates to the range of cultural phenomena that defined and projected Augustan authority, including spectacle, theater, and the visual arts. Andrew Feldherr argues that a key to the political as well as literary power of the Metamorphoses is the way it manipulates its readers' awareness that its stories cannot possibly be true. By continually juxtaposing the imaginary and the real, Ovid shows how a poem made up of fictions can and cannot acquire the authority and presence of other discursive forms. One important way that the poem does this is through narratives that create a "double vision" by casting characters as both mythical figures and enduring presences in the physical landscapes of its readers. This narrative device creates the kind of tensions between identification and distance that Augustan Romans would have felt when experiencing imperial spectacle and other contemporary cultural forms. Full of original interpretations, Playing Gods constructs a model for political readings of fiction that will be useful not only to classicists but to literary theorists and cultural historians in other fields.

Author: Steven Dietz
Publisher: Samuel French, Inc.
ISBN: 9780573632396
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 84

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Book Description
Linda and Michael Waterman are both successful fiction writers, happily married to one another. They thrive on the give and take of their unusually honest and candid relationship. However, when Linda is diagnosed with a tumor, she asks her husband to share his diaries with her. The entries dive into Michael's past stay at a writer's retreat and a hidden affair. Michael says that his entires are only works of fiction. The boundaries between past and present, fact and fiction, trust and betrayal begin to break down, and that's all before Michael reads Linda's diaries. No life, as it turns out, is an open book. -- Publisher.

Author: Jai Chakrabarti
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0525658920
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
A dazzling novel—set in early 1970's New York and rural India—the story of a turbulent, unlikely romance, a harrowing account of the lasting horrors of World War II, and a searing examination of one man's search for forgiveness and acceptance. “Looks deeply at the echoes and overlaps among art, resistance, love, and history ... an impressive debut.” —Meg Wolitzer, best-selling author of The Female Persuasion New York City, 1972. Jaryk Smith, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, and Lucy Gardner, a southerner, newly arrived in the city, are in the first bloom of love when they receive word that Jaryk's oldest friend has died under mysterious circumstances in a rural village in eastern India. Travelling there alone to collect his friend's ashes, Jaryk soon finds himself enmeshed in the chaos of local politics and efforts to stage a play in protest against the government—the same play that he performed as a child in Warsaw as an act of resistance against the Nazis. Torn between the survivor's guilt he has carried for decades and his feelings for Lucy (who, unbeknownst to him, is pregnant with his child), Jaryk must decide how to honor both the past and the present, and how to accept a happiness he is not sure he deserves. An unforgettable love story, a provocative exploration of the role of art in times of political upheaval, and a deeply moving reminder of the power of the past to shape the present, A Play for the End of the World is a remarkable debut from an exciting new voice in fiction.

Author: Barry Unsworth
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0525434097
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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A New York Times Notable Book In medieval England, a runaway scholar-priest named Nicholas Barber has joined a traveling theater troupe as they make their way toward their liege lord’s castle. In need of money, they decide to perform at a village en route. When their traditional morality plays fail to garner them an audience, they begin to stage the “the play of Thomas Wells”—their own depiction of the real-life drama unfolding within the village around the murder of a young boy. The villagers believe they have already identified the killer, and the troupe believes their play will be a straightforward depiction of justice served. But soon the players soon learn that the details of the crime are elusive, and the lines between performance and reality become blurred as they discover, scene by scene, line by line, what really happened. Thought-provoking and unforgettable, Morality Play is at once a masterful work of historical fiction, a gripping murder mystery, and a literary work of the first order.

Author: Roger Elwood
Publisher: Pocket Books
ISBN: 9780671487669
Category : American drama
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781942185697
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
From the author of Welcome to Camp America, an eerie exploration of America's performance of power and identity in the post-9/11 era What are the stories we tell ourselves, the games we play, to manage unsettling realities? Made on ten military bases across the United States since 2016, Necessary Fictionsdocuments mock-village landscapes in the fictional country of "Atropia" and its denizens, roleplayers who enact versions of their past or future selves in realistic training scenarios. Costumed Afghan and Iraqi civilians, many of whom have fled war, now recreate it in the service of the US military. Real soldiers pose in front of camouflage backdrops, dressed by Hollywood makeup artists in "moulage"--fake wounds--as they prepare to deploy. Brooklyn-based conceptual documentary artist and former civil rights lawyer Debi Cornwall (born 1973) photographs this meta-reality--the artifice of war--presented in the book with a variety of texts to provoke critical inquiry about America's fantasy industrial complex. The book includes an essay by PEN Award-winning critical theorist Sarah Sentilles.

Author: Ragnar Jónasson
Publisher: Minotaur Books
ISBN: 1250096081
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Taut and terrifying, Snowblind is a startling debut from Ragnar Jónasson, an extraordinary new talent. Where: An isolated fishing village in the fjords of northern Iceland, where no one locks their doors. Who: Ari Thór is a rookie policeman on his first posting, far from his girlfriend in Reykjavík. What: A young woman is found lying half naked in the snow, bleeding and unconscious, and a highly esteemed elderly writer falls to his death. Ari is dragged straight into the heart of a community where he can trust no one, and secrets and lies are a way of life. *BONUS CONTENT: This edition of Snowblind includes a new introduction from the author and a discussion guide

Author: Gordon Slethaug
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 9780809318414
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
In The Hawkline Monster, Brautigan's minimalist metafictive parody of the double depicts our narcissistic view of reality. In Double or Nothing, Federman subverts the conventional double, exposing its gamelike structures and traditional views of life and text.