Author: Caroline Levine Publisher: University of Virginia Press ISBN: 9780813922171 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 264
Book Description
Scholars have long recognized that narrative suspense dominates the formal dynamics of 19th-century British fiction. This study argues that various 19th-century thinkers - John Ruskin, Michael Faraday, Charlotte Bronte - saw suspense as a vehicle for a new approach to knowledge called "realism".
Author: Rick Cypert Publisher: Associated University Presse ISBN: 9781575911229 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 190
Book Description
"Does experiencing a suspenseful situation allow one to develop virtue?" "The suspense writer, Charlotte Armstrong (1905-69), no doubt believed that it could. In her works she implied the benefits of experiencing suspense by illustrating the rhetorical benefits of resolving it ethically or virtuously. Thus, in their dealings with other characters, her protagonists discover a virtuous approach to resolving suspense that involves an expanded view of the language one uses and the perspective one adopts." "After writing a number of theatrical plays, Armstrong began writing mysteries - whodunits - and then, at the advice of her literary agent, changed directions. She began writing suspense stories so that her readers, if not the other characters, would know the identity of the villain. This move left her free to focus on how one creates suspense and to what end." "Her shift in focus coincided with the family's move from New Rochelle, NY, to Glendale, CA, in the mid 1940s in time for Armstrong to absorb the elements of suspense in the new genre of film noir. Nonetheless, while informed by film noir, Armstrong's work is set in the everyday, the commonplace, where with one simple action, a series of events are set into motion that keep readers in high suspense." "In Armstrong's correspondence, one observes the lucrative market of women's magazines and newspapers for serialized novels and short stories, the painful bottom line of publishing houses, the diplomatic skills of literary agents toward their authors, the advent of television and its markets for, and marketing of, literary works, and the ever-present and ever-elusive offers from the film industry." "This book seeks to understand Armstrong's contribution to popular fiction through an exploration of her childhood diaries, her adult correspondence, her published and cinematic works, the reviews of those works, and the recollections of her agent, children, and grandchildren. What emerges is the portrait of a writer whose determination, curiosity, analytic mien, and ideas about humanity shaped her writing in ways that fascinated her critics and readers, a fashion that perhaps unconsciously recognized the virtue of suspense in her written works."--BOOK JACKET.
Author: Daniel McCann Publisher: Springer ISBN: 1137559489 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 265
Book Description
This book is about an emotion constantly present in human culture and history: fear. It is also a book about literature and medicine, two areas of human endeavour that engage with fear most acutely. The essays in this volume explore fear in various literary and medical manifestations, in the Western World, from medieval to modern times. It is divided into two parts. The first part, Treating Fear, examines fear in medical history, and draws from theology, medicine, philosophy, and psychology, to offer an account of how fear shifts in Western understanding from the Middle Ages to Modern times. The second part, Writing Fear, explores fear as a rhetorical and literary force, offering an account of how it is used and evoked in distinct literary periods and texts. This coherent and fascinating collection will appeal to medical historians, literary critics, cultural theorists, medical humanities’ scholars and historians of the emotions.
Author: Will Tattersdill Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1316539148 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages :
Book Description
In this revisionary study, Will Tattersdill argues against the reductive 'two cultures' model of intellectual discourse by exploring the cultural interactions between literature and science embodied in late nineteenth-century periodical literature, tracing the emergence of the new genre that would become known as 'science fiction'. He examines a range of fictional and non-fictional fin-de-siècle writing around distinct scientific themes: Martian communication, future prediction, X-rays, and polar exploration. Every chapter explores a major work of H. G. Wells, but also presents a wealth of exciting new material drawn from a variety of late Victorian periodicals. Arguing that the publications in which they appeared, as well as the stories themselves, played a crucial part in the development of science fiction, Tattersdill uses the form of the general interest magazine as a way of understanding the relationship between the arts and the sciences, and the creation of a new literary genre.
Author: Jens Elze Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA ISBN: 1501385496 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 297
Book Description
Realism seems to be everywhere, both as a trending critical term and as a revitalized aesthetic practice. This volume brings together for the first time three aspects that are pertinent for a proper understanding of realism: its 19th-century aesthetics committed to making reality into an object of serious art; the experiments with and against realism by 20th-century modernist, postmodernist, or magical realist writing; and the politics of realism, especially its ambitions to map the complex realities produced by global capitalism and climate catastrophe. This juxtaposition of aesthetics, experiments, and politics unsettles the entrenched opposition between realism and experimental literature that tends to ignore the fact that realism, by virtue of its commitment to a changing material and social world, cannot be but continuously experimenting. The innovative chapters of this book address some of the pressing questions of literary and cultural studies today, like the complex relation between historical materialism and new materialisms, between science and art, or the different aesthetic and political affordances of making systemic analyses against depicting the specificity of the local. Some of the chapters deal with classically realist authors, such as George Eliot, Émile Zola, and Joseph Conrad, to gauge the aesthetic radicalism of their diverse realist projects. Others investigate the experimental engagements with realism by authors such as B.S. Johnson, J.M. Coetzee, or Rachel Cusk. Yet others, analyze the politics of realism found in contemporary anglophone novels by writers like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, David Mitchell, or Rohinton Mistry. The readings assembled here are a testament to the diversity of literary realism(s) from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, and to the ongoing controversies surrounding definitions and deployments of “realism.”
Author: Grace Elisabeth Lavery Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 069124393X Category : Literary Collections Languages : en Pages : 304
Book Description
A leading trans scholar and activist explores cultural representations of gender transition in the modern period In Pleasure and Efficacy, Grace Lavery investigates gender transition as it has been experienced and represented in the modern period. Considering examples that range from the novels of George Eliot to the psychoanalytic practice of Sigmund Freud to marriage manuals by Marie Stopes, Lavery explores the skepticism found in such works about whether it is truly possible to change one’s sex. This ambivalence, she argues, has contributed to both antitrans oppression and the civil rights claims with which trans people have confronted it. Lavery examines what she terms “trans pragmatism”—the ways that trans people resist medicalization and pathologization to achieve pleasure and freedom. Trans pragmatism, she writes, affirms that transition works, that it is possible, and that it happens. With Eliot and Freud as the guiding geniuses of the book, Lavery covers a vast range of modern culture—poetry, prose, criticism, philosophy, fiction, cinema, pop music, pornography, and memes. Since transition takes people out of one genre and deposits them in another, she suggests, it should be no surprise that a cultural history of gender transition will also provide, by accident, a history of genre transition. Considering the concept of technique and its associations with feminine craftiness, as opposed to masculine freedom, Lavery argues that techniques of giving and receiving pleasure are essential to the possibility of trans feminist thriving—even as they are suppressed by patriarchal and antitrans feminist philosophies. Contesting claims for the impossibility of transition, she offers a counterhistory of tricks and techniques, passed on by women to women, that comprises a body of knowledge written in the margins of history.
Author: Jessica Ann Hughes Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 1350278173 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 278
Book Description
This book tells the story of how nineteenth-century writers turned to the realist novel in order to reimagine Jesus during a century where traditional religious faith appeared increasingly untenable. Re-workings of the canonical Gospels and other projects to demythologize the story of Jesus are frequently treated as projects aiming to secularize and even discredit traditional Christian faith. The novels of Charles Kingsley, George Eliot, Eliza Lynn Linton, and Mary Augusta Ward, however, demonstrate that the work of bringing the Christian tradition of prophet, priest, and king into conversation with a rapidly changing world can at times be a form of authentic faith-even a faith that remains rooted in the Bible and historic Christianity, while simultaneously creating a space that allows traditional understandings of Jesus' identity to evolve.
Author: Grace Lavery Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 0691227799 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 240
Book Description
How Japan captured the Victorian imagination and transformed Western aesthetics From the opening of trade with Britain in the 1850s, Japan occupied a unique and contradictory place in the Victorian imagination, regarded as both a rival empire and a cradle of exquisite beauty. Quaint, Exquisite explores the enduring impact of this dramatic encounter, showing how the rise of Japan led to a major transformation of Western aesthetics at the dawn of globalization. Drawing on philosophy, psychoanalysis, queer theory, textual criticism, and a wealth of in-depth archival research, Grace Lavery provides a radical new genealogy of aesthetic experience in modernity. She argues that the global popularity of Japanese art in the late nineteenth century reflected an imagined universal standard of taste that Kant described as the “subjective universal” condition of aesthetic judgment. The book features illuminating cultural histories of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado, English derivations of the haiku, and retellings of the Madame Butterfly story, and sheds critical light on lesser-known figures such as Winnifred Eaton, an Anglo-Chinese novelist who wrote under the Japanese pseudonym Onoto Watanna, and Mikimoto Ryuzo, a Japanese enthusiast of the Victorian art critic John Ruskin. Lavery also explains the importance and symbolic power of such material objects as W. B. Yeats’s prized katana sword and the “Japanese vellum” luxury editions of Oscar Wilde. Quaint, Exquisite provides essential insights into the modern understanding of beauty as a vehicle for both intimacy and violence, and the lasting influence of Japanese forms today on writers and artists such as Quentin Tarantino.
Author: Laura E. Nym Mayhall Publisher: Springer Nature ISBN: 303107159X Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 242
Book Description
British Murder Mysteries, 1880-1965: Facts and Fictions conceptualizes detective fiction as an archive, i.e., a trove of documents and sources to be used for historical interpretation. By framing the genre as a shifting set of values, definitions, and practices, the book historicizes the contested meanings of analytical categories like class, race, gender, nation, and empire that have been applied to the forms and functions of detection. Three organizing themes structure this investigation: fictive facticity, genre fluidity, and conservative modernity. This volume thus shows how British detective fiction from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century both shaped and was shaped by its social, cultural, and political contexts and the lived experience of its authors and readers at critical moments in time.
Author: Caroline Levine
Author: Rick Cypert
Author: Daniel McCann
Author: James Aaron Green
Author: Will Tattersdill
Author: Jens Elze
Author: Grace Elisabeth Lavery
Author: Jessica Ann Hughes
Author: Grace Lavery
Author: Laura E. Nym Mayhall