Masculinity and Syrian Fiction

Masculinity and Syrian Fiction
Author: Lovisa Berg
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2021-11-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 075563764X

What can novels tell us about masculinity in Syria? In this book, Lovisa Berg explores over 20 Syrian novels covering the last 50 years of the 20th century. Uniquely, she examines only female writers in order to gauge the changing ways in which Syrian women perceived the function of masculinity, and the impact certain attitudes towards masculinity have on men, women, children and Syrian society, from a female perspective. The works of writers from Kulit Khuri to Usayma Darwish are analysed to explore changing attitudes to gender in Syria and the Middle East, as well as the political upheavals within the country and region. We see the idealistically portrayed men in the novels of female authors in the 1950s give way in time to a more critical depictions of patriarchy. Above all, we see through the use of novels a plethora of critiques of masculine hegemony in Syrian society, the authors of which are able with the use of fiction to reorganise and question maleness in a way denied to them in reality. This book will be of interest to scholars of Contemporary Syrian and Arabic Literature, Masculinity Studies and Women's Studies.

Men of Their Words

Men of Their Words
Author: Nigel Harkness
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2017-12-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351195891

"Whereas the centrality of femininity to nineteenth-century French fiction has been the focus of widespread critical attention, masculinity has, until recently, received little sustained treatment in either the literary or socio-historical domains. In this book, Nigel Harkness uses the fiction of George Sand (1804-1876), the pre-eminent woman writer of the period, to explore questions of masculinity as they pertain to the nineteenth-century French novel, and to map out new approaches to the study of literary masculinity. Drawing on contemporary theories of gender and narrative, Harkness reveals how Sands novels repeatedly focus on a nexus of language, masculinity and power, in which narrative is both a vehicle for the expression of manhood, and a site where masculinity is discursively performed. Masculinity is thus reconfigured in Sands fiction as an identity constituted as much through words as through actions. Analysis of the performances of masculinity staged in Sands novels opens onto an exploration of gendered processes of literary representation: the links between masculinity and the doxa, the equation of writing and power, the homosocial function of acts of narration, and the masculinity of authorship and authority."

Authority Matters

Authority Matters
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2015-06-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9401206465

In this wide ranging collection of essays, eleven literary scholars and creative writers examine authorship and authority in relation to the production and reception of cultural texts. Ranging in time from the Renaissance to the era of digital publishing, the essays invite us to reconsider the influential theories of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Bourdieu for our understanding of writers such as Philip Sidney, Thomas Hardy, Laura Riding, W.B. Yeats, Gertrude Stein, and J.M. Coetzee. Shedding new light on authority’s complex role in the generation of cultural meaning, the essays will be of interest to students and teachers of literary history and critical theory alike.

The Experimental Book Object

The Experimental Book Object
Author: Sami Sjöberg
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2023-11-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000984435

The Experimental Book Object shows why and how books matter in the 21st century. Digital and audio platforms are commonplace, and other fields of art beyond literature have increasingly embraced books and publication as their medium of choice. Nevertheless, the manifold book object persists and continues to inspire various types of experimentation. This volume sets forth an unprecedented approach where literary and media theory are entangled with design practitioners’ artistic research and process descriptions. By probing the paradigm of the codex, this collection of essays focuses on historical and contemporary experimentation that has challenged what books are and could be from the perspectives of materiality, mediation, and visual and typographic design. Investigations into less-studied areas and cases of performativity demonstrate what experimental books do by interacting with their systemic and cultural environments. The volume offers a multifaceted and multidisciplinary view of the book object, the book design and publishing processes, and their significance in the digital age.

C.G.Jung and Literary Theory

C.G.Jung and Literary Theory
Author: S. Rowland
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 245
Release: 1999-04-26
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0230597645

C.G. Jung and Literary Theory remedies a significant omission in literary studies by doing for Jung and poststructuralist literary theories what has been achieved for Freud and Lacan. Offering radically new Jungian theories of deconstruction, feminism, the body, sexuality, spirituality, postcolonialism, reader-response, the book also investigates the controversial occult and fascist heritage of Jung. By using the work of Derrida, Kristeva and Irigaray and examining Jungian fiction, this book transforms modern literary theory in ways which simultaneously critique Jung's work.

Young Love

Young Love
Author: Anja Schmidt-Ott
Publisher: Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2002
Genre: History
ISBN:

This work compares seven novels by writers of different political backgrounds. Concentrating on the experience of young love in the novels, it alternates sociological and literary analyses. Issues like the presentation of men and women, the attitudes to love displayed by the National Socialist state, the characterisation of society and the socio-cultural debates around the ideals of masculinity and femininity of the 1920s and the 1930s are considered. In so doing this work gives substance to notions such as the 'crisis of manhood', the 'motherly woman' and the 'backlash against modernity'. This comparative approach establishes strikingly similar features in gender roles and the social place of love in quite disparate works revealing new insights into the Mentalitätsgeschichte of the 1930s.

Ecomasculinities

Ecomasculinities
Author: Rubén Cenamor
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 207
Release: 2019-01-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 149856755X

While there exist numerous studies on ecocriticism and ecofeminism, much less has been written about ecomasculinities. This volume contributes to filling this gap by examining models of fictional ecomasculinity in and through contemporary U.S. literature and cinema. Our study examines ecomasculinities as practices of masculinity which are deeply conservationist and can embrace non-masculine traits. In this line of thought, a main goal of the volume is to interrogate the potential of ecomasculinities to elicit in men a desire to become engage in other practices of masculinity that are counter-hegemonic and have as main goal to achieve equality on different strata of society. Bridging the gap between the Social Sciences and the Humanities, the book interrogates intersections between ecomasculinities and masculinities beyond capitalism, ecomasculinities and aging, and ecomasculinities and queerness, among others.

Our Ladies of Darkness

Our Ladies of Darkness
Author: Joseph Andriano
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 197
Release: 2010-11-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0271039167