Edward Lear and the Play of Poetry

Edward Lear and the Play of Poetry
Author: James Williams
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 402
Release: 2016-10-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 019101818X

Of all the Victorian poets, Edward Lear has a good claim to the widest audience: admired and championed by critics and poets from John Ruskin to John Ashbery, he has also been read, heard, and loved by generations of children. As a central figure in the literature of nonsense, Lear has also shaped the evolution of modern literature, and his work continues to influence and inspire writers and readers today. This collection of essays-the first ever devoted solely to Lear-builds on a recent resurgence of critical interest and asks how it is that the play of Lear's poetry continues to delight, and to challenge our sense of what poetry can be. These seventeen chapters, written by established and emerging critics of poetry, seek to explore and appreciate the playfulness embodied in the poems, and to provide contexts in which it can be better understood and enjoyed. They consider how Lear's poems play off various inheritances (the literary fool, Romantic lyric, his religious upbringing), explore particular forms in which his playful genius took flight (his letters, his queer writings about love), and trace lines of Learical influence and inheritance by showing how other poets and thinkers across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries played off Lear in their turn (Joyce, Stein, Eliot, Auden, Smith, Ashbery, and others).

Tennyson Among the Poets

Tennyson Among the Poets
Author: Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 456
Release: 2009-10-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0191609641

Published to mark the bicentenary of Alfred Tennyson's birth, these essays offer an important revaluation of his achievement and its lasting importance. After several years in which the temper of criticism has been largely political (and often hostile towards Tennyson in particular) a number of influential recent accounts of Victorian poetry have rediscovered the virtues of a closer style of reading and the benefits and pleasures of an approach that, without at all ignoring social and cultural contexts, approaches them through a primary alertness to textual detail and literary history. This volume, including entirely commissioned work by a wide range of critics and scholars from across the profession in both Britain and North America, seeks to bring such forms of attention to bear on the immense variety of Tennyson's career by exploring the complex and multiple connections between Tennyson and other writers - his predecessors, his contemporaries, and his successors. Collectively, the essays describe an intricate network of affiliation and indebtedness, resistance and reconciliation. They provide a unique assessment of Tennyson's origins, work, and imaginative legacy as he enters upon his third century.

Jane Austen

Jane Austen
Author: Tom Keymer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2020-07-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0192606476

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. So runs one of the most famous opening lines in English literature. Setting the scene in Pride and Prejudice, it deftly introduces the novel's core themes of marriage, money, and social convention, themes that continue to resonate with readers over 200 years later. Jane Austen wrote six of the best-loved novels in the English language, as well as a smaller corpus of unpublished works. Her books pioneered new techniques for representing voices, minds, and hearts in narrative prose, and, despite some accusations of a blinkered domestic and romantic focus, they represent the world of their characters with unsparing clarity. Here, Tom Keymer explores the major themes throughout Austen's novels, setting them in the literary, social, and political backgrounds from which they emerge, and showing how they engage with social tensions in an era dominated by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. The Jane Austen who emerges is a writer shaped by the literary experiments and socio-political debates of her time, increasingly drawn to a fundamentally conservative vision of social harmony, yet forever complicating this vision through her disruptive ironies and satirical energy.

The Local Scenes and Global Culture of Psytrance

The Local Scenes and Global Culture of Psytrance
Author: Graham St John
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2010-06-10
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1136944346

This lively textual symposium offers a collection of formative research on the culture of global psytrance (psychedelic trance). As the first book to address the diverse transnationalism of this contemporary electronic dance music phenomenon, the collection hosts interdisciplinary research addressing psytrance as a product of intersecting local and global trajectories. Contributing to theories of globalization, postmodernism, counterculture, youth subcultures, neotribes, the carnivalesque, music scenes and technologies, dance ritual and spirituality, chapters introduce psytrance in Goa, the UK, Israel, Japan, the US, Italy, Czech Republic, Portugal and Australia. As a global occurrence indebted to 1960s psychedelia, sharing music production technologies and DJ techniques with electronic dance music scenes, and harnessing the communication capabilities of the Internet, psytrance and its cultural implications are thoroughly discussed in this first scholarly volume of its kind.

Alice in Wonderland (Third International Student Edition) (Norton Critical Editions)

Alice in Wonderland (Third International Student Edition) (Norton Critical Editions)
Author: Lewis Carroll
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2016-04-04
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0393614603

Newly discovered letters by Lewis Carroll, an expanded selection of diary excerpts, and a wealth of new biographical materials are some of the features of this revised Norton Critical Edition. This perennially popular Norton Critical Edition again reprints the 1897 editions of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass along with the 1876 edition of The Hunting of the Snark. Each text is fully annotated and the original illustrations are included. An unusually rich “Backgrounds” section is arranged to correspond with three clearly defined periods in Lewis Carroll’s life. Letters and diary entries interwoven within each period emphasize the biographical dimension of Carroll’s writing. Readers gain an understanding of the author’s family and education, the evolution of the Alice books, and Carroll’s later years through his own words and through important scholarly work on his faith life and his relationships with women and with Alice Hargreaves and her family. Reflecting the wealth of new scholarship on Alice in Wonderland and Lewis Carroll published since the last edition, Donald Gray has chosen eleven new critical works while retaining five seminal works from the previous edition. Two early pieces—an essay by Charles Dickens and poem by Christina Rossetti—take a satirical look at children’s literature. The nine new recent essays are by James R. Kincaid, Marah Gubar, Robert M. Polemus, Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Gilles Deleuze, Roger Taylor, Carol Mavor, Jean Gattégno, and Helena M. Pycior. The Selected Bibliography has been updated and expanded.

Global Perspectives on Death in Children's Literature

Global Perspectives on Death in Children's Literature
Author: Lesley D. Clement
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2015-07-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317599497

This volume visits death in children’s literature from around the world, making a substantial contribution to the dialogue between the expanding fields of Childhood Studies, Children’s Literature, and Death Studies. Considering both textual and pictorial representations of death, contributors focus on the topic of death in children’s literature as a physical reality, a philosophical concept, a psychologically challenging adjustment, and/or a social construct. Essays covering literature from the US, Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Canada, the UK, Sweden, Germany, Poland, Bulgaria, Brazil, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, India, and Iran display a diverse range of theoretical and cultural perspectives. Carefully organized sections interrogate how classic texts have been adapted for the twenty-first century, how death has been politicized, ritualized, or metaphorized, and visual strategies for representing death, and how death has been represented within the context of play. Asking how different cultures present the concept of death to children, this volume is the first to bring together a global range of perspective on death in children’s literature and will be a valuable contribution to an array of disciplines.

Negotiating Translation and Transcreation of Children's Literature

Negotiating Translation and Transcreation of Children's Literature
Author: Joanna Dybiec-Gajer
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2020-05-04
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9811524335

This book offers fresh critical insights to the field of children’s literature translation studies by applying the concept of transcreation, established in the creative industries of the globalized world, to bring to the fore the transformative, transgressional and creative aspects of rewriting for children and young audiences. This socially situated and culturally dependent practice involves ongoing complex negotiations between creativity and normativity, balancing text-related problems and genre conventions with readers’ expectations, constraints imposed by established, canonical translations and publishers’ demands. Focussing on the translator’s strategies and decision-making process, the book investigates phenomena where transcreation is especially at play in children’s literature, such as dual address, ambiguity, nonsense, humour, play on words and other creative language use; these also involve genre-specific requirements, for example, rhyme and rhythm in poetry. The book draws on a wide range of mostly Anglophone texts for children and their translations into languages of limited diffusion to demonstrate the numerous ways in which information, meaning and emotions are transferred to new linguistic and cultural contexts. While focussing mostly on interlingual transfer, the volume analyses a variety of translation types from established, canonical renditions by celebrity translators to non-professional translations and intralingual rewritings. It also examines iconotextual dynamics of text and image. The book employs a number of innovative methodologies, from cognitive linguistics and ethnolinguistics to semiotics and autoethnographic approaches, going beyond text analysis to include empirical research on children’s reactions to translation strategies. Highlighting the complex dynamics at work in the process of transcreating for children, this volume is essential reading for students and researchers in translation studies, children’s fiction and adaptation studies.

Keywords for Children's Literature, Second Edition

Keywords for Children's Literature, Second Edition
Author: Philip Nel
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 880
Release: 2021-01-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1479843660

Introduces key terms, global concepts, debates, and histories for Children's Literature in an updated edition Over the past decade, there has been a proliferation of exciting new work across many areas of children’s literature and culture. Mapping this vibrant scholarship, the Second Edition of Keywords for Children’s Literature presents original essays on essential terms and concepts in the field. Covering ideas from “Aesthetics” to “Voice,” an impressive multidisciplinary cast of scholars explores and expands on the vocabulary central to the study of children’s literature. The second edition of this Keywords volume goes beyond disciplinary and national boundaries. Across fifty-nine print essays and nineteen online essays, it includes contributors from twelve countries and an international advisory board from over a dozen more. The fully revised and updated selection of critical writing—more than half of the essays are new to this edition—reflects an intentionally multinational perspective, taking into account non-English traditions and what childhood looks like in an age of globalization. All authors trace their keyword’s uses and meanings: from translation to poetry, taboo to diversity, and trauma to nostalgia, the book’s scope, clarity, and interdisciplinary play between concepts make this new edition of Keywords for Children’s Literature essential reading for scholars and students alike.

Children's Literature and the Avant-Garde

Children's Literature and the Avant-Garde
Author: Elina Druker
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2015-07-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 902726838X

Children’s Literature and the Avant-Garde is the first study that investigates the intricate influence of the avant-garde movements on children’s literature in different countries from the beginning of the 20th century until the present. Examining a wide range of children’s books from Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, Russia, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the USA, the individual chapters explore the historical as well as the cultural and political aspects that determine the exceptional character of avant-garde children’s books. Drawing on studies in children’s literature research, art history, and cultural studies, this volume provides comprehensive insights into the close relationships between avant-garde children’s literature, images of childhood, and contemporary ideas of education. Addressing topics such as the impact of exhibitions, the significance of the Bauhaus, and the influence of poster art and graphic design, the book illustrates the broad range of issues associated with avant-garde children’s books. More than 60 full-color illustrations demonstrate the impressive variety of design in avant-garde picturebooks and children’s books.