Isak Dinesen and the Engendering of Narrative

Isak Dinesen and the Engendering of Narrative
Author: Susan Hardy Aiken
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 342
Release: 1990-04-24
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780226011127

Although Isak Dinesen has been widely acclaimed as a popular writer, her work has received little sustained critical attention. In this revisionist study, Susan Hardy Aiken takes up the complex relations of gender, sexuality, and representation in Dinesen's narratives. Drawing on feminist, psychoanalytic, and post-structuralist theories, Aiken shows how the form and meaning of Dinesen's texts are affected by her doubled situations as a Dane who wrote in English, a European who lived for many years in Africa, and a woman who wrote under a male pseudonym within a male-centered literary tradition. In a series of readings that range across Dinesen's career, Aiken demonstrates that Dinesen persistently asserted the inseparability of gender and the engendering of narrative. She argues that Dinesen's texts anticipate in remarkable ways some of the most radical insights of contemporary literary theories, particularly those of French feminist criticism. Aiken also offers a major rereading of Out of Africa that both addresses its distinctiveness as a colonialist text and places it within Dinesen's larger oeuvre. In Aiken's account, Dinesen's work emerges as a compelling inquiry into sexual difference and the ways it informs culture, subjectivity, and the language that is their medium. This important book will at last give Isak Dinesen's work the prominence it deserves in literary studies.

Isak Dinesen and Narrativity

Isak Dinesen and Narrativity
Author: Centre TADAC.
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 260
Release: 1994
Genre: Electronic books
ISBN: 088629245X

Responding to recent Dinesen scholarship and public exposure in such films as Out of Africa and Babette's Feast, these fourteen original essays discuss and reveal the aesthetic subtlety and philosophical complexity of Dinesen's art.

Understanding Isak Dinesen

Understanding Isak Dinesen
Author: Susan Brantly
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2002
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781570034282

Shadows on the Grass, Winter's Tales, Last Tales, Anecdotes of Destiny, and Ehrengard, Brantly explores the clues, details, and subplots in texts that critics often describe as puzzles and labyrinths. Brantly reveals the thought and care that Dinesen devoted to the construction of her stories, her expansive knowledge of world literature, and the great pleasure awaiting readers as they unravel the mysteries embedded in her texts."--BOOK JACKET.

Reader's Guide to Women's Studies

Reader's Guide to Women's Studies
Author: Eleanor Amico
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 1279
Release: 1998-03-20
Genre: Reference
ISBN: 1135314039

The Reader's Guide to Women's Studies is a searching and analytical description of the most prominent and influential works written in the now universal field of women's studies. Some 200 scholars have contributed to the project which adopts a multi-layered approach allowing for comprehensive treatment of its subject matter. Entries range from very broad themes such as "Health: General Works" to entries on specific individuals or more focused topics such as "Doctors."

Historicizing Colonial Nostalgia

Historicizing Colonial Nostalgia
Author: P. Lorcin
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2011-12-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1137013044

Comparative study of the writings and strategies of European women in two colonies, French Algeria and British Kenya, during the twentieth century. Its central theme is women's discursive contribution to the construction of colonial nostalgia.

The Creative Dialectic in Karen Blixen's Essays

The Creative Dialectic in Karen Blixen's Essays
Author: Marianne T. Stecher
Publisher: Museum Tusculanum Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2014-03-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 8763540614

This new study addresses the provocative essays of Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen), an iconic figure in Scandinavia and the Anglo-American world. Celebrated for her literary tales, Karen Blixen’s essays offer sagacious reflections on three significant challenges of the twentieth century: feminism, Nazism, and colonialism. Karen Blixen (1885–1962) contributed to topical debates in Denmark, particularly during the 1950s when her distinct voice on Danish radio became familiar to a nation of listeners. Some of her lectures, radio addresses, and newspaper chronicles were later published as essays and now constitute a distinct genre within her work. In this study, Blixen’s most important essays are critically examined for the first time. The book demonstrates that a "creative dialectic" informs these essays, an interplay of complementary opposites that Blixen sees as fundamental to human life and artistic creativity. Whether exploring questions of gender and the status of the feminist movement, or the reign of National Socialism in Hitler’s Germany, or colonial race relations under British rule in East Africa, Blixen’s observations are insightful, witty, and surprisingly progressive for an author notable for aristocratic sensibilities. Blixen’s essays are also framed by a "dialectic method," which develops an idea by drawing on opposing viewpoints in order to arrive at an original vantage point. The Creative Dialectic of Karen Blixen's Essays builds on archival research, historical study, literary criticism and theory, as well as bilingual readings of Blixen’s renowned literary work. For the first time in an English translation, Karen Blixen’s essay “Blacks and Whites in Africa” (1938), by award-winning translator Tiina Nunnally, appears in this publication.

Multicultural Writers from Antiquity to 1945

Multicultural Writers from Antiquity to 1945
Author: Alba Amoia
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 508
Release: 2001-10-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0313016488

The final decades of the 20th century have seen an explosion of interest in multiculturalism. But multiculturalism is more than an awareness of the different cultures comprising contemporary societies. For centuries, people from around the world have come in contact with cultures other than their own, and their exposure to multiple cultures has fostered their creativity and ability to make lasting contributions to civilization. The effects of multiculturalism are especially apparent in literature, since writers tend to be particularly aware of their environments and record their experiences. This reference includes alphabetically arranged entries for more than 100 world writers from antiquity to 1945, who were significantly influenced by cultures other than their own. Included are entries for major canonical Ancient and Modern writers of the Western and Eastern worlds. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and includes a brief biography, a discussion of multicultural themes and contexts, a summary of the writer's critical reception, and primary and secondary bibliographies. By illuminating the shaping influence of multiculturalism on these writers, the volume points to the lasting value of multiculturalism in the contemporary world.

Following the Animal

Following the Animal
Author: Ann-Sofie Lönngren
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2015-09-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1443882461

Literary transformations from human to animal have occurred in myths, folklore, fairy tales and narratives from all over the world since ancient times, and have always provided a narrative space for depictions of power, agency, and the radical nature of change. In Following the Animal, these transformations are analysed with regards to their use in modern literature from northern-most Europe, with specific attention being paid to the insights they provide regarding the human-animal relationship, both generally in the industrialized West, and against the background of more specific circumstances in the Nordic area. In three analytic chapters, focusing respectively on Swedish author August Strindberg’s novel Tschandala (1887), Finnish author Aino Kallas’s novel The Wolf’s Bride (1928), and Danish author Karen Blixen/Isak Dinesen’s short story “The Monkey” (1934), along with discussions of a range of other authors and texts, the reader is introduced to several traditions of literary production that both connect to, and differ from, Anglophone and other literature in fascinating ways. In addition to the insights it provides concerning the uses of human-animal transformations in modern Nordic literature, and their significance in relation to “the question of the animal”, Following the Animal also offers literary scholars and students alike a series of useable and transferable strategies for approaching texts from a “more-than-anthropocentric”, human-animal studies perspective. In phrasing and employing the interpretational method of “following the animal” over the text’s surface, up metaphorical elevations, down material wormholes, and in constant dialogue with previous research, this book contributes greatly to both human-animal literary studies specifically, and to the field of literary scholarship generally, in both an international and northern-European context.

Unspeakable Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Culture

Unspeakable Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Culture
Author: Esther Rashkin
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2008-08-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0791477975

Explores the radical political potential of close reading to make the case for a new and invigorated psychoanalytic cultural studies.

The Fantastic Other

The Fantastic Other
Author: Brett Cooke
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2022-06-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004455019

The Fantastic Other is a carefully assembled collection of essays on the increasingly significant question of alterity in modern fantasy, the ways in which the understanding and construction of the Other shapes both our art and our imagination. The collection takes a unique perspective, seeing alterity not merely as a social issue but as a biological one. Our fifteen essays cover the problems posed by the Other, which, after all, go well beyond the bounds of any single critical perspective. With this in mind, we have selected studies to show how insights from deconstruction, Marxism, feminism, and Freudian, Jungian and evolutionary psychology help us understand an issue so central to the act of reading.