The Role of Place in Literature

The Role of Place in Literature
Author: Leonard Lutwack
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Total Pages: 296
Release: 1984-05-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780815623052

The Role of Place in Literature is a groundbreaking study exploring the use of metaphors and images of place in literature. Lutwack takes a dynamic view of the relationship between place and the action or thought in a work. Drawing comparisons over a wide range of works, principally American and British literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he illustrates how writers have charged different environments with symbolic and psychological meaning.

Place in Literature

Place in Literature
Author: Roberto Maria Dainotto
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2000
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780801436833

Since the 1840s, when Victorian England emerged into the modern era and industrial cities became the new cultural centers, regionalist literature has posited itself as an aesthetic alternative to nationalist culture. Yet what differentiates regionalism's claims of authenticity, derived from blood and soil, from those of nationalism? Through close readings and theoretical elaborations, Roberto M. Dainotto reveals the degree to which regionalism mimics nationalism in valorizing ethnic purity. He interprets regionalism not as a genre in the pastoral tradition but as a rhetorical trope, a way of reading in which regionalism figures as the "other" against a historical process that disrupts the organic wholeness of place. Dainotto traces the genealogy of the idea of place in literature, examining European texts from Victorian England to Fascist Italy. He finds, for example, in Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native a virtual thesaurus of regionalist commonplaces. Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South mediates between Madame de Stal's privileging of the sophisticated north and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's nostalgia for the naive south. The regionalism of the Sicilian philosopher Giovanni Gentile exhibits a deep longing for the humanities as they define Italy and Western culture. Dainotto concludes with a close look at the rhetoric of Nazism and Fascism, dramatizing the convergence of regionalist aesthetics and nationalist ideology in Italy and Germany between the two World Wars.

Space, Place, and Landscape in Ancient Greek Literature and Culture

Space, Place, and Landscape in Ancient Greek Literature and Culture
Author: Kate Gilhuly
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2014-09-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 1139992716

This book brings together a collection of original essays that engage with cultural geography and landscape studies to produce new ways of understanding place, space, and landscape in Greek literature from the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. The authors draw on an eclectic collection of contemporary approaches to bring the study of ancient Greek literature into dialogue with the burgeoning discussion of spatial theory in the humanities. The essays in this volume treat a variety of textual spaces, from the intimate to the expansive: the bedroom, ritual space, the law courts, theatrical space, the poetics of the city, and the landscape of war. And yet, all of the contributions are united by an interest in recuperating some of the many ways in which the ancient Greeks in the archaic and classical periods invested places with meaning and in how the representation of place links texts to social practices.

Tears of a Tiger

Tears of a Tiger
Author: Sharon M. Draper
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 25
Release: 2013-07-23
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1442489138

The death of high school basketball star Rob Washington in an automobile accident affects the lives of his close friend Andy, who was driving the car, and many others in the school.

Is Nothing Sacred?

Is Nothing Sacred?
Author: Salman Rushdie
Publisher: Penguin Group
Total Pages: 24
Release: 1990
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN:

Out of the Dust (Scholastic Gold)

Out of the Dust (Scholastic Gold)
Author: Karen Hesse
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2012-09-01
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 0545517125

Acclaimed author Karen Hesse's Newbery Medal-winning novel-in-verse explores the life of fourteen-year-old Billie Jo growing up in the dust bowls of Oklahoma. Out of the Dust joins the Scholastic Gold line, which features award-winning and beloved novels. Includes exclusive bonus content!"Dust piles up like snow across the prairie. . . ."A terrible accident has transformed Billie Jo's life, scarring her inside and out. Her mother is gone. Her father can't talk about it. And the one thing that might make her feel better -- playing the piano -- is impossible with her wounded hands.To make matters worse, dust storms are devastating the family farm and all the farms nearby. While others flee from the dust bowl, Billie Jo is left to find peace in the bleak landscape of Oklahoma -- and in the surprising landscape of her own heart.

A White Heron

A White Heron
Author: Sarah Orne Jewett
Publisher: Trond Knutsen
Total Pages: 284
Release: 1886
Genre: New England
ISBN:

The Dictionary of Imaginary Places

The Dictionary of Imaginary Places
Author: Alberto Manguel
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Total Pages: 780
Release: 2000
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780156008723

Describes and visualizes over 1,200 magical lands found in literature and film, discussing such exotic realms as Atlantis, Tolkien's Middle Earth, and Oz.

Space and Time in Language and Literature

Space and Time in Language and Literature
Author: Lovorka Gruić Grmuša
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 175
Release: 2009-10-02
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1443815098

Space and time, their infiniteness and/or their limit(ation)s, their coding, conceptualization and the relationship between the two, have been intriguing people for millennia. Linguistics and literature are no exceptions in this sense. This book brings together eight essays which all deal with the expression of space and/or time in language and/or literature. The book explores the issues of space, time and their interrelation from two different perspectives: the linguistic and the literary. The first section—Time and Space in Language—contains four papers which focus on linguistics, i.e. explore issues relative to the expression of time and space in natural languages. The topics under consideration include: typology regarding the expression of spatial information in languages around the world (Ch.1), space as expressed and conceptualized in neutral, postural and verbs of fictive motion (Ch. 2), prepositional semantics (Ch.3), aspectuality (in Tamil, Ch. 4). All articles propose innovative topics and/or approaches, crossreferring when possible between space and time. Given that all seem to propose at least some elements of “language universality” vs. “language variability”, the strong cognitivist nature of the approach (even when the paper is not written within a cognitive linguistic framework) represents a particularly strong feature of the section, with a strong appeal to experts from fields that need not necessarily be linguistic. The second section of this volume—Space and Time in Literature—brings together four essays dealing with literary topics. Inherent in each narrative are both temporal and spatial implications because a literary text testifies of a certain time, it is from and about a certain period, as well as about a certain space, even if virtual. A particularly strong feature of these papers is that they envision space and time as complementary parameters of experience and not as conceptual opposites, following the transfer of perspective through the whole century. Departing from the late nineteenth century England’s and Croatia’s fictive spaces (Ch. 5), the topic moves via the American Southern Gothic, focusing on Faulkner from the thirties to the early sixties (Ch. 6), via the post-WWII perspectives on history, probing the postmodern context of temporality (Ch 7), to finally reach the contemporary era of post 9/11 space-time (Ch 8). The voyage from chapter five to eight is thus a journey through space and time that allows for some answers to the nature of reality (of a variety of space-times) as conceived by both the authors of these essays as well as by the authors that these essays discuss. The main goal of the editors has been to bring together different scientific traditions which can contribute complementary concerns and methodologies to the issues under exam; from the literary and descriptive via the diachronic and typological explorations all the way to cognitive (linguistic) analyses, bordering psycholinguistics and neuroscience. One of the strengths of this volume thus lies in the diversity of perspectives articulated within it, where the agreements, but also the controversies and divergences demonstrate constant changes in society which, in turn, shapes our views of space-time/reality. All this also suggests that science and literature are not above or apart from their culture, but embedded within it, and that there exists a strong relativistic interrelation between (spatio-temporal) reality and culture. The only hope to objectively envisage any if not all of the above, is by learning how to move (our thought) through space, time or, to put it in simpler terms, how to shift perspectives.