Time, the City, and the Literary Imagination

Time, the City, and the Literary Imagination
Author: Anne-Marie Evans
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2020-11-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3030559610

Time, the City, and the Literary Imagination explores the relationship between the constructions and representations of the relationship between time and the city in literature published between the late eighteenth century and the present. This collection offers a new way of reading the literary city by tracing the ways in which the relationship between time and urban space can shape literary narratives and forms. The essays consider the representation of a range of literary cities from across the world and consider how an understanding of time, and time passing, can impact on our understanding of the primary texts. Literature necessarily deals with time, both as a function of storytelling and as an experience of reading. In this volume, the contributions demonstrate how literature about cities brings to the forefront the relationship between individual and communal experience and time.

Playing in the Dark

Playing in the Dark
Author: Toni Morrison
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 86
Release: 2007-07-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0307388638

An immensely persuasive work of literary criticism that opens a new chapter in the American dialogue on race—and promises to change the way we read American literature—from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner Morrison shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that was manifestly unfree--and that came to serve white authors as embodiments of their own fears and desires. According to the Chicago Tribune, Morrison "reimagines and remaps the possibility of America." Her brilliant discussions of the "Africanist" presence in the fiction of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemingway leads to a dramatic reappraisal of the essential characteristics of our literary tradition. Written with the artistic vision that has earned the Nobel Prize-winning author a pre-eminent place in modern letters, Playing in the Dark is an invaluable read for avid Morrison admirers as well as students, critics, and scholars of American literature.

Goodness and the Literary Imagination

Goodness and the Literary Imagination
Author: Toni Morrison
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2019-10-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0813943639

What exactly is goodness? Where is it found in the literary imagination? Toni Morrison, one of American letters’ greatest voices, pondered these perplexing questions in her celebrated Ingersoll Lecture, delivered at Harvard University in 2012 and published now for the first time in book form. Perhaps because it is overshadowed by the more easily defined evil, goodness often escapes our attention. Recalling many literary examples, from Ahab to Coetzee’s Michael K, Morrison seeks the essence of goodness and ponders its significant place in her writing. She considers the concept in relation to unforgettable characters from her own works of fiction and arrives at conclusions that are both eloquent and edifying. In a lively interview conducted for this book, Morrison further elaborates on her lecture’s ideas, discussing goodness not only in literature but in society and history—particularly black history, which has responded to centuries of brutality with profound creativity. Morrison’s essay is followed by a series of responses by scholars in the fields of religion, ethics, history, and literature to her thoughts on goodness and evil, mercy and love, racism and self-destruction, language and liberation, together with close examination of literary and theoretical expressions from her works. Each of these contributions, written by a scholar of religion, considers the legacy of slavery and how it continues to shape our memories, our complicities, our outcries, our lives, our communities, our literature, and our faith. In addition, the contributors engage the religious orientation in Morrison’s novels so that readers who encounter her many memorable characters such as Sula, Beloved, or Frank Money will learn and appreciate how Morrison’s notions of goodness and mercy also reflect her understanding of the sacred and the human spirit.

City of 201 Gods

City of 201 Gods
Author: Jacob Olupona
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 355
Release: 2011-12-13
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0520265564

The author focuses on one of the most important religious centers in Africa: the Yoruba city of Ile-Ife in southwest Nigeria. The spread of Yoruba traditions in the African diaspora has come to define the cultural identity of millions of black and white people in Brazil, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Trinidad, and the United States. He describes how the city went from great prominence to near obliteration and then rose again as a contemporary city of gods. Throughout, he corroborates the indispensable linkages between religion, cosmology, migration, and kinship as espoused in the power of royal lineages, hegemonic state structure, gender, and the Yoruba sense of place.

Languages of the Night

Languages of the Night
Author: Barry McCrea
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 198
Release: 2015-03-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0300190565

This book argues that the sudden decline of old rural vernaculars – such as French patois, Italian dialects, and the Irish language – caused these languages to become the objects of powerful longings and projections that were formative of modernist writing. Seán Ó Ríordáin in Ireland and Pier Paolo Pasolini in Italy reshaped minor languages to use as private idioms of poetry; the revivalist conception of Irish as a lost, perfect language deeply affected the work of James Joyce; the disappearing dialects of northern France seemed to Marcel Proust to offer an escape from time itself. Drawing on a broad range of linguistic and cultural examples to present a major reevaluation of the origins and meaning of European literary modernism, Barry McCrea shows how the vanishing languages of the European countryside influenced metropolitan literary culture in fundamental ways.

Imagined Cities

Imagined Cities
Author: Robert Alter
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 199
Release: 2008-10-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0300127073

In Imagined Cities, Robert Alter traces the arc of literary development triggered by the runaway growth of urban centers from the early nineteenth century through the first two decades of the twentieth. As new technologies and arrangements of public and private space changed the ways people experienced time and space, the urban panorama became less coherent—a metropolis defying traditional representation and definition, a vast jumble of shifting fragments and glimpses—and writers were compelled to create new methods for conveying the experience of the city.In a series of subtle and convincing interpretations of novels by Flaubert, Dickens, Bely, Woolf, Joyce, and Kafka, Alter reveals the ways the city entered the literary imagination. He shows how writers of diverse imaginative temperaments developed innovative techniques to represent shifts in modern consciousness. Writers sought more than a journalistic representation of city living, he argues, and to convey meaningfully the reality of the metropolis, the city had to be re-created or reimagined. His book probes the literary response to changing realities of the period and contributes significantly to our understanding of the history of the Western imagination.

Fate and Prognostication in the Chinese Literary Imagination

Fate and Prognostication in the Chinese Literary Imagination
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2020-04-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004427570

The essays collected in Fate and Prognostication in the Chinese Literary Imagination deal with the philosophical, psychological, gender and cultural issues in the Chinese conception of fate as represented in literary texts and films, with a focus placed on human efforts to solve the riddles of fate prediction. Viewed in this light, the collected essays unfold a meandering landscape of the popular imaginary in Chinese beliefs and customs. The chapters in this book represent concerted efforts in research originated from a project conducted at the International Consortium for Research in the Humanities at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. Contributors are Michael Lackner, Kwok-kan Tam, Monika Gaenssbauer, Terry Siu-han Yip, Xie Qun, Roland Altenburger, Jessica Tsui-yan Li, Kaby Wing-Sze Kung, Nicoletta Pesaro, Yan Xu-Lackner, and Anna Wing Bo Tso.

Literary Urban Studies and How to Practice It

Literary Urban Studies and How to Practice It
Author: Jason Finch
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2021-11-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 100046752X

Literary Urban Studies and How to Practice It is the first textbook in literary urban studies (LUS). It illuminates and investigates this exciting field, which has grown since the humanities’ ‘spatial turn’ of the 1990s and 2000s. The book introduces city literature, urban methods of reading, classics in LUS and new directions in the field. It outlines the located qualities of literary narratives, texts and events through three units. First, the concept of the city and the main methods and terms needed as tools for investigating city literatures are introduced. A second section, ordered historically, shows how notions like pre-modern, realist, modernist, postcolonial and planetary actually work in nuanced explorations of actual writers, texts and places. The third unit covers literary urban modes: fictional and non-fictional prose in multiple genres; poetry and the idea of the city; dramatic city representation and the theatre as urban place. Multiple key categories of place are explored: the sacred spaces of religion; entry points such as railway stations and junctions; residential areas such as the ‘slum’, suburb and mass housing district; hubs of publishing and performance; categories of city such as the port and resort. In each chapter key terms, reflection questions and tasks labelled ‘Research It’ support reference and learning. Some Research It tasks enable readers to enter new areas of LUS by engaging with neighbouring disciplines like human geography, cultural history, sociology and urban studies. Others equip users by sharpening particular skills of writing or documentation. A thorough glossary of key terms and concepts aids the reader. Literary Urban Studies and How to Practice It is designed for application to literatures and cities in any period and part of the world. Armed with it, humanities researchers at any career stage can develop their interdisciplinary skills and ability to participate in activism and public debates while becoming specialised in LUS. The book is a gateway to practicing LUS and spatial literary research.

The Literary Imagination from Erasmus Darwin to H.G. Wells

The Literary Imagination from Erasmus Darwin to H.G. Wells
Author: Michael R. Page
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2016-03-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 131702527X

At the close of the eighteenth century, Erasmus Darwin declared that he would 'enlist the imagination under the banner of science,' beginning, Michael Page argues, a literary narrative on questions of evolution, ecology, and technological progress that would extend from the Romantic through the Victorian periods. Examining the interchange between emerging scientific ideas-specifically evolution and ecology-new technologies, and literature in nineteenth-century Britain, Page shows how British writers from Darwin to H.G. Wells confronted the burgeoning expansion of scientific knowledge that was radically redefining human understanding and experience of the natural world, of human species, and of the self. The wide range of authors covered in Page's ambitious study permits him to explore an impressive array of topics that include the role of the Romantic era in the molding of scientific and cultural perspectives; the engagement of William Wordsworth and Percy Shelley with questions raised by contemporary science; Mary Shelley's conflicted views on the unfolding prospects of modernity; and how Victorian writers like Charles Kingsley, Samuel Butler, and W.H. Hudson responded to the implications of evolutionary theory. Page concludes with the scientific romances of H.G. Wells, to demonstrate how evolutionary fantasies reached the pinnacle of synthesis between evolutionary science and the imagination at the close of the century.

The Cambridge History of American Literature: Volume 7, Prose Writing, 1940-1990

The Cambridge History of American Literature: Volume 7, Prose Writing, 1940-1990
Author: Sacvan Bercovitch
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 824
Release: 1994
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780521497329

Volume VII of the Cambridge History of American Literature examines a broad range of American literature of the past half-century, revealing complex relations to changes in society. Christopher Bigsby discusses American dramatists from Tennessee Williams to August Wilson, showing how innovations in theatre anticipated a world of emerging countercultures and provided America with an alternative view of contemporary life. Morris Dickstein describes the condition of rebellion in fiction from 1940 to 1970, linking writers as diverse as James Baldwin and John Updike. John Burt examines writers of the American South, describing the tensions between modernization and continued entanglements with the past. Wendy Steiner examines the postmodern fictions since 1970, and shows how the questioning of artistic assumptions has broadened the canon of American literature. Finally, Cyrus Patell highlights the voices of Native American, Asian American, Chicano, gay and lesbian writers, often marginalized but here discussed within and against a broad set of national traditions.