Reconfigurations of the Bildungsroman

Reconfigurations of the Bildungsroman
Author: Gonçalo Cholant
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 526
Release: 2022-06-21
Genre: Science
ISBN: 3110752840

The present work deals with the representation of trauma and violence in coming-of-age stories written by African-American and Afro-Caribbean women authors in the United States. The kinds of violence explored in this work are related to the post-colonial condition the women protagonists experience, in which racism, sexism, classism, among other kinds of discrimination, are co-created in an intersectional experience of oppression. The titles analyzed in this work are: Lucy (1990), written by Jamaica Kincaid; Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), written by Edwidge Danticat; Bone Black – Memories of Girlhood (1996), written by bell hooks; and God Help the Child (2015), written by Toni Morrison. The Bildungsroman genre serves as the form with which the authors are able to display the different forms of violence experienced during the the process of growing up female and black in the United States, and also in the Caribbean islands of Antigua and Haiti, in the cases of Kincaid and Danticat respectively. The coming-of-age stories written by women, and more specifically by African-American and Afro-Caribbean women, tend to showcase narratives in which the tensions between the protagonists' self-determination and the influence of social and cultural factors in their development opportunities are negotiated. The genre is adapted and subverted by the authors, deviating from its canonical European origins, becoming a site in which the authors are able to represent different kinds of violence, and the subsequent traumatic consequences caused by it.

Sciences of Modernism

Sciences of Modernism
Author: Paul Peppis
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2014-02-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1107660084

Sciences of Modernism examines key points of contact between British literature and the human sciences of ethnography, sexology and psychology at the dawn of the twentieth century. The book is divided into sections that pair exemplary scientific texts from the period with literary ones, charting numerous collaborations and competitions occurring between science and early modernist literature. Paul Peppis investigates this exchange through close readings of literary works by Claude McKay, E. M. Forster, Mina Loy, Rebecca West and Wilfred Owen, alongside science books by Alfred Haddon, Havelock Ellis, Marie Stopes, Bernard Hart and William Brown. In so doing, Peppis shows how these competing disciplines participated in the formation and consolidation of modernism as a broad cultural movement across a range of critical discourses. His study will interest students and scholars of the history of science, literary modernism, and English literature more broadly.

Palgrave Advances in Virginia Woolf Studies

Palgrave Advances in Virginia Woolf Studies
Author: A. Snaith
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2007-03-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0230206042

This book is an invaluable guide to the body of criticism on Virginia Woolf. It includes comprehensive and insightful chapters on different approaches to Woolf, including feminist, historicist, postcolonial and biographical. The essays provide concise summaries of the key works in the field as well as an engaging description of the approach itself.

Landscapes of Realism

Landscapes of Realism
Author: Svend Erik Larsen
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 798
Release: 2022-03-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9027257965

Few literary phenomena are as elusive and yet as persistent as realism. While it responds to the perennial impulse to use literature to reflect on experience, it also designates a specific set of literary and artistic practices that emerged in response to Western modernity. Landscapes of Realism is a two-volume collaborative interdisciplinary investigation of this vast territory, bringing together leading-edge new criticism on the realist paradigms that were first articulated in nineteenth-century Europe but have since gone on globally to transform the literary landscape. Tracing the manifold ways in which these paradigms are developed, discussed and contested across time, space, cultures and media, this second volume shows in its four core essays and twenty-four case studies four major pathways through the landscapes of realism: The psychological pathways focusing on emotion and memory, the referential pathways highlighting the role of materiality, the formal pathways demonstrating the dynamics of formal experiments, and the geographical pathways exploring the worlding of realism through the encounters between European and non-European languages from the nineteenth century to the present.This volume is part of a book set which can be ordered at a special discount:

Canis Modernis

Canis Modernis
Author: Karalyn Kendall-Morwick
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2020-12-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0271088389

Modernist literature might well be accused of going to the dogs. From the strays wandering the streets of Dublin in James Joyce’s Ulysses to the highbred canine subject of Virginia Woolf’s Flush, dogs populate a range of modernist texts. In many ways, the dog in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries became a potent symbol of the modern condition—facing, like the human species, the problem of adapting to modernizing forces that relentlessly outpaced it. Yet the dog in literary modernism does not function as a stand-in for the human. In this book, Karalyn Kendall-Morwick examines the human-dog relationship in modernist works by Virginia Woolf, Jack London, Albert Payson Terhune, J. R. Ackerley, and Samuel Beckett, among others. Drawing from the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin and the scientific, literary, and philosophical work of Donna Haraway, Temple Grandin, and Carrie Rohman, she makes a case for the dog as a coevolutionary and coadapting partner of humans. As our coevolutionary partners, dogs destabilize the human: not the autonomous, self-transparent subject of Western humanism, the human is instead contingent, shaped by its material interactions with other species. By demonstrating how modernist representations of dogs ultimately mongrelize the human, this book reveals dogs’ status both as instigators of the crisis of the modern subject and as partners uniquely positioned to help humans adapt to the turbulent forces of modernization. Accessibly written and convincingly argued, this study shows how dogs challenge the autonomy of the human subject and the humanistic underpinnings of traditional literary forms. It will find favor with students and scholars of modernist literature and animal studies.

The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature

The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature
Author: Franco Moretti
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2013-06-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 178168085X

Who – and what – are the Bourgeois? “The bourgeois ... Not so long ago, this notion seemed indispensable to social analysis; these days, one might go years without hearing it mentioned. Capitalism is more powerful than ever, but its human embodiment seems to have vanished. ‘I am a member of the bourgeois class, feel myself to be such, and have been brought up on its opinions and ideals,’ wrote Max Weber, in 1895. Who could repeat these words today? Bourgeois ‘opinions and ideals’—what are they?” Thus begins Franco Moretti’s study of the bourgeois in modern European literature—a major new analysis of the once-dominant culture and its literary decline and fall. Moretti’s gallery of individual portraits is entwined with the analysis of specific keywords—“useful” and “earnest,” “efficiency,” “influence,” “comfort,” “roba”—and of the formal mutations of the medium of prose. From the “working master” of the opening chapter, through the seriousness of nineteenth-century novels, the conservative hegemony of Victorian Britain, the “national malformations” of the Southern and Eastern periphery, and the radical self-critique of Ibsen’s twelve-play cycle, the book charts the vicissitudes of bourgeois culture, exploring the causes for its historical weakness, and for its current irrelevance.

Family Fictions and World Making

Family Fictions and World Making
Author: Sreya Chatterjee
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2021-04-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 100036559X

Family Fictions and World Making: Irish and Indian Women’s Writing in the Contemporary Era is the first book-length comparative study of family novels from Ireland and India. On the one hand, despite an early as well as late colonial experience, Ireland is often viewed exclusively within a metropolitan British and Europe-centered frame. India, on the other hand, once seen as a model of decolonization for the non-Western world, has witnessed a crisis of democracy in recent years. This book charts the idea of "world making" through the fraught itineraries of the Irish and the Indian family novel. The novels discussed in the book foreground kinship based on ideological rather than biological ties and recast the family as a nucleus of interests across national borders. The book considers the work of critically acclaimed women authors Anne Enright, Elizabeth Bowen, Mahasweta Devi, Jennifer Johnston, Kiran Desai and Molly Keane. These writers are explored as representative voices for the interwar years, the late-modern period, and the globalization era. They not only push back against the male nationalist idiom of the family but also successfully interrogate family fiction as a supposedly private genre. The broad timeframe of Family Fictions and World Making from the interwar period to the globalization era initiates a dialogue between the early and the current debates around core and periphery in postcolonial literature.