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Volume Editors: and
Unlike many recent Joyce studies, De-familiarizing Readings eschews the theoretical and ideological and instead plants itself on firmer ground. Its seven outstanding Joyce scholars share a love of the “stuff” of texts, contexts, and intertexts: data and dates, food and clothing, letters and journals, literary allusions, and other quotidian desiderata. Their inductive approaches - whether to Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist, Ulysses, or Finnegans Wake - are thoroughly researched, argued with meticulous, even nit-picking, precision, and offer the pleasurable reading experience of forensic analysis. And in the end they provide the satisfaction of reaching persuasive conclusions that seem both striking and inevitable.
Domestic Politics and the American Novel of World War I
Author:
Embattled Home Fronts is an inquiry into the highly conflicted US American experience of World War I as it plays itself out in the diverse body of novelistic works to which it has given rise and by which it has been, in turn, shaped and commemorated. As such, this book naturally concerns itself with the formal aspects of artistic war representation. But rather than merely endeavoring to illustrate how American writers from various backgrounds chose to depict World War I, the present work seeks to uncover the particular ideologies and political practices that inform these representational choices.
To this end, Embattled Home Fronts examines both canonized and marginalized US American World War I novels within the context of contemporaneous debates over shifting class, gender, and race relations. The book contends that American literary representations of the Great War are shaped less by universal insights into modern society’s self-destructiveness than by concerted efforts to fashion class-, gender-, and race-specific experiences of warfare in ways that stabilize and heighten political group identities. In moving beyond the customary focus on ironic war representations, Embattled Home Fronts illustrates that the representational and ideological battles fought within American World War I literature not only shed light on the emergence of powerful identity-political concepts such as the New Woman and the New Negro, but also speak to the reappearance of utopian, communitarian, and social protest fictions in the early 1930s.
This study Embattled Home Fronts provides a new understanding of the relationship between war literature and home front politics that should be of interest to students and scholars working from a variety of disciplines and perspectives
Volume Editors: and
The apparent self-sufficiency of joie de vivre means that, despite the widespread use of the phrase since the late nineteenth century, the concept has rarely been explored critically. Joie de vivre does not readily surrender itself to examination, for it is in a sense too busy being what it is. However, as the essays in this collection reveal, joie de vivre can be as complex and variable a state as the more negative emotions or experiences that art and literature habitually evoke. This volume provides an urgently needed study of an intriguing and under-explored area of French literature and culture from the Middle Ages to the contemporary era. While the range and content of contributions embraces linguistics, literature, art, sport and politics, the starting point is, like that of the term joie de vivre itself, in French language and culture.
This volume will be of special interest to researchers across the full range of French studies, from literature and language to cultural studies. It will be of direct appeal to specialist readers, university libraries, graduate and undergraduate students, and general readers with a lively interest in French literature and culture of the medieval, early modern and broad modern periods. This book’s fresh perspectives on the theme of joie de vivre and its relation to questions of privacy, contemplation, voyeurism, feasting and nationhood will also be of relevance to researchers in comparative and cognate disciplines.
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Best known as the author of The French Lieutenant’s Woman and The Magus, John Fowles achieved both critical and popular success as a writer of profound and provocative fiction. In this innovative new study, Brooke Lenz reconsiders Fowles’ controversial contributions to feminist thought. Combining literary criticism and feminist standpoint theory, John Fowles: Visionary and Voyeur examines the problems that women readers and feminist critics encounter in Fowles’ frequently voyeuristic fiction.
Over the course of his career, this book argues, Fowles progressively created women characters who subvert voyeuristic exploitation and who author alternative narratives through which they can understand their experiences, cope with oppressive dominant systems, and envision more authentic and just communities. Especially in the later novels, Fowles’ women characters offer progressive alternative approaches to self-awareness, interpersonal relationships, and social reform – despite Fowles’ problematic idealization of women and even his self-professed “cruelty” to the women in his own life. This volume will be of interest to critics and readers of contemporary fiction, but most of all, to men and women who seek a progressive, inclusive feminism.
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Offspring Fictions: Salman Rushdie’s Family Novels is the first book-length study that examines families and especially the parent-child relationship in Rushdie’s core works. It argues that Sigmund Freud’s concept of the family and the author’s variations thereon are central to a full understanding of the four novels Midnight’s Children, Shame, the controversial The Satanic Verses and The Moor’s Last Sigh, a quasi-sequel to Rushdie’s first success. Through close readings that make use of a variety of critical approaches, Offspring Fictions provides a sustained examination of how the parents and children that people Rushdie’s fictions reflect the larger issues his work is concerned with: nationalism, religion, history and authorship. Aimed primarily at academics and students, but also of interest to the general reader, Offspring Fictions provides a clear and insightful analysis of Rushdie’s family tetralogy.
Fourteen Hard Questions and Straight Answers about a Baltic Country
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What do we know about Latvia and the Latvians? A Baltic (not Balkan) nation that emerged from fifty years under the Soviet Union – interrupted by a brief but brutal Nazi-German occupation and a devastating war – now a member of the European Union and NATO. Yes, but what else? Relentless accusations keep appearing, especially in Russian media, often repeated in the West: “Latvian soldiers single-handedly saved Lenin’s revolution in 1917”, “Latvians killed Tsar Nikolai II and the Royal family”, “Latvia was a thoroughly anti-Semitic country and Latvians started killing Jews even before the Germans arrived in 1941”, “Nazi revival is rampant in today's Latvia”, “The Russian minority is persecuted in Latvia...”
True, false or in-between? The Finnish journalist and author Jukka Rislakki examines charges like these and provides an outline of Latvia's recent history while attempting to separate documented historical fact from misinformation and deliberate disinformation. His analysis helps to explain why the Baltic States (population 7 million) consistently top the enemy lists in public opinion polls of Russia (143 million). His knowledge of the Baltic languages allows him to make use of local sources and up-to-date historical research. He is a former Baltic States correspondent for Finland's largest daily newspaper Helsingin Sanomat and the author of several books on Finnish and Latvian history. As a neutral, experienced and often critical observer, Rislakki is uniquely qualified for the task of separating truth from fiction.
The various Christian, Muslim, traditional (African), and secular (Western) ways of imagining and coping with evil collected in this volume have several things in common. The most crucial perhaps and certainly the most striking aspect is the problem of defining the nature or characteristics of evil as such. Some argue that evil has an essence that remains constant, whereas others say its interpretation depends on time and place.
However much religious and secular interpretations of evil may have changed, the human search for sense and meaning never ends. Questions of whom to blame and whom to address—God, the devil, fate, bad luck, or humans—remain at the center of our explanations and our strategies to comprehend, define, counter, or process the evil we do and the evil done to us by people, God, nature, or accident. Using approaches from cultural anthropology, religious studies, theology, philosophy, psychology, and history, the contributors to this volume analyze how several religious and secular traditions imagine and cope with evil.
Sexuality and Literary Genre in the Works of Marguerite Yourcenar and Julien Green
At the Periphery of the Center is the first comparison of two of France’s most important twentieth-century authors, Julien Green and Marguerite Yourcenar. It examines textual elements in their plays and novels to draw conclusions about the ways that they represent homosexuality in their texts. Both Yourcenar and Green turned to drama to explore aspects of same-sex desire that they felt unable to express in their prose. The analysis of their plays shows that an emphasis on dialogue and action makes drama a particularly appropriate genre for writing about homosexuality because it affords an author distance and therefore protection from the “proclivities” of his characters. The chapters on the novel show, by contrast, how prose fiction allows an author to explain a character's sexuality with a degree of subtlety difficult to achieve in theatre. Variations in narration and paratext allow writers to avoid condemning discourses and to find an original means of expression instead. At the Periphery brings a new, textually centered approach to Green’s and Yourcenar’s works that is unlike the psychological analyses that often typify queer readings. It will be of great interest to scholars of twentieth-century French literature and of Gender Studies. The book will also appeal to non-academic readers, however, since it is about two French authors who were also American citizens and who wrote about US history and contemporary culture.