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Author: Jed Esty Publisher: OUP USA ISBN: 0199857962 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 301
Book Description
The bildungsroman, with its elegant arc charting a protagonist's progression from childhood to maturity, is one of literature's most familiar and enduring genres. Yet in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a series of novels appeared that began to upend this classical formula. Rather than moving smoothly into adulthood, the characters in these new coming of age fictions seemed to veer off course into a state of suspended or stunted adolescence.Modernist-era novels of unseasonable youth disrupt the inherited conventions of the bildungsroman in order to criticize bourgeois values and to reinvent the biographical plot, but also to explore the contradictions inherent in developmental discourses of self, nation, and empire. Narratives of world progress run up against stubborn developmental obstacles, just at the same moment that post-Darwinian racial sciences and Freudian sexological theories were lending influence to the idea that some forms of human difference cannot be mitigated by civilizing forces. In this context, the modernist bildungsroman can be seen as narrating the gradual displacement of historical-progressive thinking by anthropological-structural thinking in the Age of Empire.Jed Esty follows this fascinating line of argument through analysis of novels by Kipling, Wilde, Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Rhys, and others to reveal how intertwined tropes of frozen youth and uneven development, as motifs of failed progress, play a crucial role in the emergence of dilatory modernist style and in the re-imagination of colonial space at the fin de siecle.
Author: Jed Esty Publisher: OUP USA ISBN: 0199857962 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 301
Book Description
The bildungsroman, with its elegant arc charting a protagonist's progression from childhood to maturity, is one of literature's most familiar and enduring genres. Yet in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a series of novels appeared that began to upend this classical formula. Rather than moving smoothly into adulthood, the characters in these new coming of age fictions seemed to veer off course into a state of suspended or stunted adolescence.Modernist-era novels of unseasonable youth disrupt the inherited conventions of the bildungsroman in order to criticize bourgeois values and to reinvent the biographical plot, but also to explore the contradictions inherent in developmental discourses of self, nation, and empire. Narratives of world progress run up against stubborn developmental obstacles, just at the same moment that post-Darwinian racial sciences and Freudian sexological theories were lending influence to the idea that some forms of human difference cannot be mitigated by civilizing forces. In this context, the modernist bildungsroman can be seen as narrating the gradual displacement of historical-progressive thinking by anthropological-structural thinking in the Age of Empire.Jed Esty follows this fascinating line of argument through analysis of novels by Kipling, Wilde, Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Rhys, and others to reveal how intertwined tropes of frozen youth and uneven development, as motifs of failed progress, play a crucial role in the emergence of dilatory modernist style and in the re-imagination of colonial space at the fin de siecle.
Author: Jed Esty Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0199857970 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 320
Book Description
Unseasonable Youth examines a range of modernist-era fictions that cast doubt on the ideology of progress through the figure of stunted or endless adolescence. Novels of youth by Oscar Wilde, Olive Schreiner, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, H.G. Wells, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and Elizabeth Bowen disrupt the inherited conventions of the bildungsroman in order to criticize bourgeois values and to reinvent the biographical plot, but also to explore the contradictions inherent in mainstream developmental discourses of self, nation, and empire. The intertwined tropes of frozen youth and uneven development, as motifs of failed progress, play a crucial role in the emergence of dilatory modernist style and in the reimagination of colonial space at the fin-de-siècle. The genre-bending logic of uneven development - never wholly absent from the coming-of-age novel -- takes on a new and more intense form in modernism as it fixes its broken allegory to the problem of colonial development. In novels of unseasonable youth, the nineteenth-century idea of world progress comes up against stubborn signs of underdevelopment and uneven development, just at the same moment that post-Darwinian racial sciences and quasi-Freudian sexological discourses lend greater influence to the idea that certain forms of human difference cannot be mitigated by civilizing or developmental forces. In this historical context, the temporal meaning and social vocation of the bildungsroman undergo a comprehensive shift, as the history of the novel indexes the gradual displacement of historical-progressive thinking by anthropological-structural thinking in the Age of Empire.
Author: Rebecca Duncan Publisher: University of Wales Press ISBN: 1786832488 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 317
Book Description
The term ‘Gothic’ has rarely been brought to bear on contemporary South African fictions, appearing too fanciful for the often overtly political writing of apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa. As the first book-length exploration of Gothic impulses in South African literature, this volume accounts for the Gothic currents that run through South African imaginaries from the late-nineteenth century onwards. South African Gothic identifies an intensification in Gothic production that begins with the nascent decline of the apartheid state, and relates this to real anxieties that arise with the unfolding of social and political change. In the context of a South Africa unmaking and reshaping itself, Gothic emerges as a language for long-suppressed histories of violence, and for ongoing experiences at odds with utopian images of the new democracy. Its function is interrogative and ultimately creative: South African Gothic challenges narrow conceptions of the status quo to drive at alternative, less exclusionary visions.
Author: Marian Eide Publisher: University of Virginia Press ISBN: 0813942365 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 324
Book Description
If art is our bid to make sense of the senseless, there is hardly more fertile creative ground than that of the twentieth century. From the trench poetry of World War I and Holocaust memoirs by Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel to the post-colonial novels of southern Asia and the anti-apartheid plays of the South African Market Theater, writers have married beauty and horror. This "century of trauma" produced writing at once saturated in political violence and complicated by the ethics of aesthetic representation. Stretching across genres and the globe, Terrible Beauty charts a course of aesthetic reconciliation between empathy and evil in the great literature of the twentieth century. The "violent aesthetic"—a category the author traces back to Plato and Nietzsche—accommodates the pleasure people take not only in destruction itself but also in its rendering. As readers, we oscillate between a fascination with atrocity and an ethical imperative to bear witness. Arguing for the immersive experience of literature as particularly conducive to ethical contemplation, Marian Eide plumbs the aesthetic power and ethical purpose of this creative tension. By invoking the reader as complicit—both stricken witness and enthralled voyeur— Terrible Beauty sheds new light on the relationship between violence, literature, and the moral burdens of art.
Author: Michael Kalisch Publisher: Manchester University Press ISBN: 1526156342 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 185
Book Description
How might our friendships shape our politics? This book examines how contemporary American fiction has rediscovered the concept of civic friendship and revived a long tradition of imagining male friendship as interlinked with the promises and paradoxes of democracy in the United States. Bringing into dialogue the work of a wide range of authors – including Philip Roth, Paul Auster, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Dinaw Mengestu, and Teju Cole – this innovative study advances a compelling new account of the political and intellectual fabric of the American novel today.
Author: Lawrence Buell Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674726324 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 582
Book Description
The first book in many years to take in the full sweep of national fiction, The Dream of the Great American Novel explains why this supposedly antiquated idea continues to thrive. It shows that four G.A.N. "scripts" are keys to the dynamics of American literature and identity--and to the myth of a nation perpetually under construction.
Author: Maria Elena Paniconi Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 1351357239 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 246
Book Description
Through a close-reading of a corpus of novels featuring young protagonists in their path toward adulthood, the book shows how Bildungsroman impacted the formation of the Egyptian narrative. On a larger scale, the book helps the reader to understand the key role played by the coming of age novel in the definition and perception of modern Arab subjectivity. Exploring the role of Bildungsroman in shaping the canonical Egyptian novel, the book discusses the case of Zaynab by Muhammad Husayn Haykal (1913) as an example of early Arab Bildungsnarrative. It focuses on Latifa Zayyat’s masterpiece The Open Door and the novels of the 90es Generation, offering a gender-based analysis of the Egyptian Bildungsroman. It provides insightful readings about the function of the novel in women’s re-negotiation of social boundaries. The study shows how the stories of youth present universal themes such as the thwarted quest for love, the struggle for personal fulfilment, the desire to achieve a cultural modernity often felt as "other than self". The book is a journey in the Twentieth Century Egyptian Novel, seen through the lens of the transnational form of Bildungsroman. It is a key resource to students and academics interested in Arabic literature, comparative literature and cultural studies.
Author: Seth Abramson Publisher: Wesleyan University Press ISBN: 0819576093 Category : Poetry Languages : en Pages : 250
Book Description
BAX 2015 is the second volume of an annual literary anthology compiling the best experimental writing in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. This year’s volume, guest edited by Douglas Kearney, features seventy-five works by some of the most exciting American poets and writers today, including established authors—like Dodie Bellamy, Anselm Berrigan, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Cathy Park Hong, Bhanu Kapil, Aaron Kunin, Joyelle McSweeney, and Fred Moten—as well as emerging voices. Best American Experimental Writing is also an important literary anthology for classroom settings, as individual selections are intended to provoke lively conversation and debate. The series coeditors are Seth Abramson and Jesse Damiani.
Author: Sari Edelstein Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 0198831889 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 214
Book Description
While the field of childhood studies has blossomed in recent years, few scholars have taken up the question of age more broadly as a lens for reading American literature. Adulthood and Other Fictions shows how a diverse array of nineteenth-century writers, thinkers, and artists responded to the rise of chronological age in social and political life. Over the course of the century, age was added to the census; schools were organized around age groups; birthday cards were mass-produced; geriatrics became a medical specialty. Adulthood and Other Fictions reads American literature as a rich, critical account of this modern culture of age, and it examines how our most well-known writers registeredand often resistedage expectations, particularly as they applied to women and people of color. More than simply adding age to the list of identity categories that have become de rigeur sites of scholarly attention, Adulthood and Other Fictions argues that these other measures of social location (race, gender, sexuality, class) are largely legible through the seemingly more natural and essential identity defined by age. That is, longstanding cultural ideals about maturity and development anchor ideologies of heterosexuality, race, nationalism, and capitalism, and in this sense, age rhetoric serves as one of our most pervasive disciplinary discourses. Writers including Louisa May Alcott, Frederick Douglass, and Henry James anticipated the ageism of our moment, but they also recognized how age norms both structure and limit the lives of individuals at all points on the age continuum. Ultimately, the volume argues for an intersectional understanding of age that challenges the celebration of independence and autonomy imbricated in US fantasies of adulthood and in American identity itself.
Author: Jed Esty
Author: Jed Esty
Author: Jed Esty
Author: Rebecca Duncan
Author: Marian Eide
Author: Michael Kalisch
Author: Lawrence Buell
Author: Maria Elena Paniconi
Author: Rachel Farebrother
Author: Seth Abramson
Author: Sari Edelstein