Author: Gary Saul Morson Publisher: Northwestern University Press ISBN: 9780810108110 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 238
Book Description
Using Dostoevsky's most radical experiment in literary form as a springboard, Gary Saul Morson examines a number of key topics in contemporary literary theory, including the nature of literary genres and their relation to interpretation. He convincingly argues that genre is not a property of texts alone but arises from the interaction between texts and readers. Observing that changing conventions of interpretation and classifciation may alter the perception of particular works, Morson considers a number of problematic texts that have been read according to two contradictory sets of conventions - "boundary works"--And a futher group of texts - "threshold works" such as Dostoevsky's Diary of a writer - that were evidently designed by their authors to exploit this kind of hermeneutic ambivalence. Morson explores the nature of the literary utopia and its parodic form, the anti-utopia, and, returning to Dostoevsky's Diary as his example, a third form which exists as a sort of open dialogue of utopia and anti-utopia
Author: Jeffrey Kallberg Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 9780674127913 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 322
Book Description
The complex cultural status of Chopin--he was a native Pole and adopted Frenchman, a male composer writing in "feminine" genres--is the subject of Kallberg's absorbing book. Combining social history, literary theory, musicology, and feminist thought, this book situates Chopin's music within the construct of his somewhat marginal sexual identity.
Author: B. J. Hollars Publisher: U of Nebraska Press ISBN: 1496210123 Category : Literary Collections Languages : en Pages : 311
Book Description
Contemporary discussions on nonfiction are often riddled with questions about the boundaries between truth and memory, honesty and artifice, facts and lies. Just how much truth is in nonfiction? How much is a lie? Blurring the Boundaries sets out to answer such questions while simultaneously exploring the limits of the form. This collection features twenty genre-bending essays from today's most renowned teachers and writers--including original work from Michael Martone, Marcia Aldrich, Dinty W. Moore, Lia Purpura, and Robin Hemley, among others. These essays experiment with structure, style, and subject matter, and each is accompanied by the writer's personal reflection on the work itself, illuminating his or her struggles along the way. As these innovative writers stretch the limits of genre, they take us with them, offering readers a front-row seat to an ever-evolving form. Readers also receive a practical approach to craft thanks to the unique writing exercises provided by the writers themselves. Part groundbreaking nonfiction collection, part writing reference, Blurring the Boundaries serves as the ideal book for literary lovers and practitioners of the craft.
Author: Everett Zimmerman Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 9780801432514 Category : English fiction Languages : en Pages : 268
Book Description
Focusing on canonical works by Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and others, this book explains the relationship between British fiction and historical writing when both were struggling to attain status and authority. History was at once powerful and vulnerable in the empiricist climate of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, suspect because of its reliance on testimony, yet essential if empiricism were ever to move beyond natural philosophy. The Boundaries of Fiction shows how, in this time of historiographical instability, the British novel exploited analogies to history. Titles incorporating the term ?history,? pseudo-editors presenting pseudo-documentary ?evidence,? and narrative theorizing about historical truth were some of the means used to distinguish novels from the fictions of poetry and other literary forms. These efforts, Everett Zimmerman maintains, amounted to a critique of history's limits and pointed to the novel's power to transcend them. He offers rich analyses of texts central to the tradition of the novel, chiefly Clarissa, Tom Jones, and Tristram Shandy, and concludes with discussions of Sir Walter Scott's development of the historical novel and David Hume's philosophy of history. Along the way, Zimmerman refers to such other important historical figures as John Locke, Richard Bentley, William Wotton, and Edward Gibbon and engages contemporary thinkers, including Paul Ricoeur and Michel Foucault, who have addressed the philosophical and methodological issues of historical evidence and narrative.
Author: Donald M. Hassler Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press ISBN: 9781570037368 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 384
Book Description
Surveying the vast expanse of politically-charged science fiction, this book posits that the defining dilemma for these tales rests in whether identity and meaning germinate from progressive linear changes or progress, or from a continuous return to primitive realities of war, death and the competition for survival.
Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky Publisher: ISBN: Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 834
Book Description
Winner of the AATSEEL Outstanding Translation Award This is the first paperback edition of the complete collection of writings that has been called Dostoevsky's boldest experiment with literary form; it is a uniquely encyclopedic forum of fictional and nonfictional genres. The Diary's radical format was matched by the extreme range of its contents. In a single frame it incorporated an astonishing variety of material: short stories; humorous sketches; reports on sensational crimes; historical predictions; portraits of famous people; autobiographical pieces; and plans for stories, some of which were never written while others appeared in the Diary itself.
Author: Mark Ledbury Publisher: ISBN: Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 416
Book Description
This volume reinterprets the work of the dramatist Michel-Jean Sedaine and the artist Jean-Baptiste Greuze, in the context of their innovative engagement with discourses of genre in eighteenth-century France, and in the light of new archival evidence. It reveals the complexity and audacity of both men's work, and restablishes the less well-known as a figure of major importance.
Author: Catherine Villanueva Gardner Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 0429982631 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 216
Book Description
Long considered ?non-philosophical,? the letters and novels of women like Catharine Macaulay, Mary Wollstonecraft, and George Eliot have often been omitted from the canon of the Western philosophical tradition. This unfortunate omission is corrected here through Catherine Villanueva Gardner's thorough discussion of the philosophical importance of their work. Gardner also looks carefully at why letters and novels have been considered this way since they are so prevalent in the work of women in general. Gardner argues that the devaluation or exclusion of certain forms of writing is connected to the biases that underpin the Western ethical tradition. This book is critical reading for courses in introductory philosophy and women's studies.
Author: Lily K. Hoang Publisher: ISBN: Category : Literary Collections Languages : en Pages : 160
Book Description
A compilation of essays on the author's observations of life described by Wayne Koestenbaum as "a work of great subtlety, precision, intelligence, daring, and emotive keenness" -- Page [4] cover.
Author: Gary Saul Morson
Author: Jeffrey Kallberg
Author: B. J. Hollars
Author: Henry Cloud
Author: Everett Zimmerman
Author: Donald M. Hassler
Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
Author: Mark Ledbury
Author: Catherine Villanueva Gardner
Author: Lily K. Hoang