Childhood In The Contemporary English Novel

Childhood In The Contemporary English Novel Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle version is available to download in english. Read online anytime anywhere directly from your device. Click on the download button below to get a free pdf file of Childhood In The Contemporary English Novel book. This book definitely worth reading, it is an incredibly well-written.

Childhood in the Contemporary English Novel

Author : Sandra Dinter
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 55,7 Mb
Release : 2019-09
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 0367361930

Get Book

Childhood in the Contemporary English Novel by Sandra Dinter Pdf

Since the 1980s novels about childhood for adults have been a booming genre within the contemporary British literary market. Childhood in the Contemporary English Novel offers the first comprehensive study of this literary trend. Assembling analyses of key works by Ian McEwan, Doris Lessing, P. D. James, Nick Hornby, Sarah Moss and Stephen Kelman and situating them in their cultural and political contexts, Sandra Dinter uncovers both the reasons for the current popularity of such fiction and the theoretical shift that distinguishes it from earlier literary epochs. The book's central argument is that the contemporary English novel draws on the constructivist paradigm shift that revolutionised the academic study of childhood several decades ago. Contemporary works of fiction, Dinter argues, depart from the notion of childhood as a naturally given phase of life and examine the agents, interests and conflicts involved in its cultural production. Dinter also considers the limits of this new theoretical impetus, observing that authors and scholars alike, even when they claim to conceive of childhood as a construct, do not always give up on the idea of its 'natural' core. Accordingly, this book reconstructs how the English novel between the 1980s and the 2010s oscillates between an acknowledgment of constructivism and an endorsement of childhood as the last irrevocable quintessence of humanity. In doing so, it successfully extends the literary and cultural history of childhood to the immediate present.

Childhood in the Contemporary English Novel

Author : Sandra Dinter
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 364 pages
File Size : 43,5 Mb
Release : 2019-10-10
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781000692051

Get Book

Childhood in the Contemporary English Novel by Sandra Dinter Pdf

Since the 1980s novels about childhood for adults have been a booming genre within the contemporary British literary market. Childhood in the Contemporary English Novel offers the first comprehensive study of this literary trend. Assembling analyses of key works by Ian McEwan, Doris Lessing, P. D. James, Nick Hornby, Sarah Moss and Stephen Kelman and situating them in their cultural and political contexts, Sandra Dinter uncovers both the reasons for the current popularity of such fiction and the theoretical shift that distinguishes it from earlier literary epochs. The book’s central argument is that the contemporary English novel draws on the constructivist paradigm shift that revolutionised the academic study of childhood several decades ago. Contemporary works of fiction, Dinter argues, depart from the notion of childhood as a naturally given phase of life and examine the agents, interests and conflicts involved in its cultural production. Dinter also considers the limits of this new theoretical impetus, observing that authors and scholars alike, even when they claim to conceive of childhood as a construct, do not always give up on the idea of its ‘natural’ core. Accordingly, this book reconstructs how the English novel between the 1980s and the 2010s oscillates between an acknowledgment of constructivism and an endorsement of childhood as the last irrevocable quintessence of humanity. In doing so, it successfully extends the literary and cultural history of childhood to the immediate present.

The Child in British Literature

Author : A. Gavin
Publisher : Springer
Page : 266 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2012-02-20
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780230361867

Get Book

The Child in British Literature by A. Gavin Pdf

The first volume to consider childhood over eight centuries of British writing, this book traces the literary child from medieval to contemporary texts. Written by international experts, the volume's essays challenge earlier readings of childhood and offer fascinating contributions to the current upsurge of interest in constructions of childhood.

Contemporary English-Language Indian Children's Literature

Author : Michelle Superle
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 228 pages
File Size : 53,6 Mb
Release : 2011-05-09
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781136720864

Get Book

Contemporary English-Language Indian Children's Literature by Michelle Superle Pdf

Concurrent with increasing scholarly attention toward national children’s literatures, Contemporary English-language Indian Children’s Literature explores an emerging body of work that has thus far garnered little serious critical attention. Superle critically examines the ways Indian children’s writers have represented childhood in relation to the Indian nation, Indian cultural identity, and Indian girlhood. From a framework of postcolonial and feminist theories, children’s novels published between 1988 and 2008 in India are compared with those from the United Kingdom and North America from the same period, considering the differing ideologies and the current textual constructions of childhood at play in each. Broadly, Superle contends that over the past twenty years an aspirational view of childhood has developed in this literature—a view that positions children as powerful participants in the project of enabling positive social transformation. Her main argument, formed after recognizing several overarching thematic and structural patterns in more than one hundred texts, is that the novels comprise an aspirational literature with a transformative agenda: they imagine apparently empowered child characters who perform in diverse ways in the process of successfully creating and shaping the ideal Indian nation, their own well-adjusted bicultural identities in the diaspora, and/or their own empowered girlhoods. Michelle Superle is a Professor in the department of Communications at Okanagan College. She has taught children’s literature, composition, and creative writing courses at various Canadian universities and has published articles in Papers and IRCL.

The Man Who Loved Children

Author : Christina Stead
Publisher : Open Road Media
Page : 733 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 2012-10-23
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781453265253

Get Book

The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead Pdf

“This crazy, gorgeous family novel” written at the end of the Great Depression “is one of the great literary achievements of the twentieth century” (Jonathan Franzen, The New York Times). First published in 1940, The Man Who Loved Children was rediscovered in 1965 thanks to the poet Randall Jarrell’s eloquent introduction (included in this ebook edition), which compares Christina Stead to Leo Tolstoy. Today, it stands as a masterpiece of dysfunctional family life. In a country crippled by the Great Depression, Sam and Henny Pollit have too much—too much contempt for one another, too many children, too much strain under endless obligation. Flush with ego and chilling charisma, Sam torments and manipulates his children in an esoteric world of his own imagining. Henny looks on desperately, all too aware of the madness at the root of her husband’s behavior. And Louie, the damaged, precocious adolescent girl at the center of their clashes, is the “ugly duckling” whose struggle will transfix contemporary readers. Named one of the best novels of the twentieth century by Newsweek, Stead’s semiautobiographical work reads like a Depression-era The Glass Castle. In the New York Times, Jonathan Franzen wrote of this classic, “I carry it in my head the way I carry childhood memories; the scenes are of such precise horror and comedy that I feel I didn’t read the book so much as live it.”

Symbolism 2020

Author : Rüdiger Ahrens,Florian Klaeger,Klaus Stierstorfer
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 268 pages
File Size : 51,6 Mb
Release : 2020-12-07
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9783110716962

Get Book

Symbolism 2020 by Rüdiger Ahrens,Florian Klaeger,Klaus Stierstorfer Pdf

This special anniversary volume of Symbolism explores the nexus between symbolic signification and the future from an interdisciplinary perspective. How, contributors ask, has the future been variously rendered in symbolic terms? How do symbols and symbolic reference shape our ideas of the future? To what extent are symbols constitutive of futures, and to what extent do they restrain communication about what is possible and the imagination of fundamental change? Moreover, how have symbolic practices shaped not only artistic representations of the future, but also scientific attempts at forecasting and modelling it? What, then, is the relevance of symbolism for negotiations of the future in cultural and academic production? In essays ranging from literary and film studies to the philosophy of art and ecological modelling, the volume seeks to lay groundwork in theorizing and historicising ‘symbols of the future’ as much as ‘the future of symbolism’.

Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Childhood in Contemporary Britain

Author : Sandra Dinter,Ralf Schneider
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 250 pages
File Size : 55,9 Mb
Release : 2017-11-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781315313351

Get Book

Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Childhood in Contemporary Britain by Sandra Dinter,Ralf Schneider Pdf

In the light of the complex demographic shifts associated with late modernity and the impetus of neo-liberal politics, childhood continues all the more to operate as a repository for the articulation of diverse social and cultural anxieties. Since the Thatcher years, juvenile delinquency, child poverty, and protection have been persistent issues in public discourse. Simultaneously, childhood has advanced as a popular subject in the arts, as the wealth of current films and novels in this field indicates. Focusing on the late twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries, this collection assembles contributions concerned with current political, social, and cultural dimensions of childhood in the United Kingdom. The individual chapters, written by internationally renowned experts from the social sciences and the humanities, address a broad spectrum of contemporary childhood issues, including debates on child protection, school dress codes, the media, the representation and construction of children in audiovisual media, and literary awards for children’s fiction. Appealing to a wide scholarly audience by joining perspectives from various disciplines, including art history, education, law, film and TV studies, sociology, and literary studies, this volume endorses a transdisciplinary and meta-theoretical approach to the study of childhood. It seeks to both illustrate and dismantle the various ways in which childhood has been implicitly and explicitly conceived in different disciplines in the wake of the constructivist paradigm shift in childhood studies.

Childhood's End

Author : Arthur C. Clarke
Publisher : RosettaBooks
Page : 261 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 2012-11-30
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780795324970

Get Book

Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke Pdf

In the Retro Hugo Award–nominated novel that inspired the Syfy miniseries, alien invaders bring peace to Earth—at a grave price: “A first-rate tour de force” (The New York Times). In the near future, enormous silver spaceships appear without warning over mankind’s largest cities. They belong to the Overlords, an alien race far superior to humanity in technological development. Their purpose is to dominate Earth. Their demands, however, are surprisingly benevolent: end war, poverty, and cruelty. Their presence, rather than signaling the end of humanity, ushers in a golden age . . . or so it seems. Without conflict, human culture and progress stagnate. As the years pass, it becomes clear that the Overlords have a hidden agenda for the evolution of the human race that may not be as benevolent as it seems. “Frighteningly logical, believable, and grimly prophetic . . . Clarke is a master.” —Los Angeles Times

The Children's Book

Author : A. S. Byatt
Publisher : Vintage Canada
Page : 626 pages
File Size : 50,7 Mb
Release : 2009-11-03
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780307373830

Get Book

The Children's Book by A. S. Byatt Pdf

From the renowned author of Possession, The Children’s Book is the absorbing story of the close of what has been called the Edwardian summer: the deceptively languid, blissful period that ended with the cataclysmic destruction of World War I. In this compelling novel, A.S. Byatt summons up a whole era, revealing that beneath its golden surface lay tensions that would explode into war, revolution and unbelievable change — for the generation that came of age before 1914 and, most of all, for their children. The novel centres around Olive Wellwood, a fairy tale writer, and her circle, which includes the brilliant, erratic craftsman Benedict Fludd and his apprentice Phillip Warren, a runaway from the poverty of the Potteries; Prosper Cain, the soldier who directs what will become the Victoria and Albert Museum; Olive’s brother-in-law Basil Wellwood, an officer of the Bank of England; and many others from every layer of society. A.S. Byatt traces their lives in intimate detail and moves between generations, following the children who must choose whether to follow the roles expected of them or stand up to their parents’ “porcelain socialism.” Olive’s daughter Dorothy wishes to become a doctor, while her other daughter, Hedda, wants to fight for votes for women. Her son Tom, sent to an upper-class school, wants nothing more than to spend time in the woods, tracking birds and foxes. Her nephew Charles becomes embroiled with German-influenced revolutionaries. Their portraits connect the political issues at the heart of nascent feminism and socialism with grave personal dilemmas, interlacing until The Children’s Book becomes a perfect depiction of an entire world. Olive is a fairy tale writer in the era of Peter Pan and Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind In the Willows, not long after Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. At a time when children in England suffered deprivation by the millions, the concept of childhood was being refined and elaborated in ways that still influence us today. For each of her children, Olive writes a special, private book, bound in a different colour and placed on a shelf; when these same children are ferried off into the unremitting destruction of the Great War, the reader is left to wonder who the real children in this novel are. The Children’s Book is an astonishing novel. It is an historical feat that brings to life an era that helped shape our own as well as a gripping, personal novel about parents and children, life’s most painful struggles and its richest pleasures. No other writer could have imagined it or created it.

A Crooked Tree

Author : Una Mannion
Publisher : Faber & Faber
Page : 287 pages
File Size : 44,8 Mb
Release : 2021-01-26
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780571357987

Get Book

A Crooked Tree by Una Mannion Pdf

My mother made a snap decision.How could we know it would change us forever?THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER'Brimming with curiosity and wonder.' Irish Times'Lushly atmospheric.' Daily Mail'Thoroughly gripping.' Lucy Caldwell'Brilliant.' Sara BaumeRage. That's the feeling engulfing the car as Ellen's mother swerves over to the hard-shoulder and orders her daughter out onto the roadside. Ignoring the protests of her other children, she accelerates away, leaving Ellen standing on the gravel verge in her school pinafore and knee socks as the light fades.What would you do as you watch your little sister getting smaller in the rear view window? How far would you be willing to go to help her? The Gallagher children are going to find out. This moment is the beginning of a summer that will change everything.**Una Mannion's latest novel, TELL ME WHAT I AM, is available to pre-order now**

Victorian Coral Islands of Empire, Mission, and the Boys’ Adventure Novel

Author : Michelle Elleray
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 318 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 2019-11-06
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781000752991

Get Book

Victorian Coral Islands of Empire, Mission, and the Boys’ Adventure Novel by Michelle Elleray Pdf

Attending to the mid-Victorian boys’ adventure novel and its connections with missionary culture, Michelle Elleray investigates how empire was conveyed to Victorian children in popular forms, with a focus on the South Pacific as a key location of adventure tales and missionary efforts. The volume draws on an evangelical narrative about the formation of coral islands to demonstrate that missionary investments in the socially marginal (the young, the working class, the racial other) generated new forms of agency that are legible in the mid-Victorian boys’ adventure novel, even as that agency was subordinated to Christian values identified with the British middle class. Situating novels by Frederick Marryat, R. M. Ballantyne and W. H. G. Kingston in the periodical culture of the missionary enterprise, this volume newly historicizes British children’s textual interactions with the South Pacific and its peoples. Although the mid-Victorian authors examined here portray British presence in imperial spaces as a moral imperative, our understanding of the "adventurer" is transformed from the plucky explorer to the cynical mercenary through Robert Louis Stevenson, who provides a late-nineteenth-century critique of the imperial and missionary assumptions that subtended the mid-Victorian boys’ adventure novel of his youth.

The Children of Men

Author : P. D. James
Publisher : Vintage Canada
Page : 323 pages
File Size : 48,6 Mb
Release : 2012-01-11
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780307367716

Get Book

The Children of Men by P. D. James Pdf

The year is 2021. No child has been born for twenty-five years. The human race faces extinction. Under the despotic rule of Xan Lyppiat, the Warden of England, the old are despairing and the young cruel. Theo Faren, a cousin of the Warden, lives a solitary life in this ominous atmosphere. That is, until a chance encounter with a young woman leads him into contact with a group of dissenters. Suddenly his life is changed irrevocably as he faces agonising choices which could affect the future of mankind. NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE

The Routledge Handbook of Ecofeminism and Literature

Author : Douglas A. Vakoch
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 587 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 2022-09-19
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781000634402

Get Book

The Routledge Handbook of Ecofeminism and Literature by Douglas A. Vakoch Pdf

The Routledge Handbook of Ecofeminism and Literature explores the interplay between the domination of nature and the oppression of women, as well as liberatory alternatives, bringing together essays from leading academics in the field to facilitate cutting-edge critical readings of literature. Covering the main theoretical approaches and key literary genres of the area, this volume includes: • Examination of ecofeminism through the literatures of a diverse sampling of languages, including Hindi, Chinese, Arabic, and Spanish; native speakers of Tamil, Vietnamese, Turkish, Slovene, and Icelandic. • Analysis of core issues and topics, offering innovative approaches to interpreting literature, including: activism, animal studies, cultural studies, disability, gender essentialism, hegemonic masculinity, intersectionality, material ecocriticism, postcolonialism, posthumanism, postmodernism, race, and sentimental ecology. • Surveys key periods and genres of ecofeminism and literary criticism, including chapters on Gothic, Romantic, and Victorian literatures, children and young adult literature, mystery, and detective fictions, including interconnected genres of climate fiction, science fiction, and fantasy, and distinctive perspectives provided by travel writing, autobiography, and poetry. This collection explores how each of ecofeminism’s core concerns can foster a more emancipatory literary theory and criticism, now and in the future. This comprehensive volume will be of great interest to scholars and students of literature, ecofeminism, ecocriticism, gender studies, and the environmental humanities.

Children, Childhood, and Musical Theater

Author : Donelle Ruwe,James Leve
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 281 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 2020-02-19
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781317167730

Get Book

Children, Childhood, and Musical Theater by Donelle Ruwe,James Leve Pdf

Bringing together scholars from musicology, literature, childhood studies, and theater, this volume examines the ways in which children's musicals tap into adult nostalgia for childhood while appealing to the needs and consumer potential of the child. The contributors take up a wide range of musicals, including works inspired by the books of children's authors such as Roald Dahl, P.L. Travers, and Francis Hodgson Burnett; created by Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lionel Bart, and other leading lights of musical theater; or conceived for a cast made up entirely of children. The collection examines musicals that propagate or complicate normative attitudes regarding what childhood is or should be. It also considers the child performer in movie musicals as well as in professional and amateur stage musicals. This far-ranging collection highlights the special place that musical theater occupies in the imaginations and lives of children as well as adults. The collection comes at a time of increased importance of musical theater in the lives of children and young adults.

Pigeon English

Author : Stephen Kelman
Publisher : A&C Black
Page : 289 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 2012-01-05
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781408815687

Get Book

Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman Pdf

Eleven-year-old Harrison Opoku, the second best runner in Year 7, races through his new life in England with his personalised trainers - the Adidas stripes drawn on with marker pen - blissfully unaware of the very real threat around him. Newly-arrived from Ghana with his mother and older sister Lydia, Harri absorbs the many strange elements of city life, from the bewildering array of Haribo sweets, to the frightening, fascinating gang of older boys from his school. But his life is changed forever when one of his friends is murdered. As the victim's nearly new football boots hang in tribute on railings behind fluorescent tape and a police appeal draws only silence, Harri decides to act, unwittingly endangering the fragile web his mother has spun around her family to keep them safe.