Unseasonable Youth

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Unseasonable Youth

Author : Jed Esty,Joshua Esty
Publisher : OUP USA
Page : 301 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2012
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780199857968

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Unseasonable Youth by Jed Esty,Joshua Esty Pdf

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.

Unseasonable Youth

Author : Jed Esty
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 2011-11-04
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780199857975

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Unseasonable Youth by Jed Esty Pdf

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.

Terrible Beauty

Author : Marian Eide
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
Page : 324 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 2019-03-13
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780813942360

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Terrible Beauty by Marian Eide Pdf

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.

The Dream of the Great American Novel

Author : Lawrence Buell
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 582 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 2014-02-25
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780674726321

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The Dream of the Great American Novel by Lawrence Buell Pdf

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.

Bildungsroman and the Arab Novel

Author : Maria Elena Paniconi
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 246 pages
File Size : 54,9 Mb
Release : 2022-09-30
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781351357234

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Bildungsroman and the Arab Novel by Maria Elena Paniconi Pdf

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.

BAX 2015

Author : Seth Abramson,Jesse Damiani,Douglas Kearney
Publisher : Wesleyan University Press
Page : 250 pages
File Size : 53,9 Mb
Release : 2016-01-05
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 9780819576095

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BAX 2015 by Seth Abramson,Jesse Damiani,Douglas Kearney Pdf

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.

A History of the Harlem Renaissance

Author : Rachel Farebrother,Miriam Thaggert
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 453 pages
File Size : 50,7 Mb
Release : 2021-02-04
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781108493574

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A History of the Harlem Renaissance by Rachel Farebrother,Miriam Thaggert Pdf

This book presents original essays that explore the eclecticism of Harlem Renaissance literature and culture.

Adulthood and Other Fictions

Author : Sari Edelstein
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 214 pages
File Size : 41,5 Mb
Release : 2019-02-10
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780198831884

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Adulthood and Other Fictions by Sari Edelstein Pdf

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.

High Modernism

Author : Joshua Kavaloski
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
Page : 245 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 2014
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781571139108

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High Modernism by Joshua Kavaloski Pdf

A provocative new study that identifies a deep structure -- that of the political body -- in Frost''s poetry.

Critique and Utopia in Postcolonial Historical Fiction

Author : Greg Forter
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 2019-01-17
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780192566188

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Critique and Utopia in Postcolonial Historical Fiction by Greg Forter Pdf

This bold and ambitious volume argues that postcolonial historical fiction offers readers valuable resources for thinking about history and the relationship between past and present. It shows how the genre's treatment of colonialism illustrates continuities between the colonial era and our own and how the genre distils from our colonial pasts the evanescent, utopian intimations of a properly postcolonial future. Critique and Utopia in Postcolonial Historical Fiction arrives at these insights by juxtaposing novels from the Atlantic world with books from the Indian subcontinent. Attending to the links across these regions, the volume develops luminous readings of novels by Patrick Chamoiseau, J. G. Farrell, Amitav Ghosh, Marlon James, Hari Kunzru, Toni Morrison, Marlene van Niekerk, Arundhati Roy, Kamila Shamsie, and Barry Unsworth. It shows how these works not only transform our understanding of the colonial past and the futures that might issue from it, but also contribute to pressing debates in postcolonial theory—debates about the politics of literary forms, the links between cycles of capital accumulation and the emergence of new genres, the meaning of 'working through' traumas in the postcolonial context, the relationship between colonial and panoptical power, the continued salience of hybridity and mimicry for the study of colonialism, and the tension between national liberation struggles and transnational forms of solidarity. Beautifully written and meticulously theorized, Critique and Utopia in Postcolonial Historical Fiction will be of interest to students of world literature, Marxist critics, postcolonial theorists, and thinkers of the utopian.

Progressivism's Aesthetic Education

Author : Jesse Raber
Publisher : Springer
Page : 208 pages
File Size : 52,5 Mb
Release : 2018-06-29
Category : History
ISBN : 9783319900445

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Progressivism's Aesthetic Education by Jesse Raber Pdf

During the Progressive Era in the United States, as teaching became professionalized and compulsory attendance laws were passed, the public school emerged as a cultural authority. What did accepting this authority mean for Americans’ conception of self-government and their freedom of thought? And what did it mean for the role of artists and intellectuals within democratic society? Jesse Raber argues that the bildungsroman negotiated this tension between democratic autonomy and cultural authority, reprising an old role for the genre in a new social and intellectual context. Considering novels by Abraham Cahan, Willa Cather, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman alongside the educational thought of John Dewey, the Montessorians, the American Herbartians, and the social efficiency educators, Raber traces the development of an aesthetics of social action. Richly sourced and vividly narrated, this book is a creative intervention in the fields of literary criticism, pragmatic philosophy, aesthetic theory, and the history of education.

A Planetary Avant-Garde

Author : Ignacio Infante
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
Page : 204 pages
File Size : 44,9 Mb
Release : 2023-04-28
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781442629769

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A Planetary Avant-Garde by Ignacio Infante Pdf

A Planetary Avant-Garde explores how experimental poetics and literature networks have aesthetically and politically responded to the legacy of Iberian colonialism across the world. The book examines avant-garde responses to Spanish and Portuguese imperialism across Europe, Latin America, West Africa, and Southeast Asia between 1909 and 1929. Ignacio Infante critically traces the hegemony and resistance to the colonial regimes of Spain and Portugal across particular avant-garde networks, expanding our understanding of Western colonial and imperial ideologies of the early twentieth century. The book extends geopolitical dimensions of the historical avant-garde into a wider transnational and planetary framework, including divergent experiences of modernity, forms of experimental poetics, and understandings of history. It sheds light on topics, such as the relation between Portuguese futurism and European colonialism in West Africa, the Latin American avant-garde’s critique of European historicism, the development of Brazilian modernism in relation to the European avant-garde, the comparative poetics of modernism in the Philippines, and the 1929 Barcelona World’s Fair. Grounded in extensive archival research, A Planetary Avant-Garde provides a new understanding of the historical avant-garde from a global and multilingual perspective.

Christos Tsiolkas and the Fiction of Critique

Author : Andrew McCann
Publisher : Anthem Press
Page : 177 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 2015-06-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781783084043

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Christos Tsiolkas and the Fiction of Critique by Andrew McCann Pdf

Christos Tsiolkas is one of the most recognizable and internationally successful literary novelists working in Australia today. He is also one of the country’s most politically engaged writers. These terms – recognition, commercial success, political engagement – suggest a relationship to forms of public discourse that belies the extremely confronting nature of much of Tsiolkas’s fiction and his deliberate attempt to cultivate a literary persona oriented to notions of blasphemy, obscenity and what could broadly be called a pornographic sensibility. ‘Christos Tsiolkas and the Fiction of Critique’ traces these contradictions against Tsiolkas’s acute sense of the waning of working-class identity, and reads his work as a sustained examination of the ways in which literature might express an opposition to capitalist modernity.

Postcolonial Modernism and the Picaresque Novel

Author : Jens Elze
Publisher : Springer
Page : 225 pages
File Size : 49,6 Mb
Release : 2017-09-28
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9783319519388

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Postcolonial Modernism and the Picaresque Novel by Jens Elze Pdf

This book is about the contemporary picaresque novel. Despite its popularity, the picaresque, unlike the bildungsroman, is still an undertheorized genre, especially for the context of postcolonial literatures. This study considers the picaresque novel’s traditional focus on poverty and deprivation, and argues that its postcolonial versions urge us to conceive of as a more wide-ranging sense of precarity and precariousness. Non-linear biography, episodic style, protean identities, unreliable narratives, and abject landscapes are the social and formal aspects through which this precarity is thematized and performed. A concise analysis of these concepts and phenomena in the picaresque provides the structure for this book. What is especially significant in comparison to other forms of postcolonial (post)modernism is that the picaresque does not offer a general critique of a project of modernity, but through its persistent precarity points to the paradoxical logics of capitalism, which are especially nuanced under the conditions of neo-imperialism and neoliberalism. The book features texts by established postcolonial authors such as Salman Rushdie and V.S. Naipaul, but especially focuses on the more recent proliferation of the genre in works by Aravind Adiga, Mohsin Hamid and Indra Sinha.

Never Better!

Author : Miriam Udel
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
Page : 267 pages
File Size : 52,6 Mb
Release : 2016-04-18
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780472053056

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Never Better! by Miriam Udel Pdf

It was only when Jewish writers gave up on the lofty Enlightenment ideals of progress and improvement that the Yiddish novel could decisively enter modernity. Animating their fictions were a set of unheroic heroes who struck a precarious balance between sanguinity and irony that author Miriam Udel captures through the phrase “never better.” With this rhetorical homage toward the double-voiced utterances of Sholem Aleichem, Udel gestures at these characters’ insouciant proclamation that things had never been better, and their rueful, even despairing admission that things would probably never get better. The characters defined by this dual consciousness constitute a new kind of protagonist: a distinctively Jewish scapegrace whom Udel denominates the polit or refugee. Cousin to the Golden Age Spanish pícaro, the polit is a socially marginal figure who narrates his own story in discrete episodes, as if stringing beads on a narrative necklace. A deeply unsettled figure, the polit is allergic to sentimentality and even routine domesticity. His sequential misadventures point the way toward the heart of the picaresque, which Jewish authors refashion as a vehicle for modernism—not only in Yiddish, but also in German, Russian, English and Hebrew. Udel draws out the contours of the new Jewish picaresque by contrasting it against the nineteenth-century genre of progress epitomized by the Bildungsroman. While this book is grounded in modern Jewish literature, its implications stretch toward genre studies in connection with modernist fiction more generally. Udel lays out for a diverse readership concepts in the history and theory of the novel while also explicating the relevant particularities of Jewish literary culture. In addressing the literary stylistics of a “minor” modernism, this study illuminates how the adoption of a picaresque sensibility allowed minority authors to write simultaneously within and against the literary traditions of Europe.