Desire and Domestic Fiction

Author: Nancy Armstrong
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199879036
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 317

Book Description
Desire and Domestic Fiction argues that far from being removed from historical events, novels by writers from Richardson to Woolf were themselves agents of the rise of the middle class. Drawing on texts that range from 18th-century female conduct books and contract theory to modern psychoanalytic case histories and theories of reading, Armstrong shows that the emergence of a particular form of female subjectivity capable of reigning over the household paved the way for the establishment of institutions which today are accepted centers of political power. Neither passive subjects nor embattled rebels, the middle-class women who were authors and subjects of the major tradition of British fiction were among the forgers of a new form of power that worked in, and through, their writing to replace prevailing notions of "identity" with a gender-determined subjectivity. Examining the works of such novelists as Samuel Richardson, Jane Austen, and the Brontës, she reveals the ways in which these authors rewrite the domestic practices and sexual relations of the past to create the historical context through which modern institutional power would seem not only natural but also humane, and therefore to be desired.

Lessons of Struggle

Author: Anthony W. Marx
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN: 9780195073485
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 347

Book Description
An in-depth analysis of thirty years of South African opposition; focuses on the development of the Black Consciousness movement; the ANC- aligned United Democratic Front, and the trade unions; discusses the role of ideas in shaping social change.

How Novels Think

Author: Nancy Armstrong
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231503873
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 204

Book Description
Nancy Armstrong argues that the history of the novel and the history of the modern individual are, quite literally, one and the same. She suggests that certain works of fiction created a subject, one displaying wit, will, or energy capable of shifting the social order to grant the exceptional person a place commensurate with his or her individual worth. Once the novel had created this figure, readers understood themselves in terms of a narrative that produced a self-governing subject. In the decades following the revolutions in British North America and France, the major novelists distinguished themselves as authors by questioning the fantasy of a self-made individual. To show how novels by Defoe, Austen, Scott, Brontë, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, Haggard, and Stoker participated in the process of making, updating, and perpetuating the figure of the individual, Armstrong puts them in dialogue with the writings of Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Malthus, Darwin, Kant, and Freud. Such theorists as Althusser, Balibar, Foucault, and Deleuze help her make the point that the individual was not one but several different figures. The delineation and potential of the modern subject depended as much upon what it had to incorporate as what alternatives it had to keep at bay to address the conflicts raging in and around the British novel.

The Encyclopedia of the Novel

Author: Peter Melville Logan
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118723899
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 803

Book Description
Now available in a single volume paperback, this advanced reference resource for the novel and novel theory offers authoritative accounts of the history, terminology, and genre of the novel, in over 140 articles of 500-7,000 words. Entries explore the history and tradition of the novel in different areas of the world; formal elements of the novel (story, plot, character, narrator); technical aspects of the genre (such as realism, narrative structure and style); subgenres, including the bildungsroman and the graphic novel; theoretical problems, such as definitions of the novel; book history; and the novel's relationship to other arts and disciplines. The Encyclopedia is arranged in A-Z format and features entries from an international cast of over 140 scholars, overseen by an advisory board of 37 leading specialists in the field, making this the most authoritative reference resource available on the novel. This essential reference, now available in an easy-to-use, fully indexed single volume paperback, will be a vital addition to the libraries of literature students and scholars everywhere.

Desire and Fictional Narrative in Late Imperial China

Author: Martin W. Huang
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684173574
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 370

Book Description
"In this new study of desire in Late Imperial China, Martin Huang argues that the development of traditional Chinese fiction as a narrative genre was closely related to changes in conceptions of the fundamental nature of desire. He further suggests that the rise of vernacular fiction during the late Ming dynasty should be studied in the context of contemporary debates on desire, along with the new and complex views that emerged from those debates.Desire and Fictional Narrative in Late Imperial China shows that the obsession of authors with individual desire is an essential quality that defines traditional Chinese fiction as a narrative genre. Thus the maturation of the genre can best be appreciated in terms of its increasingly sophisticated exploration of the phenomenon of desire."

Desire and Truth

Author: Patricia Meyer Spacks
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226768458
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 284

Book Description
Desire and Truth offers a major reassessment of the history of eighteenth-century fiction by showing how plot challenges or reinforces conventional categories of passion and rationality. Arguing that fiction creates and conveys its essential truths through plot, Patricia Meyer Spacks demonstrates that eighteenth-century fiction is both profoundly realistic and consistently daring.

Radical Media

Author: John D. H. Downing
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 1452238243
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 441

Book Description
This is an entirely new edition of the author′s 1984 study (originally published by South End Press) of radical media and movements. The first and second sections are original to this new edition. The first section explores social and cultural theory in order to argue that radical media should be a central part of our understanding of media in history. The second section weaves an historical and international tapestry of radical media to illustrate their centrality and diversity, from dance and graffiti to video and the internet and from satirical prints and street theatre to culture-jamming, subversive song, performance art and underground radio. The section also includes consideration of ultra-rightist media as a key contrast case. The book′s third section provides detailed case-studies of the anti-fascist media explosion of 1974-75 in Portugal, Italy′s long-running radical media, radio and access video in the USA, and illegal media in the dissolution of the former Soviet bloc dictatorships.

The Trauma of Gender

Author: Helene Moglen
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520925830
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 238

Book Description
Helene Moglen offers a revisionary feminist argument about the origins, cultural function, and formal structure of the English novel. While most critics and historians have associated the novel's emergence and development with the burgeoning of capitalism and the rise of the middle classes, Moglen contends that the novel princi- pally came into being in order to manage the social and psychological strains of the modern sex-gender system. Rejecting the familiar claim that realism represents the novel's dominant tradition, she shows that, from its inception in the eighteenth century, the English novel has contained both realistic and fantastic narratives, which compete for primacy within individual texts.

Literary Theory

Author: Julie Rivkin
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118718313
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1640

Book Description
The new edition of this bestselling literary theory anthology has been thoroughly updated to include influential texts from innovative new areas, including disability studies, eco-criticism, and ethics. Covers all the major schools and methods that make up the dynamic field of literary theory, from Formalism to Postcolonialism Expanded to include work from Stuart Hall, Sara Ahmed, and Lauren Berlant. Pedagogically enhanced with detailed editorial introductions and a comprehensive glossary of terms

The First 'Women in Love'

Author: D. H. Lawrence
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521007092
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 594

Book Description
The First 'Women in Love' is one of Lawrence's greatest works, and is the only full length work of fiction which he completed between The Rainbow and the extensively revised Women in Love. It is a piece of fiction generated in the England, and the Europe, of the First World War. Publishers were alarmed by the fate of his previous novel The Rainbow and The First 'Women in Love' was rejected by every publisher who saw it. As a result it is a novel whose very existence as an independent text has been ignored, and which has not been published until now. The First 'Women in Love' shares much of its material with Women in Love, but its central relationships are dissimilar, and the ending radically different.