The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 1950-2000

Author: Dominic Head
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521669665
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Book Description
In this introduction to post-war fiction in Britain, Dominic Head shows how the novel yields a special insight into the important areas of social and cultural history in the second half of the twentieth century. Head's study is the most exhaustive survey of post-war British fiction available. It includes chapters on the state and the novel, class and social change, gender and sexual identity, national identity and multiculturalism. Throughout Head places novels in their social and historical context. He highlights the emergence and prominence of particular genres and links these developments to the wider cultural context. He also provides provocative readings of important individual novelists, particularly those who remain staple reference points in the study of the subject. Accessible, wide-ranging and designed specifically for use on courses, this is the most current introduction to the subject available. An invaluable resource for students and teachers alike.

The Cambridge Introduction to Modernist Poetry

Author: Peter Howarth
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139502328
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 277

Book Description
Modernist poems are some of the twentieth-century's major cultural achievements, but they are also hard work to read. This wide-ranging introduction takes readers through modernism's most famous poems and some of its forgotten highlights to show why modernists thought difficulty and disorientation essential for poetry in the modern world. In-depth chapters on Pound, Eliot, Yeats and the American modernists outline how formal experiments take on the new world of mass media, democracies, total war and changing religious belief. Chapters on the avant-gardes and later modernism examine how their styles shift as they try to re-make the community of readers. Howarth explains in a clear and enjoyable way how to approach the forms, politics and cultural strategies of modernist poetry in English.

The Cambridge Introduction to Walt Whitman

Author: M. Jimmie Killingsworth
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139462288
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 123

Book Description
Walt Whitman is one of the most innovative and influential American poets of the nineteenth century. Focusing on his masterpiece Leaves of Grass, this book provides a foundation for the study of Whitman as an experimental poet, a radical democrat, and a historical personality in the era of the American Civil War, the growth of the great cities, and the westward expansion of the United States. Always a controversial and important figure, Whitman continues to attract the admiration of poets, artists, critics, political activists, and readers around the world. Those studying his work for the first time will find this an invaluable book. Alongside close readings of the major texts, chapters on Whitman's biography, the history and culture of his time, and the critical reception of his work provide a comprehensive understanding of Whitman and of how he has become such a central figure in the American literary canon.

The Cambridge Introduction to Michel Foucault

Author: Lisa Downing
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780511650109
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 153

Book Description
This 2008 book covers Foucault's major works in depth, and offers clear explanations of his key themes of power and discourse.

The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare

Author: Emma Smith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139462393
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 6

Book Description
This lively and innovative introduction to Shakespeare promotes active engagement with the plays, rather than recycling factual information. Covering a range of texts, it is divided into seven subject-based chapters: Character; Performance; Texts; Language; Structure; Sources and History, and it does not assume any prior knowledge. Instead, it develops ways of thinking and provides the reader with resources for independent research through the 'Where next?' sections at the end of each chapter. The book draws on scholarship without being overwhelmed by it, and unlike other introductory guides to Shakespeare it emphasizes that there is space for new and fresh thinking by students and readers, even on the most-studied and familiar plays.

British Postmodern Fiction

Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004647244
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 179

Book Description

The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare's Comedies

Author: Penny Gay
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139469770
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 197

Book Description
Why did theatre audiences laugh in Shakespeare's day? Why do they still laugh now? What did Shakespeare do with the conventions of comedy that he inherited, so that his plays continue to amuse and move audiences? What do his comedies have to say about love, sex, gender, power, family, community, and class? What place have pain, cruelty, and even death in a comedy? Why all those puns? In a survey that travels from Shakespeare's earliest experiments in farce and courtly love-stories to the great romantic comedies of his middle years and the mould-breaking experiments of his last decade's work, this book addresses these vital questions. Organised thematically, and covering all Shakespeare's comedies from the beginning to the end of his career, it provides readers with a map of the playwright's comic styles, showing how he built on comedic conventions as he further enriched the possibilities of the genre.

The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English

Author: Dominic Head
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521831792
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 1241

Book Description
This illustrated and fully updated Third Edition of The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English is the most authoritative and international survey of world literature in English available. The Guide covers everything from Old English to contemporary writing from all over the English-speaking world. There are entries on writers from Britain and Ireland, the USA, Canada, India, Africa, South Africa, New Zealand, the South Pacific and Australia, as well as on many important poems, novels, literary journals and plays. This new edition has been brought completely up to date with more than 280 new author entries, most of them for living authors. The general reader will find it fascinating to browse and to discover many new writers and works, while students will find it an invaluable resource for daily use. This is a unique work of reference for the twenty-first century that no reader or library should be without.

Englishness and National Culture

Author: Antony Easthorpe
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134643063
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 254

Book Description
In this highly engaging book, Antony Easthope examines 'Englishness' as a form and a series of shared discourses. Discussing the subject of 'nation' - a growing area in literary and cultural studies - Easthope offers polemical arguments written in a lively and accessible style. Englishness and National Culture asserts a profound and unacknowledged continuity between the seventeenth century and today. It argues that contemporary journalists, historians, novelists, poets and comedians continue to speak through the voice of a long-standing empiricist tradition.

The Power of the Story

Author: Michael Hanne
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781571810519
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Book Description
"... a spirited, well-researched volume ... this highly readable study is an impressive work ofcontemporary criticism, richly deserving of its intended general and academic audiences." - Choice Can a novel cause riots, start a war, free serfs or slaves, break up marriages, drive readers to suicide, close factories, bring about law change, swing an election, or serve as a weapon in a national or international struggle? The author explores this question in the form of a theoretical essay on narrative and power, followed by five detailed case studies of works by Turgenev, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ignazio Silone, Solzhenitsyn and Salman Rushdie, each of which had or was said to have had a major impact on the political events in its time. Forcefully argued and written with a minimum of jargon, this book no doubt appeals to a wide readership well beyond that of the specialist in literature.