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"18.05 English literature."
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English mythography in its European context, 1500-1650
Greco-Roman mythology and its reception are at the heart of the European Renaissance, and mythographies-texts that collected and explained ancient myths-were considered indispensable companions to any reader of literature. Despite the importance of this genre, English mythographies have not gained sustained critical attention, largely because they have been wrongly considered mere copies of their European counterparts. This volume focuses on the English mythographies written between 1577 and 1647 by Stephen Batman, Abraham Fraunce, Francis Bacon, Henry Reynolds, and Alexander Ross: it places their texts into a wider, European context to reveal their unique English take on the genre and also unfolds the significant role myth played in the broader culture of the period, influencing not only literary life, natural philosophy and poetics, but also religious conflicts and Civil War politics. In doing so it demonstrates, for the first time, the considerable explanatory value classical mythology holds for the study of the English Renaissance and its literary culture in particular, and how early modern England answered a question we still find fascinating today: what is myth?
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Radical sacrifice
A trenchant analysis of sacrifice as the foundation of the modern, as well as the ancient, social order The modern conception of sacrifice is at once cast as a victory of self-discipline over desire and condescended to as destructive and archaic abnegation. But even in the Old Testament, the dual natures of sacrifice, embodying both ritual slaughter and moral rectitude, were at odds. In this analysis, Terry Eagleton makes a compelling argument that the idea of sacrifice has long been misunderstood. Pursuing the complex lineage of sacrifice in a lyrical discourse, Eagleton focuses on the Old and New Testaments, offering a virtuosic analysis of the crucifixion, while drawing together a host of philosophers, theologians, and texts-from Hegel, Nietzsche, and Derrida to the Aeneid and The Wings of the Dove. Brilliant meditations on death and eros, Shakespeare and St. Paul, irony and hybridity explore the meaning of sacrifice in modernity, casting off misperceptions of barbarity to reconnect the radical idea to politics and revolution.
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Strangers in Blood
Strangers in Blood explores, in a range of early modern literature, the association between migration to foreign lands and the moral and physical degeneration of individuals. Arguing that, in early modern discourse, the concept of race was primarily linked with notions of bloodline, lineage, and genealogy rather than with skin colour and ethnicity, Jean E. Feerick establishes that the characterization of settler communities as subject to degenerative decline constituted a massive challenge to the fixed system of blood that had hitherto underpinned the English social hierarchy.
Considering contexts as diverse as Ireland, Virginia, and the West Indies, Strangers in Blood tracks the widespread cultural concern that moving out of England would adversely affect the temper and complexion of the displaced individual, changes that could be fought only through willed acts of self-discipline. In emphasizing the decline of blood as found at the centre of colonial narratives, Feerick illustrates the unwitting disassembling of one racial system and the creation of another.
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The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction
Postmodern fiction presents a challenge to the reader: instead of enjoying it passively, the reader has to work to understand its meanings, to think about what fiction is, and to question their own responses. Yet this very challenge makes postmodern writing so much fun to read and rewarding to study. Unlike most introductions to postmodernism and fiction, this book places the emphasis on literature rather than theory. It introduces the most prominent British and American novelists associated with postmodernism, from the 'pioneers', Beckett, Borges and Burroughs, to important post-war writers such as Pynchon, Carter, Atwood, Morrison, Gibson, Auster, DeLillo, and Ellis. Designed for students and clearly written, this Introduction explains the preoccupations, styles and techniques that unite postmodern authors. Their work is characterized by a self-reflexive acknowledgement of its status as fiction, and by the various ways in which it challenges readers to question common-sense and commonplace assumptions about literature.
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Medieval romance : the aesthetics of possibility
\"Widely heard and read throughout the middle ages, romance literature has persisted for centuries and has lately re-emerged in the form of speculative fiction, inviting readers to step out of the actual world and experience the intriguing pleasure of possibility. Medieval Romance is the first study to focus on the deep philosophical underpinnings of the genre's fictional worlds. James F. Knapp and Peggy A. Knapp uniquely utilize Leibniz's \"possible worlds\" theory, Kant's aesthetic reflections, and Gadamer's writings on the apprehension of language over time, to bring the romance genre into critical dialogue with fundamental questions of philosophical aesthetics, modal logic, and the hermeneutics of literary transmission. The authors' compelling and illuminating analysis of six instances of medieval secular writing, including that of Marie de France, the Gawain-poet, and Chaucer demonstrates how the extravagantly imagined worlds of romance invite reflection about the nature of the real. These stories, which have delighted readers for hundreds of years, do so because the impossible fictions of one era prefigure desired realities for later generations.\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Joyce's Ulysses : philosophical perspectives
Ulysses is a famously difficult book. Philosophy is well-known as an abstruse subject. Yet thinking about Joyce’s great novel in philosophical ways provides not only new approaches for seasoned Joyceans but also orientation for those perplexed by Ulysses. Six eminent scholars, philosophers and literary critics, combine philosophical and literary analysis to present accessible perspectives on one of the world’s masterpieces. Successive chapters explore Joyce’s revisionary attitudes to the emotions, to consciousness, to the roles of the senses, to the relation between fiction and reality, to the impact of history and tradition on human lives, and to the ways in which we can reorganize the experiential worlds in which we live.
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Novel politics : democratic imaginations in nineteenth-century fiction
Founded on a deep disagreement with current criticism of the novel, this book challenges a longstanding consensus that the nineteenth-century novel indelibly registers bourgeois ideology and morality, assuming the novel’s default position is conservative and hegemonic. Systematically under-reading democratic imaginations, this critique emerges alike from Marxists, from readers of nineteenth-century liberalism, and from critics making claims for the working-class novel. To undo such readings the book addresses some classic nineteenth-century political texts—by John Stuart Mill, de Tocqueville, and Hegel. But its core is a new poetics of the novel based on four claims: that the novel is an open Inquiry, a lived interrogation, on analogy with the form of earlier philosophical inquiries, not a predetermined political document; that radical thinking requires radical formal experiment, creating generic disruption and putting the so-called realist text and its values under pressure; that the poetics of social and phenomenological space reveals the dispossessed subject, not the bildung of success or overcoming; that the presence of the aesthetic and artworks in the novel is a constant source of social questioning. Illegitimacy, with its challenge to social norms, is a test case, from Scott and Jane Austen to George Eliot and George Moore, the growing point of democratic imagination.
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