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Updike
\"Updike is Adam Begley's masterful, much-anticipated biography of one of the most celebrated figures in American literature: Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Updike--a candid, intimate, and richly detailed look at his life and work.In this magisterial biography, Adam Begley offers an illuminating portrait of John Updike, the acclaimed novelist, poet, short-story writer, and critic who saw himself as a literary spy in small-town and suburban America, who dedicated himself to the task of transcribing \"middleness with all its grits, bumps and anonymities.\"Updike explores the stages of the writer's pilgrim's progress: his beloved home turf of Berks County, Pennsylvania; his escape to Harvard; his brief, busy working life as the golden boy at The New Yorker; his family years in suburban Ipswich, Massachusetts; his extensive travel abroad; and his retreat to another Massachusetts town, Beverly Farms, where he remained until his death in 2009. Drawing from in-depth research as well as interviews with the writer's colleagues, friends, and family, Begley explores how Updike's fiction was shaped by his tumultuous personal life--including his enduring religious faith, his two marriages, and his first-hand experience of the \"adulterous society\" he was credited with exposing in the bestselling Couples.With a sharp critical sensibility that lends depth and originality to his analysis, Begley probes Updike's best-loved works--from Pigeon Feathers to The Witches of Eastwick to the Rabbit tetralogy--and reveals a surprising and deeply complex character fraught with contradictions: a kind man with a vicious wit, a gregarious charmer who was ruthlessly competitive, a private person compelled to spill his secrets on the printed page. Updike offers an admiring yet balanced look at this national treasure, a master whose writing continues to resonate like no one else's\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Fictions of Dignity
Over the past fifty years, debates about human rights have assumed an increasingly prominent place in postcolonial literature and theory. Writers from Salman Rushdie to Nawal El Saadawi have used the novel to explore both the possibilities and challenges of enacting and protecting human rights, particularly in the Global South. InFictions of Dignity, Elizabeth S. Anker shows how the dual enabling fictions of human dignity and bodily integrity contribute to an anxiety about the body that helps to explain many of the contemporary and historical failures of human rights, revealing why and how lives are excluded from human rights protections along the lines of race, gender, class, disability, and species membership. In the process, Anker examines the vital work performed by a particular kind of narrative imagination in fostering respect for human rights. Drawing on phenomenology, Anker suggests how an embodied politics of reading might restore a vital fleshiness to the overly abstract, decorporealized subject of liberal rights.
Each of the novels Anker examines approaches human rights in terms of limits and paradoxes. Rushdie'sMidnight's Childrenaddresses the obstacles to incorporating rights into a formerly colonized nation's legal culture. El Saadawi'sWoman at Point Zerotakes up controversies over women's freedoms in Islamic society. InDisgrace, J. M. Coetzee considers the disappointments of post-apartheid reconciliation in South Africa. And inThe God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy confronts an array of human rights abuses widespread in contemporary India. Each of these literary case studies further demonstrates the relevance of embodiment to both comprehending and redressing the failures of human rights, even while those narratives refuse simplistic ideals or solutions.
eBook
Forms of a World
The first full-length work to use prominent accounts of globalization to examine contemporary poetry written in English.Offers accessible readings of poetic form and of the contemporary political economy and sociology of globalization.Restores attention to poetic subgenres such as the ode and the prospect poem by offering a new, globalized interpretation of their ethical and political relevance.What happens when we think of poetry as a global literary form, while also thinking the global in poetic terms?F
orms of a Worldshows how the innovations of contemporary poetics have been forged against a backdrop of globalization. Creatively intervening against the changes wrought by neoliberalism before they are made fully present, contemporary poets have remade the formal repertoire. In experimental reinventions of the ballad, the prospect poem, and the ode, Hunter excavates a new, globalized interpretation of the ethical and political relevance of forms.Shows how poetry exhorts us to imagine forms of social life and political intervention.
eBook
Ted Hughes : the unauthorised life
\"A biography of poet Ted Hughes that includes ... new information about his relationship with Sylvia Plath, written while consulting the just-opened Hughes archives in the British Library and at Emory University\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Dangerous bodies
Through an investigation of the body and its oppression by the church, the medical profession and the state, this book reveals the actual horrors lying beneath fictional horror in settings as diverse as the monastic community, slave plantation, operating theatre, Jewish ghetto and battlefield trench. The book provides original readings of canonical Gothic literary and film texts including The Castle of Otranto, The Monk, Frankenstein, Dracula and Nosferatu. This collection of fictionalised dangerous bodies is traced back to the effects of the English Reformation, Spanish Inquisition, French Revolution, Caribbean slavery, Victorian medical malpractice, European anti-Semitism and finally warfare, ranging from the Crimean up to the Vietnam War. The endangered or dangerous body lies at the centre of the clash between victim and persecutor and has generated tales of terror and narratives of horror, which function to either salve, purge or dangerously perpetuate such oppositions. This ground-breaking book will be of interest to academics and students of Gothic studies, gender and film studies and especially to readers interested in the relationship between history and literature.
eBook
A biocultural approach to literary theory and interpretation
Combining cognitive and evolutionary research with traditional humanist methods, Nancy Easterlin demonstrates how a biocultural perspective in theory and criticism opens up new possibilities for literary interpretation. Easterlin maintains that the practice of literary interpretation is still of central intellectual and social value. Taking an open yet judicious approach, she argues, however, that literary interpretation stands to gain dramatically from a fair-minded and creative application of cognitive and evolutionary research. This work does just that, expounding a biocultural method that charts a middle course between overly reductive approaches to literature and traditionalists who see the sciences as a threat to the humanities. Easterlin develops her biocultural method by comparing it to four major subfields within literary studies: new historicism, ecocriticism, cognitive approaches, and evolutionary approaches. After a thorough review of each subfield, she reconsiders them in light of relevant research in cognitive and evolutionary psychology and provides a textual analysis of literary works from the romantic era to the present, including William Wordsworth's \"Simon Lee\" and the Lucy poems, Mary Robinson's \"Old Barnard,\" Samuel Taylor Coleridge's \"Dejection: An Ode,\" D. H. Lawrence's The Fox, Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, and Raymond Carver's \"I Could See the Smallest Things.\" A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation offers a fresh and reasoned approach to literary studies that at once preserves the central importance that interpretation plays in the humanities and embraces the exciting developments of the cognitive sciences.
eBook