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"Literary form -- History -- 20th century"
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Contemporary fiction and the fairy tale
Recent decades have witnessed a renaissance of interest in the fairy tale, not least among writers of fiction. In Contemporary Fiction and the Fairy Tale, editor Stephen Benson argues that fairy tales are one of the key influences on fiction of the past thirty years and also continue to shape literary trends in the present. Contributors detail the use of fairy tales both as inspiration and blueprint and explore the results of juxtaposing fairy tales and contemporary fiction.
At the heart of this collection, seven leading scholars focus on authors whose work is heavily informed and transformed by fairy tales: Robert Coover, A. S. Byatt, Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, and Salman Rushdie. In addition to investigating the work of this so-called fairy-tale generation, Contemporary Fiction and the Fairy Tale provides a survey of the body of theoretical writing surrounding these authors, both from within literary studies and from fairy-tale studies itself. Contributors present an overview of critical positions, considered here in relation to the work of Jeanette Winterson and of Nalo Hopkinson, suggesting further avenues for research.
Contemporary Fiction and the Fairy Tale offers the first detailed and comprehensive account of the key authors working in this emerging genre. Students and teachers of fiction, folklore, and fairy-tale studies will appreciate this insightful volume.
eBook
Reading the Middle Generation Anew
Ten original essays by advanced scholars and well-published poets address the middle generation of American poets, including the familiar---Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, and John Berryman---and various important contemporaries: Delmore Schwartz, Theodore Roethke, Robert Hayden, and Lorine Niedecker. This was a famously troubled cohort of writers, for reasons both personal and cultural, and collectively their poems give us powerful, moving insights into American social life in the transforming decades of the 1940s through the 1960s.In addition to having worked during the broad middle of the last century, these poets constitute the center of twentieth-century American poetry in the larger sense, refuting invidious connotations of “middle\" as coming after the great moderns and being superseded by a proliferating postmodern experimentation. This middle generation mediates the so-called American century and its prodigious body of poetry, even as it complicates historical and aesthetic categorizations.Taking diverse formal and thematic angles on these poets---biographical-historical, deconstructionist, and more formalist accounts---this book re-examines their between-ness and ambivalence: their various positionings and repositionings in aesthetic, political, and personal matters. The essays study the interplay between these writers and such shifting formations as religious discourse, consumerism, militarism and war, the ideology of America as “nature's nation,\" and U.S. race relations and ethnic conflicts. Reading the Middle Generation Anew also shows the legacy of the middle generation, the ways in which their lives and writings continue to be a shaping force in American poetry. This fresh and invigorating collection will be of great interest to literary scholars and poets.
eBook
Faulkner on the Color Line
A study of William Faulkner's final phase as a
period in which he faced up to America's rigid protocols of racial
ideology
This study argues that Faulkner's writings about racial matters
interrogated rather than validated his racial beliefs and that, in
the process of questioning his own ideology, his fictional forms
extended his reach as an artist.
After winning the Nobel Prize in 1950, Faulkner wrote what
critics term \"his later novels.\" These have been almost uniformly
dismissed, with the prevailing view being that as he became a more
public figure, his fiction became a platform rather than a
canvas.
Within this context Faulkner on the Color Line redeems
the novels in the final phase of his career by interpreting them as
Faulkner's way of addressing the problem of race in America. They
are seen as a series of formal experiments Faulkner deliberately
attempted as he examined the various cultural functions of
narrative, most particularly those narratives that enforce American
racial ideology.
The first chapters look at the ways in which the ability to
assert oneself verbally informs matters of individual and cultural
identity in both the widely studied works of Faulkner's major phase
and those in his later career. Later chapters focus on the last
works, providing detailed readings of Intruder in the
Dust , Requiem for a Nun , the Snopes trilogy, A
Fable , and The Reivers .
The book examines Faulkner as he confronted the vexing questions
of race in these novels and assesses the identity of Faulkner as
the Nobel Prize winner who claimed on many occasions that he was
\"tired,\" maybe \"written out.\" In his decision not to speak in the
identity of the black people represented in his fiction, in his
decision to write instead about the complexities of all racial
constructions, he produced a host of characters suffering within
the rigid protocols on race that had been enforced in America for
centuries. As a private, white individual, he could never be other
than what he was. Rather than attempt to reconcile Faulkner the
public man with the private one, however, this study concludes that
through his fiction Faulkner the artist questioned himself and came
to understand others across the color line.
Theresa M. Towner is Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies in
the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas in
Dallas.
eBook
Conrad's Narratives of Difference
In Joseph Conrad's tales, representations of women and of \"feminine\" generic forms like the romance are often present in fugitive ways. Conrad's use of allegorical feminine imagery, fleet or deferred introductions of female characters, and hybrid generic structures that combine features of \"masculine\" tales of adventure and intrigue and \"feminine\" dramas of love or domesticity are among the subjects of this literary study. Many of Conrad's critics have argued that Conrad's fictions are aesthetically flawed by the inclusion of women and love plots; thus Thomas Moser has questioned why Conrad did not \"cut them out altogether.\" Yet a thematics of gender suffuses Conrad's narrative strategies. Even in tales that contain no significant female characters or obvious love plots, Conrad introduces elusive feminine presences, in relationships between men, as well as in men's relationships to their ship, the sea, a shore breeze, or even in the gendered embrace of death. This book investigates an identifiably feminine \"point of view\" which is present in fugitive ways throughout Conrad's canon. Conrad's narrative strategies are articulated through a language of sexual difference that provides the vocabulary and grammar for tales examining European class, racial, and gender paradigms to provide acute and, at times, equivocal investigations of femininity and difference.
eBook
Writing Beat and other occasions of literary mayhem
\"This hybrid memoir of sixteen interconnected essays attempts to reconsider the Beats and to focus as well on the process of writing non-fiction and biography\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Serious poetry : form and authority from Yeats to Hill
Do we want to read poetry, or just like having a few poets to talk about? The history of poetry in 20th-century Britain and Ireland is one which ends with the assimilation of successful poets into a media culture. It is also, however, another history, one of form and authority, in which certain poets found modes and pitches of resistance to the seeming inevitabilities of their times. In this history, it is the authority of poetry (and not the media-processed poet) which is at stake in the integrity of poetic form. This book offers a controversial reading of 20th-century British and Irish poetry centred on six figures, all of whom are critics as well as poets: William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Wystan Hugh Auden, Louis MacNeice, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill. Yeats's centrality to 20th-century poetry — and the problem many poets and critics had, or still have, with that centrality — is a major focus of the book. The book argues that it is in the strengths, possibilities, perplexities, and certainties of the poetic form that poetry's authority in a distrustful cultural climate remains most seriously alive.
eBook