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"Literary influences"
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Pulphead
\"A sharp-eyed, uniquely humane tour of America's cultural landscape--from high to low to lower than low--by the award-winning young star of the literary nonfiction world In Pulphead, John Jeremiah Sullivan takes us on an exhilarating tour of our popular, unpopular, and at times completely forgotten culture. Simultaneously channeling the gonzo energy of Hunter S. Thompson and the wit and insight of Joan Didion, Sullivan shows us--with a laidback, erudite Southern charm that's all his own--how we really (no, really) live now. In his native Kentucky, Sullivan introduces us to Constantine Rafinesque, a nineteenth-century polymath genius who concocted a dense, fantastical prehistory of the New World. Back in modern times, Sullivan takes us to the Ozarks for a Christian rock festival; to Florida to meet the alumni and straggling refugees of MTV's Real World, who've generated their own self-perpetuating economy of minor celebrity; and all across the South on the trail of the blues. He takes us to Indiana to investigate the formative years of Michael Jackson and Axl Rose and then to the Gulf Coast in the wake of Katrina--and back again as its residents confront the BP oil spill. Gradually, a unifying narrative emerges, a story about this country that we've never heard told this way. It's like a fun-house hall-of-mirrors tour: Sullivan shows us who we are in ways we've never imagined to be true. Of course we don't know whether to laugh or cry when faced with this reflection--it's our inevitable sob-guffaws that attest to the power of Sullivan's work\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
The German student movement and the literary imagination
Through a close reading of novels by Ulrike Kolb, Irmtraud Morgner, Emine Sevgi Ozdamar, Bernhard Schlink, Peter Schneider, and Uwe Timm, this book traces the cultural memory of the 1960s student movement in German fiction, revealing layers of remembering and forgetting that go beyond conventional boundaries of time and space. These novels engage this contestation by constructing a palimpsest of memories that reshape readers' understanding of the 1960s with respect to the end of the Cold War, the legacy of the Third Reich, and the Holocaust. Topographically, these novels refute assertions that East Germans were isolated from the political upheaval that took place in the late 1960s and 1970s. Through their aesthetic appropriations and subversions, these multicultural contributions challenge conventional understandings of German identity and at the same time lay down claims of belonging within a German society that is more openly diverse than ever before.
eBook
How Russian Literature Became Great
How Russian Literature Became Great
explores the cultural and political role of a modern
national literature, orchestrated in a Slavonic key but resonating
far beyond Russia's borders.
Rolf Hellebust investigates a range of literary tendencies,
philosophies, and theories from antiquity to the present: Roman
jurisprudence to German Romanticism, French Enlightenment to Czech
Structuralism, Herder to Hobsbawm, Samuel Johnson to Sainte-Beuve,
and so on. Besides the usual Russian suspects from Pushkin to
Chekhov, Hellebust includes European writers: Byron and Shelley,
Goethe and Schiller, Chateaubriand and Baudelaire, Dante,
Mickiewicz, and more.
As elsewhere, writing in Russia advertises itself via a canon of
literary monuments constituting an atemporal \"ideal order among
themselves\" (T.S. Eliot). And yet this is a tradition that could
only have been born at a specific moment in the golden
nineteenth-century age of historiography and nation-building. The
Russian example reveals the contradictions between immutability and
innovation, universality and specificity at the heart of modern
conceptions of tradition from Sainte-Beuve through Eliot and down
to the present day.
The conditions of its era of formation-the prominence of the
crucial literary-historical question of the writer's social
function, and the equation of literature with national
identity-make the Russian classical tradition the epitome of a
unified cultural text, with a complex narrative in which competing
stories of progress and decline unfold through the symbolic
biographical encounters of the authors who constitute its members.
How Russian Literature Became Great thus offers a new
paradigm for understanding the paradoxes of modern tradition.
eBook
The Afterlife of Character, 1726-1825
The Afterlife of Character, 1726-1825 reconstructs how eighteenth-century British readers invented further adventures for beloved characters, including Gulliver, Falstaff, Pamela, and Tristram Shandy. Far from being close-ended and self-contained, the novels and plays in which these characters first appeared were treated by many as merely a starting point, a collective reference perpetually inviting augmentation through an astonishing wealth of unauthorized sequels. Characters became an inexhaustible form of common property, despite their patent authorship. Readers endowed them with value, knowing all the while that others were doing the same and so were collectively forging a new mode of virtual community.By tracing these practices, David A. Brewer shows how the literary canon emerged as much \"from below\" as out of any of the institutions that have been credited with their invention. Indeed, he reveals the astonishing degree to which authors had to cajole readers into granting them authority over their own creations, authority that seems self-evident to a modern audience.In its innovative methodology and its unprecedented attention to the productive interplay between the audience, the book as a material artifact, and the text as an immaterial entity, The Afterlife of Character, 1726-1825 offers a compelling new approach to eighteenth-century studies, the history of the book, and the very idea of character itself.
eBook
Gothic imagination in Latin American fiction and film
\"This work traces how Gothic imagination from the literature and culture of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe and twentieth-century US and European film has impacted Latin American literature and film culture. Serrano argues that the Gothic has provided Latin American authors with a way to critique a number of issues, including colonization, authoritarianism, feudalism, and patriarchy. The book includes a literary history of the European Gothic to demonstrate how Latin American authors have incorporated its characteristics but also how they have broken away or inverted some elements, such as traditional plot lines, to suit their work and address a unique set of issues. The book examines both the modernistas of the nineteenth century and the avant-garde writers of the twentieth century, including Huidobro, Bombal, Rulfo, Roa Bastos, and Fuentes. Looking at the Gothic in Latin American literature and film, this book is a groundbreaking study that brings a fresh perspective to Latin American creative culture\"-- Provided by publisher.
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In the shadow of Enoch Powell
Fifty years ago Enoch Powell made national headlines with his 'Rivers of Blood' speech, warning of an immigrant invasion in the once respectable streets of Wolverhampton. This local fixation brought the Black Country town into the national spotlight, yet Powell's unstable relationship with Wolverhampton has since been overlooked. Drawing from interviews and archival material, this book offers a rich local history through which to investigate the speech, bringing to life the racialised dynamics of space during a critical moment in British history. What was going on beneath the surface in Wolverhampton and how did Powell's constituents respond to this dramatic moment? The research traces the ways in which Powell's words reinvented the town and uncovers highly contested local responses. While Powell left Wolverhampton in 1974, the book returns to the city to explore the collective memories of the speech which continue to reverberate. In a contemporary period of new crisis and national divisions, revisiting the shadow of Powell allows us to reflect on racism and resistance from 1968 to today.
eBook
African, American : from Tarzan to Dreams from my father : Africa in the US imagination
A panoramic account of the role Africa has played in the American psyche, covering books, movies, music and more.
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Dorian Unbound
A bold reimagining of the literary history of Decadence through a close examination of the transnational contexts of Oscar Wilde's classic novel The Picture of Dorian Gray.Building upon a large body of archival and critical work on Oscar Wilde's only novel, Dorian Unbound offers a new account of the importance of transnational contexts in the forging of Wilde's imagination and the wider genealogy of literary Decadence. Sean O'Toole argues that the attention critics have rightly paid to Wilde's backgrounds in Victorian Aestheticism and French Decadence has had the unintended effect of obscuring a much broader network of transnational contexts. Attention to these contexts allows us to reconsider how we read The Picture of Dorian Gray, what we believe we know about Wilde, and how we understand literary Decadence as both a persistent, highly mobile cultural mode and a precursor to global modernism. In developing a transnational framework for reading Dorian Gray, O'Toole recovers a subterranean network of nineteenth-century cultural movements. At the same time, he joins several active and vital conversations about what it might mean to expand the geographical reach of Victorian studies and to trace the globalization of literature over a longer period of time. Dorian Unbound includes chapters on the Irish Gothic, German historical romance, US magic-picture tradition, and experimental English epigrams, as well as a detailed history and a new close reading of the novel, in an effort to understand Wilde's contribution to a more dynamic idea of Decadence than has been previously known. From its rigorous account of the broad archive of texts that Wilde read and the array of cultural movements from which he drew inspiration in writing Dorian Gray to the novel's afterlives and global resonances, O'Toole paints a richer picture of the author and his famously allusive prose. This book makes a compelling case for a comparative reading of the novel in a global context. It will appeal to historians and admirers of Wilde's career as well as to scholars of nineteenth-century literature, queer and narrative theory, Irish studies, and art history.
eBook