Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
18
result(s) for
"Manors Fiction."
Sort by:
The peacock summer
At twenty-six, Lillian feels trapped by life. Her marriage to Charles Oberon has not turned out the way she expected it would. To her it seems she is just another object captured within the walls of Cloudesley, her husband's beautiful manor house tucked away high in the Chiltern Hills. But, with a young step-son and a sister to care for, Lillian accepts there is no way out for her. Then Charles makes an arrangement with an enigmatic artist visiting their home and his presence will unbalance everything she thought she knew and understood. Maggie Oberon ran from the hurt and resentment she caused. Half a world away, in Australia, it was easier to forget, to pretend she didn't care. But when her elderly grandmother, Lillian, falls ill she must head back to Cloudesley. Forced to face her past, Maggie fights to hold herself and her family's legacy together as she learns that all she thought was real, all that she held so close, was never as it seemed. Two summers, decades apart. Two women whose lives are forever entwined. And a house that holds the dark secrets that could free them both.
Cadbury and \The Camelot Caper\
Elizabeth Peters' novel The Camelot Caper, published in 1969 when the excavations at South Cadbury were in progress, offers a clever pastiche of Gothic novels, set partly at Glastonbury and South Cadbury. The protagonists face potential dangers on every hand but suffer little from them, and the narrator even characterizes a chase scene set in the Glastonbury ruins as a 'merry romp.' The climax of the narrative features an episode that inverts the imagery of the Cadbury excavations as the villains dig in order to place objects into the ground.
Journal Article
Peculiar ground : a novel
\"It is the seventeenth century and a wall is being raised around Wychwood, transforming the great house and its park into a private realm of ornamental lakes, grandiose gardens, and majestic avenues designed by Mr. Norris, a visionary landscaper. In this enclosed world everyone has something to hide after decades of civil war. Dissenters shelter in the woods, lovers rendezvous in secret enclaves, and outsiders--migrants fleeing the plague--find no mercy. Three centuries later, far away in Berlin, another wall is raised, while at Wychwood, an erotic entanglement over one sticky, languorous weekend in 1961 is overshadowed by news of historic change. Young Nell, whose father manages the estate, grows up amid dramatic upheavals as the great house is invaded: a pop festival by the lake, a television crew in the dining room, a Great Storm brewing. In 1989, as the Cold War peters out, a threat from a different kind of conflict reaches Wychwood's walls. Lucy Hughes-Hallett conjures an intricately structured, captivating story that explores the lives of game keepers and witches, agitators and aristocrats; the exuberance of young love and the pathos of aging; and the way those who try to wall others out risk finding themselves walled in. With poignancy and grace, she illuminates a place where past and present are inextricably linked by stories, legends, and history--and by one patch of peculiar ground.\"--Amazon.com.
Book
Charlotte Smith's Literary Exile
Frequently praised for the way in which her landscape descriptions copy nature, and often charged with plagiarism, Charlotte Smith unsettles distinctions made by contemporaries between art's imitation of nature and its imitation of other texts. Her fiction, in particular, suggests that for Smith the authenticity promised by properly mirroring nature is inextricable from less respectable modes of copying. This essay addresses the relation between Smith's imitative aesthetic—broadly characterized as encompassing various modes of copying—and her biographical experience of exile and alienation, which she copies into the novels not as an \"original,\" but as an imitation that proliferates through a structural principle of copying.
Journal Article
Kay's story, 1934
\"The Great Depression is raging across America and even the Vandermeers have fallen on hard times. In an attempt to stay afloat, Kay and her parents have started living in the guest cottage and getting Vandermeer Manor ready for renters. Money starts coming in when a mysterious man purchases some family heirlooms, but questions are raised when it comes to light that the wealthy benefactor has knowingly paid more money for the heirlooms than they are actually worth. Who is he, why does he want to help the Vandermeers, and what does he want in return?\"--Jacket.
Book
Tolstoy, Rousseau, and the Russian estate: the search for paradise in Landowner's morning
Each volume centers on a particular area of husbandry- domestic animals, horticulture and forestry, domestic industry, and vegetation-and provides cultivation techniques dating from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Since it offers a comprehensive guide to land restoration- \"here is quite a powerful system of civilization for the countryside,\" boasts its editors (Bixio 2; my translation)-La Maison rustique appears to be the perfect textual companion for a novice such as Nekhliudov. The statistical evidence provided by La Maison rustique, compiled strictly from Western European farms, proves useless when applied to Russian soil. [...]Nekhliudov's preparatory reading from La Maison rustique does not help him in any practical way- he repeatedly fails in his attempts at basic farming activities. [...]La Maison rustique offers no guidance for dealing with the Russian peasantry, whose complex political reality in the 1850s cannot be treated solely with foreign models. [...]he often retreats when called upon to act as an authority figure.
Journal Article
Sheer folly : a Daisy Dalrymple mystery
1926. Daisy and her friend Lucy are at a stately home reputed to have the best grotto in the country, for research on their architectural book. As long-held secrets and resentments threaten to explode, even Daisy couldn't predict the deadly events to come.
Book
A Sacrificial Myth
It is characteristic of the historical imagination that it creates myths that are often more illustrative of the times in which they were created than they are of the remote universe they were invented to explain.
Accepting this proposition, I will take on the somewhat risky task of revisiting a commonplace of comparative literature scholars, who interpret Brazilianindianismo(Indianism) with reference to European Romanticism’s exploration of national origins. There, in Europe, we have medieval figures and scenes, whereas here in Brazil we see an indigenous world just as it first appeared to the surprised discoverers. Both here and there
Book Chapter
The clockmaker's daughter : a novel
A \"story of a love affair and a mysterious murder that cast their shadows across generations, set in England from the 1860s until the present day\"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
Connaissance Délicieuse or the Science of Jealousy: Tsushima Yūko's Story \Kikumushi\ (The Chrysanthemum Beetle)
This essay analyzes the story \"Kikumushi\" (The Chrysanthemum Beetle) by the noted woman writer Tsushima Yūko (b. 1947). Though most Japanese critics claim that Tsushima's writings have a narrow focus, revolving around a few, readily identifiable \"themes\" and \"motifs\" such as the brother-sister incest, the marginalization of single mothers and their children in contemporary Japanese society, the meaninglessness and absurdity of family ties/blood relationships and the various ways in which lonely, defiant women challenge traditional discourses on motherhood and female sexuality, \"Kikumushi\" demonstrates that Tsushima's texts not only display a complex narrative structure, but articulate critiques that transcend the Japanese context and raise important questions for feminist cross-cultural analyses. By contrasting \"Kikumushi\" with the sarayashiki (Manor-of-the-Dishes) tradition which significantly structures Tsushima's narrative, by bringing several theoretical perspectives to bear on, and especially by highlighting the play of fantasy in the story, this study shows that, in the face of a non-anthropocentric, continually shifting mythical discursive space such as that envisioned by Tsushima our habitual interpretive strategies—even the most \"subversive\" and \"politically correct\" ones—are largely inadequate and that a new critical discourse has to be invented. 要旨:批評界や文芸ジャーナリズムでは津島佑子は妊娠・出産・育児等、女性特有の経験を中心に、数少ない特定のテーマやモチーフを繰り返し追求している作者のように思われている。つまり津鳥が捉えようとしているテーマやモチーフが知恵遅れの兄(弟)とその妹(姉)との近親相姦、未婚の母・離婚した母やその子供の、生々しい、愛や暴力や殺意に満ちた日常生活、女の身体性(セクシュアリテイー)等、現代における女性を中心とした人間関係の新たな様相の表現への模索である。本稿では津島の短褊「菊虫」(『逢摩物語』所収、1984年発行)を取り上げる。作品の解読・解釈を行ないながら、津島文学についての、上記のような、一般的な読み方にとらわれず、作者のテクストが探り続ける文化的・思想的・政治的言説空間を捉えようと思う。そのためには、現在の国文学研究や文芸批評、フェミニズム批評や所謂“政治的に正しい批評”(politically correct criticism)のディスコースさえも超越した、新しい読み・批評のストラテジーを展開せねばならない。「菊虫」の場合、作者は、作品の中核である“嫉妬”をアイロニーや滑稽味やファン夕ジーの世界として表出しているが、この魅惑的言説空間を解読するための、新たな方法論の提示を筆者は意図するものである。
Journal Article