Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
14
result(s) for
"Ugliness Fiction."
Sort by:
Who's the grossest of them all?
\"A goblin and a troll argue about who is grosser, until a little girl outgrosses them both\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Plain and Ugly Janes
\"If beauty is truth, is ugliness falsehood and deception? If all art need concern itself with is beauty, what need have we to explore in our literature the nature and consequences of ugliness?\" InPlain and Ugly Janes, originally published in hardcover in 2000 by Garland, Charlotte Wright defines and explores the ramifications of a new character type in twentieth-century American literature, the \"ugly woman,\" whose roots can be traced to the old maid/spinster character of the nineteenth century.
During the 1970s, stories began to appear in which the ugly woman is a figure of power-heroic not in the traditional old maid's way of quiet, passive acceptance but in a way more in keeping with the active, masculine definition of heroic behavior. Wright uses these stories to discuss the nature and definitions of ugliness and the effects of female ugliness on both male and female literary characters in the works of a range of American authors, including Sherwood Anderson, Russell Banks, Djuna Barnes, Peter S. Beagle, Sarah Bird, Ray Bradbury, Katherine Dunn, Louise Erdrich, William Faulkner, Tess Gallagher, Barry Hannah, Ernest Hemingway, Zora Neale Hurston, Alison Lurie, Lorrie Moore, Joyce Carol Oates, Flannery O'Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, Leon Rooke, Anne Tyler, Alice Walker, and Eudora Welty. Wright concludes that the ugly woman character allows American authors to explore the ironies and inequalities inherent in the beauty system.
eBook
The charlatan's boy : a novel
Grady knows nothing of his origins--he does not even have a last name--but as he and a huckster travel from one small, frontier town to another he poses one of the wild, ugly swamp beasts called feechies.
Book
Laideur et libertinage au XVIIIe siècle
La laideur dans les arts pose des questions complexes aux théoriciens des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, souvent adeptes du principe aristotélicien qui en prône le rachat par la mimésis. Les romanciers y consacrent une moindre attention. Faisant l’objet de descriptions conventionnelles, la laideur du corps est souvent associée à la laideur morale, dont elle constitue le corollaire physique. Cependant, il existe des enclaves narratives qui témoignent d'une utilisation originale et désinhibée de la laideur que cet essai se propose d’illustrer par des exemples tirés du roman libertin. En subvertissant les valeurs consacrées, en persiflant les nobles, les courtisanes et les moines, en mettant à l’épreuve le désir même du lecteur, la laideur saisie au cœur de l'éros forge une clé de lecture ultérieure pour comprendre la marche de la raison au siècle des Lumières.
eBook
Extras
After rebel Tally Youngblood brings down the uglies/pretties/specials regime, fame, instead of beauty, becomes the new world order, and fifteen-year-old Aya Fuse embarks on a dangerous plan to boost her popularity ranking.
Book
Monstrosity, Suffering, Subjectivity, and Sympathetic Community in Frankenstein and \The Structure of Torture\
Mary Shelley's 1818 version of Frankenstein and Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain share an interest in the essential makeup of individual identity and its dependence on communal recognition. Scarry's model describes a process wherein the application of physical pain reverses the progress of individual self-extension, driving a victim from the larger conceptual world and back into a solipsistic bodily sensation of pain. The victim is then forced to facilitate the annihilation of his identity through acquiescence to the verbal component of torture, wherein he is required to \"confess\" or otherwise \"betray\" himself. The process as a whole acts as a medium for the torturer's performance of power. By mapping the experience of the Creature in Frankenstein onto this model, the narrative can be read as a relentless process of annihilation that culminates in the Creature's embodiment of the appellation \"monster\" in contravention of his noble aspirations and desire \"to be participated\" in human community. Frankenstein complicates Scarry's model by resisting the unambiguous moral divide between innocent-victim and culpable-torturer. In Frankenstein, the torture process does not occur in a closed system; it unfolds in parallel to the Creature's efforts toward self-extension and identity formation. Taken in concert, Frankenstein and Scarry's \"The Structure of Torture\" suggest how an individual forms an identity in collaboration with, or in response to, community. Further, both individuals and the community at large bear responsibility for the world which comes into being through their interactions.
Journal Article
Colonialism and the Need for Impurity: Katherine Mansfield, ‘The Garden Party’ and Postcolonial Feeling
Does Katherine Mansfield's writing pertain to the sphere of what we today call ‘postcolonial’? And how radical and productive a notion is the postcolonial? In an important essay, Ella Shohat argues that the postcolonial is probably much less radical than is generally thought, insofar as it reproduces the colonial narrative of progress and linearity, predicated upon an ethics of chronological expansion from a ‘pre’ to a ‘post’. Even if we suppose, for the sake of the argument, that over a period of several decades we went from colonialism to anti-colonialism, and then to postcolonialism, we cannot but accept that the post-colonial, by expanding spatially, also involves micro-mechanisms of producing both colonial and anti-colonial elements. In this essay, I want to argue that the postcolonial, if examined through a number of Mansfield's journals, letters and her famous short story ‘The Garden Party’, may be seen more broadly as a spatial as well as a chronological entity, or even a frame of thinking that runs counter to the mentality and practice of the colonial, without, however, precluding or eliminating the work or influence of coloniality. The postcolonial, in that sense, does not constitute an airtight category or territory but is rather infiltrated by a fusion of colonial practices and anti-colonial techniques, thus forming something resembling Homi Bhabha's insight concerning the existence of a third space which ‘problematises the binary division of past and present, tradition and modernity, at the level of cultural representation and its authoritative address’.
Book Chapter
Tearful Gaze
Yuo-Djung lived in the city of Sianfu and was preparing for the supreme state examination. He studied night after night in solitude by candlelight. This was how he spent the winter, and when spring arrived, fresh aromas drifted through his window. At first they came one at a time—the aroma of melting snow, the aroma of the damp, wilted foliage, and the aroma of the first violets. The smells came in droves. They pushed their way through the window like herds of sheep when driven into a corral in the evening. Yuo-Djung had a very fine sense of smell
Book Chapter
Ethnicity, Race, and Monstrosity
There are many conceptions of beauty. Some associate beauty with proportion and harmony; some with pleasure taken in the appearance of things; and some, more narrowly, withdisinterestedpleasure. Kant, of course, uses disinterested pleasure as the central mark of what he calls free beauty. However, Kant also speaks of dependent or accessory beauty, which pertains to the aesthetic judgments we make about things in relation to the determinate concepts under which the objects in question fall.¹ Human beauty, for Kant, is of this sort.² We call a human beautiful, he suggests, insofar as a person approaches being a perfect
Book Chapter