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This book focuses on the imaginary construction and deconstruction of human communities in modern and contemporary fiction. Drawing on recent theoretical debate on the notion of community (Nancy, Blanchot, Badiou, Esposito), this collection examines narratives by Joyce, Mansfield, Davies, Naipaul, DeLillo, Atwood and others.
Drawing on critical frameworks, this study establishes the centrality of language, gender, and community in the quest for identity in contemporary American fiction. Close readings of novels by Alice Walker, Ernest Gaines, Ann Beattie, John Updike, Chang-rae Lee, and Rudolfo Anaya, among others, show how individuals find their American identities.
Secrecy and Community in 21st-Century Fiction examines the relation between secrecy and community in a diverse and international range of contemporary fictional works in English. In its concern with what is called 'communities of secrecy', it is fundamentally indebted to the thought of Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot, who have pointed to the fallacies and dangers of identitarian and exclusionary communities, arguing for forms of being-in-common characterized by non-belonging, singularity and otherness. Also drawing on the work of J. Hillis Miller, Derek Attridge, Nicholas Royle, Matei Calinescu, Frank Kermode and George Simmel, among others, this volume analyses the centrality of secrets in the construction of literary form, narrative sequence and meaning, together with their foundational role in our private and interpersonal lives and the public and political realms. In doing so, it engages with the Derridean ethico-political value of secrecy and Derrida's conception of literature as the exemplary site for the operation of the unconditional secret.
In dialogue with groundbreaking technologies and scientific models, twentieth century fiction presents readers with a vast mosaic of perspectives on the cosmos. The literary imagination of the world beyond the human scale, however, faces a fundamental difficulty: if, as researchers in both cognitive science and narrative theory argue, fiction is a practice geared toward the human embodied mind, how can it cope with scientific theories and concepts— the Big Bang, quantum physics, evolutionary biology, and so on—that resist our common-sense intuitions and appear discontinuous, in spatial as well as temporal terms, with our bodies? This book sets out to answer this question by showing how the embodiment of mind continues to matter even as writers— and readers—are pushed out of their terrestrial comfort zone. Offering thoughtful commentary on work by both mainstream literary authors and science fiction writers (from Primo Levi to Jeanette Winterson, from Olaf Stapledon to Pamela Zoline), Embodiment and the Cosmic Perspective in Twentieth-Century Fiction explores the multiple ways in which narrative can radically defamiliarize our bodily experience and bridge the gap with cosmic realities. This investigation affords an opportunity to reflect on the role of literature as it engages with science and charts its epistemological and ethical ramifications.
This Encyclopedia offers an indispensable reference guide to twentieth-century fiction in the English-language. With nearly 500 contributors and over one million words, it is the most comprehensive and authoritative reference guide to twentieth-century fiction in the English language. Contains over 500 entries of 1000-3000 words written in lucid, jargon-free prose, by an international cast of leading scholars Arranged in three volumes covering British and Irish Fiction, American Fiction, and World Fiction, with each volume edited by a leading scholar in the field Entries cover major writers (such as Saul Bellow, Raymond Chandler, John Steinbeck, Virginia Woolf, A.S. Byatt, Samual Beckett, D.H. Lawrence, Zadie Smith, Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, Alice Munro, Chinua Achebe, J.M. Coetzee, and Ngûgî Wa Thiong’o) and their key works Examines the genres and sub-genres of fiction in English across the twentieth century (including crime fiction, Sci-Fi, chick lit, the noir novel, and the avant-garde novel) as well as the major movements, debates, and rubrics within the field, such as censorship, globalization, modernist fiction, fiction and the film industry, and the fiction of migration, diaspora, and exile
Heather Ingman's study argues that reading twentieth-century Irish women's fiction in the light of Kristeva's theories of nationhood places Irish women at the heart of writing about the nation and demonstrates that the political dimension of their fiction has often been underestimated. Her book is an important contribution to the study of gender in Irish writing that changes the way we view Irish women's writing.
This book examines the connections between two disparate yet persistently bound thematics -- mobility and intoxication -- and explores their central yet frequently misunderstood role in constructing subjectivity following the 1960s. Emerging from profound mid-twentieth-century changes in how drugs and travel were imagined, the conceptual nexus discussed sheds new light on British and North American responses to sixties counterculture. With readings of Aldous Huxley, William Burroughs, Alex Garland, Hunter S. Thompson, and Robert Sedlack, Banco traces twin arguments, looking at the ways travel is imagined as a disciplinary force acting upon the creative, destabilizing powers of psychedelic intoxication; and exploring the ways drugs help construct travel spaces and practices as, at times, revolutionary, and at other times, neo-colonial. By following a sequence of shifting understandings of drug and travel orthodoxies, this book traverses fraught and irresistibly linked terrains from the late 1950s up to a period marked by international, postmodern tourism. As such, it helps illuminate a world where tourism is continually expanding yet constantly circumscribed, and where illegal drugs are both increasingly unregulated in the global economy and perceived more and more as crucial agents in the construction of human subjectivity.
The Present Anthology Of Critical Essays On Twentieth Century English Literature Seeks To Put Together The Body Of Writing Criticism, Poetry, Fiction, Short-Story, In England, America, Australia, Africa And India In The Present Age, To Discover How, Despite Its Seeming Divergence And Dissimilarities, It Falls Into A Broad Pattern With Regard To The Choice Of Themes And Formal Strategies.The Essays Included Are Theoretical, Com¬Parative And Exigetical, Expounding Move¬Ments Like Modernism And Post-Modernism; Critical Perspectives Like The Scientifico-Psychological Approach And Its Practical Application, And Critiques Of T.S. Eliot, Thomas Hardy, E.M. Forster, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh, G.B. Shaw, Harold Pinter, Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, Wole Soyinka, Manohar Malgonkar, Nayantara Sahgal, C.J. Koch And Frank Moorhouse.The Anthology Reveals The Family Re¬Semblance In Twentieth Century English Literature Irrespective Of Geographic And Cultural Barriers, Reinforcing The View That In The Global Village That The World Has Become, Literature In English All Over The World In The Modern Context Has Come To Assume The Form Of A Community-Discourse.
The Present Anthology, Consisting Of Some Twenty Articles Of Moderate Length By Eminent Scholars At The National Level, Is An Attempt In Analysing The Point Of View Of Women As Evinced In The Writings Of The Women Writers Belonging To The Different Genres And The Countries Like India, America, South-Africa, Canada, The Other Countries Of The Commonwealth And Africa, And Also The Writing Branded As Post Modernist Literature And The Literature Of The New Modernity .Where The Emphasis Is Laid Particularly Upon The Issues Of Identity, Alienation, Suppression And Protest Pertaining To The Lot Of Women In The Present Day World, The Volume Stresses An Usurping Issue Of Her Dominance Over Men, Not Through Her Sexuality But The Far Effective Qualities Of Her Motherhood.This Volume Is Brought Out With The Trust That It Would Throw Fresh Light On The Approach Of The Researchers And Make The Literary Critical Art A Pastime In Excavating As Well As Analysing Thoughts Of The Modern Writers On Both Woman And Her Feminity.
