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What Is a Classic? revisits the famous question posed by critics from Sainte-Beuve and T. S. Eliot to J. M. Coetzee to ask how classics emanate from postcolonial histories and societies. Exploring definitive trends in twentieth- and twenty-first century English and Anglophone literature, Ankhi Mukherjee demonstrates the relevance of the question of the classic for the global politics of identifying and perpetuating so-called core texts. Emergent canons are scrutinized in the context of the wider cultural phenomena of book prizes, the translation and distribution of world literatures, and multimedia adaptations of world classics. Throughout, Mukherjee attunes traditional literary critical concerns to the value contestations mobilizing postcolonial and world literature. The breadth of debates and topics she addresses, as well as the book's ambitious historical schema, which includes South Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the West Indies, Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and North America, set this study apart from related titles on the bookshelf today.
This volume draws together eleven essays by scholars of the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, Greco-Roman religion and early Judaism, to address the ways that conceptions of identity and otherness shape the interpretation of biblical and other religiously authoritative texts. The contributions explore how interpreters of scriptural texts regularly assume or assert an identification between their own communities and those described in the text, while ignoring the cultural, social, and religious differences between themselves and the text's earliest audiences. Comparing a range of examples, these essays address varying ways in which social identity has shaped the historical contexts, implied audiences, rhetorical shaping, redactional development, literary appropriation, and reception history of particular texts over time. Together, they open up new avenues for studying the relations between social identity, scriptural interpretation, and religious authority.
"Irigaray speculates of the elected audience of her essay that most of them will be unable to understand its title, meaning, history, or its full afterlife. The title, "The Poverty of Psychoanalysis," is referring, of course, to Karl Marx's The Poverty of Philosophy"--
This book shows how prose writers in the Victorian period grappled with the sea as a setting, a shaper of plot and character, as a structuring motif, and as a source of metaphor.
Great Expectations has had a long, active and sometimes surprising life since its first serialized appearance in All the Year Round between 1 December 1860 and 3 August 1861. In this new publishing and reception history, Mary Hammond demonstrates that while Dickens’s thirteenth novel can tell us a great deal about the dynamic mid-Victorian moment into which it was born, its afterlife beyond the nineteenth-century Anglophone world reveals the full extent of its versatility. Re-assessing generations of Dickens scholarship and using newly discovered archival material, Hammond covers the formative history of Great Expectations' early years, analyses the extent and significance of its global reach, and explores the ways in which it has functioned as literature and stage, TV, film and radio drama from its first appearance to the latest film version of 2012. Appendices include contemporary reviews and comprehensive bibliographies of adaptations and translations. The book is a rich resource for scholars and students of Dickens; of comparative literature; and of publishing, readership, and media history.
Explores a wide range of affects, affect theory, and literature to consolidate a fresh understanding of literary affect.
This book brings the insights of social geographers and cultural historians into a critical dialogue with literary narratives of urban culture and theories of literary cultural production. In so doing, it explores new ways of conceptualizing the relationship between urban planning, its often violent effects, and literature. Comparing the spatial pasts and presents of the post-imperial and post/colonial cities of London, Delhi and Johannesburg, but also including case studies of other cities, such as Chicago, Belfast, Jerusalem and Mumbai, Planned Violence investigates how that iconic site of modernity, the colonial city, was imagined by its planners — and how this urban imagination, and the cultural and social interventions that arose in response to it, made violence a part of the everyday social life of its subjects. Throughout, however, the collection also explores the extent to which literary and cultural productions might actively resist infrastructures of planned violence, and imagine alternative ways of inhabiting post/colonial city spaces.
Looking at texts including Jean Toomer's "Cane", Toni Morrison's "Beloved", James Baldwin's "Another Country", and 'Beat' poetry by Bob Kaufmann, this work describes the phenomena of haunting, displacement, and ghostliness as endemic to modern African American literature and culture.
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