Fatal Attractions, Abjection, and the Self in Literature from the Restoration to the Romantics

Fatal Attractions, Abjection, and the Self in Literature from the Restoration to the Romantics PDF

Author: Laura Alexander

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2019-03-18

Total Pages: 118

ISBN-13: 152753152X

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This book examines Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection in several works by early British writers from the Restoration to the Romantic era. This period saw an increased emphasis on understanding the self. Poems with anxious speakers or narratives featuring characters with considerable psychic pressures emerged as writers responded to ideas on consciousness by natural philosophers. The pursuit of self-knowledge also reached greater imaginative depths, inspiring new artistic movements, including sensibility, with its attention to expressions of the suffering self, and the Gothic, a mode of art that examines the self’s deepest fears. Romantic writers theorized about artistic genius, creating a cult of the self that has never left us. Kristeva offers a more complete psychoanalytic vocabulary for understanding the self’s unconscious motivations in literature written during this period, and this book provides readers interested in early British literature, philosophy, and literary theory with a constructive perspective for thinking about literary depictions of the self-in-crisis.

The Beauty of Melancholy and British Women Writers, 1670-1720

The Beauty of Melancholy and British Women Writers, 1670-1720 PDF

Author: Laura Alexander

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2019-11-15

Total Pages: 112

ISBN-13: 1527543560

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This book considers melancholy language in representative works by several British women writers in late Stuart England. To understand how these women writers understood and reframed the discussion about melancholy and women’s experience of suffering in their art, it turns to the twentieth-century French feminist theorist Julia Kristeva, whose radical work on melancholy in Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (1989) provides an alternative psychoanalytic perspective for considering melancholy discourse created by women experiencing alienation, depression, and anguish in earlier periods. Kristeva offers a theoretical lens for understanding loss as a significant and ongoing perspective on life experience that finds expression through art and language. This text argues that early women writers created a new expressive mode, revising existing models to account for their own losses during a time of cultural and political transitioning in England. These writers provide a melancholy aesthetic in their works or depict depressed female figures reflecting artistic angst and a new discourse within language for articulating pain.

Women Writing Trauma in Literature

Women Writing Trauma in Literature PDF

Author: Laura Alexander

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2022-10-17

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1527589714

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This collection features studies on trauma, literary theory, and psychoanalysis in women’s writing. It examines the ways in which literature helps to heal the wounded self, and it particularly concentrates attention on the way women explain the traumatic experiences of war, violence, or displacement. Covering a global range of women writers, this book focuses on the psychoanalytic role of literature in helping recover the voices buried by intense pain and suffering and to help those voices be heard. Literature brings the unconscious into being and focus, reconfiguring life through narration. These essays look at the relationship between traumatic experience and literary form.

Fatal Attractions

Fatal Attractions PDF

Author: Lynne Pearce

Publisher: Pluto Press (UK)

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780745313818

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Our fascination with romance is seemingly indestructible. Until now, however, romance has been badly neglected as a subject for serious academic study. This original collection aims to redress this imbalance by focusing on the changing nature, or "rescripting" of romance in film & fiction. This is the first volume to fully consider the cultural representation of romance in the wake of postmodernism & postcolonialism & offers clear evidence of romance as a "category under stress." The contemporary nature of the texts discussed - such as Basic Instinct, Fatal Attraction & Hotel du Lac - places it at the center of many current debates concerning identity, gender, sexuality & desire. Viewing romance in the context of queer theory & AIDS, & challenging many popular psychoanalytic concepts such as abjection, the collection also makes a significant contribution to feminist & gay/lesbian discussions on the politics of romantic love.

Women Writing Trauma in Literature

Women Writing Trauma in Literature PDF

Author: Laura Alexander

Publisher:

Published: 2023-08-10

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781527529748

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This collection features studies on trauma, literary theory, and psychoanalysis in women's writing. It examines the ways in which literature helps to heal the wounded self, and it particularly concentrates attention on the way women explain the traumatic experiences of war, violence, or displacement. Covering a global range of women writers, this book focuses on the psychoanalytic role of literature in helping recover the voices buried by intense pain and suffering and to help those voices be heard. Literature brings the unconscious into being and focus, reconfiguring life through narration. These essays look at the relationship between traumatic experience and literary form.

Transformations of Trauma in Women's Writing

Transformations of Trauma in Women's Writing PDF

Author: Laura Alexander

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2023-01-10

Total Pages: 170

ISBN-13: 1527591638

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This volume examines the ways in which trauma alters women’s identities. While some of the chapters look deeply at individual experiences, many of the contributions look to national traumas and the consequences of political abuses, including colonial subjugation and genocide for women. The book shows that language has a transformative power to change us, to give us a great capacity for inner and outer dialogues and for healing and self-love. As shown here, women have historically employed autobiography and memoir to free themselves and others; rather than seeing the limit of form, they reinvent the parameters to offer a new relationship with language.

Transformations of Trauma in Women's Writing

Transformations of Trauma in Women's Writing PDF

Author: Laura Alexander

Publisher:

Published: 2024-02-16

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781036400743

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This volume examines the ways in which trauma alters women's identities. While some of the chapters look deeply at individual experiences, many of the contributions look to national traumas and the consequences of political abuses, including colonial subjugation and genocide for women. The book shows that language has a transformative power to change us, to give us a great capacity for inner and outer dialogues and for healing and self-love. As shown here, women have historically employed autobiography and memoir to free themselves and others; rather than seeing the limit of form, they reinvent the parameters to offer a new relationship with language.

Children of the Mire

Children of the Mire PDF

Author: Octavio Paz

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1991

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 9780674116290

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Octavio Paz launches a far-ranging excursion into the "incestuous and tempestuous" relations between modern poetry and the modern epoch. From the perspective of a Spanish-American and a poet, he explores the opposite meanings that the word "modern" has held for poets and philosophers, artists, and scientists. Tracing the beginnings of the modern poetry movement to the pre-Romantics, Paz outlines its course as a contradictory dialogue between the poetry of the Romance and Germanic languages. He discusses at length the unique character of Anglo-American "modernism" within the avant-garde movement, and especially vis- -vis French and Spanish-American poetry. Finally he offers a critique of our era's attitude toward the concept of time, affirming that we are at the "twilight of the idea of the future." He proposes that we are living at the end of the avant-garde, the end of that vision of the world and of art born with the first Romantics.

Roads to Rome

Roads to Rome PDF

Author: Jenny Franchot

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2024-03-29

Total Pages: 528

ISBN-13: 0520310306

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The mixture of hostility and fascination with which native-born Protestants viewed the "foreign" practices of the "immigrant" church is the focus of Jenny Franchot's cultural, literary, and religious history of Protestant attitudes toward Roman Catholicism in nineteenth-century America. Franchot analyzes the effects of religious attitudes on historical ideas about America's origins and destiny. She then focuses on the popular tales of convent incarceration, with their Protestant "maidens" and lecherous, tyrannical Church superiors. Religious captivity narratives, like those of Indian captivity, were part of the ethnically, theologically, and sexually charged discourse of Protestant nativism. Discussions of Stowe, Longfellow, Hawthorne, and Lowell—writers who sympathized with "Romanism" and used its imaginative properties in their fiction—further demonstrate the profound influence of religious forces on American national character. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.