Idleness, Indolence and Leisure in English Literature

Idleness, Indolence and Leisure in English Literature PDF

Author: M. Fludernik

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2014-11-11

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 1137404000

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Idleness, Indolence and Leisure in English Literature is the first study to provide transhistorical perspectives and cutting-edge critical analyses of debates concerning idleness in English literature. The topicality of the subject is emphasized by two pieces of sociological analysis.

The Anxieties of Idleness

The Anxieties of Idleness PDF

Author: Sarah Jordan

Publisher: Bucknell University Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 9780838755235

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The Anxieties of Idleness: Idleness in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture investigates the preoccupation with idleness that haunts the British eighteenth century. Jordan argues that as Great Britain began to define itself as a nation during this period, one important quality it claimed was industriousness. However, this claim was undermined and complicated by many factors, such as leisure's importance to class status. Thus idleness was a subject of intense anxiety. One result of this anxiety was an increased surveillance of the supposed idleness of those members of society with less power to wield: the working classes, the nonwhite races, and women. Jordan analyzes how the "idleness" of these groups is figured, in traditional literature and in extra-literary works. Idleness was also a concern for writers of the day, as writing became a money-earning profession. Jordan examines the lives and works of two writers especially obsessed with idleness, Samuel Johnson and William Cowper.

How to Do Things with Narrative

How to Do Things with Narrative PDF

Author: Jan Alber

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2017-11-20

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 3110569957

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This volume combines narratological analyses with an investigation of the ideological ramifications of the use of narrative strategies. The collected essays do not posit any intrinsic or stable connection between narrative techniques and world views. Rather, they demonstrate that world views are inevitably expressed through highly specific formal strategies. This insight leads the contributors to investigate why and how particular narrative techniques are employed and under what conditions.

Representing Poverty in the Anglophone Postcolonial World

Representing Poverty in the Anglophone Postcolonial World PDF

Author: Verena Jain-Warden

Publisher: V&R Unipress

Published: 2021-06-07

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 3847013203

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Originally a concern primarily of social studies and economics, poverty has emerged as a significant thematic focus and analytical tool in literary and cultural studies in the last two decades. The "new poverty studies" are dedicated to analyzing representations of poverty and the poor in literature and the visual arts, in the news media and in social practices. They aim at exploring the frameworks of representation that impact the affective and ethical responses of audiences to disenfranchised groups such as the poor. The contributions to this volume focus on representations of poverty in the Anglophone postcolonial world, exploring, for example, contemporary discourses on poverty in the UK, filmic representations of Nairobi slums or the agency of the poor in literature from India.

Lost Books and Printing in London, 1557-1640

Lost Books and Printing in London, 1557-1640 PDF

Author: Alexandra Hill

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2018-04-17

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 9004349200

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In Lost Books and Printing in London, 1557-1640 Alexandra Hill uses modern digital approaches to bibliography to reveal and analyse the entries of lost books in the Stationers’ Company Register.

Idleness and Aesthetic Consciousness, 1815–1900

Idleness and Aesthetic Consciousness, 1815–1900 PDF

Author: Richard Adelman

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-08-02

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 1108335837

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Charting the failure of the Romantic critique of political economy, Richard Adelman explores the changing significances and the developing concepts of idleness and aesthetic consciousness during the nineteenth century. Through careful analysis of some of the period's most influential thinkers, including John Stuart Mill, George Eliot, John Ruskin and Karl Marx, Adelman weaves together evolving ideas across a range of intellectual discourses - political economy, meditative poetry, the ideology of the 'gospel of work', cultural theory, the Gothic and psychoanalysis. In doing so, he reconstructs debates over passivity and repose and demonstrates their centrality to the cultural politics of the age. Arguing that hardened conceptions of aesthetic consciousness come into being at moments of civic unrest concerning political representation and that the fin-de-siècle witnesses the demonization of the once revolutionary category of aesthetic consciousness, the book demonstrates that late eighteenth-century positivity around human spirituality is comprehensively dismantled by the beginning of the twentieth century.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau and British Romanticism

Jean-Jacques Rousseau and British Romanticism PDF

Author: Russell Goulbourne

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2017-05-18

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1474250688

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Bringing together leading scholars from the USA, UK and Europe, this is the first substantial study of the seminal influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau on British Romanticism. Reconsidering Rousseau's connection to canonical Romantic authors such as Wordsworth, Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and British Romanticism also explores his impact on a wide range of literature, including anti-Jacobin fiction, educational works, familiar essays, nature writing and political discourse. Convincingly demonstrating that the relationship between Rousseau's thought and British Romanticism goes beyond mere reception or influence to encompass complex forms of connection, transmission and appropriation, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and British Romanticism is a vital new contribution to scholarly understanding of British Romantic literature and its transnational contexts.

Sleep and its spaces in Middle English literature

Sleep and its spaces in Middle English literature PDF

Author: Megan G. Leitch

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2021-07-06

Total Pages: 343

ISBN-13: 152615109X

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Middle English literature is intimately concerned with sleep and the spaces in which it takes place. In the medieval English imagination, sleep is an embodied and culturally determined act. It is both performed and interpreted by characters and contemporaries, subject to a particular habitus and understood through particular hermeneutic lenses. While illuminating the intersecting medical and moral discourses by which it is shaped, sleep also sheds light on subjects in favour of which it has hitherto been overlooked: what sleep can enable (dreams and dream poetry) or what it can stand in for or supersede (desire and sex). This book argues that sleep mediates thematic concerns and questions in ways that have ethical, affective and oneiric implications. At the same time, it offers important contributions to understanding different Middle English genres: romance, dream vision, drama and fabliau.

Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama

Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama PDF

Author: Leslie C. Dunn

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-01-04

Total Pages: 333

ISBN-13: 3030572080

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Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama investigates the cultural work done by early modern theatrical performances of disability. Proffering an expansive view of early modern disability in performance, the contributors suggest methodologies for finding and interpreting it in unexpected contexts. The volume also includes essays on disabled actors whose performances are changing the meanings of disability in Shakespeare for present-day audiences. By combining these two areas of scholarship, this text makes a unique intervention in early modern studies and disability studies alike. Ultimately, the volume generates a conversation that locates and theorizes the staging of particular disabilities within their historical and literary contexts while considering continuity and change in the performance of disability between the early modern period and our own.

The Routledge Companion to Joseph Conrad

The Routledge Companion to Joseph Conrad PDF

Author: Debra Romanick Baldwin

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-07-15

Total Pages: 387

ISBN-13: 1040047084

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The Routledge Companion to Joseph Conrad attests to the global significance and enduring importance of Conrad’s works, reception, and legacy. This volume brings together an international roster of scholars who consider his works in relation to biography, narrative, politics, women’s studies, comparative literature, and other forms of art. They offer approaches as diverse as re-examining Conrad’s sea voyages using newly available digital materials, analyzing his archipelagic narrative techniques, applying Chinese philosophy to Lord Jim, interrogating gendered epistemology in the neglected story “The Tale,” considering Conrad alongside W.E.B. Du Bois, Graham Greene, Virginia Woolf, or Orhan Pamuk, or alongside sound, gesture, opera, graphic novels, or contemporary events. An invaluable resource for students and scholars of Conrad and twentieth-century literature, this groundbreaking collection shows how Conrad’s works – their artistry, vision, and ideas – continue to challenge, perplex, and delight.