Liminal Fictions in Postmodern Culture

Liminal Fictions in Postmodern Culture PDF

Author: Thomas Phillips

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2015-09-16

Total Pages: 167

ISBN-13: 1137548770

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Liminal Fictions in Postmodern Culture examines distinctive literary, musical, and cinematic narratives that seek to inspire critical thought and conduct through provocation. From Gogol's Dead Souls to Salinger's Franny and Zooey , Phillips argues liminal narratives offer an antidote to the modern commodification of the self.

Deleuze and the Postcolonial

Deleuze and the Postcolonial PDF

Author: Simone Bignall

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2010-04-15

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 074863701X

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This is the first collection of essays bringing together Deleuzian philosophy and postcolonial theory. Bignall and Patton assemble some of the world's leading figures in these fields - including Reda Bensmaia, Timothy Bewes, Rey Chow, Philip Leonard, Nick Nesbitt, John K. Noyes, Patricia Pisters, Marcelo Svirsky and Simon Tormey - to explore rich linkages between two previously unrelated areas of study. They deal with colonial and postcolonial social, cultural and political issues in Asia, Africa, the Americas, Australia and Palestine. Topics include colonial government, nation building and ethics in the contemporary context of globalisation and decolonisation; issues relating to resistance, transformation and agency; and questions of 'representation' and discursive power as practiced through postcolonial art, cinema and literature. This book constitutes a timely intervention to debates in poststructuralist, postcolonial and postmodern studies. It will be of interest to students in cultural studies, cinema and film studies, languages and literature, political and postcolonial studies, critical theory, social and political philosophy.

Myth and Fairy Tale in Contemporary Women's Fiction

Myth and Fairy Tale in Contemporary Women's Fiction PDF

Author: Susan Sellers

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2017-03-14

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 1350317632

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Woman as gorgon, woman as temptress: the classical and biblical mythology which has dominated Western thinking defines women in a variety of patriarchally encoded roles. This study addresses the surprising persistence of mythical influence in contemporary fiction. Opening with the question 'what is myth?', the first section provides a wide-ranging review of mythography. It traces how myths have been perceived and interpreted by such commentators as Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Bruno Bettelheim, Roland Barthes, Jack Zipes and Marina Warner. This leads to an examination of the role that mythic narrative plays in social and self formation, drawing on the literary, feminist and psychoanalytic theories of Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous and Judith Butler to delineate the ways in which women's mythos can transcend the limitations of logos and give rise to potent new models for individual and cultural regeneration. In this light, Susan Sellers offers challenging new readings of a wide range of contemporary women's fiction, including works by A. S. Byatt, Angela Carter, Anne Rice, Michele Roberts, Emma Tennant and Fay Weldon. Topics explored include fairy tale as erotic fiction, new religious writing, vampires and gender-bending, mythic mothers, genre fiction, the still-persuasive paradigm of feminine beauty, and the radical potential of comedy.

Rewriting the Victorians

Rewriting the Victorians PDF

Author: Andrea Kirchknopf

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2013-05-28

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 0786471344

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The 19th century has become especially relevant for the present--as one can see from, for example, large-scale adaptations of written works, as well as the explosion of commodities and even interactive theme parks. This book is an introduction to the novelistic refashionings that have come after the Victorian age with a special focus on revisions of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Charles Dickens's Great Expectations. As post-Victorian research is still in the making, the first part is devoted to clarifying terminology and interpretive contexts. Two major frameworks for reading post-Victorian fiction are developed: the literary scene (authors, readers, critics) and the national-identity, political and social aspects. Among the works examined are Caryl Phillips's Cambridge, Matthew Kneale's English Passengers, Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda and Jack Maggs, Lloyd Jones's Mister Pip, Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, D.M. Thomas's Charlotte, and Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair.

Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting

Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting PDF

Author: L. Plate

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2010-12-08

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 0230294634

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Including topics as diverse as feminism and its relationship to the marketplace, plagiarism and copyright, silence and forgetting, and myth in a digital age, this book explores the role of rewriting within feminist literature from the 1970s onwards in relation to the theme of cultural memory.

Echoes of History, Shadowed Identities

Echoes of History, Shadowed Identities PDF

Author: María José Chivite de León

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 9783034300704

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This book addresses the recovery of submerged memories, loss and trauma in self-avowed intertextual fiction, while simultaneously exposing the tensions and untenability of any stable figuration of alterity. Otherness thus posits a liminal and largely transversal site of resistance to monological representations of Western identity, history and canon, which are now displayed inherently crossbred and built on the occulting and alienating of difference. With this in view, the author carries out a close reading of the works and scholarly statements of J. M. Coetzee and Marina Warner by taking as the point of departure the intertextualist approaches that most attend to the phenomenon of alterity against the critical discourses of modern representation. Fully installed in the revision of canon policies, Foe and Indigo re-read Eurocentric institutionalised forms of othering at the same time they posit new and suggestive rehearsals of identity languages via literature. Intertextual fiction thus turns out to be a powerful instrument to render alterity visible and agential in the discourses of reality. Ultimately, alterity is enabled to speak and invite social change and ethical awareness without denying the history of its alienation.

Mapping Metabiographical Heartlands in Marina Warner’s Fiction

Mapping Metabiographical Heartlands in Marina Warner’s Fiction PDF

Author: Souhir Zekri

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2019-06-04

Total Pages: 143

ISBN-13: 1527535460

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This volume covers a wide range of contemporary and pressing issues, namely colonialism, displacement, rape, women’s oppression and the manipulation of religious discourse through a variety of theoretical approaches to Marina Warner’s fiction. It focuses on the theories of feminism, psychoanalysis and post-colonialism through the original perspective of metabiography as engrafted diaries, letters, memoirs and chronicles communicate the voices of the oppressed and the deceased by demystifying the mythopoeia constructed around and about them. The book also reconciles undergraduates and MA students to critical and literary theory through the study of Warner’s enriching fictional works as close textual analysis blends with brief overviews of various literary theories without burdening the book or its language with forbidding jargon. This book will be relevant to students, researchers and teachers due to its methodological orientation, dealing as it does with extracts which can be converted into critical theory practice in class.