Samuel Butler, Victorian Against the Grain

Samuel Butler, Victorian Against the Grain PDF

Author: James G. Paradis

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2007-12-29

Total Pages: 441

ISBN-13: 1442692308

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Samuel Butler (1835-1902), Victorian satirist, critic, and visual artist, possessed one of the most original and inquiring imaginations of his age. The author of two satires, Erewhon (1872) and The Way of All Flesh (1903), Butler's intellectually adventurous explorations along the cultural frontiers of his time appeared in volume after eccentric volume. Author of four works on evolution, he was one of the most prolific evolutionary speculators of his time. He was an innovative travel writer and art historian who used the creative insights of his own painting, photography, and local knowledge to invent, in works like Alps and Sanctuaries (1881), a vibrant Italian culture that contrasted with the spiritually frigid experience of his High Church upbringing. Despite his range and achievement, there remains surprisingly little contemporary analytical commentary on Butler's work. Samuel Butler, Victorian against the Grain is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that provides a critical overview of Butler's career, one which places his multifaceted body of work within the cultural framework of the Victorian age. The essays, taken together, discuss the formation of Victorian England's ultimate polymath, an artistic and intellectual ventriloquist who assumed an extraordinary range of roles - as satirist, novelist, evolutionist, natural theologian, travel writer, art historian, biographer, classicist, painter, and photographer.

Samuel Butler against the Professionals

Samuel Butler against the Professionals PDF

Author: David Gillott

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 1351550187

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

In the wake of the 2009 Darwin bicentenary, Samuel Butler (1835-1902) is becoming as well known for his public attack on Darwin's character and the basis of his scientific authority as for his novels Erewhon and The Way of All Flesh. In the first monograph devoted to Butler's ideas for over twenty years, David Gillott offers a much-needed reappraisal of Butler's work and shows how Lamarckian ideas pervaded the whole of Butler's wide-ranging ouevre, and not merely his evolutionary theory. In particular, he argues that Lamarckism was the foundation on which Butler's attempt to undermine professional authority in a variety of disciplines was based. Samuel Butler against the Professionals provides new insight into a fascinating but often misunderstood writer, and on the surprisingly broad application of Lamarckian ideas in the decades following publication of the Origin of Species.

The Varieties of Temporal Experience

The Varieties of Temporal Experience PDF

Author: Michael D. Jackson

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2018-04-10

Total Pages: 331

ISBN-13: 0231546440

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

What does it mean to live in time, between the unforeseeable and the irreversible? In The Varieties of Temporal Experience, Michael Jackson demonstrates the significance of a phenomenology of time for ethnography, philosophy, and history through a multifaceted consideration of the gap between our cultural representations of temporality and the bewildering multiplicity of our experience of being-in-time. Jackson explores temporality in a subjective mode as a form of literary anthropology. The first part of the book tells the story of John Joseph Pawelka, whose 1910 escape from prison and subsequent disappearance became one of New Zealand’s great unsolved mysteries, discussing what it reveals about the interplay of popular stories, hidden histories, and media narratives in constructing allegories of national and moral identity. In the second, Jackson reflects on journeys up and down the islands of New Zealand, touching on the ways that personal stories are interwoven with social and historical events. Throughout this groundbreaking book, Jackson juxtaposes philosophy, history, and ethnography in an attempt to do justice to the extraordinary variety of temporal experience, at the same time exploring the ethical and existential quandaries that arise from the complexity of lived time.

Chiasmus and Culture

Chiasmus and Culture PDF

Author: Boris Wiseman

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2014-03-01

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 0857459619

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Anyone who has heard of chiasmus is likely to think of it as no more than a piece of rhetorical playfulness, at times challenging, though useful for supplying a memorable sententious note or for performing a pirouette of syntax and thought. Going beyond traditional rhetoric, this volume is concerned with the possibility of using the figure of chiasmus to model a broad array of phenomena, from human relations to artistic creation. In the process, it provides the first book-length study not of chiasmus, the rhetorical figure, but of chiastic thought. The contributors are concerned with chiastic inversion and its place in social interactions, cultural creation, and more generally human thought and experience.They explore from a variety of angles what the unsettling logic of chiasmus (from the Greek meaning “cross-wise”), has to tell us about the world, human relations, cultural patterns, psychology, and artistic and poetic creation.

The Fourth Discontinuity

The Fourth Discontinuity PDF

Author: Bruce Mazlish

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 1993-01-01

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 9780300065121

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Discusses the relationship between humans and machines, pondering the implications of humans becoming more mechanical and of computer robots being programmed to think. He describes early Greek and Chinese automatons and discusses ideas of previous centuries and of individuals on this subject.

Convalescence in the Nineteenth-Century Novel

Convalescence in the Nineteenth-Century Novel PDF

Author: Hosanna Krienke

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-05-13

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 1108844847

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This interdisciplinary study examines how holistic aftercare became a crucial supplement to scientific medicine in nineteenth-century Britain.

Form Miming Meaning

Form Miming Meaning PDF

Author: Max Nänny

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 488

ISBN-13: 9789027221797

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Annotation Presents selected papers from a March 1997 symposium held in Zurich, in sections on general topics, sound and rhythm, typography and graphic design, word-formation, and syntax and discourse. Studies explore iconicity from two different angles. A first group of scholars is especially interested in how far the primary code, the code of grammar, is influenced by iconic motivation and how originally iconic models have become conventionalized. A second group of contributors is more interested in the presence of iconicity as part of the secondary code. Specific subjects include imagination by ideophones, the visual poetry of e. e. cummings, and iconic use of syntax in fiction. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

The British Critical Tradition

The British Critical Tradition PDF

Author: Gary Day

Publisher: Springer

Published: 1993-01-12

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 1349224243

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This collection offers a reinterpretation of the history of British criticism by exploring the work of neglected as well as celebrated critics. It contextualizes the current crisis and shows how traditional criticism anticipates and to some extent parallels the concerns of postmodern critical theory. The issue of value is also addressed as is the question of the future direction of criticism making this volume an important contribution to contemporary critical debate.

The Threads of The Scarlet Letter

The Threads of The Scarlet Letter PDF

Author: Richard Kopley

Publisher: University of Delaware Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 9780874137699

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The Threads of The Scarlet Letter offers new discoveries regarding the origins of Hawthorne's masterpiece, as well as critical interpretations based on these discoveries. Relying on a blend of close reading, biographical analysis, and archival research, this book demonstrates anew the power of traditional scholarship. The Threads of The Scarlet Letter illuminates Hawthorne's transformation of Poe's celebrated tale The Tell-Tale Heart and Lowell's long-neglected poem A Legend of Brittany and, identifying the hitherto-unknown author of the seminal narrative The Salem Belle, investigates Hawthorne's brilliant borrowing from that novel as well. The present volume argues that Hawthorne repeatedly attenuated his sources, but also allowed sufficient detail to permit their recognition. Furthermore, this volume elaborates Hawthorne's reworking of formal traditions in The Scarlet Letter--traditions that importantly clarify the meaning of the whole. The Scarlet Letter is shown to be a complex rendering of man's fall and redemption, and a triumphant assertion of literary vocation. The Threads of The Scarlet Letter includes a useful bibliographical overview of the history of the study of the origins of Hawthorne's greatest work.