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The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde
by Peter AckroydProvides insightful commentary on Wilde and his work.
Last Things: Disastrous Form from Kant to Hujar (Lit Z)
by Jacques KhalipThe arrival of the Anthropocene brings the suggestion that we are only now beginning to speculate on an inhuman world that is not for us, only now confronting fears and anxieties of ecological, political, social, and philosophical extinction. While pointing out that reflections on disaster were not foreign to what we historically call romanticism, Last Things pushes romantic thought toward an altogether new way of conceiving the “end of things,” one that treats lastness as neither privation nor conclusion. Through quieter, non-emphatic modes of thinking the end of human thought, Khalip explores lastness as what marks the limits of our life and world. Reading the fate of romanticism—and romantic studies—within the key of the last, Khalip refuses to elegize or celebrate our ends, instead positing romanticism as a negative force that exceeds theories, narratives, and figures of survival and sustainability. Each chapter explores a range of romantic and contemporary materials: poetry by John Clare, Emily Dickinson, John Keats, Percy Shelley, and William Wordsworth; philosophical texts by William Godwin, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau; paintings by Hubert Robert, Caspar David Friedrich, and Paterson Ewen; installations by Tatsuo Miyajima and James Turrell; and photography by John Dugdale, Peter Hujar, and Joanna Kane. Shuttling between temporalities, Last Things undertakes an original reorganization of romantic thought for contemporary culture. It examines an archive on the side of disappearance, perishing, the inhuman, and lastness.
The Last Titan: A Life of Theodore Dreiser
by Jerome LovingA standard biography of one of America's best novelists, Theodore Dreiser, this book paints a full portrait of a writer who boldly swept away Victorian timidity to open the twentieth century in American literature.
The Last Utopians: Four Late Nineteenth-Century Visionaries and Their Legacy
by Michael RobertsonThe entertaining story of four utopian writers—Edward Bellamy, William Morris, Edward Carpenter, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman—and their continuing influence todayFor readers reared on the dystopian visions of Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Handmaid's Tale, the idea of a perfect society may sound more sinister than enticing. In this lively literary history of a time before "Orwellian" entered the cultural lexicon, Michael Robertson reintroduces us to a vital strain of utopianism that seized the imaginations of late nineteenth-century American and British writers.The Last Utopians delves into the biographies of four key figures--Edward Bellamy, William Morris, Edward Carpenter, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman—who lived during an extraordinary period of literary and social experimentation. The publication of Bellamy's Looking Backward in 1888 opened the floodgates of an unprecedented wave of utopian writing. Morris, the Arts and Crafts pioneer, was a committed socialist whose News from Nowhere envisions a workers' Arcadia. Carpenter boldly argued that homosexuals constitute a utopian vanguard. Gilman, a women's rights activist and the author of "The Yellow Wallpaper," wrote numerous utopian fictions, including Herland, a visionary tale of an all-female society.These writers, Robertson shows, shared a belief in radical equality, imagining an end to class and gender hierarchies and envisioning new forms of familial and romantic relationships. They held liberal religious beliefs about a universal spirit uniting humanity. They believed in social transformation through nonviolent means and were committed to living a simple life rooted in a restored natural world. And their legacy remains with us today, as Robertson describes in entertaining firsthand accounts of contemporary utopianism, ranging from Occupy Wall Street to a Radical Faerie retreat.
Last Works: Lessons in Leaving
by Mark C. TaylorA powerful consideration of the lessons imparted in the final works of essential writers and philosophers For many today, retirement and the leisure said to accompany it have become vestiges of a slower, long-lost time. In a world where the sense of identity is tied to work and careers, to stop working often is to become nobody. In this deeply perceptive and personal exploration of last works, Mark C. Taylor poignantly explores the final reflections of writers and thinkers from Kierkegaard to David Foster Wallace. How did they either face or avoid ending and leaving? What do their lessons in ending teach us about living in the time that remains for us? Some leavings brought relief, even joy, while others brought pain and suffering. Whether the cause was infirmity, impending death, or simply exhaustion and ennui, the ways these influential voices fell silent offer poignant examples of people withdrawing from the world’s stage. Throughout this learned and moving book, Taylor probes how the art of living involves learning to leave gracefully.
Lasting Impressions: The Legacies of Impressionism in Contemporary Culture (Literature Now)
by Jesse MatzImpressionism captured the world's imagination in the late nineteenth century and remains with us today. Portraying the dynamic effects of modernity, impressionist artists revolutionized the arts and the wider culture. Impressionism transformed the very pattern of reality, introducing new ways to look at and think about the world and our experience of it. Its legacy has been felt in many major contributions to popular and high culture, from cubism and early cinema to the works of Zadie Smith and W. G. Sebald, from advertisements for Pepsi to the observations of Oliver Sacks and Malcolm Gladwell. Yet impressionism's persistence has also been a problem, a matter of inauthenticity, superficiality, and complicity in what is merely "impressionistic" about culture today. Jesse Matz considers these two legacies—the positive and the negative—to explain impressionism's true contemporary significance. As Lasting Impressions moves through contemporary literature, painting, and popular culture, Matz explains how the perceptual role, cultural effects, and social implications of impressionism continue to generate meaning and foster new forms of creativity, understanding, and public engagement.
The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books
by Jeff Martin C. Max MageeThe way we absorb information has changed dramatically. Edison's phonograph has been reincarnated as the iPod. Celluloid went digital. But books, for the most part, have remained the same-until now. And while music and movies have undergone an almost Darwinian evolution, the literary world now faces a revolution, a sudden seismic change in the way we buy, produce, and, yes, read books.Scholars, journalists, and publishers have turned their brains inside out in the effort to predict what lies ahead, but who better to comment on the future of the book than those who are driven to write them?In The Late American Novel, Jeff Martin and C. Max Magee gather some of today's finest writers to consider the sea change that is upon them. Lauren Groff imagines an array of fantastical futures for writers, from poets with groupies to novelists as vending machines. Rivka Galchen writes about the figurative and literal death of paper. Joe Meno expounds upon the idea of a book as a place set permanently aside for the imagination, regardless of format. These and other original essays by Reif Larsen, Benjamin Kunkel, Victoria Patterson, and many more provide a timely and much-needed commentary on this compelling cultural crossroad.
Late Ancient Platonism in Eighteenth-Century German Thought (International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d'histoire des idées #227)
by Leo CatanaThis work synthesizes work previously published in leading journals in the field into a coherent narrative that has a distinctive focus on Germany while also being aware of a broader European dimension. It argues that the German Lutheran Christoph August Heumann (1681-1764) marginalized the biographical approach to past philosophy and paved the way for the German Lutheran Johann Jacob Brucker’s (1696-1770) influential method for the writing of past philosophy, centred on depersonalised and abstract systems of philosophy. The work offers an authoritative and engaging account of how late ancient Platonism, Plotinus in particular, was interpreted in eighteenth-century Germany according to these new precepts. Moreover, it reveals the Lutheran religious assumptions of this new approach to past philosophy, which underpinned the works of Heumann and Brucker, but also influential reviews that rejected the English Plato translator Thomas Taylor (1758-1835) and his understanding and evaluation of late ancient Platonism.
Late Antique Letter Collections: A Critical Introduction and Reference Guide
by Cristiana Sogno Edward J. Watts Bradley K. StorinBringing together an international team of historians, classicists, and scholars of religion, this volume provides the first comprehensive overview of the extant Greek and Latin letter collections of late antiquity (ca. 300-600 c.e.). Each chapter addresses a major collection of Greek or Latin literary letters, introducing the social and textual histories of each collection and examining its assembly, publication, and transmission. Contributions also reveal how collections operated as discrete literary genres, with their own conventions and self-presentational agendas. This book will fundamentally change how people both read these texts and use letters to reconstruct the social history of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries.
Late Capitalist Freud in Literary, Cultural, and Political Theory
by Maria-Daniella Dick Robbie McLaughlanLate Capitalist Freud in Literary, Cultural, and Political Theory proposes that late Freudian theory has had an historical influence on the configuration of contemporary life and is central to the construction of twenty-first-century capitalism. This book investigates how we continue to live in the Freudian century, turning its attentions to specific crisis points within neoliberalism—the rise of figures like Trump, the development of social media as a new superego force, the economics that underpin the wellness and self-care industries as well as the contemporary consumption of popular culture—to maintain the continued historical importance of Freudian thought in all its dimensions. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, literary theory, cultural studies, and political theory, this book assesses the contribution that an historical and theoretical consideration of the late Freud can make to analyzing certain aspects of late capital.
Late Churchill: Language from Crisis to Death (Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature)
by Jonathan Locke HartThis book focuses on a close analysis of selected speeches of Winston Churchill in the House of Commons and some of the responses from fellow MPs from the middle of 1940 to the death of Churchill in 1965, speeches in war and peace, and concentrates on foreign affairs. The book will appeal to those interested in Churchill, freedom, tyranny, diplomacy, war and conflict, democracy, politics, the Second World War, the Cold War, Britain, Canada, the United States, the British Empire and Commonwealth, Europe, France, Asia, Germany, Japan, totalitarianism, Parliament, legislative assemblies, rhetoric, language, style, speech-writing, oral and written communication, literature, history and other areas. The debate between autocracy (tyranny, totalitarianism) and democracy is in those times and ours, with many parallels, chilling. Churchill was key to our world history and is a key to understanding what is at stake in the world now.
Late Cold War Literature and Culture
by Daniel CordleThis book analyses the 1980s as a nuclear decade, focusing on British and United States fiction. Ranging across genres including literary fiction, science fiction, post-apocalyptic fiction, graphic novels, children's and young adult literature, thrillers and horror, it shows how pressing nuclear issues were, particularly the possibility of nuclear war, and how deeply they penetrated the culture. It is innovative for its discussion of a "nuclear transatlantic," placing British and American texts in dialogue with one another, for its identification of a vibrant young adult fiction that resonates with more conventionally studied literatures of the period and for its analysis of a "politics of vulnerability" animating nuclear debates. Placing nuclear literature in social and historical contexts, it shows how novels and short stories responded not only to nuclear fears, but also crystallised contemporary debates about issues of gender, the environment, society and the economy.
Late Edition: A Love Story
by Bob GreeneA loving and laughter-filled trip back to a lost American time when the newspaper business was the happiest game in town.In a warm, affectionate true-life tale, New York Times bestselling author Bob Greene (When We Get to Surf City, Duty, Once Upon a Town) travels back to a place where—when little more than a boy—he had the grand good luck to find himself surrounded by a brotherhood and sisterhood of wayward misfits who, on the mezzanine of a Midwestern building, put out a daily newspaper that didn't even know it had already started to die."In some American cities," Greene writes, "famous journalists at mighty and world-renowned papers changed the course of history with their reporting." But at the Columbus Citizen-Journal, there was a willful rejection of grandeur—these were overworked reporters and snazzy sportswriters, nerve-frazzled editors and insult-spewing photographers, who found pure joy in the fact that, each morning, they awakened to realize: "I get to go down to the paper again."At least that is how it seemed in the eyes of the novice copyboy who saw romance in every grungy pastepot, a symphony in the song of every creaking typewriter. With current-day developments in the American newspaper industry so grim and dreary, Late Edition is a Valentine to an era that was gleefully cocky and seemingly free from care, a wonderful story as bracing and welcome as the sound of a rolled-up paper thumping onto the front stoop just after dawn.
Late Essays: 2006-2017
by J. M. CoetzeeA new collection of twenty-three literary essays from the Nobel Prize–winning author. J. M. Coetzee’s latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. J. M. Coetzee is not only one of the most acclaimed fiction writers in the world, he is also an accomplished and insightful literary critic. In Late Essays: 2006–2016, a thought-provoking collection of twenty-three pieces, he examines the work of some of the world’s greatest writers, from Daniel Defoe in the early eighteenth century to Goethe and Irène Némirovsky to Coetzee’s contemporary Philip Roth. Challenging yet accessible, literary master Coetzee writes these essays with great clarity and precision, offering readers an illuminating and wise analysis of a remarkable list of works of international literature that span three centuries.
Late Europeans and Melancholy Fiction at the Turn of the Millennium (Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature)
by Ian EllisonThis book is the first comparative study of novels by Patrick Modiano, W. G. Sebald, and Antonio Muñoz Molina. Drawing on many literary figures, movements, and traditions, from the Spanish Golden Age, to German Romanticism, to French philosophy, via Jewish modernist literature, Ian Ellison offers a fresh perspective on European fiction published around the turn of the millennium. Reflecting on what makes European fiction European, this book examines how certain novels understand themselves to be culturally and historically late, expressing a melancholy awareness of how the past and present are irreconcilable. Within this framework, however, it considers how backwards-facing, tradition-oriented self-consciousness, burdened by a sense of exhaustion in European culture and the violence of its past, may yet suggest the potential for re-enchantment in the face of obsolescence.
The Late Harold Pinter
by Basil ChiassonThis volume is the first to provide a book-length study of Pinter's overtly political activity. With chapters on political drama, poetry, and speeches, it charts a consistent tension between aesthetics and politics through Pinter's later career and defines the politics of the work in terms of a pronounced sensory dimension and capacity to affect audiences. The book brings to light unpublished letters and drafts from the Pinter Archive in the British Library and draws his political poems and speeches, which have previously been overshadowed by his plays, into the foreground. Intended for students, instructors, and researchers in drama and theatre, performance studies, literature, and media studies, this book celebrates Pinter's later life and work by discerning a coherent political voice and project and by registering the complex ways that project troubles the divide between aesthetics and politics.
Late-Life Love: A Memoir
by Susan Gubar“Winning [and] intelligent. . . . [An] impressive, often heartening addition to the literature of aging.” — Heller McAlpin, Wall Street Journal In this “unique blend of memoir and literary commentary” (Bookpage), acclaimed author and literary scholar Susan Gubar contemplates the beauty and strength of enduring love—both for her husband and for the literature that has shaped her life. Throughout the complications of devoted caregiving, her own ongoing cancer treatments, and a stressful move to a more manageable apartment, Gubar proves that love and desire have no expiration date—on the page or in life. Late-Life Love offers a resounding retort to ageist stereotypes, appraises the obstacles unique to senior couples, and celebrates second chances.
Late Medieval Englishwomen: Printed Writings, 1500–1640: Series I, Part Four, Volume 3 (The Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works & Printed Writings, 1500-1640: Series I, Part Four #Vol. 3)
by Barry CollettThis volume includes the works of three Englishwomen: Julian of Norwich (1342-c.1416) whose Revelations were first printed in 1670; Margery Kempe (c.1373-c.1438) from whose Boke of Marjorie Kempe a few extracts were printed in 1501 and again in 1512; Juliana Berners (possibly c.1388) whose treatise on hawkyng and huntyng was first printed in 1486, with a second edition containing an additional treatise on fishing. The writings of these three women are brought together in this book because they are amongst the earliest female writers in the English language, they each reflected everyday lives, and reveal with passion, insight and compassion spiritualities not separate from the physical world but entwined with it. Julian of Norwich brings contemplative insights of God's love to a sinful and suffering humanity; Margery Kempe actively weeps for her own sin and the sins and suffering of the world and Juliana Berners lives actively with expertise and serenity in the world of nature.
Late Modern English Syntax
by Marianne HundtThe Late Modern period is the first in the history of English for which an unprecedented wealth of textual material exists. Using increasingly sophisticated databases, the contributions in this volume explore grammatical usage from the period, specifically morphological and syntactic change, in a broad context. Some chapters explore the socio-historical background of the period while others provide information on prescriptivism, newspaper language, language contact, and regional variation in British and American English. Internal processes of change are discussed against grammaticalisation theory and construction grammar and the rich body of textual evidence is used to draw inferences on the precise nature of historical change. Exposing readers to a wealth of data that informs the description of a broad range of syntactic phenomena, this book is ideal for graduate students and researchers interested in historical linguistics, corpus linguistics and language development.
The Late Modernist Novel: A Critique of Global Narrative Reason
by Seo Hee ImThe Late Modernist Novel explores how the novel reinvented itself for a Modernist age, a world riven by war and capitalist expansion. Seo Hee Im argues that the Anglophone novel first had to disassociate itself from the modern nation-state and, by extension, national history, which had anchored the genre from its very inception. Existing studies of modernism show how the novel responded to the crisis in the national idea. Polyglot high modernists experimented with cosmopolitanism and multilingualism on the level of style, while the late modernists retreated to a literary nativism. This book explores a younger generation of writers that incorporated empirical structures as theme and form to expand the genre beyond the nation-state.
Late Modernist Style in Samuel Beckett and Emmanuel Levinas
by Peter FifieldBeckett and Levinas are of central importance to critical debates about literary ethics. Rather than suggest the presence of literary and ethical value in the wake of the Second World War, this book argues that both thinkers waged a sustained attack on the principles of literature, weaving narrative and descriptive doubt through phenomenology, prose, and drama. Peter Fifield uses conceptual and rhetorical figures shared by Beckett and Levinas - such as the face, the trace, re-commencement, hyperbole, the saying and the said - to address a wide range of texts by both authors, arguing for a Levinasian manner of reading that is distinctly non-ethical.
Late Romanticism and the End of Politics: Byron, Mary Shelley, and the Last Men (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)
by John HavardIn the late Romantic age, demands for political change converged with thinking about the end of the world. This book examines writings by Lord Byron, Mary Shelley and their circle that imagined the end, from poems by Byron that pictured fallen empires, sinking islands, and dying stars to the making and unmaking of populations in Frankenstein and The Last Man. These works intersected with and enclosed reflections upon brewing political changes. By imagining political dynasties, slavery, parliament, and English law reaching an end, writers challenged liberal visions of the political future that viewed the basis of governance as permanently settled. The prospect of volcanic eruptions and biblical deluges, meanwhile, pointed towards new political worlds, forged in the ruins of this one. These visions of coming to an end acquire added resonance in our own time, as political and planetary end-times converge once again.
Late Ruskin: New Contexts (Routledge Revivals #6)
by Francis O'GormanThis title was first published in 2001. Ruskin said that 1860 marked the beginning of his 'proper work'. This study presents new, historicized readings of important texts and themes from that late period, 1860-1889, discussing in detail works including Unto this Last (1860), the Lectures on Art (1870), Fors Clavigera (1871-1884), and The Bible of Amiens (1880-85), and considering key themes such as Ruskin's politicized regard for Pre-Raphaelitism in the 1870s, and the complex topic of Ruskin and manliness. Claiming new and distinctive importance for this period of Ruskin's work, both in terms of Ruskin's development as a writer and his place in Victorian culture as it moved toward modernity, this book is the first solely devoted to the prolific later years, and draws on much unpublished material.
Late Shakespeare, 1608–1613
by Rory Loughnane Andrew J. PowerIn fourteen specially commissioned chapters by leading Shakespeare scholars from around the globe, Late Shakespeare, 1608-1613 provides an essential re-appraisal of the final phase of Shakespeare's writing life. Arranged for the first time in the best-established chronological sequence, Shakespeare's last seven extant plays are discussed in detail in dedicated chapters, from Pericles to the other late co-authored works, King Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen. The plays are situated in the context of Shakespeare's financial investments, his focus on the practice of reading, the changing nature of his acting company and the pressing issues of contemporary politics and urban life. The book also goes on to explore the relationship between Shakespeare and his audience and considers the dominant themes in his final works. Analysing and responding to the latest criticism in the field, this volume brings to light a vital re-examination of what it means to discuss 'late Shakespeare'.
Late Stevens: The Final Fiction
by B. J. Leggett"If one no longer believes in God (as truth)," Wallace Stevens once wrote, "it is not possible merely to disbelieve; it becomes necessary to believe in something else. . . . I say that one's final belief must be in a fiction." Stevens addressed the concept of a "supreme fiction" throughout much of his career, but many critics feel that his poems never realized that concept beyond a theoretical possibility. B. J. Leggett argues that Stevens did indeed achieve the supreme fiction in his often overlooked late poems. To share in the poet's vision, though, Leggett finds that readers must understand the ingenious intertext that runs through this culminating body of work. After three volumes of difficult and abstract poetry, Stevens in the last five years of his life reverted to a style that is refreshingly personal and accessible. Leggett gives close examination to The Rock, which is the closing section of Stevens's Collected Poems, and to the uncollected poems published as Opus Posthumous, supplying readers with the motifs, conventions, texts, and fictions--or intertext--on which these works' significance depends. He ultimately shows that there is a kind of master narrative in Stevens's late poems, one that is not always explicitly present but that is based on the supreme fiction. It is here that Stevens gives form to his belief. Leggett traces the development of this fiction and demonstrates how knowledge of its presence dramatically changes the reading of key poems. His discussion of Schopenhauer's influence on Stevens, together with rich analyses of major poems, challenges to conventional interpretations, and speculation on the direction Stevens's poetry might have taken had he lived longer, all make for provocative reading. Late Stevens is a book for anyone who thought they knew this poet.