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Literature and the Creative Economy
by Sarah BrouilletteFor nearly twenty years, social scientists and policy makers have been highly interested in the idea of the creative economy. This book contends that mainstream considerations of the economic and social force of culture, including theories of the creative class and of cognitive and immaterial labor, are indebted to historic conceptions of the art of literary authorship. What's more, it shows how contemporary literature has been involved in and has responded to creative-economy phenomena, including the presentation of artists as models of contentedly flexible and self-managed work, the treatment of training in and exposure to art as a pathway to social inclusion, the use of culture and cultural institutions to increase property values, and support for cultural diversity as a means of growing cultural markets. Contemporary writers have not straightforwardly bemoaned these phenomena in a classic rejection of the instrumental application of art. Rather, they have tended to explore how their own critical capacities have become compatible with or even essential to a neoliberal economy that has embraced art's autonomous gestures as proof that authentic self-articulation and social engagement can and should occur within capitalism. Taking a sociological approach to literary criticism, Brouillette interprets major works of contemporary fiction by Monica Ali, Aravind Adiga, Daljit Nagra, and Ian McEwan alongside government policy, social science, and theoretical explorations of creative work and immaterial labor.
Literature and the Critics: Developing Responses to Texts
by Richard JacobsThis timely volume presents a rich and absorbing selection of extracts from over two hundred leading literary critics of the last several decades, writing on many of the most widely studied literary texts in English, from Shakespeare to Toni Morrison. Structured chronologically, working through familiar literary periods, this book presents illuminating and stimulating examples of critical readings of familiar texts, demonstrating a variety of methods and approaches to critical practice. The range of critical voices represented – from Abrams and Adelman to Zimmerman and Žižek – provides students with eloquent and insightful models of how to read, think and write about texts so that they can form their own critical responses and develop as independent readers. The book also shows how criticism has developed over time and how it has always been intimately involved in wider cultural, social and political debates. Connections between criticism, culture and politics are explored in the book’s wide-ranging first chapter. In his warm, clear and engaging style, Richard Jacobs provides the perfect introduction to literature and criticism. Literature and the Critics is a book to which students will want to return throughout their courses as they read more widely and encounter new texts and critical voices.
Literature and the Cult of Personality: Essays on Goethe and His Influence
by Gregory MaertzThe construction of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as an Anglo-American sage and literary icon was the product of a cult of personality that lay at the center of nineteenth-century cultural politics. A reconstruction of the culture wars fought over Goethe's authority, a previously hidden chapter in the intellectual history of the period ranging from the late eighteenth century to the threshold of Modernism, is the focus of Literature and the Cult of Personality. Marginal as well as canonical writers and critics figured prominently in this process, and Literature and the Cult of Personality offers insight into the mediation activities of Mary Wollstonecraft, Henry Crabb Robinson, the canonical Romantic poets, Thomas Carlyle, Margaret Fuller, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, and others. For women writers and Jacobins, Scots, and Americans, translating Goethe served as an empowering cultural platform that challenges the myth of the self-sufficiency of British literature. Reviewing and translating German authors provided a means of gaining literary enfranchisement and offered a paradigm of literary development according to which 're-writers' become original writers through an apprenticeship of translation and reviewing. In the diverse and fascinating body of critical writing examined in this book, textual exegesis plays an unexpectedly minor role; in its place, a full-blown cult of personality emerges along with a blueprint for the ideology of hero-worship that is more fully mapped out in the cultural and political life of twentieth-century Europe.
Literature and the Development of Feminist Theory
by Robin Truth GoodmanLiterature and the Development of Feminist Theory offers an insightful look at the development of feminist theory through a literary lens. Stressing the significance of feminism's origins in the European Enlightenment, this book traces the literary careers of feminism's major thinkers in order to elucidate the connection of feminist theoretical production to literary work. In addition to considering such well-known authors as Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Simone de Beauvoir and Hélène Cixous, this book also reflects on the lasting influence of postcolonialism, liberalism, and specific genres such as science fiction and modernist poetry. Written by leading scholars and focusing on the literary trajectories of feminism's noted contributors, Literature and the Development of Feminist Theory ultimately provides a new perspective on feminism's theoretical context, bringing into view the effects of literary form on the growth of feminist thought.
Literature and the Encounter with God in Post-Reformation England: Literature And The Encounter With God In Post-reformation England, C. 1550--1704
by Michael MartinEach of the figures examined in this study”John Dee, John Donne, Sir Kenelm Digby, Henry and Thomas Vaughan, and Jane Lead”is concerned with the ways in which God can be approached or experienced. Michael Martin analyzes the ways in which the encounter with God is figured among these early modern writers who inhabit the shared cultural space of poets and preachers, mystics and scientists. The three main themes that inform this study are Cura animarum, the care of souls, and the diminished role of spiritual direction in post-Reformation religious life; the rise of scientific rationality; and the struggle against the disappearance of the Holy. Arising from the methods and commitments of phenomenology, the primary mode of inquiry of this study resides in contemplation, not in a religious sense, but in the realm of perception, attendance, and acceptance. Martin portrays figures such as Dee, Digby, and Thomas Vaughan not as the eccentrics they are often depicted to have been, but rather as participating in a religious mainstream that had been radically altered by the disappearance of any kind of mandatory or regular spiritual direction, a problem which was further complicated and exacerbated by the rise of science. Thus this study contributes to a reconfiguration of our notion of what ’religious orthodoxy’ really meant during the period, and calls into question our own assumptions about what is (or was) ’orthodox’ and ’heterodox.’
Literature and the Global Contemporary
by Sarah Brouillette Mathias Nilges Emilio SauriThis book attempts to understand what 'contemporary' has meant, and should mean, for literary studies. The essays in this volume suggest that an attentive reading of recent global literatures challenges the idea that our contemporary moment is best characterized as a timeless, instantaneous 'now'. The contributors to this book argue that global literatures help us to conceive of the contemporary as an always plural, heterogeneous, and contested temporality. Far from suggesting that we replace theories of an omnipresent 'end of history' with a traditional, single, diachronic timeline, this book encourages the development of such a timeline's rigorous inverse: a synchronic, multi-faceted and multi-temporal history of the contemporary in literature, and thus of contemporary global literatures. It opens up the concept of the contemporary for comparative study by unlocking its temporal, logical, political, and ultimately aesthetic and literary complexity.
Literature and the Glocal City: Reshaping the English Canadian Imaginary (Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature)
by Ana María Fraile-MarcosThe modern city is a space that can simultaneously represent the principles of its homeland alongside its own unique blend of the cultures that intermingle within its city limits. This book makes an intervention in Canadian literary criticism by foregrounding both ‘globalism,’ which is increasingly perceived as the state-of-the-art literary paradigm, and the city. These are two significant axes of contemporary culture and identity that were previously disregarded by a critical tradition built around the importance of space and place in Canadian writing. Yet, as relevant as the turn to the city and to globalism may be, this collection’s most notable contribution lies in linking the notion of ‘glocality’, that is, the intermeshing of local and global forces to representations of subjectivity in the material and figurative space of the Canadian city. Dealing with oppositional discourses as multiculturalism, postcolonialism, feminism, diaspora, and environmentalism this book is an essential reference for any scholar with an interest in these areas.
Literature and the Gods
by Roberto CalassoFrom the internationally acclaimed author ofThe Marriage of Cadmus and HarmonyandKa, a stunning summation of his lifelong study of the role of the gods in the human imagination. Based on the prestigious Weidenfeld Lectures Roberto Calasso gave at Oxford in May 2000,Literature and the Godstraces the return of pagan divinities to Western literature from their first reappearance at the beginning of the modern era to their place in the literature of our own time. Calasso sets out to uncover the divine— godly or otherwise—in specific texts, and finds it in what he calls "absolute literature. " With its roots in early Vedic verse, absolute literature reached the apex of its expression during the period beginning with the German Romantics in 1798 and ending with Mallarmé's death in 1898. But Calasso also discovers the divine in the work of Valéry, Auden, Yeats, Montale, Borges, and Nabokov, and he reveals how these writers, in their own very particular ways, were articulating the same unnameable thing. Finally, he delineates the timeless, ever-mysterious laws that surround the creative act itself. WithLiterature and the Gods, Roberto Calasso profoundly deepens our understanding of our literary tradition. It is, itself, a literary masterpiece.
Literature and the Human: Criticism, Theory, Practice
by Andy MousleyWhy does literature matter? What is its human value? Historical approaches to literature have for several decades prevailed over the idea that literary works can deepen our understanding of fundamental questions of existence. This book re-affirms literature's existential value by developing a new critical vocabulary for thinking about literature's human meaningfulness. It puts this vocabulary into practice through close reading of a wide range of texts, from The Second Wakefield Shepherds’ Play to Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Individual chapters discuss: Literature’s engagement of the emotions Literature’s humanisation of history Literature’s treatment of universals and particulars The depth of reflection provoked by literary works Literature as a special kind of seeing and framing The question at the heart of the volume, of why literature matters, makes this book relevant to all students and professors of literature.
Literature and the Idea of Luxury in Early Modern England
by Alison V. ScottExploring the idea of luxury in relation to a series of neighboring but distinct concepts including avarice, excess, licentiousness, indulgence, vitality, abundance, and waste, this study combines intellectual and cultural historical methods to trace discontinuities in luxury’s conceptual development in seventeenth-century England. The central argument is that, as ’luxury’ was gradually Englished in seventeenth-century culture, it developed political and aesthetic meanings that connect with eighteenth-century debates even as they oppose their so-called demoralizing thrust. Alison Scott closely examines the meanings of luxury in early modern English culture through literary and rhetorical uses of the idea. She argues that, while ’luxury’ could and often did denote merely ’lust’ or ’licentiousness’ as it tends to be glossed by modern editors of contemporary works, its cultural lexicon was in fact more complex and fluid than that at this time. Moreover, that fuller understanding of its plural and shifting meanings-as they are examined here-has implications for the current intellectual history of the idea in Western thought. The existing narrative of luxury’s conceptual development is one of progressive upward transformation, beginning with the rise of economic liberalism amidst eighteenth-century debates; it is one that assumes essential continuity between the medieval treatment of luxury as the sin of ’luxuria’ and early modern notions of the idea even as social practises of luxury explode in early seventeenth-century culture.
Literature and the Image of Man: Volume 2, Communication in Society (Essay Index Reprint Ser.)
by Leo LowenthalThis volume's predominant theme is bourgeois mentality and its historical development. The works of Lope de Vega, Calderon, Cervantes, and Shakespeare, among others, are analysed within the historical framework of the decline of feudalism and the rise of the absolute regimes. Those of Moliere and Goethe are set against the background of an evolving and consolidating bourgeois society in Western Europe.
Literature and the Internet: A Guide for Students, Teachers, and Scholars (Wellesley Studies in Critical Theory, Literary History and Culture #21)
by Richard Sears Stephanie Browner Stephen PulsfordFirst published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Literature and the Language Arts: Understanding Literature
by EMC CorporationThe Guided Reading program in this EMC Masterpiece Series book gives you tips before, during, and after you read each selection. Read on for a description of the features you will find in your textbook.
Literature and the Language Arts: Experiencing Literature (2nd Edition)
by EMC CorporationThe contents of this text are Part One--Genres in Literature: The Folk Tradition, Poetry, Fiction, Drama, Nonfiction, Informational and Visual Media; Part Two--Themes in Literature: The Search for Self, What is Talent?, Relationships, Courage and Perseverance, Journeys and Visions of the Future; Part Three--Language Arts Survey: Reading Resource, Writing Resource, Language, Grammar, and Style Resource, Speaking and Listening Resource, Study and Research Resource, and Applied English Resource, etc.
Literature and the Language Arts: Discovering Literature (2nd Edition)
by EMC CorporationWhen you open your EMC Masterpiece Series textbook, you will find great literature, both classic and contemporary, by a wide variety of authors. You will also find useful step-by-step study strategies for each selection, helpful background information, and activities that allow you to relate the literature to your own experiences and share your point of view.
Literature and the Language Arts: Exporing Literature
by EMC CorporationThis textbook contains great literature; both classic and contemporary, by a wide variety of authors, step-by-step study strategies for each selection, helpful background information, and activities that allow one to relate the literature to their own experiences and share their point of view.
Literature and the Language Arts: World Literature
by The Editors at the EMC CorporationIn this text your reading will allow you to explore the cultures of many times and places under a spectrum of chosen topics.
Literature and the Legal Imaginary: Knowing Justice (Crossroads of Knowledge in Early Modern Literature #4)
by Subha Mukherji Dunstan RobertsTuning into the collective understanding of law as lived experience, Knowing Justice is a timely and distinctive intervention in the field of law and literature. It seeks to understand and inhabit the intersection between judicial procedure, legal thinking and imaginative practice, where epistemic processes that elude the formal discourses of law and legal history are generated and brought into view. But the law in early modern England – the focus of this book though not its horizon – was also an imaginative resource and a repository of structures of feeling. These are functions uniquely grasped through literary mediation because literature shares the representational modes and structures of law but not its methods or ends. Bringing together established and younger scholars from literary studies, legal history, theology and law, and employing a variety of approaches, this collection of essays eschews flat description in favour of layered analysis, cognisant of the plurality of concept, practice and representation. In using a literary lens, it treats apparent binaries or distinct registers as interlinked constituents of an ecology, and navigates the gap between abstract jurisprudence and the affective, composite, social event of justice or judgment. Its perception of ‘literature’, likewise, is capacious: including imaginative method, literary strategies used by law and its cognate disciplines, and hermeneutic and critical methods that are traditionally regarded as literary. Its notion of epistemology, meanwhile, encompasses not simply the condition of judicial knowledge but also its process, psychology and ethics: it attempts to know justice at the same time as it attends to what justice knows, fails to know, or resists knowing.
Literature and the Metaphoric Universe in the Mind
by Nicolae BabutsNicolae Babuts believes that the study of metaphoric thought and literature can be enriched by the application of recent discoveries from neuroscientific c experiments. He maintains that metaphors are neither linguistic formations nor conceptual formations, but instead the product of association of images and language. They are a matter of vision.Memory is an essential component in the creation of meaning and is the way the mind receives messages from the outside world. In this process of transferring data from the outside world, the mind's overriding tendency is to integrate and interpret. Thus, incoming messages are recognized and given meaning whether they are in harmony with the inner world of the mind or in confl ict with it.Babuts argues that the literature we read is related to our perception of reality. And reality has two identities: the physical identity of the outside world and its symbolic identity within memory. The symbolic identity of the outside world is represented internally by the metaphoric universe in the mind.
Literature and the New Culture Wars: Triggers, Cancel Culture, and the Teacher's Dilemma
by Deborah ApplemanCan educators continue to teach troubling but worthwhile texts? Our current “culture wars” have reshaped the politics of secondary literature instruction. Due to a variety of challenges from both the left and the right—to language or subject matter, to potentially triggering content, or to authors who have been canceled—school reading lists are rapidly shrinking. For many teachers, choosing which books to include in their curriculum has become an agonizing task with political, professional, and ethical dimensions. In Literature and the New Culture Wars, Deborah Appleman calls for a reacknowledgment of the intellectual and affective work that literature can do, and offers ways to continue to teach troubling texts without doing harm. Rather than banishing challenged texts from our classrooms, she writes, we should be confronting and teaching the controversies they invoke. Her book is a timely and eloquent argument for a reasoned approach to determining what literature still deserves to be read and taught and discussed.
Literature and the Peripheral City
by Lieven Ameel Jason Finch Markku SalmelaCities have always been defined by their centrality. But literature demonstrates that their diverse peripheries define them, too: from suburbs to slums, rubbish dumps to nightclubs and entire failed cities. The essays in this collection explore urban peripheries through readings of literature from four continents, taking the reader on a journey from global urban hubs such as London and New York to Nordic capitals and cities like Santiago and Johannesburg. The book shows powerfully that peripheral areas are essential to bo th urban fiction and the identities of cities. The urban experience keeps feeding on images from the margins and hinterlands, which help cities and their parts define themselves. Without peripheries there would be no centres.
Literature and the Politics of Post-Victorian Decadence
by Kristin MahoneyIn Literature and the Politics of Post-Victorian Decadence, Kristin Mahoney argues that the early twentieth century was a period in which the specters of the fin de siècle exercised a remarkable draw on the modern cultural imagination and troubled emergent avant-gardistes. These authors and artists refused to assimilate to the aesthetic and political ethos of the era, representing themselves instead as time travellers from the previous century for whom twentieth-century modernity was both baffling and disappointing. However, they did not turn entirely from the modern moment, but rather relied on decadent strategies to participate in conversations concerning the most highly vexed issues of the period including war, the rise of the Labour Party, the question of women's sexual freedom, and changing conceptions of sexual and gender identities.
Literature and the Remains of the Death Penalty (Idiom: Inventing Writing Theory)
by Peggy KamufWhy have generations of philosophers failed or refused to articulate a rigorous challenge to the death penalty, when literature has been rife with death penalty abolitionism for centuries? In this book, Peggy Kamuf explores why any properly philosophical critique of capital punishment in the West must confront the literary as that which exceeds the logical demands of philosophy.Jacques Derrida has written that “the modern history of the institution named literature in Europe over the last three or four centuries is contemporary with and indissociable from a contestation of the death penalty.” How, Kamuf asks, does literature contest the death penalty today, particularly in the United States where it remains the last of its kind in a Western nation that professes to be a democracy? What resources do fiction, narrative, and poetic language supply in the age of the remains of the death penalty?Following a lucid account of Derrida’s approach to the death penalty, Kamuf pursues this question across several literary texts. In reading Orwell’s story “A Hanging,” Kamuf explores the relation between literary narration and the role of the witness, concluding that such a witness needs the seal of literary language in order to account for the secret of the death penalty. The next chapter turns to the American scene with Robert Coover’s 1977 novel The Public Burning, which restages the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as an outlandish public spectacle in Times Square. Because this fictional device reverses the drive toward secrecy that, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, put an end to public executions in the West, Kamuf reads the novel in a tension with the current tendency in the U.S. to shore up and protect remaining death penalty practices through increasingly pervasive secrecy measures. A reading of Norman Mailer’s 1979 novel The Executioner’s Song, shows the breakdown of any firm distinction between suicide and capital execution and explores the essential affinity between traditional narrative structure, which is plotted from the end, and the “plot” of a death penalty. Final readings of Kafka, Derrida, and Baudelaire consider the relation between literature and law, showing how performative literary language can “play the law. “A brief conclusion, titled “Postmortem,” reflects on the condition of literature as that which survives the death penalty.A major contribution to the field of law and society, this book makes the case for literature as a space for contesting the death penalty, a case that scholars and activists working across a range of traditions will need to confront.
Literature and the Renaissance Garden from Elizabeth I to Charles II: England’s Paradise (Literary And Scientific Cultures Of Early Modernity Ser.)
by Amy L. TignerSpanning the period from Elizabeth I's reign to Charles II's restoration, this study argues the garden is a primary site evincing a progressive narrative of change, a narrative that looks to the Edenic as obtainable ideal in court politics, economic prosperity, and national identity in early modern England. In the first part of the study, Amy L. Tigner traces the conceptual forms that the paradise imaginary takes in works by Gascoigne, Spenser, and Shakespeare, all of whom depict the garden as a space in which to imagine the national body of England and the gendered body of the monarch. In the concluding chapters, she discusses the function of gardens in the literary works by Jonson, an anonymous masque playwright, and Milton, the herbals of John Gerard and John Parkinson, and the tract writing of Ralph Austen, Lawrence Beal, and Walter Blithe. In these texts, the paradise imaginary is less about the body politic of the monarch and more about colonial pursuits and pressing environmental issues. As Tigner identifies, during this period literary representations of gardens become potent discursive models that both inspire constructions of their aesthetic principles and reflect innovations in horticulture and garden technology. Further, the development of the botanical garden ushers in a new world of science and exploration. With the importation of a new world of plants, the garden emerges as a locus of scientific study: hybridization, medical investigation, and the proliferation of new ornamentals and aliments. In this way, the garden functions as a means to understand and possess the rapidly expanding globe.
Literature and the Scottish Reformation (St Andrews Studies in Reformation History)
by David George MullanThroughout the twentieth century Scottish literary studies was dominated by a critical consensus that critiqued contemporary anti-Catholic by advancing a re-reading of the Reformation. This consensus understood that Scotland's rich medieval culture had been replaced with an anti-aesthetic tyranny of life and letters. As a result, Scottish literature has consistently been defined in opposition to the Calvinism to which it frequently returns. Yet, as the essays in this collection show, such a consensus appears increasingly untenable in light both of recent research and a more detailed survey of Scottish literature. This collection launches a full-scale reconsideration of the series of relationships between literature and reformation in early modern Scotland. Previous scholarship in this area has tended to dismiss the literary value of the writing of the period - largely as a reaction to its regular theological interests. Instead the essays in this volume reinforce recent work that challenges the received scholarly consensus by taking these interests seriously. This volume argues for the importance of this religiously orientated writing, through the adoption of a series of interdisciplinary approaches. Arranged chronologically, the collection concentrates on major authors and texts while engaging with a number of contemporary critical issues and so highlighting, for example, writing by women in the period. It addresses the concerns of historians and theologians who have routinely accepted the established reading of this period of literary history in Scotland and offers a radically new interpretation of the complex relationships between literature and religious reform in early modern Scotland.