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Literature--Philosophy

How does literature work? And what does it mean? How does it relate to the world: to politics, to history, to the environment? How do we analyse and interpret a literary text, paying attention to its specific poetic and fictitious qualities? This wide-ranging introduction helps students to explore these and many other essential questions in the study of literature, criticism and theory. In a series of introductory chapters, leading international scholars present the fundamental topics of literary studies through conceptual definitions as well as interpretative readings of works familiar from a range of world literary traditions. In an easy-to-navigate format, Literature: An Introduction to Theory and Analysis covers such topics as: ·Key definitions – from plot, character and style to genre, trope and author ·Literature's relationship to the surrounding world – ethics, politics, gender and nature ·Modes of literature and criticism – from books to performance, from creative to critical writing With annotated reading guides throughout and a glossary of major critical schools to help students when studying, revising and writing essays, this is an essential introduction and reference guide to the study of literature at all levels

Literature

This introductory volume provides an overview of the history of Literature as a cultural concept, and reflects on the contemporary nature, place and function of what the literary might mean for us today. Literature: • offers a concise history of the canonic concept of'literature'from its earliest origins • illustrates the kinds of theoretical issues which are currently invoked by the term'literary'• provides a definition of the'literary'for the twenty-first century With Literature Peter Widdowson provides a thought-provoking essay on the contemporary relevance of the'literary'for students.

Comparative literature, Criticism, Literature--History and criticism, and Literature--Study and teaching

Within lies a shakeup of the traditional introductory literature course textbook formula, with a unique perspective on literature. You will find some theories that have not even been published in scholarly journals before, like the examination of the merchants'language that Swift uses to disguise his meaning. Each of the sections on fiction, drama and poetry provides the most essential commentary, definitions and concepts. The readings include three short stories from Edgar Allan Poe, novel segments from Don Quixote, and Gulliver's Travels, various poems, and a classic Greek play, Lysistrata. The uniting elements in these pieces are satire, sarcasm, and other forms of humor. This dense political, social and cultural content should inspire students with questions and a desire to write about it.

Literature--Philosophy, Pragmatics, and Discourse analysis, Literary

Pragmatics and Literature is an important collection of new work by leading practitioners working at the interface between pragmatic theory and literary analysis. The individual studies collected here draw on a variety of theoretical approaches and are concerned with a range of literary genres. All have a shared focus on applying ideas from specific pragmatic frameworks to understanding the production, interpretation and evaluation of literary texts. A full-length introductory chapter highlights distinctions and contrasts between pragmatic theories, but also brings out complementarities, shared aims and assumptions, and ways in which different pragmatic theories can make different contributions to our understanding of literary texts. The book as a whole encourages a sense of coherence for the field and presents insights from various approaches for systematic comparison. Building on previous work by the editors, the contributors and others, it makes a significant contribution to the growing field of pragmatic literary stylistics.

Xhosa literature

Xhosa Literature consists of fourteen essays addressing Xhosa literature in three media - the spoken word, newspapers, and books. Literary critics tend to focus on Xhosa literature published in books with some attention paid to Xhosa oral poetry and tales, but by and large the contribution of newspapers to the development of Xhosa literature has been overlooked. This book explores aspects of Xhosa literature in all three media, and their interconnections. Six of the essays treat historical narratives (amabali) and praise poetry (izibongo), setting out the social and ritual function of poetry and the poet (imbongi), mapping changes in the izibongo of three poets as South Africa moved towards democracy in the 1990s, and analyzing recordings of two poems recited by S.E.K. Mqhayi. Three essays are devoted to the first Xhosa novel, Mqhayi's U-Samson (1907), to the publication of the greatest novel in Xhosa, A.C. Jordan's Ingqumbo yeminyanya (1940), and to the first published poem in praise of Nelson Mandela, D.L.P. Yali-Manisi's'UNkosi Rolihlahla Nelson Mandela'(1954). There follow accounts of Xhosa literature in the nineteenth century and the appropriation of the press by Xhosa editors towards the end of that century, of Nontsizi Mgqwetho's fiery poetry published in Umteteli wa Bantu, and of poems by Mgqwetho and Mqhayi published in Abantu-Batho, two Johannesburg newspapers. The volume concludes with an exposition of an imaginative response to David Yali-Manisi and his poetry. (Series: Publications of the Opland Collection of Xhosa Literature, Vol. 6) [Subject: African Studies, Politics, Sociology, Xhosa Literature]

Environment (Aesthetics), Weather in literature, and Weather--Psychological aspects

'Literature and Weather. Shakespeare – Goethe – Zola'is dedicated to the relation between literature and weather, i.e. a cultural practice and an everyday phenomenon that has played very different epistemic roles in the history of the world. The study undertakes an archaeology of literature's affinity to the weather which tells the story of literature's weathery self-reflection and its creative reinventions as a medium in different epistemic and social circumstances.The book undertakes extensive close readings of three exemplary literary texts: Shakespeare's The Tempest, Goethe's The Sufferings of Young Werther and Zola's The Rougon-Macquarts. These readings provide the basis for reconstructing three distinct formations, negotiating the relationship between literature and weather in the 17th, the 18th and the 19th centuries.The study is a pioneering contribution to the recent debates of literature's indebtedness to the environment. It initiates a rewriting of literary history that is weather-sensitive; the question of literature's agency, its power to affect, cannot be raised without understanding the way the weather works in a certain cultural formation.

Religious education and Conduct of life--Religious aspects

In the opinion of the present study, a masterwork of literature is a work that teaches human beings how to live, in a carefully constructed artifact; in venerable terms, a work that constructs a fable (a narrative) whose intellectual function is to convey an idea (what is taught). Every such work is passionately convinced of the seriousness of what is taught; and its passion is strictly disciplined by a narrative divided into parts that are internally coherent, and that appear in an order that cannot be changed. All five of the masterworks analyzed in the present study passionately teach, in splendid artifacts, that Christianity is adequate to the dangers of life, and capable of irradiating the human soul. The indispensable reference of all five is the Christian Bible; the God is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; the aspiration is salvation. The intent of all five--Spenser's The Faerie Queene (Book One), Shakespeare's Macbeth, Milton's Paradise Lost, Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, and Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment--is thus ad dei gloriam, the glorification of the God of Christianity.

Literature--Philosophy, Concrete poetry, Brazilian, and Latin American literature--History and criticism

Anti-Literature articulates a rethinking of what is meant today by “literature.” Examining key Latin American forms of experimental writing from the 1920s to the present, Adam Joseph Shellhorse reveals literature's power as a site for radical reflection and reaction to contemporary political and cultural conditions. His analysis engages the work of writers such as Clarice Lispector, Oswald de Andrade, the Brazilian concrete poets, Osman Lins, and David Viñas, to develop a theory of anti-literature that posits the feminine, multimedial, and subaltern as central to the undoing of what is meant by “literature.” By placing Brazilian and Argentine anti-literature at the crux of a new way of thinking about the field, Shellhorse challenges prevailing discussions about the historical projection and critical force of Latin American literature. Examining a diverse array of texts and media that include the visual arts, concrete poetry, film scripts, pop culture, neo-baroque narrative, and others that defy genre, Shellhorse delineates the subversive potential of anti-literary modes of writing while also engaging current debates in Latin American studies on subalternity, feminine writing, posthegemony, concretism, affect, marranismo, and the politics of aesthetics.

Scandinavian literature--History and criticism

Nordic Literature: A comparative history is a multi-volume comparative analysis of the literature of the Nordic region. Bringing together the literature of Finland, continental Scandinavia (Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Sápmi), and the insular region (Iceland, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands), each volume of this three-volume project adopts a new frame through which one can recognize and analyze significant clusters of literary practice. This first volume, Spatial nodes, devotes its attention to the changing literary figurations of space by Nordic writers from medieval to contemporary times. Organized around the depiction of various “scapes” and spatial practices at home and abroad, this approach to Nordic literature stretches existing notions of temporally linear, nationally centered literary history and allows questions of internal regional similarities and differences to emerge more strongly. The productive historical contingency of the “North” as a literary space becomes clear in this close analysis of its literary texts and practices.

European literature--20th century--History and criticism, American literature--20th century--History and criticism, Modernism (Literature)--Europe, Modernism (Literature)--United States, and Literature, Modern--20th century--History and criticism

In Interbellum Literature Cor Hermans offers an overview of modernist writing in the interwar years. The ideas embodied in the personalities and works of Proust, Woolf, Joyce, Kafka, Musil, Beckett, Céline and others are captured in a new synthesis.

Spanish American literature--21st century--History and criticism, Spanish American literature--20th century--History and criticism, Literature and globalization, Literature and society--Latin America, and Sovereignty in literature

Examines literary responses to the impact of economic and technological globalization in Latin America.Literature and “Interregnum” examines the unraveling of the political forms of modernity through readings of end-of-millennium literary texts by César Aira, Marcelo Cohen, Sergio Chejfec, Diamela Eltit, and Roberto Bolaño. The opening of national spaces to the global capitalist system in the 1980s culminates in the suspension of key principles of modernity, most notably that of political sovereignty. While the neoliberal model subjugates modern forms of social organization and political decision making to an economic rationale, the market is unable to provide a new ordering principle that could fill the empty place formerly occupied by the national figure of the sovereign. The result is a situation that resembles what the Italian political philosopher Antonio Gramsci termed “interregnum,” an in-between time in which “the old [order] is dying and the new cannot be born.” The recoding of history as literary form provides occasions for reconsidering modern conceptualizations of aesthetic experience, mood, temporality, thought, politics, ethical experience, as well as of literature itself as social institution. In his analysis, Patrick Dove seeks to create dialogues between literature and theoretical perspectives, including Continental philosophy, political thought, psychoanalysis, and sociology of globalization. The author highlights the connections between mass media, technology, politics, and economics.Patrick Dove is Associate Professor of Spanish at Indiana University and the author of The Catastrophe of Modernity: Tragedy and the Nation in Latin American Literature.

Law in literature, Law and literature, Censorship, and Intellectual property in literature

María José Falcón y Tella invites us on a fascinating journey through the world of law and literature, travelling through the different eras and meeting eternal and as such current issues. Law in Literature is undoubtedly the most fertile and documented perspective of this book.

Geography and literature

In a period marked by the Spatial Turn, time is not the main category of analysis any longer. Space is. It is now considered as a central metaphor and topos in literature, and literary criticism has seized space as a new tool. Similarly, literature turns out to be an ideal field for geography. This book examines the cross-fertilization of geography and literature as disciplines, languages and methodologies. In the past two decades, several methods of analysis focusing on the relationship and interconnectedness between literature and geography have flourished. Literary cartography, literary geography and geocriticism (Westphal, 2007, and Tally, 2011) have their specificities, but they all agree upon the omnipresence of space, place and mapping at the core of analysis. Other approaches like ecocriticism (Buell, 2001, and Garrard, 2004), geopoetics (White, 1994), geography of literature (Moretti, 2000), studies of the inserted map (Ljunberg, 2012, and Pristnall and Cooper, 2011) and narrative cartography have likewise drawn attention to space. Literature and Geography: The Writing of Space Throughout History, following an international conference in Lyon bringing together literary academics, geographers, cartographers and architects in order to discuss literature and geography as two practices of space, shows that literature, along with geography, is perfectly valid to account for space. Suggestions are offered here from all disciplines on how to take into account representations and discourses since texts, including literary ones, have become increasingly present in the analysis of geographers.

Literature--History and criticism

Introduces the most important terms for understanding literature, past and present. Literature Now argues that modern literary history is currently the main site of theoretical and methodological reflection in literary studies. Via 19 key terms, the book takes stock of recent scholarship and demonstrates how analyses of particular historical phenomena have modified our understanding of crucial notions like archive, book, event, media, objects, style and the senses. The book not only reveals a rich diversity of subjects and approaches but also identifies the most salient traits of literature and literary studies today. Leading literary critics and historians offer thought-provoking arguments as well as authoritative explorations of the key terms of literary studies providing students as well as scholars with a rich resource for exploring theoretical issues from a historically informed perspective. Key Features Organised around the key terms used in literary studies today: archive, book, medium, translation, subjects, senses, animals, objects, politics, time, invention, event, generation, period, beauty, mimesis, style, popular and genre Puts literary history at the forefront of theoretical and methodological reflection in literary studies Original chapters by leading literary critics, theorists and historians

Gays' writings--History and criticism, Homosexuality and literature, and Literature, Modern--20th century--History and criticism

Although artists are nowadays able to be openly gay and to address homosexuality explicitly in their work, this book argues that it was the harsh climate of 1890-1930 that produced the most outstanding explorations of homosexuality. To support his argument, Meyers illuminates the character and creative process of a range of authors of the period, including Wilde, Gide, Proust, E.M. Forster and T.E. Lawrence, and analyses the sexual problems that were sublimated and transcended in their art.

Literature--Philosophy and Values in literature

While scholars frequently discuss different types of value separately, this book approaches values of literature in the plural. It shows how and why the ethical, aesthetic, cognitive, affective, social, historical, and existential values of literature should be explored in connection with each other. Through their interplay, the book argues, literature engages in its own distinctively literary forms of value inquiry.

Criticism--History--20th century and Literature

'If Bakhtin is right,'Wayne C. Booth has said,'a very great deal of what we western critics have spent our time on is mistaken, or trivial, or both.'In Literature and Spirit David Patterson proceeds from the premise that Bakhtin is right.Exploring Bakhtin's notions of spirit, responsibility, and dialogue, Patterson takes his reader from the narrow arena of literary criticism to the larger realm of human living and human loving. True to the spirit of Bakhtin, he draws the Russian into a vibrant dialogue with other thinkers, including Foucault, Berdyaev, Gide, Lacan, Levinas, and Heidegger. But he does not stop there. He engages Bakhtin in his own insightful and unique dialogue, meeting the responsibility and taking the risk summoned by dialogue. Literature and Spirit, therefore, is not a typically cool and detached exercise in academic curiosity. Instead, it is a passionate and penetrating endeavor to respond to literature and spirit as the links in life's attachment to life. The author demonstrates that in deciding something about literature, we decide something about the substance and meaning of our lives. Far from being a question of commentary or explication, he argues, our relation to literature is a matter of spiritual life and death. The reader who comes before a literary text encounters the human voice. And Patterson enables his reader to hear that voice in all its spiritual dimensions.Unique in its questions and in its quest, Literature and Spirit addresses an audience that goes beyond the ordinary academic categories. It appeals not only to students of literature, philosophy, and religion, but to anyone who seeks an understanding of spiritual presence and meaning in life. Through his affirmation of what is dear, Patterson responds to the needful question. And in his response he puts the question to his audience: Where are you? Literature and Spirit thus speaks to those who face the task of answering,'Here I am.'

Education

Fantasy literature, often derided as superficial and escapist, is one of the most popular and enduring genres of fiction worldwide. It is also—perhaps surprisingly—thought-provoking, structurally complex, and relevant to contemporary society, as the essays in this volume attest. The scholars, teachers, and authors represented here offer their perspectives on this engaging genre.Within these pages, a reader will find a wealth of ideas to help teachers use these texts in the classroom, challenging students to read fantasy with a critical eye. They employ interdisciplinary, philosophical, and religious lenses, as well as Marxist and feminist critical theory, to help students unlock texts. The books discussed include epic fantasy by such authors as Tolkien and Le Guin, children's fantasy by Beatrix Potter and Saint-Exupéry, modern fantasy by Rowling and Martin, and even fairy tales and comic books. The contributors offer provocations, questioning the texts and pushing the boundaries of meaning within the fantasy genre. And in doing so, they challenge readers themselves to ponder these tales more deeply.But through each of these chapters runs a profound love of the genre and a respect for those who produce such beautiful and moving stories. Furthermore, as with all the books in this series, this volume is informed by the tenets of critical pedagogy, and is focused on re-envisioning fantasy literature through the lens of social justice and empowerment. Prepare to be challenged and inspired as you read these explorations of a much-loved genre.

Expatriate authors--Europe--20th century and Authors, Exiled--Europe--20th century

This book brings together papers presented at an international conference held in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 2013, and organised by the Shota Rustaveli Institute of Georgian Literature and the Georgian Comparative Literature Association (GCLA).It represents the first in-depth analysis of the different angles of the problem of emigration and emigrant writing, so painful for the cultural history of Soviet countries, as well as many other European countries with different political regimes. It brings together scholars from Post-Soviet countries, as well as various other countries, to discuss a range of issues surrounding emigration and emigrant writing, highlighting the historical and cultural experience of each particular country. The book deals with such significant problems as the fate of writers revolting against different political regimes, conceptual, stylistic and generic issues, the matter of the emigrant author and the language of his fiction, and the place of emigrant writers'fiction within their national literatures and the world literary process.

Sexual minorities in literature, Gender identity in literature, Homosexuality in literature, Bisexuality in literature, and Transsexuals in literature

Outstanding, in-depth scholarship by renowned literary critics; great starting point for students seeking an introduction to the theme and the critical discussions surrounding it.