Contemporary Reconfigurations of American Literary Classics

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1136264213
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (362 download)

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Book Synopsis Contemporary Reconfigurations of American Literary Classics by : Betina Entzminger

Download or read book Contemporary Reconfigurations of American Literary Classics written by Betina Entzminger and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-03-05 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The number and popularity of novels that have overtly reconfigured aspects of classic American texts suggests a curious trend for both readers and writers, an impulse to retell and reread books that have come to define American culture. This book argues that by revising canonical American literature, contemporary American writers are (re)writing an American myth of origins, creating one that corresponds to the contemporary writer’s understanding of self and society. Informed by cognitive psychology, evolutionary literary criticism, and poststructuralism, Entzminger reads texts by canonical authors Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Alcott, Twain, Chopin, and Faulkner, and by the contemporary writers that respond to them. In highlighting the construction and cognitive function of narrative in their own and in their antecedent texts, contemporary writers highlight the fact that such use of narrative is universal and essential to human beings. This book suggests that by revising the classic texts that compose our cultural narrative, contemporary writers mirror the way human individuals consistently revisit and refigure the past through language, via self-narration, in order to manage and understand experience.

The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern American Fiction

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Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107103444
Total Pages : 246 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (71 download)

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Book Synopsis The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern American Fiction by : Paula Geyh

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern American Fiction written by Paula Geyh and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-24 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Companion is an authoritative, comprehensive, and accessible guide to the key works, genres, and movements of postmodern American fiction.

Prequels, Coquels and Sequels in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 0429795882
Total Pages : 200 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (297 download)

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Book Synopsis Prequels, Coquels and Sequels in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction by : Armelle Parey

Download or read book Prequels, Coquels and Sequels in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction written by Armelle Parey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-08-30 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers to delineate a key phenomenon in contemporary Anglophone fiction: novel expansion, when the plot and characters from a finished novel are retrieved to be developed in new adventures set before, after or during the narrative time of the source-text. If autographic and allographic sequels are almost as old as literature, prequels – that imagine the anteriority of a narrative – and coquels – that develop secondary characters in the same story time as the source-text – are more recent. The overall trend for novel expansion spread in the mid-1980s and 1990s and has since shown no sign of abating. This volume is organised following three types of relationships to the source-texts even if these occasionally combine to produce a more complex structure. This book comprises 11 essays, preceded by an introduction, that examine narrative strategies, aesthetic, ethical and political tendencies underlying these novel expansions. Following the overview provided in the introduction, the reader will find case studies of prequels, coquels and sequels before a final chapter that encompasses them all and more.

The Epic Trickster in American Literature

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1136194835
Total Pages : 325 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (361 download)

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Book Synopsis The Epic Trickster in American Literature by : Gregory E. Rutledge

Download or read book The Epic Trickster in American Literature written by Gregory E. Rutledge and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-04-26 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Just as Africa and the West have traditionally fit into binaries of Darkness/Enlightenment, Savage/Modern, Ugly/Beautiful, and Ritual/Art, among others, much of Western cultural production rests upon the archetypal binary of Trickster/Epic, with trickster aesthetics and commensurate cultural forms characterizing Africa. Challenging this binary and the exceptionalism that underlies anti-hegemonic efforts even today, this book begins with the scholarly foundations that mapped out African trickster continuities in the United States and excavated the aesthetics of traditional African epic performances. Rutledge locates trickster-like capacities within the epic hero archetype (the "epic trickster" paradigm) and constructs an Homeric Diaspora, which is to say that the modern Homeric performance foundation lies at an absolute time and distance away from the ancient storytelling performance needed to understand the cautionary aesthetic inseparable from epic potential. As traditional epic performances demonstrate, unchecked epic trickster dynamism anticipates not only brutal imperialism and creative diversity, but the greatest threat to everyone, an eco-apocalypse. Relying upon the preeminent scholarship on African-American trickster-heroes, traditional African heroic performances, and cultural studies approaches to Greco-Roman epics, Rutledge traces the epic trickster aesthetic through three seminal African-American novels keenly attuned to the American Homeric Diaspora: Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition, Richard Wright’s Native Son, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved.

American Literature in Transition, 1990–2000

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Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108547397
Total Pages : 635 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (85 download)

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Book Synopsis American Literature in Transition, 1990–2000 by : Stephen J. Burn

Download or read book American Literature in Transition, 1990–2000 written by Stephen J. Burn and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-12-28 with total page 635 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written in the shadow of the approaching millennium, American literature in the 1990s was beset by bleak announcements of the end of books, the end of postmodernism, and even the end of literature. Yet, as conservative critics marked the century's twilight hours by launching elegies for the conventional canon, American writers proved the continuing vitality of their literature by reinvigorating inherited forms, by adopting and adapting emerging technologies to narrative ends, and by finding new voices that had remained outside that canon for too long. By reading 1990s literature in a sequence of shifting contexts - from independent presses to the AIDS crisis, and from angelology to virtual reality - American Literature in Transition, 1990–2000 provides the fullest map yet of the changing shape of a rich and diverse decade's literary production. It offers new perspectives on the period's well-known landmarks, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, but also overdue recognition to writers such as Ana Castillo, Evan Dara, Steve Erickson, and Carole Maso.

The Nineteenth Century Revis(it)ed

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000295702
Total Pages : 297 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (2 download)

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Book Synopsis The Nineteenth Century Revis(it)ed by : Ina Bergmann

Download or read book The Nineteenth Century Revis(it)ed written by Ina Bergmann and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-29 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nineteenth Century Revis(it)ed: The New Historical Fiction explores the renaissance of the American historical novel at the turn of the twenty-first century. The study examines the revision of nineteenth-century historical events in cultural products against the background of recent theoretical trends in American studies. It combines insights of literary studies with scholarship on popular culture. The focus of representation is the long nineteenth century – a period from the early republic to World War I – as a key epoch of the nation-building project of the United States. The study explores the constructedness of historical tradition and the cultural resonance of historical events within the discourse on the contemporary novel and the theory formation surrounding it. At the center of the discussion are the unprecedented literary output and critical as well as popular success of historical fiction in the USA since 1995. An additional postcolonial and transatlantic perspective is provided by the incorporation of texts by British and Australian authors and especially by the inclusion of insights from neo-Victorian studies. The book provides a critical comment on current and topical developments in American literature, culture, and historiography.

Minor Characters Have Their Day

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Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231542402
Total Pages : 278 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (315 download)

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Book Synopsis Minor Characters Have Their Day by : Jeremy Rosen

Download or read book Minor Characters Have Their Day written by Jeremy Rosen and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do genres develop? In what ways do they reflect changing political and cultural trends? What do they tell us about the motivations of publishers and readers? Combining close readings and formal analysis with a sociology of literary institutions and markets, Minor Characters Have Their Day offers a compelling new approach to genre study and contemporary fiction. Focusing on the booming genre of books that transform minor characters from canonical literary texts into the protagonists of new works, Jeremy Rosen makes broader claims about the state of contemporary fiction, the strategies of the publishing industry over recent decades, and the function of literary characters. Rosen traces the recent surge in "minor-character elaboration" to the late 1960s and works such as Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea and Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. These early examples often recover the voices of marginalized individuals and groups. As the genre has exploded between the 1980s and the present, with novels about Ahab's wife, Huck Finn's father, and Mr. Dalloway, it has begun to embody the neoliberal commitments of subjective experience, individual expression, and agency. Eventually, large-scale publishers capitalized on the genre as a way to appeal to educated audiences aware of the prestige of the classics and to draw in identity-based niche markets. Rosen's conclusion ties the understudied evolution of minor-character elaboration to the theory of literary character.

Silent Film and U.S. Naturalist Literature

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317293207
Total Pages : 208 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (172 download)

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Book Synopsis Silent Film and U.S. Naturalist Literature by : Katherine Fusco

Download or read book Silent Film and U.S. Naturalist Literature written by Katherine Fusco and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-17 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Typically, studies of early cinema’s relation to literature have focused on the interactions between film and modernism. When film first emerged, however, it was naturalism, not modernism, competing for the American public’s attention. In this media ecosystem, the cinema appeared alongside the works of authors including Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jack London, and Frank Norris. Drawing on contemporaneous theories of time and modernity as well as recent scholarship on film, narrative, and naturalism, this book moves beyond traditional adaptation studies approaches to argue that both naturalism and the early cinema intervened in the era’s varying experiments with temporality and time management. Specifically, it shows that American naturalist novels are constructed around a sustained formal and thematic interrogation of the relationship between human freedom and temporal inexorability and that the early cinema developed its norms in the context of naturalist experiments with time. The book identifies the silent cinema and naturalist novel’s shared privileging of narrative progress over character development as a symbolic solution to social and aesthetic concerns ranging from systems of representation, to historiography, labor reform, miscegenation, and birth control. This volume thus establishes the dynamic exchange between silent film and naturalism, arguing that in the products of this exchange, personality figures as excess bogging down otherwise efficient narratives of progress. Considering naturalist authors and a diverse range of early film genres, this is the first book-length study of the reciprocal media exchanges that took place when the cinema was new. It will be a valuable resource to those with interests in Adaptation Studies, American Literature, Film History, Literary Naturalism, Modernism, and Narrative Theory.

The Afterlife of "Little Women"

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Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 1421415585
Total Pages : 284 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (214 download)

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Book Synopsis The Afterlife of "Little Women" by : Beverly Lyon Clark

Download or read book The Afterlife of "Little Women" written by Beverly Lyon Clark and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written in an accessible narrative style, The Afterlife of Little Women speaks to scholars, librarians, and devoted Alcott fans.

Charles Bukowski, Outsider Literature, and the Beat Movement

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1134059787
Total Pages : 252 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (34 download)

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Book Synopsis Charles Bukowski, Outsider Literature, and the Beat Movement by : Paul Clements

Download or read book Charles Bukowski, Outsider Literature, and the Beat Movement written by Paul Clements and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-04-26 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book uses cultural and psycho-social analysis to examine the beat writer Charles Bukowski and his literature, focusing on representations of the anti-hero rebel and outsider. Clements considers the complexities, ambiguities, and contradictions represented by the author and his work, exploring Bukowski’s visceral writing of the cultural ordinary and everyday self-narrative. The study considers Bukowski’s apolitical, gendered, and working-class stance to understand how the writer represents reality and is represented with regards to counter-cultural literature. In addition, Clements provides a broader socio-cultural focus that evaluates counterculture in relation to the American beat movement and mythology, highlighting the male cool anti-hero. The cultural practices and discourses utilized to situate Bukowski include the individual and society, outsiderdom, cult celebrity, fan embodiment, and disneyfication, providing a greater understanding of the beat generation and counterculture literature.

British Spy Fiction and the End of Empire

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317678958
Total Pages : 198 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (176 download)

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Book Synopsis British Spy Fiction and the End of Empire by : Sam Goodman

Download or read book British Spy Fiction and the End of Empire written by Sam Goodman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-06-05 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The position of spy fiction is largely synonymous in popular culture with ideas of patriotism and national security, with the spy himself indicative of the defence of British interests and the preservation of British power around the globe. This book reveals a more complicated side to these assumptions than typically perceived, arguing that the representation of space and power within spy fiction is more complex than commonly assumed. Instead of the British spy tirelessly maintaining the integrity of Empire, this volume illustrates how spy fiction contains disunities and disjunctions in its representation of space, and the relationship between the individual and the state in an era of declining British power. Focusing primarily on the work of Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, Len Deighton, and John le Carre, the volume brings a fresh methodological approach to the study of spy fiction and Cold War culture. It presents close textual analysis within a framework of spatial and sovereign theory as a means of examining the cultural impact of decolonization and the shifting geopolitics of the Cold War. Adopting a thematic approach to the analysis of space in spy fiction, the text explores the reciprocal process by which contextual history intersects with literature throughout the period in question, arguing that spy fiction is responsible for reflecting, strengthening and, in some cases, precipitating cultural anxieties over decolonization and the end of Empire. This study promises to be a welcome addition to the developing field of spy fiction criticism and popular culture studies. Both engaging and original in its approach, it will be important reading for students and academics engaged in the study of Cold War culture, popular literature, and the changing state of British identity over the course of the latter twentieth century.

AIDS Literature and Gay Identity

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1136227938
Total Pages : 209 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (362 download)

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Book Synopsis AIDS Literature and Gay Identity by : Monica B. Pearl

Download or read book AIDS Literature and Gay Identity written by Monica B. Pearl and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-01-04 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses the significance of late twentieth century and early twenty first century American fiction written in response to the AIDS crisis and interrogates how sexual identity is depicted and constructed textually. Pearl develops Freudian psychoanalytic theory in a complex account of the ways in which grief is expressed and worked out in literature, showing how key texts from the AIDS crisis by authors such as Edmund White, Michael Cunningham, Eve Sedgwick – and also, later, the archives of The ACT UP Oral History Project - lie both within the tradition of gay writing and a postmodernist poetics. The book demonstrates how literary texts both expose and construct personal identity, how they expose and produce sexual identities, and how gay and queer identities were written onto the page, but also constructed and consolidated by these very texts. Pearl argues that the division between realist and postmodern, and gay and queer, respectively, is determined by whether the experience expressed and accounted is mediated through the psychoanalytic categories of mourning or melancholia, and is marked by a kind of coherence or chaos in the texts themselves. This study presents an important development in scholarly work in gay literary studies, queer theory, and AIDS representation.

Poetry as Testimony

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1134742657
Total Pages : 194 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (347 download)

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Book Synopsis Poetry as Testimony by : Antony Rowland

Download or read book Poetry as Testimony written by Antony Rowland and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-03-26 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes Holocaust poetry, war poetry, working-class poetry, and 9/11 poetry as forms of testimony. Rowland argues that testamentary poetry requires a different approach to traditional ways of dealing with poems due to the pressure of the metatext (the original, traumatic events), the poems’ demands for the hyper-attentiveness of the reader, and a paradox of identification that often draws the reader towards identifying with the poet’s experience, but then reminds them of its sublimity. He engages with the work of a diverse range of twentieth-century authors and across the literature of several countries, even uncovering new archival material. The study ends with an analysis of the poetry of 9/11, engaging with the idea that it typifies a new era of testimony where global, secondary witnesses react to a proliferation of media images. This book ranges across the literature of several countries, cultures, and historical events in order to stress the large variety of contexts in which poetry has functioned productively as a form of testimony, and to note the importance of the availability of translations to the formation of literary canons.

James Joyce, Science, and Modernist Print Culture

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317541502
Total Pages : 180 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (175 download)

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Book Synopsis James Joyce, Science, and Modernist Print Culture by : Jeffrey S. Drouin

Download or read book James Joyce, Science, and Modernist Print Culture written by Jeffrey S. Drouin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-12-05 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book makes an important intervention in the ongoing debates about modernism, science, and the divisions of early Twentieth-Century print culture. In order to establish Joyce's place in the nexus of modernism and scientific thought, Drouin uses the methods of periodical studies and textual criticism to examine the impact of Einstein's relativity theories on the development of Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939). Looking at experiments with space, time, motion, and perspective, it rigorously surveys discourse of science and the novel in the print culture networks connected to Joyce, with concrete analysis of avant-garde magazines, newspapers, popular science books, BBC pamphlets, and radio broadcasts between 1914 and 1939. These sources elucidate changes that Joyce made to the manuscripts, typescripts, and page proofs of certain episodes of his final two novels. The new evidence establishes for the first time the nature of the material link between Joyce and non-technical science, and the manner in which Ulysses and Finnegans Wake owe their structure and meaning to the humanistic issues associated with science during the wartime and inter-war years. In examining the relationships between Joyce's later work and the popular science industry, the book elucidates the often conflicting attitudes toward science in inter-war British print culture, filling in a piece of the puzzle that is modernism's relationship to the new physics and, simultaneously, the history of the novel.

Jorge Luis Borges, Post-Analytic Philosophy, and Representation

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317394836
Total Pages : 218 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (173 download)

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Book Synopsis Jorge Luis Borges, Post-Analytic Philosophy, and Representation by : Silvia G. Dapía

Download or read book Jorge Luis Borges, Post-Analytic Philosophy, and Representation written by Silvia G. Dapía and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-08-20 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Making an important contribution to studies in Literature and Philosophy, this book reads Jorge Luis Borges philosophically, particularly in reference to his use of representation and reality. Rather than attempting to subordinate Borges to a set of philosophical constructs, to reduce Borges’ texts to mere exemplifications or illustrations of philosophical theories, the book uses Borges’s short stories to demonstrate how philosophical questions related to representation develop out of literature and actually serve as precursors to the various strains of post-analytic philosophy that later developed in the United States. The volume discusses American post-analytic philosophers Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, Donald Davidson, Nelson Goodman, and Arthur Danto, as well as a wide-ranging set of philosophical ideas including reflections on Keynes, Hayek, Schopenhauer and many others . Chapters offer detailed readings of Borges’ texts extending from 1939 to 1983, locating where he thematizes issues of representation, and pursuing the logic of Borges’s text toward its philosophical implications without neglecting their literary value. The book argues that Borges’ exploration of the relationship between representation and reality places him unmistakably in the position of a precursor to the post-analytic philosophers. Illuminating the role that language plays in the creation of reality and representation, this volume makes significant contributions not only to Borges scholarship but also post-structuralism, post-analytic studies of language, semiotics, comparative literature, and Latin American literature.

Dramatizing Time in Twentieth-Century Fiction

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317743652
Total Pages : 234 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (177 download)

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Book Synopsis Dramatizing Time in Twentieth-Century Fiction by : William Vesterman

Download or read book Dramatizing Time in Twentieth-Century Fiction written by William Vesterman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-07-17 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How have twentieth-century writers used techniques in fiction to communicate the human experience of time? Dramatizing Time in Twentieth-Century Fiction explores this question by analyzing major narratives of the last century that demonstrate how time becomes variously manifested to reflect and illuminate its operation in our lives. Offering close readings of both modernist and non-modernist writers such as Wodehouse, Stein, Lewis, Joyce, Hemingway, Faulkner, Borges, and Nabokov, the author shares and unifies the belief, as set forth by the distinguished philosopher Paul Ricoeur, that narratives rather than philosophy best help us understand time. They create and communicate its meanings through dramatizations in language and the reconfiguration of temporal experience. This book explores the various responses of artistic imaginations to the mysteries of time and the needs of temporal organization in modern fiction. It is therefore an important reference for anyone with an interest in twentieth-century literature and the philosophy of time.

The Dirty South

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Publisher : LSU Press
ISBN 13 : 0807180807
Total Pages : 271 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (71 download)

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Book Synopsis The Dirty South by : James A. Crank

Download or read book The Dirty South written by James A. Crank and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2023-11-15 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Dirty South examines the shifting significances of the South as a constructed, fantasized region in the American psyche, particularly its frequent association with tropes of dirt that emphasize soil, garbage, trash, grit, litter, mud, swamp water, slime, and pollution. Beginning with iconic works from the 1970s such as Deliverance and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, James A. Crank traces the image of a “dirty” South into the twenty-first century to explore the social, political, and psychological effects of the region’s hold on the imaginations of southerners and nonsoutherners alike. With a focus on media forms through which southern identity gets articulated and questioned—including horror movies, Swamp Thing comics, and popular music by artists such as Waylon Jennings and OutKast—The Dirty South probes the sustained fascination with southern dirtiness while reflecting on its causes and consequences since the end of the civil rights era. Highlighting the period from 1970 to 2020, during which the South began to represent several new possible identities for the nation as a whole and for the area itself, Crank considers the ways that southerners have used depictions of dirt to create and police boundaries and to contest those boundaries. Each chapter pairs prominent literary or cultural texts from the 1970s with more contemporary works, such as Jordan Peele’s film Get Out, which recycle similar investments or, critically, challenge the inherent whiteness of the earlier images. By historicizing fantasies of the region and connecting them to the first decades of the twenty-first century, The Dirty South reveals that notions about southern dirtiness proliferate not because they lend authenticity or relevancy to the U.S. South, but because they aid so conspicuously in the zombified work of tethering investors (real and imagined) to a graveyard of ideas.