Download The Irresponsible Self On Laughter And The Novel PDF

The Irresponsible Self

Author : James Wood
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Release Date : 2005-04-01
ISBN 10 : 1429923814
Pages : 320 pages
Rating : 4.4/5 (923 downloads)

Download The Irresponsible Self in PDF Full Online Free by James Wood and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2005-04-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "James Wood has been called our best young critic. This is not true. He is our best critic; he thinks with a sublime ferocity."--Cynthia Ozick Following the collection The Broken Estate--which established James Wood as the leading critic of his generation--The Irresponsible Self confirms Wood's preeminence, not only as a discerning judge but also as an appreciator of contemporary novels. In twenty-three passionate, sparkling dispatches, he effortlessly connects his encyclopedic, passionate understanding of the literary canon with an equally earnest and appreciative view of the most discussed authors writing today, including Franzen, Pynchon, Rushdie, DeLillo, Naipaul, David Foster Wallace, and Zadie Smith. This collection includes Wood's famous and controversial attack on "hysterical realism", and his sensitive but unsparing examinations of White Teeth and Brick Lane. The Irresponsible Self is indispensable reading for anyone who cares about modern fiction.

The Irresponsible Self

Author : James Wood
Publisher : Random House
Release Date : 2013-07-31
ISBN 10 : 9781446419755
Pages : 320 pages
Rating : 4.4/5 (754 downloads)

Download The Irresponsible Self in PDF Full Online Free by James Wood and published by Random House. This book was released on 2013-07-31 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When James Wood's first collection of essays, The Broken Estate, was published in 1999, the reviewers hailed a master critic. The common thread in Wood's latest collection of essays is what makes us laugh - and the book is an attempt to distinguish between the perhaps rather limited English comedy (as seen in Waugh, for example) and a 'continental' tragic-comedy, which he sees as real, universal and quixotic. A particularly acerbic, and very funny, essay - which has been widely celebrated - deals with Zadie Smith, Rushdie, Pynchon and DeLillo; its title, 'Hysterical Realism', has already entered the phrasebook of literary language. With its brilliant studies of Shakespeare, Dickens and Dostoevsky, Naipaul, Pritchett and Bellow, The Irresponsible Self offers more exhilarating despatches from one of our finest living critics.

The Comic Turn in Contemporary English Fiction

Author : Huw Marsh
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Release Date : 2020-07-09
ISBN 10 : 9781474293044
Pages : 256 pages
Rating : 4.2/5 (42 downloads)

Download The Comic Turn in Contemporary English Fiction in PDF Full Online Free by Huw Marsh and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-07-09 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Comic Turn in Contemporary English Fiction explores the importance of comedy in contemporary literature and culture. In an era largely defined by a mood of crisis, bleakness, cruelty, melancholia, environmental catastrophe and collapse, Huw Marsh argues that contemporary fiction is as likely to treat these subjects comically as it is to treat them gravely, and that the recognition and proper analysis of this humour opens up new ways to think about literature. Structured around readings of authors including Martin Amis, Nicola Barker, Julian Barnes, Jonathan Coe, Howard Jacobson, Magnus Mills and Zadie Smith, this book suggests not only that much of the most interesting contemporary writing is funny and that there is a comic tendency in contemporary fiction, but also that this humour, this comic licence, allows writers of contemporary fiction to do peculiar and interesting things – things that are funny in the sense of odd or strange and that may in turn inspire a funny turn in readers. Marsh offers a series of original critical and theoretical frameworks for discussing questions of literary genre, style, affect and politics, demonstrating that comedy is an often neglected mode that plays a generative role in much of the most interesting contemporary writing, creating sites of rich political, stylistic, cognitive and ethical contestation whose analysis offers a new perspective on the present.

Laughter, Literature, Violence, 1840–1930

Author : Jonathan Taylor
Publisher : Springer
Release Date : 2019-02-04
ISBN 10 : 9783030114138
Pages : 258 pages
Rating : 4.1/5 (139 downloads)

Download Laughter, Literature, Violence, 1840–1930 in PDF Full Online Free by Jonathan Taylor and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-02-04 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Laughter, Literature, Violence, 1840-1930 investigates the strange, complex, even paradoxical relationship between laughter, on the one hand, and violence, war, horror, death, on the other. It does so in relation to philosophy, politics, and key nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary texts, by Edgar Allan Poe, Edmund Gosse, Wyndham Lewis and Katherine Mansfield – texts which explore the far reaches of Schadenfreude, and so-called ‘superiority theories’ of laughter, pushing these theories to breaking point. In these literary texts, the violent superiority often ascribed to laughter is seen as radically unstable, co-existing with its opposite: an anarchic sense of equality. Laughter, humour and comedy are slippery, duplicitous, ambivalent, self-contradictory hybrids, fusing apparently discordant elements. Now and then, though, literary and philosophical texts also dream of a different kind of laughter, one which reaches beyond its alloys – a transcendent, ‘perfect’ laughter which exists only in and for itself.

Comedy and the Feminine Middlebrow Novel

Author : Erica Brown
Publisher : Routledge
Release Date : 2015-10-06
ISBN 10 : 9781317320746
Pages : 176 pages
Rating : 4.3/5 (743 downloads)

Download Comedy and the Feminine Middlebrow Novel in PDF Full Online Free by Erica Brown and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elizabeth von Arnim and Elizabeth Taylor wrote witty and entertaining novels about the domestic lives of middle-class women. Widely read and enjoyed, their work was often dismissed as middlebrow. Brown argues their skilful use of comedy and irony provided the receptive reader with subversive commentary on the cruelties and disappointments of life.

Handbook of the English Novel of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

Author : Christoph Reinfandt
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Release Date : 2017-06-12
ISBN 10 : 9783110369489
Pages : 613 pages
Rating : 4.3/5 (486 downloads)

Download Handbook of the English Novel of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries in PDF Full Online Free by Christoph Reinfandt and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2017-06-12 with total page 613 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Handbook systematically charts the trajectory of the English novel from its emergence as the foremost literary genre in the early twentieth century to its early twenty-first century status of eccentric eminence in new media environments. Systematic chapters address ̒The English Novel as a Distinctly Modern Genreʼ, ̒The Novel in the Economy’, ̒Genres’, ̒Gender’ (performativity, masculinities, feminism, queer), and ̒The Burden of Representationʼ (class and ethnicity). Extended contextualized close readings of more than twenty key texts from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) to Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island (2015) supplement the systematic approach and encourage future research by providing overviews of reception and theoretical perspectives.

The Critic in the Modern World

Author : James Ley
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Release Date : 2014-05-08
ISBN 10 : 9781623568276
Pages : 240 pages
Rating : 4.5/5 (277 downloads)

Download The Critic in the Modern World in PDF Full Online Free by James Ley and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2014-05-08 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Critic in the Modern World explores the work of six influential literary critics-Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, Matthew Arnold, T.S. Eliot, Lionel Trilling and James Wood-each of whom occupies a distinct historical moment. It considers how these representative critics have constructed their public personae, the kinds of arguments they have used, and their core principles and philosophies. Spanning three hundred years of cultural history, The Critic in the Modern World considers the various ways in which literary critics have positioned themselves in relation to the modern tradition of descriptive criticism. In providing a lucid account of each critic's central principles and philosophies, it considers the role of the literary critic as a public figure, interpreting him as someone who is compelled to address the wider issues of individualism and the social implications of the democratising, secularising, liberalising forces of modernity.

Traumatic Memory and the Ethical, Political and Transhistorical Functions of Literature

Author : Susana Onega
Publisher : Springer
Release Date : 2017-12-01
ISBN 10 : 9783319552781
Pages : 331 pages
Rating : 4.5/5 (783 downloads)

Download Traumatic Memory and the Ethical, Political and Transhistorical Functions of Literature in PDF Full Online Free by Susana Onega and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-12-01 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume addresses the construction and artistic representation of traumatic memories in the contemporary Western world from a variety of inter- and trans-disciplinarity critical approaches and perspectives, ranging from the cultural, political, historical, and ideological to the ethical and aesthetic, and distinguishing between individual, collective, and cultural traumas. The chapters introduce complementary concepts from diverse thinkers including Cathy Caruth, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Homi Bhabha, Abraham and Torok, and Joyce Carol Oates; they also draw from fields of study such as Memory Studies, Theory of Affects, Narrative and Genre Theory, and Cultural Studies. Traumatic Memory and the Political, Economic, and Transhistorical Functions of Literature addresses trauma as a culturally embedded phenomenon and deconstructs the idea of trauma as universal, transhistorical, and abstract.

Hilarion’s Asse

Author : Anne Bandry-Scubbi
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Release Date : 2014-08-11
ISBN 10 : 9781443865838
Pages : 155 pages
Rating : 4.8/5 (834 downloads)

Download Hilarion’s Asse in PDF Full Online Free by Anne Bandry-Scubbi and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-08-11 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The humour of Tristram Shandy has often been acknowledged, but it is not easy to find scholarly articles on Laurence Sterne which suggest that their authors laughed as they wrote. Nine authors have been invited to redress this in the year of the tercentenary of Sterne’s birth. This volume offers nine different facets of humour, a kaleidoscope which enables readers to recombine at will the genial, the bawdy, the sentimental, the ludicrous, the hobby-horsical, the philosophical, the irreverent, the incongruous and the facetious, sending the text spiralling out of the page.

Interwar Women’s Comic Fiction

Author : Nicola Darwood
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Release Date : 2020-01-10
ISBN 10 : 9781527545151
Pages : 127 pages
Rating : 4.5/5 (156 downloads)

Download Interwar Women’s Comic Fiction in PDF Full Online Free by Nicola Darwood and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2020-01-10 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays examines the work of five intermodernist writers. Some were established authors before the First World War and others continued to write after the Second World War, but this book focuses particularly on their writing between 1918 and 1939. Elizabeth von Arnim, Stella Benson, Bradda Field, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Stella Gibbons and Winifred Watson had much in common: they all wrote novels full of comic moments, which often challenged the cultural politics of the interwar period. Drawing on the literary and critical contexts of each novel, the essays here discuss the use of comic structures that enabled the authors to critique the dominant patriarchal structures of their time, and offer an alternative, sometimes subversive, view of the world in which their characters reside. This book contributes to the growing scholarly interest in interwar fiction, focusing principally on novelists who have fallen out of public view. It widens our understanding both of the authors and of the continuing, highly topical debate about interwar women novelists.

Russian Writers and the Fin de Siècle

Author : Katherine Bowers
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Release Date : 2015-06-17
ISBN 10 : 9781107073210
Pages : 317 pages
Rating : 4.0/5 (219 downloads)

Download Russian Writers and the Fin de Siècle in PDF Full Online Free by Katherine Bowers and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-17 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An essay collection that explores Russian literature and culture in relation to the late nineteenth-century fin de siècle.

J. M. Coetzee and the Power of Narrative

Author :
Publisher : Cambria Press
Release Date :
ISBN 10 : 9781621968993
Pages : pages
Rating : 4.9/5 (995 downloads)

Download J. M. Coetzee and the Power of Narrative in PDF Full Online Free by and published by Cambria Press. This book was released on with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Zadie Smith

Author : Philip Tew
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Release Date : 2009-11-23
ISBN 10 : 9781137063595
Pages : 176 pages
Rating : 4.0/5 (599 downloads)

Download Zadie Smith in PDF Full Online Free by Philip Tew and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2009-11-23 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An introduction to the work of Zadie Smith, placing her fiction in a clear historical and theoretical context, and exploring her work in relation to contemporaneity and postcolonialism. Including a timeline of key dates, this guide offers an accessible reading of Smith's work and an overview of its critical reception.

Integration und Ausgrenzung

Author : Mark H. Gelber
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter
Release Date : 2009
ISBN 10 : 9783484620063
Pages : 565 pages
Rating : 4.6/5 (64 downloads)

Download Integration und Ausgrenzung in PDF Full Online Free by Mark H. Gelber and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2009 with total page 565 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dieser Sammelband ist Prof. Dr. Hans Otto Horch, der in den letzten Jahrzehnten die wissenschaftliche Aufarbeitung der deutsch-jüdischen Literatur- und Kulturgeschichte in großem Maße bereichert hat, anlässlich seines 65. Geburtstags gewidmet. Das weite Feld seiner Forschung spiegelt sich in den Beiträgen international renommierter Germanisten, Historiker und Kulturwissenschaftler wider, die sich mit jüdischer Identität vor dem Hintergrund der jüdisch-christlichen Beziehungen im deutschsprachigen Gebiet von der Frühen Neuzeit bis zur Gegenwart befassen.

Bergson and Phenomenology

Author : M. Kelly
Publisher : Springer
Release Date : 2010-09-29
ISBN 10 : 9780230282995
Pages : 277 pages
Rating : 4.2/5 (997 downloads)

Download Bergson and Phenomenology in PDF Full Online Free by M. Kelly and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-09-29 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining the revival of Bergsonism for phenomenology, leading scholars of both areas inaugurate a dialogue long overdue. By assessing phenomenology's readings of Bergson and Bergsonian challenges to phenomenological methods, the essays in this volume explore anew the issues of central concern in contemporary continental philosophy.

Aging Masculinity in the American Novel

Author : Alex Hobbs
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Release Date : 2016-05-17
ISBN 10 : 9781442266797
Pages : 196 pages
Rating : 4.2/5 (791 downloads)

Download Aging Masculinity in the American Novel in PDF Full Online Free by Alex Hobbs and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-05-17 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on literary examples, this book helps readers better understand the full range of issues that older men face—from legacy and loss to health issues and grace. Looking at how older men’s lives are documented in American fiction, the author examines works by some of the most important names in contemporary literature including Don DeLillo, Jonathan Franzen, Cormac McCarthy, Marilynne Robinson, Philip Roth, Jane Smiley, Anne Tyler, and John Updike.

Iris Murdoch and Morality

Author : Anne Rowe
Publisher : Springer
Release Date : 2010-01-29
ISBN 10 : 9780230277229
Pages : 198 pages
Rating : 4.2/5 (225 downloads)

Download Iris Murdoch and Morality in PDF Full Online Free by Anne Rowe and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-01-29 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Iris Murdoch and Morality provides a close focus on moral issues in Murdoch's novels, philosophy and theology. It situates Murdoch within current theoretical debates and develops an understanding of her work as a crucial link between twentieth and twenty-first century writing and theory.