The question of intention is central to the study of literature. How far can an author's intentions determine the meanings of his/her text? What do we mean by 'intention' in a literary context? What force does the reader's intention have in the construction of textual meaning? To what extent can a text itself be said to be 'intentional'? The aim of this book is to provide an in-depth analysis and critique of this concept of intention, its uses within the realms of literary theory, aesthetics, philosophy of language, phenomenology and deconstruction, and its potential for redefinition....
The question of intention is central to the study of literature. How far can an author's intentions determine the meanings of his/her text? What do...
Are we living in a post-temporal age? Has history come to an end? This book argues against the widespread perception of postmodern narrativity as atemporal and ahistorical, claiming that postmodernity is characterized by an explosion of heterogeneous narrative "timeshapes" or chronotopes.
Chronological linearity is being challenged by quantum physics that implies temporal simultaneity; by evolutionary theory that charts multiple time-lines; and by religious and political millenarianism that espouses an apocalyptic finitude of both time and space. While science, religion, and...
Are we living in a post-temporal age? Has history come to an end? This book argues against the widespread perception of postmodern narrativity as a...
By discussing the work of Thomas Hardy, Richard Jefferies, John Cowper Powys and Mary Butts, Mapping the Wessex Novel imaginatively maps and excavates various districts of the 'west country' so as radically to redefine the 'parochial'; while being keenly aware of their own status as natives locked into complex histories of self-exile and return, estrangement and ardent identification.
Contributing to the growing research on space and place in Victorian and Modernist writing, Radford uses the analysis of these writers as a lens through which to inspect the relationship between...
By discussing the work of Thomas Hardy, Richard Jefferies, John Cowper Powys and Mary Butts, Mapping the Wessex Novel imaginatively maps and...
Ted Hughes is now widely regarded as a major figure in twentieth-century poetry. Critical literature has often characterized him primarily as a mythologizer of nature but the impact of Hughes's class background on his poems has received relatively little attention. Ted Hughes, Class and Violence is the first full length study to take the measure of the importance of class in Hughes.
Paul Bentley here revisits such crucial topics as the controversy over 'natural' violence in Hughes's early poems, Hughes's relationship with Philip Larkin and with Seamus Heaney, the...
Ted Hughes is now widely regarded as a major figure in twentieth-century poetry. Critical literature has often characterized him primarily as a myt...
Now in its second edition and with new chapters covering such texts as Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love and 'yummy mummy' novels such as Allison Pearson's I Don't Know How She Does It, this is a wide-ranging survey of popular women's fiction from 1945 to the present.
Examining key trends in popular writing for women in each decade, Women's Fiction offers case study readings of major British and American writers. Through these readings, the book explores how popular texts often neglected by feminist literary criticism have charted the shifting demands,...
Now in its second edition and with new chapters covering such texts as Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love and 'yummy mummy' novels such as ...
Bringing new insights from genre theory to bear on the work of the journalist and novelist Rebecca West, this study explores how West's use of and combinations of multiple genres (often in single works) was informed and furthered by her subversive feminist goals.
Rebecca West's Subversive Use of Hybrid Genres analyzes West's sense of genres as dynamic and strategic processes with transgressive political ends rather than as fixed and reified taxonomies, a radical new approach at the time that is now mirrored in much contemporary theory. Surveying her oeuvre from...
Bringing new insights from genre theory to bear on the work of the journalist and novelist Rebecca West, this study explores how West's use of and ...
Author of Biographia Literaria (1817) and The Friend (1809-10, 1812 and 1818), Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the central figure in the British transmission of German idealism in the 19th century. The advent of Immanuel Kant in Coleridge's thought is traditionally seen as the start of the poet's turn towards an internalized Romanticism. Demonstrating that Coleridge's discovery of Kant came at an earlier point than has been previously recognized, this book examines the historical roots of Coleridge's life-long preoccupation with Kant over a period of 20 years from the first...
Author of Biographia Literaria (1817) and The Friend (1809-10, 1812 and 1818), Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the central figure in the ...
Arguing that the consecrated body in the Eucharist is one of the central metaphors structuring The Divine Comedy, this book is the first comprehensive exploration of the theme of transubstantiation across Dante's epic poem. Drawing attention first to the historical and theological tensions inherent in ideas of transubstantiation that rippled through Western culture up to the early fourteenth century, Sheila Nayar engages in a Eucharistic reading of both the "flesh" allusions and "metamorphosis" motifs that thread through the entirety of Dante's poem.
From the cannibalistic...
Arguing that the consecrated body in the Eucharist is one of the central metaphors structuring The Divine Comedy, this book is the first com...
Mary Butts was an important figure in inter-war modernist circles and one who reviewed and associated with some of the major literary figures of the era, from T.S. Eliot to Gertrude Stein. Despite her importance and the varied nature of her writing, she has been a neglected figure in modernist scholarship. Providing a new analysis of the interwar literary period, Mary Butts and British Neo-Romanticism revisits her work - vividly experimental writings spanning memoir, poetry, polemic and fiction - through the lens of mid-20th-century British neo-Romanticism. The book argues that behind...
Mary Butts was an important figure in inter-war modernist circles and one who reviewed and associated with some of the major literary figures of th...
John McGahern's work is not easily conceived of as belatedly modernist. His memorialising, faintly archaic style implies a concern with 'making it old' rather than new, suggesting the symptomatic diffidence of many who wrote in the wake of modernism. Nevertheless, McGahern's statements about the 'presence' of words and the hard-won impersonality of the artwork point to a covert engagement with modernist aesthetics. Offering intertextual interpretations of McGahern's six novels, and of thematically grouped short stories, Richard Robinson reads McGahern's fiction alongside writing by Joyce,...
John McGahern's work is not easily conceived of as belatedly modernist. His memorialising, faintly archaic style implies a concern with 'making it old...
