How does one capture the delightful irony of Edith Wharton's prose or the spare lyricism of Kate Chopin's? Kathleen Wheeler challenges the reader to experiment with a more imaginative method of literary criticism in order to comprehend more fully writers of the Modernist and late Realist period. In examining the creative works of seven women writers from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Wheeler never lets the mystery and magic of literature be overcome by dry critical analysis.

Modernist Women Writers and Narrative Art begins by evaluating how Edith Wharton,...

This book is an examination of the fiction of Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Kate Chopin, Jean Rhys, Stevie Smith, Katherine Mansfield and Jane Bowles, with a view to clarifying the narrative strategies these women adopt to establish, in varying degrees, a critique of realism and its hidden dualistic, patriarchal assumptions about life, literature, and society. While examining the literary conventions and the innovations of various texts, Kathleen Wheeler is careful to respect the particularity and individuality of each of these writers.

This book is an examination of three major literary, critical and philosophical movements in European and Anglo--American literature. It aims to show their differences (often pointed out) and their similarities (never yet demonstrated) and to make accessible recent post--structuralist theory.

An overview of the immensely rich literary criticism of the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century in Germany

The Biographia Literaria has long been recognised as one of the central prose texts of the Romantic period, both for its value as a piece of elevated prose writing and for the insights into poetry, criticism and the faculties of the mind that it offers. It seeks to reunify philosophical thought and aesthetic feeling in the belief that genuine knowledge emerges from only such a synthesis. Dr Wheeler's analysis proceeds from a number of points of view. The gradual growth of the Biographia Literaria is illuminated by notebooks and letters that show Coleridge wrestling with the work over a period...

One of many writers inspired by Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, the German novelist Jean Paul Richter coined the term 'Shandean humour' in his work of aesthetic theory. The essays in this volume investigate how Sterne's humour functions, the reasons for its enduring appeal, and what role it played in identity-construction and in the representation of melancholy. In tracing its hitherto under-recognised impact both on literary writers, such as Jean Paul and Herman Melville, and on philosophers, including Hegel and Marx, the collection reveals that Shandean humour is a GrenzgAnger - a point...