This revised and expanded volume examines the intersections of aesthetics and morality and asks what Decadence means to art and society at various moments in British literature. As time passes, the definition of what it takes to be D/decadent changes. The decline from a higher standard, social malaise, aesthetic ennui -- all these ideas presume certain facts about the past, the present, and the linear nature of time itself. To reject the past as a given, and to relish the subtleties of present nuance, is the beginning of Decadence. The conflict underlying the contributions to this collection...

The essays in this volume explore a variety of structuring taxonomies, the relationships between the aesthetic forms, styles and methodologies of detective and crime fiction in the late-Victorian and Edwardian period. The influences on the artists in the genre are as varied as the interests of the period in scientific method, forensics, archaeology, aesthetics, medicine, and the paranormal. But the formalizing tendencies of investigative process remain, and it is this adherence, in artist and detective alike, to seeing crime and its resolution as a stylistic imposition of structure on...

These proceedings of the international 2006 symposium 'The Theory and Practice of Life Writing: Auto/biography, Memoir and Travel Writing in Post/modern Literature' at Halic University, Istanbul, include the majority of contributions to this event, some of them heavily revised for publication. A first group, treatments of more comprehensive and/or theoretical aspects of life and travel writing, concerns genre history (Nazan Aksoy; Manfred Pfister), typology (Manfred Pfister; Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson), issues of narration (Gerald P. Mulderig; Rana Tekcan), the recent phenomenon of...

Ghostly Alterities analyses the meaning of ghostliness in con-temporary Anglophone novels - Patricia Grace's Baby No-Eyes (1998), Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), J. M. Coetzee's Foe (1986), Vivienne Cleven's Her Sister's Eye (2002), Ben Okri's The Famished Road (1991), Pat Barker's The Ghost Road (1995) - in which the figure of the ghost is often entrusted with the task of questioning Western culture and history. After an in-troductory chapter which investigates Freud's concept of the un-canny along with theoretical issues raised by Iain Chambers and Jacques Derrida, Ghostly Alterities...

Ob-scene Spaces in Australian Narrative is an exhaustive survey of Australian literature proposing itself as a journey through time and space. With a sound selection of texts which recount Australian history from the early days of white colonization to the present, this study endeavours to cast light on the process of socio-topographic construction that the settlers imposed upon the continent. As suggested by the title, the textual inquiry conducted in this book is driven by the stimulating ambiguity that lies between physical space and its discursive construction. A selection of canonical...

This monograph seeks to reconstruct the culture of the pioneer woman as presented in O. E. Rlvaag's Giants in the Earth, Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie, and Willa Cather's My ntonia. Essentially, the textual analyses show the pioneer woman's evolving and dynamic reaction to both felicitous space and the open spaces of the western frontier as she progresses from completely loathing to totally embracing vast spaces. The texts discussed demonstrate the genesis and growth of the modern American, independent woman who successfully negotiated the volatile topics of gender and...

Paola Baseottos important study stresses deaths ubiquity as a concept in Spensers works, always present in intimate relation to life, whether in the recurring, disturbing, figures of deathwishers, characters who seem to belong as much to the dead as the living, or as a perspective, challenging both characters and readers, to reassess their own apprehension of death and the way in which it shapes our lives. Baseottos analyses of Spensers deathwishers and living dead focus our attention on some of the most compelling and distinctive images in Spensers work, illuminating our understanding of...

This book brings the ideas of French feminist Hélène Cixous to bear on a number of Early Modern English texts. The female characters of Mariam from Elizabeth Carys 'The Tragedy of Mariam', Lavinia from William Shakespeares 'Titus Andronicus' as well as John Miltons Eve in 'Paradise Lost' and the poetic voice of Isabella Whitney are investigated through the application of Cixouss theories of figurative decapitation and disgorgement. The author examines the creation of a unique discourse through the blending of what is stereotypically referred to as female text with male discourse, which...