Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh

This book explores the relationship between Dickens s novels and the financial system. Elements of Dickens s work form a critique of financial capitalism. This critique is rooted in the difference between use-value and exchange-value, and in the difference between productive circulations and mere accumulation. In a money-based society, exchange-value and accumulation dominate to the point where they infect even the most important and sacred relationships between parts of society and individuals.

This study explores Dickens s critique from two very different points of view. The...

This book examines and explains the obsession with history in the contemporary British novel. It frames these "historical" novels as expressions of narrative desire, highlighting the reciprocal relationship between a desire to disclose and to rid ourselves of anxieties elicited by the past. Scrutinizing representative novels from Byatt, McEwan and Rushdie, contemporary fiction is revealed as capable of advocating a viable ethical stance and as a form of authentic commentary. Our anxieties often exist in response to what might be perceived as the oppression or eradication of values,...

The Imperial Quest and Modern Memory explores relationships between narrative and imperium in the context of Western Modernism by examining the Quest as a vexed trope in Heart of Darkness, Passage to India, The Sheltering Sky, and The Quiet American. The book takes stock of twentieth century theory regarding the Quest--as archetype, trope, and construct, considers the dominant expression and the imperial organization of this trope in Western culture and iconography from the Dark Ages to the...

Strange Cases is the story of the mutual influence of the case history

and the British novel during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Fictions from Defoe's Roxana to James's The Turn of the Screw and

case histories from George Cheyne's to Sigmund Freud's have found

narrative impetus in pathology. The writer of a case history faces a

rhetorical bind unique to the human sciences: the need to display the

acumen of a scientist and the sympathy warranted to the suffering

patient. Repeatedly, case...

This book analyzes the gendered transformation of magical figures occurring in Arthurian romance in England from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries.

In the earlier texts, magic is predominantly a masculine pursuit, garnering its user prestige and power, but in the later texts, magic becomes a primarily feminine activity, one that marks its user as wicked and heretical. This project explores both the literary and the social motivations for this transformation, seeking an answer to the question, 'why did the witch become wicked?'

Heidi Breuer traverses both the medieval...