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The Savage Detectives elicits mixed feelings. An instant classic in the Spanish-speaking world upon its 1998 publication, a critical and commercial smash on its 2007 translation into English, Roberto Bolaño’s novel has also been called an exercise in 1970s nostalgia, an escapist fantasy of a romanticized Latin America, and a publicity event propped up by the myth of the bad-boy artist. David Kurnick argues that the controversies surrounding Bolaño’s life and work have obscured his achievements—and that The Savage Detectives is still underappreciated for the subtlety and vitality of its portrait of collective life. Kurnick explores The Savage Detectives as an epic of social structure ...
According to the dominant tradition of literary criticism, the novel is the form par excellence of the private individual. Empty Houses challenges this consensus by reexamining the genre's development from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century and exploring what has until now seemed an anomaly--the frustrated theatrical ambitions of major novelists. Offering new interpretations of the careers of William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, Henry James, James Joyce, and James Baldwin--writers known for mapping ever-narrower interior geographies--this book argues that the genre's inward-looking tendency has been misunderstood. Delving into the critical role of the theater in the origin...
The first collection of criticism devoted to the problem of reading in Victorian literature
Introduction : the biopolitical imagination -- Populating solitude : Malthus, the masses, and the romantic subject -- Political animals : the Victorian city, demography, and the politics of creaturely life -- Dickens's supernumeraries -- The sensation novel and the redundant woman questions -- "Because we are too menny
More than thirty thousand people were forcibly disappeared during the military dictatorship that governed Argentina from 1976 to 1983, leaving behind a cultural landscape fractured by absence, denial, impunity, and gaps in knowledge. This book is about how these absences assume narrative form in late twentieth-century Argentine fiction and the formal strategies and structures authors have crafted to respond to the country's use of systematic disappearance as a mechanism of state terror. In incisive close readings of texts by Rodolfo Walsh, Julio Cortázar, and Tomás Eloy Martínez, Karen Elizabeth Bishop explores how techniques of dissimulation, doubling, displacement, suspension, and embod...
Novelists have long been attracted to theatre. Some have pursued success on the stage, but many have sought to combine these worlds, entering theatre through their fiction, setting stages on their novels’ pages, and casting actors, directors, and playwrights as their protagonists. The Routledge Companion to Theatre-Fiction has convened an international community of scholars to explore the remarkable array of novelists from many eras and parts of the world who have created fiction from the stuff of theatre, asking what happens to theatre on the pages of novels, and what happens to novels when they collaborate with theatre. From J. W. Goethe to Louisa May Alcott, Mikhail Bulgakov, Virginia W...
A short, provocative book that challenges basic assumptions about Victorian fiction Now praised for its realism and formal coherence, the Victorian novel was not always great, or even good, in the eyes of its critics. As Elaine Freedgood reveals in Worlds Enough, it was only in the late 1970s that literary critics constructed a prestigious version of British realism, erasing more than a century of controversy about the value of Victorian fiction. Examining criticism of Victorian novels since the 1850s, Freedgood demonstrates that while they were praised for their ability to bring certain social truths to fictional life, these novels were also criticized for their formal failures and compared...
This book addresses an under-researched area of modernist studies, reconsidering modernist attitudes towards feeling in the light of the humanities' turn to affect.
This account of George Eliot's spiritual life reveals a writer who devoted the full span of her career to imagining a wide religious sensibility that could inform personal and social life. As we range among Eliot's many literary works, we encounter someone whose extraordinary art and intellect offers us company in the search for modern meaning.
Explores the many ways in which Anthony Trollope is being read in the twenty-first centurySince the turn of the century, the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope has become a central figure in the critical understanding of Victorian literature. By bringing together leading Victorianists with a wide range of interests, this innovative collection of essays involves the reader in new approaches to Trollope's work. The contributors to this volume highlight dimensions that have hitherto received only scant attention and in doing so they aim to draw on the aesthetic capabilities of Trollope's twenty-first-century readers. Instead of reading Trollope's novels as manifestations of social theory, they aim to foster an engagement with a far more broadly theorised literary culture.Key Features:The most innovative collection of original essays on Anthony Trollope to dateEnables the reader to see the direction of Trollope studies and Victorian studies in the twenty-first centurySituates Trollope's work in newly emerging critical contexts, such as media networks and economicsMakes use of pioneering developments in stylistics, ethics, epistemology, and reception history