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Oxford Textual Perspectives is a series of informative and provocative studies focused upon literary texts (conceived of in the broadest sense of that term) and the technologies, cultures, and communities that produce, inform, and receive them. It provides fresh interpretations of fundamental works and of the vital and challenging issues emerging in English literary studies. By engaging with the materiality of the literary text, its production, and reception history, and frequently testing and exploring the boundaries of the notion of text itself, the volumes in the series question familiar frameworks and provide innovative interpretations of both canonical and less well-known works. The Aes...
This study examines how selected authors of the late 20th and early 21st centuries write about their creative processes in old age and thus purposefully produce a late style of their own. Late-life creativity has not always been viewed favourably. Prevalent "peak-and-decline" models suggest that artists, as they grow old, cease to produce highquality work. Aiming to counter such ageist discourses, the present study proposes a new ethics of reading literary texts by elderly authors. For this purpose, it develops a methodology that consolidates textual analysis with cultural gerontology.
In Forces of Nature, the authors investigate the relationships between the natural world and gender and sexuality. The authors explore the frameworks within which femininity and nature have been constructed, as well as the impact nature has had on our understandings of masculinity, homosexuality, and heterosexuality. For some writers nature has restorative powers, for others nature embodies violence and destruction. Yet, one common thread runs across all of the chapters in this collection: nature and animals can not be separated from the human experience. Forces of Nature brings to light the intimate connection humans have with the natural world and provides students and scholars with innovative readings of both canonical and noncanonical texts.
This study aims to counter right-wing discourses of belonging. It discusses key theoretical concepts for the study of home, focusing in particular on Marxist, feminist, postcolonial, and psychoanalytic contributions. The book also maintains that postmodern celebrations of nomadism and exile tend to be incapable of providing an alternative to conservative, xenophobic appropriations of home. In detailed readings of one film and six novels, a view is developed according to which home, as a spatio-temporal imaginary, is rooted in our species being, and as such constitutes the inevitable starting point for any progressive politics.
Trauma has become a hotly contested topic in literary studies. But interest in trauma is not new; its roots extend to the Romantic period, when novelists and the first psychiatrists influenced each others' investigations of the »wounded mind«. This book looks back to these early attempts to understand trauma, reading a selection of Romantic novels in dialogue with Romantic and contemporary psychiatry. It then carries that dialogue forward to postmodern fiction, examining further how empirical approaches can deepen our theorizations of trauma. Within an interdisciplinary framework, this study reveals fresh insights into the poetics, politics, and ethics of trauma fiction.
As the world still reels from the financial crisis of 2007-8, it seems timely to reflect on the connections between money and value embedded in all our discourses about economy, language and literature. The essays in this volume bring together a wide range of approaches to demonstrate how the discipline of English studies and language and literature studies more generally rest on a goldmine of largely unexamined economic metaphors: from Ferdinand de Saussure's notions of linguistic "value" to the actual economic value of English as a second language; from Shakespeare's uncanny eye for the ?duciary principle of the modern economy to Joyce's "scrupulous meanness" as an economy of style; from women interrupting the circulation of money in early modern comedy to "living well on nothing a day" in Thackeray's 'Vanity Fair'; from derivatives in the poetics of Anne Carson to the generic economy of gay coming-out films.
This book examines the language development of two children from the ages of two till four, who are growing up exposed to English, Swiss German and French. Its aim is to ascertain the importance of different environmental factors in fostering active trilingualism. These factors include the quantity of input for each language, whether or not the societal language is spoken in the home, and the conversational style of the caregivers. Although increasing numbers of children are being raised trilingually, research in this field is scarce; this study thus makes an important contribution to our knowledge of trilingual language acquisition. A special point of interest lies in a comparison of the acquisition of two minority languages by a single child, since this allows us to pinpoint more precisely how the development of non-societal languages can be influenced. This book will be of considerable interest to researchers and students working on multilingualism and language acquisition alike.
Blake's Drama challenges conventional views of William Blake's multimedia work by reinterpreting it as theatrical performance. Viewed in its dramatic contexts, this art form is shown to provoke an active spectatorship and to depict identity as paradoxically essential and constructed, revealing Blake's investments in drama, action, and the body.
This open access book analyses migration and its relation to socio-political transformation in Switzerland. It addresses how migration has made new forms of life possible and shows how this process generated gender innovation in different fields: the changing division of work, the establishment of a nursery infrastructure, access to higher education for women, and the struggle for female suffrage. Seeing society through the lens of migration alters the perspective from which our past and thus our present is told—and our future imagined.
The twenty-one essays collected in this volume offer a broad range of critical views on the intricate interdependence between verbal and visual representation. Drawing on recent research, scholars from Europe, America and Asia approach the topic from a host of different angles, exploring topics such as popular visual cultures in Japan, devotional graffiti in a Piedmontese chapel, textual trompe-l’oeil in Jaques Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind or the relationship between the landscape paintings of Albert Bierstadt and the representation of landscape in the texts of James Fenimore Cooper. The International Association of Word and Image Studies was founded nearly twenty years ago – 1987 – and is based in Amsterdam. One of the aims of the association is to be a forum for both theoretical debate and innovative research in different disciplines. Over the years, the IAWIS triennial conferences and the IAWIS publications have established themselves as internationally acknowledged sites where literary critics, art historians, architects, art and design specialists, semioticians, artists, psychologists and art critics can meet and engage in a sustained dialogue.