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This set comprises 40 volumes covering 19th and 20th century European and American authors. These volumes will be available as a complete set, mini boxed sets (by theme) or as individual volumes. This second set complements the first 68 volume set of Critical Heritage published by Routledge in October 1995.
First published in 1996. This comparative study investigates thematic and technical similarities in the works of the two authors who shared a cultural heritage and achieved comparable status in their separate literary traditions. Drawing upon theories by Bloom, Bakhtin, and Lacan, the book examines ways in which Henry James and Thomas Mann treat the creative artist and analyze the creative and interpretive processes in their fiction. The texts covered range from early works to their great modern novels: The GoldenBowland Doctor Faustus To a great extent, the similarities between the works stem from the authors' preoccupation with artistic responsibility. Adopting Bloom's claim that the creative activity is an interpretive one, and that the reader, as well as the writer, interprets a text into being the book also investigates the reader's responsibility in confronting the dilemmas challenging James' and Mann's artist figures. Such challenges are "the dangers of interpretation" discussed in this book. Index. Bibliography.
Jane Austen is a formative influence on how we think about 'England' and 'Englishness', about class, ideology and gender issues. But the critical convoy for 'Jane', as she is patronizingly styled, aligns her with conservative views which her texts entertain - but don't finally sign up for. In fact, as Edward Neill points out in this devastating new study, it is possible to show that 'Tory Jane' is largely illusion, and that much traditional critical effort has been fundamentally misdirected. This exhilarating book seeks to 'liberate' the reading of Jane Austen by offering a very different critical inflection from those of traditional critical appropriations.
In The Ruling Passion, Christopher Lane examines the relationship between masculinity, homosexual desire, and empire in British colonialist and imperialist fictions at the turn of the twentieth century. Questioning the popular assumption that Britain's empire functioned with symbolic efficiency on sublimated desire, this book presents a counterhistory of the empire's many layers of conflict and ambivalence. Through attentive readings of sexual and political allegory in the work of Kipling, Forster, James, Beerbohm, Firbank, and others--and deft use of psychoanalytic theory--The Ruling Passion interprets turbulent scenes of masculine identification and pleasure, power and mastery, intimacy and antagonism. By foregrounding the shattering effects of male homosexuality and interracial desire, and by insisting on the centrality of unconscious fantasy and the death drive, The Ruling Passion examines the startling recurrence of colonial failure in narratives of symbolic doubt and ontological crisis. Lane argues compellingly that Britain can progress culturally and politically only when it has relinquished its residual fantasies of global mastery.
Philosophy and theology have long harboured contradictory views on spiritual practice. While philosophy advocates the therapeutic benefits of daily meditation, the theology of grace promotes an ideal of happiness bestowed with little effort. As such, the historical juxtaposition of effort and grace grounding modern spiritual exercise can be seen as the essential tension between the secular and sacred. In Effort and Grace, Simone Kotva explores an exciting new theory of spiritual endeavour from the tradition of French spiritualist philosophy. Spiritual exercise has largely been studied in relation to ancient philosophy and the Ignatian tradition, yet Kotva's new engagement with its more recen...
A story of economic breakdown and romantic recovery from the author of Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman. Tom and Annie's kids have grown up, the mortgage is do-able, and they're about to get a gorgeous new, state-of-the-art French stove. Life is good- or so it seems. Beneath the veneer of professional success and domestic security, their marriage is crumbling, eaten away by years of resentment, loneliness, and the fall out from the estrangement of their daughter, and they've settled into simply being two strangers living under the same roof. Until the economy falls apart. Suddenly the dull but oddly comfortable predictability of their lives is upended by financial calamity-Tom loses his job,...
In the nineteenth century, Great Britain and the United States shared a single literary marketplace that linked the reform movements, as well as the literatures, of the two nations. The writings of transatlantic reformers—antislavery, temperance, and suffrage activists—gave novelists a new sense of purpose and prompted them to invent new literary forms. The result was a distinctively Anglo-American realism, in which novelists, conceiving of themselves as reformers, sought to act upon their readers—and, through their readers, the world. Indeed, reform became so predominant that many novelists borrowed from reformist writings even though they were skeptical of reform itself. Among them a...