Peter D. McDonald
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780198725152
- eISBN:
- 9780191792595
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198725152.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory, Prose (inc. letters, diaries)
Some forms of literature interfere with the workings of the literate brain, posing a challenge to readers of all kinds. This book argues that they pose as much of a challenge to the way states ...
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Some forms of literature interfere with the workings of the literate brain, posing a challenge to readers of all kinds. This book argues that they pose as much of a challenge to the way states conceptualize language, culture, and community. Drawing on a wealth of evidence, from Victorian scholarly disputes over the identity of the English language to the constitutional debates about its future in Ireland, India, and South Africa, and from quarrels over the idea of culture within the League of Nations to UNESCO’s ongoing struggle to articulate a viable concept of diversity, it brings together a large group of legacy writers, including T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Rabindranath Tagore, putting them in dialogue with each other and with the policymakers who shaped the formation of modern states and the history of internationalist thought from the 1860s to the 1940s. The second part of the book reflects on the continuing evolution of these dialogues, showing how a varied array of more contemporary writers from Amit Chaudhuri, J. M. Coetzee, and Salman Rushdie, to Antjie Krog, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, and Es’kia Mphahlele cast new light on a range of questions that have preoccupied UNESCO since 1945. At once a novel contribution to institutional and intellectual history and an innovative exercise in literary and philosophical analysis, Artefacts of Writing affords a unique perspective on literature’s place at the centre of some of the most fraught, often lethal public controversies that defined the long-twentieth century and that continue to haunt us today.Less
Some forms of literature interfere with the workings of the literate brain, posing a challenge to readers of all kinds. This book argues that they pose as much of a challenge to the way states conceptualize language, culture, and community. Drawing on a wealth of evidence, from Victorian scholarly disputes over the identity of the English language to the constitutional debates about its future in Ireland, India, and South Africa, and from quarrels over the idea of culture within the League of Nations to UNESCO’s ongoing struggle to articulate a viable concept of diversity, it brings together a large group of legacy writers, including T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Rabindranath Tagore, putting them in dialogue with each other and with the policymakers who shaped the formation of modern states and the history of internationalist thought from the 1860s to the 1940s. The second part of the book reflects on the continuing evolution of these dialogues, showing how a varied array of more contemporary writers from Amit Chaudhuri, J. M. Coetzee, and Salman Rushdie, to Antjie Krog, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, and Es’kia Mphahlele cast new light on a range of questions that have preoccupied UNESCO since 1945. At once a novel contribution to institutional and intellectual history and an innovative exercise in literary and philosophical analysis, Artefacts of Writing affords a unique perspective on literature’s place at the centre of some of the most fraught, often lethal public controversies that defined the long-twentieth century and that continue to haunt us today.
Denis Sampson
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198752998
- eISBN:
- 9780191816000
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198752998.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory, Prose (inc. letters, diaries)
The five essays in this book investigate a key work early in the careers of V.S. Naipaul, Alice Munro, J.M. Coetzee, Mavis Gallant and William Trevor. Each of these major writers of fiction found ...
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The five essays in this book investigate a key work early in the careers of V.S. Naipaul, Alice Munro, J.M. Coetzee, Mavis Gallant and William Trevor. Each of these major writers of fiction found what they variously called ‘the writing voice’, ‘the voice in my head’, ‘the voice of the mind’ ‘[my] own voice’, or a ‘true voice’. Their mature achievement as artists depended on that earlier period of creative synthesis that led to an unprecedented kind of articulation. The circumstances of creation are reconstructed for Naipaul’s writing of Miguel Street, Coetzee’s Dusklands, Gallant’s Green Water, Green Sky, Trevor’s Mrs Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel and related stories, and for certain stories by Alice Munro in Dance of the Happy Shades and Lives of Girls and Women. Each essay is focused on illuminating how and why the particular work marked a crucial turning point. In a sense, what followed, what grew out of this work, provides as much insight as what came before. The later autobiographical essays and fictions of Naipaul and Coetzee, and occasional interviews and essays by Munro, Trevor, and Gallant illuminate the convergence of needs and aesthetic ends in each case. Many of these writers refer to instinct, to curiosity, and to writing as a site of discovery, as if their trust in hidden processes is key. Using biographical and literary critical means, the essays bring the reader close to such a process. Even if there cannot be definitive conclusions, it intrigues many readers and, in particular, beginning writers. The writers’ own expression, ‘finding a voice’, provides an opening for understanding this process.Less
The five essays in this book investigate a key work early in the careers of V.S. Naipaul, Alice Munro, J.M. Coetzee, Mavis Gallant and William Trevor. Each of these major writers of fiction found what they variously called ‘the writing voice’, ‘the voice in my head’, ‘the voice of the mind’ ‘[my] own voice’, or a ‘true voice’. Their mature achievement as artists depended on that earlier period of creative synthesis that led to an unprecedented kind of articulation. The circumstances of creation are reconstructed for Naipaul’s writing of Miguel Street, Coetzee’s Dusklands, Gallant’s Green Water, Green Sky, Trevor’s Mrs Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel and related stories, and for certain stories by Alice Munro in Dance of the Happy Shades and Lives of Girls and Women. Each essay is focused on illuminating how and why the particular work marked a crucial turning point. In a sense, what followed, what grew out of this work, provides as much insight as what came before. The later autobiographical essays and fictions of Naipaul and Coetzee, and occasional interviews and essays by Munro, Trevor, and Gallant illuminate the convergence of needs and aesthetic ends in each case. Many of these writers refer to instinct, to curiosity, and to writing as a site of discovery, as if their trust in hidden processes is key. Using biographical and literary critical means, the essays bring the reader close to such a process. Even if there cannot be definitive conclusions, it intrigues many readers and, in particular, beginning writers. The writers’ own expression, ‘finding a voice’, provides an opening for understanding this process.
Oliver Herford
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198734802
- eISBN:
- 9780191799310
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198734802.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory, Prose (inc. letters, diaries)
This book examines Henry James’s engagement with the writing of the recent past across the last twenty-five years of his life and analyses the changes his style underwent as he gradually turned from ...
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This book examines Henry James’s engagement with the writing of the recent past across the last twenty-five years of his life and analyses the changes his style underwent as he gradually turned from the observation of contemporary manners to biographical commemoration and autobiographical reminiscence, and as the balance of his literary output shifted correspondingly from fiction to non-fiction. James’s ‘late personal writings’ are a retrospective non-fictional works: commemorative essays and obituary tributes, textual revisions and accounts of revisiting familiar places, cultural and literary criticism, biography and autobiography, and family memoir. The book proposes that we understand these apparently heterogeneous writings as an imaginatively coherent sequence that enacts a principled commitment on James’s part to personal, historical, and stylistic continuity, and reflects the innovative dynamism of his newly discovered sense for the literary possibilities of non-fiction. On this basis the book offers a revisionist account of the way style itself challenges and preoccupies the very late James. Interlinked close readings take the major works of this period in chronological order, addressing a key point of style in each. Particular attention is paid to procedures of reference (to the historical past, to real persons and places and objects), a dimension of style often neglected in analyses of James’s late work. Henry James’s Style of Retrospect asks what it means for a great novelist to embrace a different literary mode in late life, and shows how we may begin to reconfigure our understanding of late Jamesian aesthetics accordingly.Less
This book examines Henry James’s engagement with the writing of the recent past across the last twenty-five years of his life and analyses the changes his style underwent as he gradually turned from the observation of contemporary manners to biographical commemoration and autobiographical reminiscence, and as the balance of his literary output shifted correspondingly from fiction to non-fiction. James’s ‘late personal writings’ are a retrospective non-fictional works: commemorative essays and obituary tributes, textual revisions and accounts of revisiting familiar places, cultural and literary criticism, biography and autobiography, and family memoir. The book proposes that we understand these apparently heterogeneous writings as an imaginatively coherent sequence that enacts a principled commitment on James’s part to personal, historical, and stylistic continuity, and reflects the innovative dynamism of his newly discovered sense for the literary possibilities of non-fiction. On this basis the book offers a revisionist account of the way style itself challenges and preoccupies the very late James. Interlinked close readings take the major works of this period in chronological order, addressing a key point of style in each. Particular attention is paid to procedures of reference (to the historical past, to real persons and places and objects), a dimension of style often neglected in analyses of James’s late work. Henry James’s Style of Retrospect asks what it means for a great novelist to embrace a different literary mode in late life, and shows how we may begin to reconfigure our understanding of late Jamesian aesthetics accordingly.
G. Thomas Couser
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- March 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780199826902
- eISBN:
- 9780190252878
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199826902.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory, Prose (inc. letters, diaries)
Each year brings a glut of new memoirs, ranging from works by former teachers and celebrity has-beens to disillusioned soldiers and bestselling novelists. In addition to becoming bestsellers in their ...
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Each year brings a glut of new memoirs, ranging from works by former teachers and celebrity has-beens to disillusioned soldiers and bestselling novelists. In addition to becoming bestsellers in their own right, memoirs have become a popular object of inquiry in the academy and a mainstay in most MFA workshops. Courses in what is now called life-writing study memoir alongside personal essays, diaries, and autobiographies. This book proffers a concise history of the genre (and its many subgenres) while taking readers through the various techniques, themes, and debates that have come to characterize the ubiquitous literary form. Its fictional origins are traced to eighteenth-century British novels like Robinson Crusoe and Tom Jones; its early American roots are examined in Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography and eighteenth-century captivity narratives; and its ethical conundrums are considered with analyses of the imbroglios brought on by the questionable claims in Rigoberta Menchú' s I, Rigoberta, and more notoriously, James Frey's A Million Little Pieces. Alongside these more traditional literary forms, this book expands the discussion of memoir to include film with what it calls “documemoir” (exemplified in Nathaniel Kahn's My Architect), and graphic narratives like Art Spiegleman's Maus.Less
Each year brings a glut of new memoirs, ranging from works by former teachers and celebrity has-beens to disillusioned soldiers and bestselling novelists. In addition to becoming bestsellers in their own right, memoirs have become a popular object of inquiry in the academy and a mainstay in most MFA workshops. Courses in what is now called life-writing study memoir alongside personal essays, diaries, and autobiographies. This book proffers a concise history of the genre (and its many subgenres) while taking readers through the various techniques, themes, and debates that have come to characterize the ubiquitous literary form. Its fictional origins are traced to eighteenth-century British novels like Robinson Crusoe and Tom Jones; its early American roots are examined in Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography and eighteenth-century captivity narratives; and its ethical conundrums are considered with analyses of the imbroglios brought on by the questionable claims in Rigoberta Menchú' s I, Rigoberta, and more notoriously, James Frey's A Million Little Pieces. Alongside these more traditional literary forms, this book expands the discussion of memoir to include film with what it calls “documemoir” (exemplified in Nathaniel Kahn's My Architect), and graphic narratives like Art Spiegleman's Maus.
“A Gentleman and an Officer”
‘A Nation of Beggars’?
The A Priori in Philosophy
A. J. Appasamy and his Reading of Rāmānuja
A. J. Tomlinson
Aaron Hill
The Abbey Theatre, 1899-1999
The Abbots and Priors of Late Medieval and Reformation England
Abelard and Heloise
