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Subject Area: Writing-Specific Writers
Sedlmayr, Gerold2005 0-7734-5978-2 420 pages
This book provides a comprehensive overview of the work of one of Ireland’s most prominent yet also critically neglected writers, Brendan Kennelly. While covering his output from 1959 onwards, the chosen approach is systematic rather than chronological. Shedding light on Kennelly’s poems, novels, and plays from different angles – “History and Politics”, “Spaces/Places: Country, City, Nature”, “Religion and Ethics” as well as “Gender and Sexuality” – Kennelly’s development is traced from his neo-Romanticist beginnings to a critical and highly provocative postmodern stance, above all in the later long poems: Cromwell, The Book of Judas, and Poetry My Arse. While this study is certainly valuable as an introduction for the general reader, combining in-depth analyses of the most important works with general contextual information, the embedding of these analyses within a larger theoretical framework (including deconstruction, postcolonial theory, or gender studies) will also challenge the more experienced Kennellyan. Brendan Kennelly is a painstaking critic of today’s complacencies, inhibitions and violence, a scrupulous analyst of society, and an uncompromising reader of the past who, nevertheless, remains self-critical throughout.
García-Corales, Guillermo
2005 0-7734-5992-8 320 pages
The objective of this book is to document the perceptions of distinguished Chilean authors and critics with respect to their own literary works produced approximately during the last fifteen years (1990-2005) and the manners in which these texts have generated cultural debate. The book consists, in large part, of in-depth academic interviews completed during the second semester of 2004 and the first part of 2005 with prominent authors whom are related to the New Chilean Narrative. These interviews are preceded by an introductory chapter which outlines the key ideological and literary concepts present in the reflections found in the interviews.
This volume contributes material that will enhance the understanding of key representatives of the New Chilean Narrative. These distinguished authors have a fundamental place in the history of Chilean literature and play a crucial role in Chile’s and Latin America’s literary scene. As demonstrated in the foreword of each of the in-depth interviews in this book, all of the writers have been recognized at an international level and have been bestowed with prestigious literary awards. In addition, their novels and volumes of short stories can be appreciated by a large community of readers and are the focus of investigation in diverse academic centers of Latin America, the United States, and Europe. This work will appeal to scholars in Latin American Studies and Contemporary Latin American Literature
Davis, Philip
1995 0-7734-9060-4 204 pages
In Dubin's Lives, and some of his later short stories, Bernard Malamud began to experiment with the use of fiction as a way of thinking about writers and writing. This study takes Malamud's model and offers six short stories, about books and their effect upon the imagined lives of their writers and readers, as a means of thinking about the work of Bernard Malamud himself. The result is an experimental alternative to more conventional forms of literary criticism, an essay intermingling biography, autobiography, literary analysis and fiction, in an effort to broaden the means of literary thinking available within cultural studies today. It tells stories about imagined people reading Malamud - in particular The Assistant, A New Life, Dubin's Lives, The Fixer and The Natural. The author sees Malamud as an undervalued writer not yet safely established within an impersonal canon; a writer whose commitment to the richness of realism, whose secularized Judaism, and whose sheer power of language constitute a challenging involvement in the uncertainties of uncategorizable experience; and a man whose unfashionable concern for human personality, serious emotions, and ordinary efforts at better lives offer a testing-ground for the claims of literary humanism. This controversial book will be of benefit to students, teachers and general readers specifically interested in Bernard Malamud, and to all those concerned with the current theory and practice of literary study.
Wilks, Thomas
2006 0-7734-5602-3 356 pages
This study compares the substantial literary projects of Michel Leiris and Hubert Fichte, and it examines how they overstep theoretical prescriptions in their explorations of the self. The author concentrates predominantly on those components of these multi-volume projects that he argues are autobiographically motivated, although he establishes that these texts are not straightforwardly representative of this mode. In its tripartite arrangement, his study investigates the main areas of critical attention relating to the classification of the authors’ works, with particular reference to autobiography. Throughout this investigation, he provides evidence for his contention that for Leiris and Fichte alike, life and writing becomes mutually defining over the protracted progressions of their self-scrutiny. In the first part, he highlights biographical parallels between the authors, and he compares their respective project-conceptions. He then evaluates the efficacy of autobiographical theory in explaining their self-projections beyond their personal experience and towards textual processes of enactment.
Sasso, Eleonora
2012 0-7734-3913-7 224 pages
This text is the first to examine the influence of William Morris on the artistic, literary, and ideological styles of Tennyson, Swinburne, Gissing, and Yeats. The focus is on a selection of Morris’ writings and situates them in the fields of art, culture, and society. Through Roland Barthes’ approach to interpreting text, Sasso demonstrates that Tennyson, Swinburne, Gissing, and Yeats were all readers of Morris’ work which in turn stimulated their own writing and infused them with desire. Shows how Morris’ influence caused his contemporaries to emulate his style of writing and how that style ultimately framed the mind of Victorian England.
El-Meligi, Eman
2012 0-7734-3047-4 360 pages
This book compares the literary styles of two authors from vastly different cultural and national heritages. Tawfiq Al-Hakim is an Egyptian and V.S. Naipaul is from Trinidad. The cultures are different but their literary techniques bear an affinity to one another. The author showcases how cultural differences are depicted in these novels, while also revealing a shared set of literary conventions utilized by these talented authors. Both draw on mythology and Jungian archetypes which are fertile ground for critical analysis that juxtapose them.
McKenzie, Tim
2003 0-7734-6570-7 284 pages
This book examines the poetry of George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and R. S. Thomas in light of their shared experience as poets who were also priests. While having twin vocations is a constant that unites them, the poets’ vocational experiences differ markedly in line with the variable periods in which they wrote. Thus each comes up with quite different answers to the question of whether the Voice of the Muse is the same as the Voice of God.