This is our backup site. Click here to visit our main site at MellenPress.com
Subject Area: Writing-Theory
Punter, David2005 0-7734-6183-3 372 pages
This is a book that treats postmodernism in its own terms, regarding it as a phenomenon which both represents a contemporary moment and also looks towards its own transcendence, passing away, disappearance. It is distinctive in two ways. First, it not only deals with recognizably postmodern features and aspects – the death of the author, dislocations of time and space, experimentations with different media – but it also looks forward to modes of writing and textuality which have – perhaps already – displaced the postmodern – the graphic novel, electronic textuality, the virtually real. Second, it attempts a type of discourse that matches these developments: never completely discursive or linear, this book seeks for a new type of criticism which will both reflect the spectrality towards which much postmodernism tends and at the same time remain in touch with the need to encounter postmodern and post-postmodern texts and cultural phenomena in intelligible terms. The book’s critical range extends from the Gothic through to the most recent harbingers of modernity, and it describes a trajectory that will both take account of a significant mass of recent fiction and poetry and at the same time point readers towards the most likely developments in the textualities of the twenty-first century.
El-Meligi, Eman
2014 0-7734-4297-9 244 pages
A fascinating analysis of postmodernist metafictional writers offering a unique juxtapositioning of authors from distinct cultural worlds with their varied fictional narrative techniques. A must read for comparative literature, postmodernist fiction and cultural studies interests.
Aronson, Alex
1991 0-88946-385-9 135 pages
Studies the diary as a metaphor of the continuous flow of time in a person's life, evoking the writer's often capricious and fragmentary recall of the past, and his daily attempt to transform memory into images that are appended as if they existed outside or beyond time. Contends that diaries supply the evidence that there is a need to engrave phrases and dates to "protect them from oblivion."
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.