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Subject Area: Writing
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.
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.
Kennedy, George A.
2005 0-7734-6251-1 324 pages
Some of the greatest writers of fiction have introduced imaginary novelists as characters in their novels and short stories, sometimes including extended examples or descriptions of the character's work, in a few instances building whole smaller works into the larger structure of their novels. The present study, addressed to the general reader of fiction, is concerned for the first time with collecting and examining these fictional creations by some of the most famous French, English, and American writers, including Balzac, Thackeray, Dickens, Hawthorne, Trollope, James, Proust, Wolfe, Murdock, Updike, Roth, and Byatt, and also introducing readers to striking instances by lesser known writers. Imaginary fiction is often entertaining and readable in itself; in addition it can perform important literary functions for the plot and themes of the work in which it occurs, it provides both imaginary and real author opportunities for literary criticism and social satire, and it can also perform psychological and therapeutic purposes for the writer.
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.
Punter, David
2005 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.
Bloor, Anthony
2003 0-7734-6800-5 392 pages
Models of the writing process are used in teaching, research, and the design of software tools for writers. This study constructs a model of fiction writing. It approaches the subject in an investigative fashion, looking firstly at the range of models in current use. The result is a basic model of writing, which encapsulates the findings of empirical research into writing behavior. It shows that current theories of writing make assumptions about language, whose roots can be traced to Chomsky’s transformational grammar and its forebears. To add specificity to the basic model, the study turns to Saussure’s view of language as a system of signs, and pursues the idea that semiology and literary theory can be used to develop theories of writing as well as of reading. It discusses work by Jakobson, Genette, Todorov and Barthes, and proposes a hypothesis about the ways in which fiction writers create meanings. Written for readers in the humanities, it will be of equal value to any scholar who is interested in the theory and practice of writing.
Tipper, Karen Sasha Anthony
2017 1-4955-0603-7 324 pages
In this study, Dr. Tipper observes that there is a striking resemblance between both the lives and works of Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde. The study compares the philosophical, artistic, and social backgrounds of the two writers and the personal aspects of their lives which caused them to live and to write in similar ways. Such resemblances naturally enhance the influence a writer has on a successor and this led Wilde to conceive of Baudelaire as a fellow genius and noble sufferer from whom he could borrow some ready-made splendor.