Suchergebnisse

Michael Keren traces the political lives and messages of some of the twentieth century's greatest literary characters in this insightful and jargon-free book of literary criticism. Hans Castorp (Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain), Joseph K. (Franz Kafka's The Trial), John the Savage (Aldous Huxley's Brave New World), Winston Smith (George Orwell's 1984), Ralph (William Golding's Lord of the Flies), Merusault (Albert Camus's The Stranger), Ida Ramundo (Elsa Morante's History), and Chauncey Gardiner (Jerzy Kosinski's Being There) participate in ideological, technological, and organizational projects of the twentieth century. Keren observes these infamous characters' behaviours and attitudes while they struggle through world wars, the rise and fall of totalitarianism, the Holocaust, the development of the atomic bomb, de-colonization, the Cold War, and globalization. Here is a refreshing contribution to civil society theory that makes a pioneering effort to cross the boundaries between politics, literature, and culture. A study of the human condition via literature, The Citizen's Voice expounds the key features of a "good citizen" while offering a perfect discussion piece for courses in political theory, politics and literature, and history. ; Yes

How did Anglo-Saxons reflect on the experience of growing old? Was it really a golden age for the elderly, as has been suggested? This first full survey of the Anglo-Saxon cultural conceptualisation of old age, as manifested and reflected in the texts and artwork of the inhabitants of early medieval England, presents a more nuanced and complicated picture. The author argues that although senescence was associated with the potential for wisdom and pious living, the Anglo-Saxons also anticipated various social, psychological and physical repercussions of growing old. Their attitude towards elderly men and women - whether they were saints, warriors or kings - was equally ambivalent. Multidisciplinary in approach, this book makes use of a wide variety of sources, ranging from the visual arts to hagiography, homiletic literature and heroic poetry. Individual chapters deal with early medieval definitions of the life cycle; the merits and downsides of old age as represented in Anglo-Saxon homilies and wisdom poetry; the hagiographic topos of elderly saints; the portrayal of grey-haired warriors in heroic literature; Beowulf as a mirror for elderly kings; and the cultural roles attributed to old women.

The conjunction of print and political revolutions between 1770 and 1820 generated a body of literary history writing whose competing narratives serve functions distinct from the consolidating and regulatory ones implicit in the genre's modern identification with canonicity. This first full-length investigation of period literary history argues that it accommodated adversarial positions as well as consensus, spoke to multiple readerships, fostered provisionality along with the search for certainty, and advanced a sense of historical locatedness. After 1820, however, its mediatory powers withered in response to the ascendancy of literary criticism, unease about the numbers and diversity of readers, and the perception of a national crisis post-Peterloo. Drawing on collective biography, memoir, antiquarianism, the novel, secret history, specimens, reviews and Institutional lectures, the study invites a fundamental rethinking of the place of literary history in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century print culture, and hence in the wider social and political movements it was both shaped by and itself helped shape.

At a 1966 international symposium hosted by the Johns Hopkins University, many of the leading figures of European structuralist criticism first presented their ideas to the American academic community. This work includes the proceedings of this event.

"Nationalism has given the world a genre of poetry bright with ideals of justice, freedom and the brotherhood of man, but also, at times, burning with humiliation and grievance, hatred and lust for revenge, driving human kind, as the Austrian poet Grillparzer put it, 'From humanity via nationality to bestiality'. National Poetry, Empires and War considers national poetry, and its glorification of war, from ancient to modern times, in a series of historical, social and political perspectives. Starting with the Hebrew Bible and Homer and moving through the Crusades and examples of subsequent empires, this book has much on pre-modern national poetry but focuses chiefly on post-1789 poetry which emerged from the weakening and collapse of empires, as the idealistic liberalism of nationalism in the age of Byron, Whitman, D'Annunzio, Yeats, Bialik, and Kipling was replaced by darker purposes culminating in World War I and the rise of fascism. Many national poets are the subject of countless critical and biographical studies, but this book aims to give a panoramic view of national poetry as a whole. It will be of great interest to any scholars of nationalism, Jewish Studies, history, comparative literature, and general cultural studies"--