When Ian Buruma arrived in Tokyo as a young film student in 1975, he found a feverish and surreal metropolis in the midst of an economic boom, where everything seemed new and history only remained in
This 1992 book analyses the relation between an emergent modern subjectivity in seventeenth-century French literature, particularly in dramatic works, and the contemporaneous evolution of the absolutist state. It shows how major writers of the Classical period (Corneille, Racine, Moliere, Lafayette) elaborate a new subject in and through their representations of the family, and argues that the family serves as the mediating locus of a patriarchal ideology of sexual and political containment. Most importantly, it asks why the theatre became the privileged form of representation in this state, and why this theatre concentrates almost exclusively on family conflict. Professor Greenberg argues that the narrative of oedipal sexuality and subjugation central to this new literary canon reflected the conflicting social, political and economic forces that were shifting European society away from the universe of the Renaissance and guiding it towards the 'transparency' of Classical representatio
This Companion focuses on the novel as a global genre with a 2,000-year history. The first section includes an examination of the various genres out of which it emerged (epic, history, romance, the picaresque) and the different ways in which fiction and realism (magical, hyper, and social) were developed in response to specific political, social, and economic forces. The second section focuses on how the novel works, considering how it has played a crucial role in the formation of more abstract social, political, and familial identities. The third section considers what the novel has become and will continue to become in the twenty-first century. It examines the recent interest in graphic novels as well as data, digitization, and a global literary marketplace's role in shaping the future of the novel. This book will be a key resource for students and scholars studying the novel as a genre.
Nineteenth-Century Literary Realism argues for realism as a genre committed to depicting the imperilled ecological system of soul and society. More specifically: realism, Kearns argues, suggests to its readers that social and political and economic reforms are inextricably tied to spiritual well being. In the process of trying to communicate that suggestion, realism enters into a kind of considerate conversation with its readers which - through the slippage endemic to language - rapidly works to destabilise, even undermine, its own assumptions. Thus realism, in addition to bearing the burden of its own reformist agenda and the duty of character-enactment within a restricted environment, is charged with an alternative energy which can be seen at the same time to disrupt and to enrich its generic, formal bounds. She explores these concepts through five British and American novels - Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, The Blithedale Romance, Hard Times and The Awakening.
This Companion focuses on the novel as a global genre with a 2,000-year history. The first section includes an examination of the various genres out of which it emerged (epic, history, romance, the picaresque) and the different ways in which fiction and realism (magical, hyper, and social) were developed in response to specific political, social, and economic forces. The second section focuses on how the novel works, considering how it has played a crucial role in the formation of more abstract social, political, and familial identities. The third section considers what the novel has become and will continue to become in the twenty-first century. It examines the recent interest in graphic novels as well as data, digitization, and a global literary marketplace's role in shaping the future of the novel. This book will be a key resource for students and scholars studying the novel as a genre.
