Postmodern Counternarratives - Irony and Audience in the Novels of Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Charles Johnson, and Tim O'Brien
This book provides a wide-ranging discussion of realism, postmodernism, literary theory and popular fiction before focusing on the careers of four prominent novelists. Despite wildly contrasting ambitions and agendas, all four grow progressively more sympathetic to the expectations of a mainstream literary audience, noting the increasingly neglected yet archetypal need for strong explanatory narrative even while remaining wary of its limitations, presumptions, and potential abuses.
Employing Northrop Frye and Rene Girard as his theoretical foundation, Johnsen reinterprets the works of three canonical modernists--Ibsen, Joyce, and Woolf--to argue for their commitment to analyzing collective violence as a defining motive in literary modernism. Johnsen shows how Frye's vision of a movement from mythic to ironic heroes parallels Girard's view of a society increasingly demythologized, and increasingly concerned with scapegoats and victims. He points to important similarities between these theoretical visions and a growing concern for weaker subjects across literary history, especially with the move into the modern period.
Renaissance Self-Fashioning - From More to Shakespeare
Renaissance Self-Fashioning is a study of sixteenth-century life and literature that spawned a new era of scholarly inquiry. Stephen Greenblatt examines the structure of selfhood as evidenced in major literary figures of the English Renaissance—More, Tyndale, Wyatt, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare—and finds that in the early modern period new questions surrounding the nature of identity heavily influenced the literature of the era. Now a classic text in literary studies, Renaissance Self-Fashioning continues to be of interest to students of the Renaissance, English literature, and the new historicist tradition.
Pocket Essentials is a dynamic series of books that are concise, lively, and easy to read. Packed with facts as well as expert opinions, each book has all the key information you need to know about such popular topics as film, television, cult fiction, history, and more. It sounds daunting: all those -isms, long technical words, weird French thinkers, and incomprehensible Germans. Most books providing introductions to "Literary Theory" are long-winded tomes, guiding dogged readers through the twists and turns of critical analysis and logic.
Aristotle as Poet - The Song for Hermias and Its Contexts
Aristotle is known as a philosopher and as a theorist of poetry, but he was also a composer of songs and verse. This is the first comprehensive study of Aristotle's poetic activity, interpreting his remaining fragments in relation to the earlier poetic tradition and to the literary culture of his time. Its centerpiece is a study of the single complete ode to survive, a song commemorating Hermias of Atarneus, Aristotle's father-in-law and patron in the 340's BCE. This remarkable text is said to have embroiled the philosopher in charges of impiety and so is studied both from a literary perspective and in its political and religious contexts.
