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In this remarkable study, Gail Turley Houston examines the rich interplay of consumption as alimental process, medical entity, psychological construct, and economic practice in order to explore Charles Dickens’s fictional representations of Victorian culture as he presents it in his novels. Drawing from medical, historical, economic, psychoanalytic, and biographical materials from the Victorian period, Houston anchors her work in the belief that if class and gender are fictional constructions, real people’s lives are affected in complex and coercive ways by such constructions. Proceeding chronologically, Houston traces particular patterns throughout ten of Dickens’s major novels: The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, The Old Curiosity Shop, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend. Houston maintains that Victorian codes of behavior prescribed for gender and class regarding sexual and alimental appetites were so extreme and complicated that numerous consequent eating disorders and related diseases developed. Ideologies about consumption translated into medically defined consumptions, such as anorexia. Using anorexia and its etiology as representative of an underlying cultural dynamics of consumption, Houston examines anorexia as a deep structure of the Victorian period. Further, consumption as economic process is reflected in the expansion of individual material desires at the expense of the designated body politic. In other words, extravagant consumption occurs in society only if certain groups—usually consisting of lower-class men and women and, in Dickens’s novels, women in general—are severely limited in their consumption. To support her approach, Houston turns to Rita Felski’s Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, agreeing with Felski’s argument that it is necessary to recognize the complex dialectics that take place between the individual and society. Not only does culture construct human beings, but human beings also construct culture. Felski’s theory aids Houston in emphasizing that Dickens not only influenced but was also greatly influenced by the Victorian dynamics of consumption. In fact, Houston argues that while Dickens dismantles Victorian ideologies about class and hunger by demonstrating the unnaturalness of expecting one class to starve so that another might gluttonize, he nevertheless accepts and perpetuates the Victorian identification of woman as the self-sacrificing, always-nurturing "angel in the house" without need of nurture herself. This extraordinary book will appeal to literary scholars, as well as to scholars in the social sciences, history, humanistically oriented medicine, and women’s studies.
Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) was a pioneering female journalist, experimental novelist, playwright, and poet whose influence on literary modernism was profound and whose writings anticipated many of the preoccupations of poststructuralist and feminist thought. In her new book,the author argues that Barnes' writings made significant contributions to gender and aesthetic debates in their immediate early twentieth-century context, and that they continue to contribute to present-day debates on identity. In particular, Warren traces the works' close engagement with the effects of cultural boundaries on the individual, showing how the journalism, Ryder, Ladies Almanack, and the early chapters of Nightwood energetically and playfully subvert such boundaries. In this reading, Nightwood is contextualised as a pivotal text which poses questions about the limits of subversion, thereby positioning The Antiphon (1958) as an analysis of why such boundaries are sometimes necessary. Djuna Barnes' Consuming Fictions shows that from the irreverent and carnivalesque iconoclasm of Barnes' early works, to the bleak assessment that conflict lies at the root of culture, seen from the close of Nightwood, Barnes' oeuvre offers a profound analysis of the relationship between culture, the individual and textual expression.
Drawing on the wide experience of a range of consultants including writers, publishers and booksellers, Richard Todd explains how literary prizes work and analyses who is reading and who is buying.
"To be continued..." Whether these words fall at the end of The Empire Strikes Back or a TV commercial flirtation between coffee-loving neighbors, true fans find them impossible to resist. Ever since the 1830s, when Charles Dickens's Pickwick Papers enticed a mass market for fiction, the serial has been a popular means of snaring avid audiences. In Consuming Pleasures jennifer Hayward establishes serial fiction as a distinct genre-one defined by the activities of its audience rather than by the formal qualities of the text. Ranging from installment novels, mysteries, and detective fiction of the 1800s to the television and movie series, comics, and advertisements of the twentieth century, serials are loosely linked by what may be called, after Wittgenstein, "family resemblances." These traits include intertwined subplots, diverse casts of characters, dramatic plot reversals, suspense, and such narrative devices as long-lost family members and evil twins. Hayward chooses four texts—Dickens's novel Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), Milton Caniff's comic strip Terry and the Pirates (1934-46), and the soap operas All My Children (1970-) and One Life to Live (1968-)—to represent the evolution of serial fiction as a genre, and to analyze the peculiar draw serials have upon their audiences. Although the serial has enjoyed great marketplace success, traditional literary and social critics have denounced its ties to mass culture, claiming it preys upon passive fans. But Hayward argues that active serial audiences have developed identifiable strategies of consumption, such as collaborative reading and attempts to shape the production process.
From 1980 to the present, huge transformations have occurred in every area of British cultural life. The election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 ushered in a new neoliberal era in politics and economics that dramatically reshaped the British landscape. Alongside this political shift, we have seen transformations to the public sphere caused by the arrival of the internet and of social media, and changes in the global balance of power brought about by 9/11, the emergence of China and India as superpowers, and latterly the British vote to leave the European Union. British fiction of the period is intimately interwoven with these historical shifts. This collection brings together some of the most penetrating critics of the contemporary, to explore the role that the British novel has had in shaping the cultural landscape of our time, at a moment, in the wake of the EU referendum of 2016, when the question of what it means to be British has become newly urgent.
The objective of this study is to inquire, from a broad epistemological view, into the underlying nature of fictions, and above all, to discover how it is possible to create and process them. In Chapter One, I put forth four "postulates" in the form of though experiments. in Chapter Two I turn attention to make-believe, imaginary, and dream worlds, and how they can be conceived and perceived only with respect to the/a "real world." Chapter Three includes a discussion of the affinities and differences between one's tacit knowledge of certain aspects of the number system in arithmetic (an ordered series) and the range of all possible fictional entities (an unordered network). In Chapter Four I establish more precisely the relations between one's "real world" and one's fictional worlds in light of the conclusions from Chapter Three. And, in Chapter Five, I attempt to construct a formal model with which to account for the construction of all possible fictional sentences.
This Guide examines the key critical responses to Byatt's fiction (both her novels and short stories) tracing the wider debates about realism, postmodernism and feminism with which they engage. The Guide also explores the themes which are central to Byatt's work, such as her depiction of writer-figures and her conception of artistic vision.
This book scrutinizes a range of relatively overlooked post-WWII British women writers who sought to demonstrate that narrative prose fiction offered rich possibilities for aesthetic innovation. What unites all the primary authors in this volume is a commitment to challenging the tenets of British mimetic realism as a literary and historical phenomenon. This collection reassesses how British female novelists operated in relation to transnational vanguard networking clusters, debates and tendencies, both political and artistic. The chapters collected in this volume enquire, for example, whether there is something fundamentally different (or politically dissident) about female experimental procedures and perspectives. This book also investigates the processes of canon formation, asking why, in one way or another, these authors have been sidelined or misconstrued by recent scholarship. Ultimately, it seeks to refine a new research archive on mid-century British fiction by female novelists at least as diverse as recent and longer established work in the domain of modernist studies.
THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN FICTION Accessibly structured with entries on important historical contexts, central issues, key texts and the major writers, this Handbook provides an engaging overview of twentieth-century American fiction. Featured writers range from Henry James and Theodore Dreiser to contemporary figures such as Joyce Carol Oates, Thomas Pynchon, and Sherman Alexie, and analyses of key works include The Great Gatsby, Lolita, The Color Purple, and The Joy Luck Club, among others. Relevant contexts for these works, such as the impact of Hollywood, the expatriate scene in the 1920s, and the political unrest of the 1960s are also explored, and their importance discussed. This is a stimulating overview of twentieth-century American fiction, offering invaluable guidance and essential information for students and general readers.
When novels, plays and poems refer to food, they are often doing much more than we might think. Recent critical thinking suggests that depictions of food in literary works can help to explain the complex relationship between the body, subjectivity and social structures. A History of Food in Literature provides a clear and comprehensive overview of significant episodes of food and its consumption in major canonical literary works from the medieval period to the twenty-first century. This volume contextualises these works with reference to pertinent historical and cultural materials such as cookery books, diaries and guides to good health, in order to engage with the critical debate on food and literature and how ideas of food have developed over the centuries. Organised chronologically and examining certain key writers from every period, including Chaucer, Shakespeare, Austen and Dickens, this book's enlightening critical analysis makes it relevant for anyone interested in the study of food and literature.