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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.
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.
New expanded edition of a classic anthropology title that examines ethnicity as a dynamic and shifting aspect of social relations.
The story of two journalists whose entanglement in a French philosopher's death becomes a surreal journey into global conspiracy.
The buying, selling, and writing of books is a colossal industry in which marketing looms large, yet there are very few books which deal with book marketing (how-to texts excepted) and fewer still on book consumption. This innovative text not only rectifies this, but also argues that far from being detached, the book business in fact epitomises today’s Entertainment Economy (fast moving, hit driven, intense competition, rapid technological change, etc.). Written by an impressive roster of renowned marketing authorities, many with experience of the book trade and all gifted writers in their own right, Consuming Books steps back from the practicalities of book marketing and takes a look at the industry from a broader consumer research perspective. Consisting of sixteen chapters, divided into four loose sections, this key text covers: * a historical overview * the often acrimonious marketing/literature interface * the consumers of books (from book groups to bookcrossing) * a consideration of the tensions that both literary types and marketers feel. With something for everyone, Consuming Books not only complements the ‘how-to’ genre but provides the depth that previous studies of book consumption conspicuously lack.
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.