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The development of sport in the twentieth century has been examined from a variety of angles. Rarely, though, has the work of the creative writer been considered in detail. This book directs its attention to this neglected area, examining a selection of novels in which the subject of sport has featured prominently. It highlights the ways in which novelists in the second half of the twentieth century have approached sport, explained its place in society, and through the sporting subject constructed a critique of the historical circumstances in which their narrative is set. The study therefore seeks to complement the increasing body of work on the representation of sport through such media as film, television, and autobiography. It also brings a fresh dimension to the use made by historians of literary sources, suggesting that creative fiction can be far more valuable as historical evidence than has customarily been acknowledged.
An immensely persuasive work of literary criticism that opens a new chapter in the American dialogue on race—and promises to change the way we read American literature—from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner Morrison shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that was manifestly unfree--and that came to serve white authors as embodiments of their own fears and desires. According to the Chicago Tribune, Morrison "reimagines and remaps the possibility of America." Her brilliant discussions of the "Africanist" presence in the fiction of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemingway leads to a dramatic reappraisal of the essential characteristics of our literary tradition. Written with the artistic vision that has earned the Nobel Prize-winning author a pre-eminent place in modern letters, Playing in the Dark is an invaluable read for avid Morrison admirers as well as students, critics, and scholars of American literature.
The statement, "The Civil Rights Movement changed America," though true, has become something of a cliché. Civil rights in the White Literary Imagination seeks to determine how, exactly, the Civil Rights Movement changed the literary possibilities of four iconic American writers: Robert Penn Warren, Norman Mailer, Eudora Welty, and William Styron. Each of these writers published significant works prior to the Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954 and the Montgomery Bus Boycott that began in December of the following year, making it possible to trace their evolution in reaction to these events. The work these writers crafted in response to the upheaval of the day, from Warren's Who Speaks for the Negro?, to Mailer's "The White Negro" to Welty's "Where Is the Voice Coming From?" to Styron's Confessions of Nat Turner, reveal much about their own feeling in the moment even as they contribute to the national conversation that centered on race and democracy. By examining these works closely, Gray posits the argument that these writers significantly shaped discourse on civil rights as the movement was occurring but did so in ways that--intentionally or not--often relied upon a notion of the relative innocence of the South with regard to racial affairs, and on a construct of African Americans as politically and/or culturally na*ve. As these writers grappled with race and the myth of southern nobility, their work developed in ways that were simultaneously sympathetic of, and condescending to, black intellectual thought occurring at the same time.
What exactly is goodness? Where is it found in the literary imagination? Toni Morrison, one of American letters’ greatest voices, pondered these perplexing questions in her celebrated Ingersoll Lecture, delivered at Harvard University in 2012 and published now for the first time in book form. Perhaps because it is overshadowed by the more easily defined evil, goodness often escapes our attention. Recalling many literary examples, from Ahab to Coetzee’s Michael K, Morrison seeks the essence of goodness and ponders its significant place in her writing. She considers the concept in relation to unforgettable characters from her own works of fiction and arrives at conclusions that are both eloquent and edifying. In a lively interview conducted for this book, Morrison further elaborates on her lecture’s ideas, discussing goodness not only in literature but in society and history—particularly black history, which has responded to centuries of brutality with profound creativity. Morrison’s essay is followed by a series of responses by scholars in the fields of religion, ethics, history, and literature to her thoughts on goodness and evil, mercy and love, racism and self-destruction, language and liberation, together with close examination of literary and theoretical expressions from her works. Each of these contributions, written by a scholar of religion, considers the legacy of slavery and how it continues to shape our memories, our complicities, our outcries, our lives, our communities, our literature, and our faith. In addition, the contributors engage the religious orientation in Morrison’s novels so that readers who encounter her many memorable characters such as Sula, Beloved, or Frank Money will learn and appreciate how Morrison’s notions of goodness and mercy also reflect her understanding of the sacred and the human spirit.
How did Jews understand sacred writing before the concepts of "Bible" and "book" emerged? The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity challenges anachronistic categories to reveal new aspects of how ancient Jews imagined written revelation-a wildly varied collection stretching back to the dawn of time, with new discoveries always around the corner.
Seven noted scholars examine slave narratives and the topic of slavery in American literature, from Frederick Douglass's Narrative (1845)-- treated in chapters by James Olney and William L. Andrews-- to Sheley Anne William's "Dessa Rose" (1984). Among the contributors, Arnold Rampersad reads W.E.B. DuBois's classic work "The Souls of Black Folk" (1903) as a response to Booker T. Washington's "Up from Slavery" (1901). Hazel V. Carby examines novels of slavery and novels of sharecropping and questions the critical tendency to conflate the two, thereby also conflating the nineteenth century with the twentieth, the rural with the urban.
This book examines representations of tuberculosis in Victorian fiction, giving insights into how society viewed this disease and its sufferers.
Christ and Apollo, originally published in 1960, is a classic of literary criticism, a book that Commonweal once predicted may well change the course of literary studies. It did not do that, of course. Its literary, philosophical, and theological presuppositions, as Glenn Arbery points out in his new introduction, were too different from those of the ruling theoretical paradigms for it to be given a hearing And that is precisely what makes it a volume worth returning to. In Christ and Apollo, William Lynch examines the Greek dramatists, Dante, Shakespeare, Proust, Camus, Graham Greene, and other writers in light of their affinities with two opposing tendencies. The symbol of the first approach is Apollo. For Lynch, this is the tendency to want to escape the finite, real world and the human condition of embodiment: it has much in common with what critic Allen Tate called the angelic imagination. The symbol of the other tendency is Christ, the Word made flesh. Artists working in this tradition give readers a glimpse of the infinite by working patiently and honestly with the materials of the finite world, in all its messy imprecision. For Lynch, then, as Arbery points out, limitation, or finitude, is the great human good. Praised by Flannery O'Connor, among others, Lynch's sophisticated work is in many ways an important elaboration of the New Criticism, avoiding that school of thought's formalist excesses while providing it with firmer philosophical ground. For anyone interested in understanding what distinguishes great literature, Christ and Apollo is an essential text.
This book argues that the sudden decline of old rural vernaculars – such as French patois, Italian dialects, and the Irish language – caused these languages to become the objects of powerful longings and projections that were formative of modernist writing. Seán Ó Ríordáin in Ireland and Pier Paolo Pasolini in Italy reshaped minor languages to use as private idioms of poetry; the revivalist conception of Irish as a lost, perfect language deeply affected the work of James Joyce; the disappearing dialects of northern France seemed to Marcel Proust to offer an escape from time itself. Drawing on a broad range of linguistic and cultural examples to present a major reevaluation of the origins and meaning of European literary modernism, Barry McCrea shows how the vanishing languages of the European countryside influenced metropolitan literary culture in fundamental ways.
A critical and interpretive study of the literature of atrocity, major imaginative writing inspired and informed by the Holocaust, examining works in English translation by such writers as Aichinger, Boll, Kosinski, Lind, Sachs, Schwarz-Bart, and Wiesel.