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Drawing on developments in critical theory and postmodernist fiction, this study makes an important contribution to the appreciation of playforms in language, texts, and cultural practices. Tracing trajectories in theories of play and game, and with particular attention to the writings of Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, and Derrida, the author argues that the concept of play provides perspectives on language and communication processes useful both for analysis of literary texts and also for understanding the interactive nature of constructions of knowledge Exploring manifestations of game and play throughout the history of Western culture, from Plato to Pynchon, this study traces developments in 20th-century cultural and literary theory of ideas about play in the writings of Johan Huizinga, Roger Caillois, Jacques Ehrmann, Bernard Suits, James Hans, Mihai Spariosu and Robert Rawdon Wilson. The author emphasizes post-structuralist developments with specific attention to deconstruction and reception theory and argues that deconstruction makes the most significant recent contribution to play theory in its application to language and to literature The work also explores the modes and effects of playforms in particular examples of postmodernist fiction. With attention to major works from Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow), John Barth (LETTERS , Robert Kroetsch (What the Crow Said ), Angela Carter (Nights at the Circus ) and Peter Carey (Illywhacker ), Edwards acknowledges and deconstructs such basic oppositions as play and seriousness, fiction and truth, difference and identity to explore the literature's cultural/political significance. Seeking to affirm the fiction's continuing social relevance, the readings presented in this book place play irresistibly at the heartland of language, meaning and culture.
First Published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
In The Hawkline Monster, Brautigan's minimalist metafictive parody of the double depicts our narcissistic view of reality. In Double or Nothing, Federman subverts the conventional double, exposing its gamelike structures and traditional views of life and text.
The Multiverse as Theory in Postmodern Speculative Fictional Narratives considers the concept of the multiverse beyond the immediacy of being merely an excuse or scenario for the development of stories, instead positioning the multiverse as a theoretical method in which speculative fiction narratives can explore diverse issues to bridge ideas across cultural, social, and philosophical analysis. Taking a cross-cultural approach, the book centres around the critical engagements that literary and media texts have with the representations of the multiverse, beyond considering this subject as a mere rhetorical flourish or a passing fad. A diverse and international team of authors engage with the multiverse from the point of view of “other worlds,” understanding it not as the appearance of another independent world, but as the collision of two or more different worlds into one of them. From this key finding, the multiverse encourages us to pay attention to the influence that fiction exerts on narratives and world-building, providing possible frameworks to rethink critical aspects of temporality, space, self, society, and culture in contemporary times. This pioneering work will interest students and scholars working in the areas of media and cultural studies, comparative literature, popular culture studies, speculative fiction, and transmedia studies.
The first-of-its-kind, Games and Gaming in Medieval Literature explores the depth and breadth of games in medieval literature and culture. Chapters span from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries, and cover England, France, Denmark, Poland, and Spain, re-examining medieval games in diverse social settings such as the church, court, and household.
Children’s Literature and Intergenerational Relationships: Encounters of the Playful Kind explores ways in which children’s literature becomes the object and catalyst of play that brings younger and older generations closer to one another. Providing examples from diverse cultural and historical contexts, this collection argues that children’s texts promote intergenerational play through the use of literary devices and graphic formats and that they may prompt joint play practices in the real world. The book offers a distinctive contribution to children’s literature scholarship by shifting critical attention away from the difference and conflict between children and adults to the exploration of inter-age interdependencies as equally crucial aspects of human life, presenting a new perspective for all who research and work with children’s culture in times of global aging.
Essays re-examining the Legend of Good Women, placing it in its cultural and historical context.
Fictional narratives of the late twentieth century often cross boundaries. This study argues that the undoing of structure in postmodern art form demands a different way of thinking and represents a commentary on the material and social conditions of the late twentieth century and beyond.
A new analytical framework for understanding literary videogames, the literary-ludic spectrum, illustrated by close readings of selected works. In this book, Astrid Ensslin examines literary videogames—hybrid digital artifacts that have elements of both games and literature, combining the ludic and the literary. These works can be considered verbal art in the broadest sense (in that language plays a significant part in their aesthetic appeal); they draw on game mechanics; and they are digital-born, dependent on a digital medium (unlike, for example, conventional books read on e-readers). They employ narrative, dramatic, and poetic techniques in order to explore the affordances and limitations of ludic structures and processes, and they are designed to make players reflect on conventional game characteristics. Ensslin approaches these hybrid works as a new form of experimental literary art that requires novel ways of playing and reading. She proposes a systematic method for analyzing literary-ludic (L-L) texts that takes into account the analytic concerns of both literary stylistics and ludology. After establishing the theoretical underpinnings of her proposal, Ensslin introduces the L-L spectrum as an analytical framework for literary games. Based on the phenomenological distinction between deep and hyper attention, the L-L spectrum charts a work's relative emphases on reading and gameplay. Ensslin applies this analytical toolkit to close readings of selected works, moving from the predominantly literary to the primarily ludic, from online hypermedia fiction to Flash fiction to interactive fiction to poetry games to a highly designed literary “auteur” game. Finally, she considers her innovative analytical methodology in the context of contemporary ludology, media studies, and literary discourse analysis.
Towards a Theory of Life-Writing: Genre Blending provides a look into the rules of life-writing genre blending proposing a theory to explain and illustrate the main regulations governing such genre play. It centers on fact and fiction duality in the formation of auto/biofictional genres. This book investigates the existing developments in this field, and explores major criticism and lines of inquiry in order to arrive at the theory of life-writing genre play textuality. The specific interplay of the different generic characteristics develops a specific textuality at the heart of it. This is termed biofictional preservation (biopreservation) to explain the textual transformation and the shaping of the auto/biofictional genres. Written for undergraduate and graduate students, but also for the general readers, the book further exemplifies the theory in the analyses of different biofictions about the American authors F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway featuring overlapping and juxtaposed material. This volume aims to provide a theory of this specific textuality in order to better understand and approach the process in question as well as to open up new horizons for further study and exploration.