Imagining the Primitive in Naturalist and Modernist Literature

Imagining the Primitive in Naturalist and Modernist Literature PDF Author: Gina M. Rossetti
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826265030
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
"Examines the depiction of primitive characters in naturalist and modernist texts, focusing on works by Jack London, Frank Norris, Eugene O'Neill, Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Nella Larsen"--Provided by publisher.

Imagining the Primitive in Naturalist and Modernist Literature

Imagining the Primitive in Naturalist and Modernist Literature PDF Author: Gina M. Rossetti
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826265030
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 205

Get Book

Book Description
"Examines the depiction of primitive characters in naturalist and modernist texts, focusing on works by Jack London, Frank Norris, Eugene O'Neill, Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Nella Larsen"--Provided by publisher.

The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Naturalism

The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Naturalism PDF Author: Keith Newlin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199709203
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
After its heyday in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, naturalism, a genre that typically depicts human beings as the product of biological and environmental forces over which they have little control, was supplanted by modernism, a genre in which writers experimented with innovations in form and content. In the last decade, the movement is again attracting spirited scholarly debate. The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Naturalism takes stock of the best new research in the field through collecting twenty-eight original essays drawing upon recent scholarship in literary and cultural studies. The contributors offer an authoritative and in-depth reassessment of writers from Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London to Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, Richard Wright, John Steinbeck, Joyce Carol Oates, and Cormac McCarthy. One set of essays focus on the genre itself, exploring the historical contexts that gave birth to it, the problem of definition, its interconnections with other genres, the scientific and philosophical ideas that motivate naturalist authors, and the continuing presence of naturalism in twenty-first century fiction. Others examine the tensions within the genre-the role of women and African-American writers, depictions of sexuality, the problem of race, and the critique of commodity culture and class. A final set of essays looks beyond the works to consider the role of the marketplace in the development of naturalism, the popular and critical response to the works, and the influence of naturalism in the other arts.

Re-Reading Zola and Worldwide Naturalism

Re-Reading Zola and Worldwide Naturalism PDF Author: Marie-Sophie Armstrong
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443850756
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 445

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Book Description
Re-Reading Zola and Worldwide Naturalism continues the discussion of Émile Zola and French naturalism with examinations of unexplored areas of the founding father’s project and legacy. In addition to offering essays on Zola’s lesser known naturalist contemporaries, the volume extends the investigation of the naturalist literary current to include areas of Europe outside France, as well as the Americas and Asia, tracking its persistence in various forms through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. The authors pay particular attention to the ways naturalism was conceived and then received, including in other channels, undergoing transformations in new social conditions and creating other versions of the basic precepts. This work features multidisciplinary and comparative approaches to the study of naturalism, paying tribute to Anna Gural-Migdal—a Professor of French Literature and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, in Canada, who specializes in the visual aspect of Zola’s Rougon Macquart novels and the transfer of these strategies to naturalist film. She has been a leader in the field of Zola and naturalism in her role as president of the AIZEN for almost fifteen of its twenty years of existence.

Nordic Literature of Decadence

Nordic Literature of Decadence PDF Author: Pirjo Lyytikäinen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429655428
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
Nordic Literature of Decadence fills a gap on the map of world literature and participates in a thriving area of research by extending the investigation of broadly understood fin de siècle decadence to unexplored areas of Nordic literature, which remain practically unknown to Anglophone audiences. In the Nordic countries the new Parisian movements were seen as having caused a malicious invasion, a ‘black flood’ that was spreading over the North destroying the very foundations of Nordic national cultures. Nevertheless, the appeal of this controversial movement was irresistible to discontents and innovators, even in countries where the old moral, religious and nationalist atmosphere still retained its stranglehold and modern urban, industrial and social developments lagged behind that of the metropoles breeding this new literature and art. The Nordic countries developed their own distinctive manifestations of decadence favouring allegorical and allusive forms, local rural settings and depictions of primitive nature, coupling the philosophical underpinnings of fin-de-siècle decadence with ancient Nordic mythology and rising national movements. Nordic decadence thus became a distinctive and recognizable phenomenon, which travelled back to France and other European countries, influencing the ongoing debate on decadence as it was conducted on a global scale. Nordic Literature of Decadence discusses literature from five Nordic countries: Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Estonia and offers additional and alternative perspectives to the cosmopolitan traffic and cultural exchanges of literary decadence that have been explored so far in the English language scholarship.

Primitive Thinking

Primitive Thinking PDF Author: Nicola Gess
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 311069509X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
This book examines the discourse on ‘primitive thinking’ in early twentieth century Germany. It explores texts from the social sciences, writings on art and language and – most centrally – literary works by Robert Musil, Walter Benjamin, Gottfried Benn and Robert Müller, focusing on three figurations of alterity prominent in European primitivism: indigenous cultures, children, and the mentally ill.

Figures of the World

Figures of the World PDF Author: Christopher Laing Hill
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810142163
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 373

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Book Description
Figures of the World: The Naturalist Novel and Transnational Form overturns Eurocentric genealogies and globalizing generalizations about “world literature” by examining the complex, contradictory history of naturalist fiction. Christopher Laing Hill follows naturalism’s emergence in France and circulation around the world from North and South America to East Asia. His analysis shows that transnational literary studies must operate on multiple scales, combine distant reading with close analysis, and investigate how literary forms develop on the move. The book begins by tracing the history of naturalist fiction from the 1860s into the twentieth century and the reasons it spread around the world. Hill explores the development of three naturalist figures—the degenerate body, the self-liberated woman, and the social milieu—through close readings of fiction from France, Japan, and the United States. Rather than genealogies of European influence or the domination of cultural “peripheries” by the center, novels by Émile Zola, Tayama Katai, Frank Norris, and other writers reveal conspicuous departures from metropolitan models as writers revised naturalist methods to address new social conditions. Hill offers a new approach to studying culture on a large scale for readers interested in literature, the arts, and the history of ideas.

Modernism and Food Studies

Modernism and Food Studies PDF Author: Jessica Martell
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813052491
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Transnational in scope, this much-needed volume explores how modernist writers and artists address and critique the dramatic changes to food systems that took place in the early twentieth century. During this period, small farms were being replaced with industrial agriculture, political upheavals exacerbated food scarcity in many countries, and globalization opened up new modes of distributing culinary commodities. Looking at a unique variety of art forms by authors, painters, filmmakers, and chefs from Ireland, Italy, France, the United States, India, the former Soviet Union, and New Zealand, contributors draw attention to modernist representations of food, from production to distribution and consumption. They consider Oscar Wilde’s aestheticization of food, Katherine Mansfield’s use of eggs as a feminist symbol, Langston Hughes’s use of chocolate as a redemptive metaphor for blackness, hospitality in William Faulkner’s Sanctuary, Ernest Hemingway’s struggles with gender and sexuality as expressed through food and culinary objects, Futurist cuisine, avant-garde cookbooks, and the impact of national famines on the work of James Joyce, Viktor Shklovsky, and Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay. Less celebrated topics of putrefaction and waste are analyzed in discussions of food as both a technology of control and a tool for resistance. The diverse themes and methodologies assembled here underscore the importance of food studies not only for the literary and visual arts but also for social transformation. The cultural work around food, the editors argue, determines what is produced, who has access to it, and what can or will change. A milestone volume, this collection uncovers new links between seemingly disparate spaces, cultures, and artistic media and demystifies the connection between modernist aesthetics and the emerging food cultures of a globalizing world. Contributors: Giles Whiteley | Aimee Gasston | Randall Wilhelm | Bradford Taylor | Sean Mark | Céline Mansanti | Shannon Finck

Modernist Women Writers and American Social Engagement

Modernist Women Writers and American Social Engagement PDF Author: Jody Cardinal
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498582915
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
Modernist Women Writers and American Social Engagement explores the role of social and political engagement by women writers in the development of American modernism. Examining a diverse array of genres by both canonical modernists and underrepresented writers, this collection uncovers an obscured strain of modernist activism. Each chapter provides a detailed cultural and literary analysis, revealing the ways in which modernists’ politically and socially engaged interventions shaped their writing. Considering issues such as working class women’s advocacy, educational reform, political radicalism, and the global implications for American literary production, this book examines the complexity of the relationship between creating art and fostering social change. Ultimately, this collection redefines the parameters of modernism while also broadening the conception of social engagement to include both readily acknowledged social movements as well as less recognizable forms of advocacy for social change.

Jack London

Jack London PDF Author: Kenneth K. Brandt
Publisher: Writers and Their Work
ISBN: 0746312962
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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Book Description
Recounting his 1897-98 Klondike Gold Rush experience Jack London stated: It was in the Klondike I found myself. There nobody talks. Everybody thinks. There you get your perspective. I got mine. This study explores how London's Northland odyssey - along with an insatiable intellectual curiosity, a hardscrabble youth in the San Francisco Bay Area, and an acute craving for social justice - launched the literary career of one of America's most dynamic 20th-century writers. The major Northland works - including The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and To Build a Fire- are considered in connection with the motifs of literary Naturalism, as well as in relation to complicated issues involving imperialism, race, and gender. London's key subjects-the frontier, the struggle for survival, and economic mobility-are examined in conjunction with how he developed the underlying themes of his work to engage and challenge the social, political, and philosophical revolutions of his era that were initiated by Darwin,

Vandover and the Brute

Vandover and the Brute PDF Author: Frank Norris
Publisher: Broadview Press
ISBN: 1770486216
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
Written circa 1894-95 but published posthumously in 1914, Frank Norris’s Vandover and the Brute presents an unflinching portrait of unconventional sexuality, moral dissolution, and physical degeneration. In the setting of turn-of-the-century San Francisco depicted in Vandover, disaster encompasses far more than the vivid accounts of shipwreck or earthquake that appear in the novel. The slow wasting away of characters who contract syphilis, the suicide of a young girl, and the murder of a man clinging to a lifeboat fascinate readers today as much as they did a century ago, when this scandalous novel was first published. The most complete wreck is Vandover himself, whose artistic talents and constitution collapse after orgies of drink and sexual abandon. Russ Castronovo’s new edition gathers historical materials on literary naturalism, gender and criminality, and the visual culture of the late nineteenth century.