Academic literature on the topic 'English literature – 20th century – History and criticism'
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Journal articles on the topic "English literature – 20th century – History and criticism"
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Brannigan, John, Marcela Santos Brigida, Thayane Verçosa, and Gabriela Ribeiro Nunes. "Thinking in Archipelagic Terms: An Interview with John Brannigan." Palimpsesto - Revista do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras da UERJ 20, no. 35 (May 13, 2021): 3–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.12957/palimpsesto.2021.59645.
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John Brannigan is Professor at the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin. He has research interests in the twentieth-century literatures of Ireland, England, Scotland, and Wales, with a particular focus on the relationships between literature and social and cultural identities. His first book, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism (1998), was a study of the leading historicist methodologies in late twentieth-century literary criticism. He has since published two books on the postwar history of English literature (2002, 2003), leading book-length studies of working-class authors Brendan Behan (2002) and Pat Barker (2005), and the first book to investigate twentieth-century Irish literature and culture using critical race theories, Race in Modern Irish Literature and Culture (2009). His most recent book, Archipelagic Modernism: Literature in the Irish and British Isles, 1890-1970 (2014), explores new ways of understanding the relationship between literature, place and environment in 20th-century Irish and British writing. He was editor of the international peer-reviewed journal, Irish University Review, from 2010 to 2016.
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Gu, Qiushi. "Trauma, Haunting, and Representation: Rereading and the Translation Examination of Kokoro." Journal of Language Teaching and Research 15, no. 1 (December 31, 2023): 263–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.17507/jltr.1501.29.
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The Japanese novel, Kokoro (1914), offers a profound insight into early 20th-century Japanese society encompassing history, politics, and literature. Although this novel has been extensively explored in literary and translation studies, the convergence remains underexplored. This study advocates integrating literary criticism with translation practice for a more faithful representation of narratives. Applying trauma/PTSD studies theory, it meticulously analyzes Kokoro, particularly examining the English and Chinese renditions of the pivotal term “談判 (danpan; negotiation)”. The methodology involves constructing a trilingual database, incorporating the Japanese source text and seven translations in English and Chinese. By scrutinizing specific passages, the study delves into trauma-related responses and behaviors, revealing their impact on long-lasting changes in personality and relationships. Emphasis is placed on the translation of key terms, preserving cultural and linguistic nuances. This innovative approach advances both literary criticism and translation theory, emphasizing psychological elements for a nuanced portrayal of characters’ states of mind. The study underscores the significance of trauma narratives in comprehending personal and historical traumas, asserting that translators of trauma literature must blend theoretical knowledge with social responsibility. They serve as “secondary witnesses,” entrusted with accurately transmitting traumatic stories between languages, fostering empathy, and preventing the repetition of tragedies in history. This approach provides an innovative interpretation of Kokoro and its translations, bridging the realms of literary criticism and translation studies.
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Tkachuk, Olena. "MULTICULTURALISM BY CONRAD-EMIGRANT." Polish Studies of Kyiv, no. 35 (2019): 376–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.17721/psk.2019.35.376-380.
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The article is devoted to the problem of the multiculturalism by Joseph Conrad, the English writer and the world classic of the 20th century, who, due to the preservation of his Polish national-cultural identity, and by estrangement from this identity in his artistic consciousness, was able to influence the intellectual and artistic atmosphere in England of his times. In this way, the Polish identity became a background for Conrad’s artistic creativity, and at the same time, universal values and criteria were the key to the successful acculturation in English society in its one of the most effective strategies – the integration strategy. In this case Conrad acquired another national-cultural identity, English, – while retaining his native, Polish. Undoubtedly, one of the most important issues touched by almost all researchers is his arrival in English literature, a Pole in origin, who only arrived in England in the twenty-first year, actually emigrating, and for a very short time becaming a venerable writer. It should be noted that, taking into account the peculiarities of English mentality, the task was rather uneasy. All this undoubtedly led to the development of a variety of approaches to understanding the creative personality and rich heritage of Joseph Conrad. Foreign literary and critical academic circles, which introduced the concept of «new English literature» (meaning the post-colonial period), do not take into account such figures of the English literary process as Joseph Conrad, whose work falls out of its chronological framework, and indicates that multicultural literature appeared on the approaches to the twentieth century. However, only nowadays it was possible that such an approach was based on the principles of multiculturalism, that is, the phenomenon justified in the 90s of the XX century, although, as the majority of scholars testify, it existed for a long time in cultural studies, literary criticism, art history and philosophy. We have chosen this approach. The research is devoted to the study of the problems of national-cultural identity by Joseph Conrad, as well as the mechanism of his acculturation in the conditions of emigration.
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Shcherbinina, Yu I. "Teaching Creative Writing within the framework of philology: historical overview." Vestnik of Samara University. History, pedagogics, philology 29, no. 4 (December 30, 2023): 173–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.18287/2542-0445-2023-29-4-173-182.
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The purpose of the present article is to consider the dialectical relationship between Creative Writing and philology. The relevance of this subject is borne out by the recent surge of interest in teaching Creative Writing among EFL practitioners, writers, as well as teachers and researchers of literature, and the lack of a well-established system of instruction in our country. The materials analyzed in the paper include the works of American theoreticians and practitioners of Creative Writing, who laid the foundation of this discipline in the late 19th – early 20th century, the works of British scholars, as well as the articles on linguodidactics of modern Russian researchers. The paper seeks to point out the issues involved in teaching Creative Writing, such as its place among other disciplines (literary criticism, English studies, English composition, linguodidactics) and its institutional status; its vision as a mere method of teaching or a separate field of investigation. It is shown that the skills and competences developed by Creative Writing programmes are in high demand, and there is a growing need for such courses in Russia. The article aims to demonstrate the features that bring together Creative Writing and philology in the Russian academic context and allow to envisage the incorporation of Creative Writing into the professional training of philologists, in particular those specializing in English studies. The article concludes by highlighting the role creative writing plays in promoting a deeper appreciation of literature, developing productive language skills and raising more competent readers.
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Kinkley, Jeffrey C. "The Monster That Is History: History, Violence, and Fictional Writing in Twentieth-Century China. By David Der-Wei Wang. [Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2004. 402 pp. ISBN 0-520-23140-6.]." China Quarterly 182 (June 2005): 439–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0305741005270261.
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This celebration of modern Chinese literature is a tour de force, David Wang's third major summation in English. He is even more prolific in Chinese. Wang's command of the creative and critical literatures is unrivalled.Monster's subject is “the multivalence of Chinese violence across the past century”: not 1960s “structural violence” or postcolonial “epistemic violence,” but hunger, suicide, anomie, betrayal (though not assassination or incarceration), and “the violence of representation”: misery that reflects or creates monstrosity in history. Monster thus comments on “history and memory,” like Ban Wang's and Yomi Braester's recent efforts, although for historical reasons modern Chinese literature studies are allergic to historical and sociological methodologies.Monster is comparative, mixing diverse – sometimes little read – post-May Fourth and Cold War-era works with pieces from the 19th and 20th fins de siècle. Each chapter is a free associative rhapsody (sometimes brilliant, sometimes tedious; often neo-Freudian), evoking, from a recurring minor detail as in new historicist criticism, a major binary trope or problematic for Wang to “collapse” or blur. His forte is making connections between works. The findings: (1) decapitation (loss of a “head,” or guiding consciousness?) in Chinese fiction betokens remembering or “re-membering” (of the severed), as in an unfinished Qing novel depicting beheaded Boxers, works by Lu Xun and Shen Congwen, and Wuhe's 2000 commemoration of a 1930 Taiwanese aboriginal uprising; (2) justice is poetic, but equals punishment, even crime, in late Qing castigatory novels, Bai Wei, and several Maoist writers; (3) in revolutionary literature, love and revolution blur, as do love affairs in life with those in fiction; (4) hunger, indistinct from anorexia, is excess; witness “starved” heroines of Lu Xun, Lu Ling, Eileen Chang and Chen Yingzhen; (5) remembering scars creates scars, as in socialist realism, Taiwan's anticommunist fiction, and post-Mao scar literature; (6) in fiction about evil (late Ming and late Qing novels; Jiang Gui), inhumanity is all too human and sex blurs with politics; (7) suicide can be a poet's immortality, from Wang Guowei to Gu Cheng; (8) cultural China's most creative new works invoke ghosts again, obscuring lines between the human, the “real,” and the spectral.
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Herman, David. "How Jewish Refugee Critics Changed British Literary Criticism, 1970–2020." Humanities 9, no. 3 (August 14, 2020): 80. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/h9030080.
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During the mid- and late 20th century, a small group of Jewish refugee critics changed the way British culture thought about what kind of literature mattered and why. These outsiders went on to have an enormous impact on late 20th-century British literary culture. What was this impact? Why in the last third of the 20th century? Why did British literary culture become so much more receptive to critics like George Steiner, Gabriel Josipovici, Martin Esslin and SS Prawer and to a new canon of continental Jewish writers? The obstacles to Jewish refugee critics were formidable. Yet their work on writers like Kafka, Brecht and Paul Celan, and thinkers like Heidegger and Lukacs had a huge impact. They also broke the post-war silence about the Holocaust and moved the Jewish Bibl from the margins of English-speaking culture.
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Kisieliūtė, Ingrida. "Literature and Economics. Another Way to Read the Text." Respectus Philologicus 28, no. 33 (October 25, 2015): 31–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.15388/respectus.2015.28.33.3.
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At the end of the 20th century, the study of literature was supplemented by such new methods as biopoetics, geopoetics, new historicism, etc. The New Economic Criticism, a new approach to the literary text, was found in the United States in the late 20th century. The present article discusses the main aspects of the aforementioned area of the study of literature and as well presents the possible approaches to literary texts from the economic perspective. The New Economic Criticism does not aim to become a method or tendency; thus, it givesthe freedom for a researcher to choose the perspective on the relationship between the literature and economics. The above-mentioned kind of analysis may be found in the English-speaking countries; whereas, the Russian literature has still remained unconsidered; however, Russian scholars are attempting to look at their fiction through the eyes of an economist. In Lithuania, the kind of research has not been found yet. Therefore, the article suggests one of the possible economic approaches, i.e., the analysis of the financial practices of the protagonist of The Gambler by F. Dostoyevsky.
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Zhang, Jie, and Wenxin Lin. "Historical facts of literature and personality in research – about the compilation of the book “History of Russian and Soviet literary criticism of the XX century”." Neophilology, no. 24 (2020): 755–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.20310/2587-6953-2020-6-24-755-764.
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Russian literature is an important part of world literature and is studied all over the world. In comparison with the history of literature, the history of literary criticism is more an interaction between the objectivity of literary facts and the personality of the compiler of this history. This work presents a description of the personality in research using the example of the book “History of Russian and Soviet literary criticism of the XX century” written by Chinese scientist Zhang Jie, the main task of which is to provide a theoretical basis and methods of criticism for analyzing the mechanism of reproducing the meanings of literary texts and images. We analyze the functions of literary criticism and explain the interaction and harmony of objective historical facts of literature and the compiler’s personality in the study. We define three currents of Russian and Soviet literary criticism of the 20th century: religious and cultural criticism, real literary criticism, and aesthetic criticism. We prove that history reflects not only the objectivity of factors, but also its compiler’s personality, which is an indicator. We explain the need to coordinate the objectivity of historical facts and the subjectivity of the compiler, and we present a value-based reflection of a scientific linguistic personality in the Chinese ethnoculture.
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Frolova, Natal'ya S. "Devices of comic in the work of the 20th century English-speaking Ugandan poets." Vestnik of Kostroma State University, no. 4 (2019): 140–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.34216/1998-0817-2019-25-4-140-144.
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Poetry of the Ugandans are analysed in an article in the context of the use of devices of comic in the East African English-language poetry. The critical-realistic and enlightener tendencies that were eagerly apprehended by most East African authors in the 1960s have not allowed them going beyond the direct criticism of damning poetry to this day as well, although point-by-point attempts to use humour and satire when contemplating socio-political issues, do occur throughout the sixty-year existence of East Africa English-language poetry. The dilogy by Okot p’Bitek, Timothy Wangusa and Taban Lo Liyong are clear examples of such attempts made in Uganda literature. At the same time, the three authors use fundamentally different techniques of comic, when portraying modern reality, both purely African and universal human.
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Hundt, Marianne, and Benedikt Szmrecsanyi. "Animacy in early New Zealand English." English World-Wide 33, no. 3 (October 29, 2012): 241–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/eww.33.3.01hun.
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The literature suggests that animacy effects in present-day spoken New Zealand English (NZE) differ from animacy effects in other varieties of English. We seek to determine if such differences have a history in earlier NZE writing or not. We revisit two grammatical phenomena — progressives and genitives — that are well known to be sensitive to animacy effects, and we study these phenomena in corpora sampling 19th- and early 20th-century written NZE; for reference purposes, we also study parallel samples of 19th- and early 20th-century British English and American English. We indeed find significant regional differences between early New Zealand writing and the other varieties in terms of the effect that animacy has on the frequency and probabilities of grammatical phenomena.
Dissertations / Theses on the topic "English literature – 20th century – History and criticism"
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Kaplan, Stacey Meredith 1973. "The modern(ist) short form: Containing class in early 20th century literature and film." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/10574.
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ix, 182 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number.My dissertation analyzes the overlooked short works of authors and auteurs who do not fit comfortably into the conventional category of modernism due to their subtly experimental aesthetics: the versatile British author Vita Sackville-West, the Anglo-Irish novelist and short-story writer Elizabeth Bowen, and the British emigrant filmmaker Charlie Chaplin. I focus on the years 1920-1923 to gain an alternative understanding of modernism's annus mirabulus and the years immediately preceding and following it. My first chapter studies the most critically disregarded author of the project: Sackville-West. Her 1922 volume of short stories The Heir: A Love Story deserves attention for its examination of social hierarchies. Although her stories ridicule characters regardless of their class background, those who attempt to change their class status, especially when not sanctioned by heredity, are treated with the greatest contempt. The volume, with the reinforcement of the contracted short form, advocates staying within given class boundaries. The second chapter analyzes social structures in Bowen's first book of short stories, Encounters (1922). Like Sackville-West, Bowen's use of the short form complements her interest in how class hierarchies can confine characters. Bowen's portraits of classed encounters and of characters' encounters with class reveal a sense of anxiety over being confined by social status and a sense of displacement over breaking out of class groups, exposing how class divisions accentuate feelings of alienation and instability. The last chapter examines Chaplin's final short films: "The Idle Class" (1921), "Pay Day (1922), and "The Pilgrim" (1923). While placing Chaplin among the modernists complicates the canon in a positive way, it also reduces the complexity of this man and his art. Chaplin is neither a pyrotechnic modernist nor a traditional sentimentalist. Additionally, Chaplin's shorts are neither socially liberal nor conservative. Rather, Chaplin's short films flirt with experimental techniques and progressive class politics, presenting multiple perspectives on the thematic of social hierarchies. But, in the end, his films reinforce rather than overthrow traditional artistic forms and hierarchical ideas. Studying these artists elucidates how the contracted space of the short form produces the perfect room to present a nuanced portrayal of class.
Committee in charge: Paul Peppis, Chairperson, English; Michael Aronson, Member, English; Mark Quigley, Member, English; Jenifer Presto, Outside Member, Comparative Literature
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Emig, Rainer. "The end of modernism in English poetry." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1992. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:c02149d4-6f3b-4368-b20e-d8e669514ccf.
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'End' as 'goal' and 'limit' is explored in signs, symbols, metaphors, metonymies, and myths in the works of G.M. Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, before the study examines the aesthetics of modernist poetry which - through psychoanalysis, economy, and language philosophy - presents itself as one facet of the 'modernist project'. Modernist poetry struggles with its material, the lacking motivation of signs, the unstable connection of signifier and signified. Already in Hopkins this creates tensions between mimetic endeavour and construction. Appropriation and distancing as compensation strategies prefigure modernism's tendencies of simultaneous expansion and reduction. They produce impasses, evident in attempts to signify the self: absence, dissolution, and submission to myth, recurring limits in modernist poetry. Yeats's poems avoid mimetic tensions by focussing on opaque signifieds of symbols, intertextuality rather than empiricism. Yet the excluded 'outside' in the shape of history questions works and their creator. Again, silence, dissolution, or superhistoricism become refuges, leading to dissolution of symbols into metaphors and metonymies or their sublimation in myth. Eliot's poems seemingly return to realism. Yet their focussing on everyday life disguises the internalisation of reality in psychological landscapes. Difficulties of drawing borderlines between subject and object(s) result: objects become threatening and characters mutilated in reifications, processes expressed in shifts from metaphor to metonymy. Pound's stabilising strategies reify language itself. His personae try to legitimise poems by incorporating histories of others, but produce overcharge and disintegration. Imagism refines modernism's reductive move, but creates monadic closure. Attempts at impersonality and superhistoricism lead to the dominance of the suppressed. Vorticism's construction/destruction dialectic does not tolerate 'works'. Only the ideogrammatic method achieves the shift to signifiers only which enables poems to 'include' reality and history at the cost of blindness towards themselves. Psychoanalysis displays analogies in its holistic concepts and simultaneous internal delineations, its distrust of signs and incomplete and lacking constructs deriving from them. Modernist poetry's struggle with tradition in order to legitimise its existence mirrors the individual's subjection to the 'law of the father'. Individuation is achieved by mutilation; the return to imaginary wholeness preceding it, although Utopian goal, remains impossible; it appears in poems as self-destruction. The economy of modernist poems shows their fight against expenditure, creation of artificial value through symbols, eventually a reductio ad absurdum in poems producing only themselves in reification. Work and subject become borderlines when reality shifts into the text altogether and the signified is eliminated. Language philosophy reproduces the positions of modernist poems towards reality, admitting the separation of language and objects: Nietzsche in disqualifying truth, Wittgenstein uncovering language's impotence. Again the excluded appears as the mystical which Heidegger re-integrates by setting up language as reality's creator and receptacle of Being. The nominalist upside-down turn of his linguistic universe is analogous to modernism's myth of itself. Adorno criticises the closed nature of works as statements and advocates a 'true' modernism in the fragmentation of the work and openness towards heterogeneity. Like Baudrillard, he stresses the riddle of art which permits its orbital position, neither detached from societal conditioning nor completely subjected to it, thus capable of unveiling the relativity of master-narratives. The 'true' modernist poem displays its tensions and 'sacrifices itself in order to remind its reader of the damages of existence.
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Sugars, Cynthia Conchita 1963. "The uncompromised New World : Canadian literature and the British imaginary." Thesis, McGill University, 1998. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=35630.
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This thesis explores contemporary (post-1980) British constructions of Canada or "Canadianness" as these have been conceived through the reading and reception of English-Canadian literary texts in Britain. I am arguing that in recent years Canada has been construed in Britain as an ideal, and furthermore, that this idealization has taken place in response to a perceived cultural and socio-economic malaise within contemporary British society. I use a combined postcolonial and object-relations approach to discuss the psychic investment involved in this construction of Canada as a post-imperial role model. These readers engage with the Canadian object as a sort of phantasy space, projecting onto Canada a self-image which expresses the British desire for postcolonial diversity. Canada thereby enables the dodging of the quagmires of imperiled national identity (and personal subjectivity), for its diffuse and decentralized makeup is balanced by an essentialized notion of cultural and national uniqueness. Throughout I take issue with the ways Canada tends to get celebrated in these writings as a postmodern ideal of unproblematized pluralism and endless diffusion, knowable by the sheer extent to which it seems to defy collective identity. These celebrations of Canada as a new (postmodern) Eden succeed only in emptying the Canadian domain of anything remotely contestatory or political. Indeed, this vision of Canada utilizes a limited version of postmodernism as an idealistic play of pluralities without any sense of accompanying political strife or contradiction.
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Tay, Eddie, and 鄭竹文. "Not at home: colonial and postcolonial Anglophone literatures of Singapore and Malaysia." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2007. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B37898139.
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Hill, Colin. "The modern-realist movement in English-Canadian fiction, 1919-1950." Thesis, McGill University, 2003. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=19471.
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This dissertation offers the first comprehensive examination of realism in English-Canadian fiction of the early twentieth century. It argues for the existence of a "modern-realist" movement that is Canada's unique and unacknowledged contribution to the collection of international movements that makes up literary modernism. This argument involves a detailed analysis of the aesthetics, aims, preoccupations, and techniques of the modern realists, a reexamination of the oeuvres of the movement's most prominent writers, and a critical reevaluation of the "modernity" of Canada's three most significant realist sub-genres—prairie realism, urban realism, and social realism. This study also provides a literary-historical overview of the movement as a whole, which begins with the inauguration of the Canadian Bookman in 1919, and concludes with the emergence of a contemporary Canadian fiction in the 1950s. The conclusions arrived at in this work are based upon a reading of dozens of novels and works of short fiction, many of them unpublished and/or critically neglected and forgotten. The findings in this study are also based on original research into archival materials from seven institutions across Canada.
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Stalla, Heidi. "Life is in the manuscript : Virginia Woolf, historiography, and the 'mythical method'." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:58e6f835-b776-4a87-bafd-f48525c11918.
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Virginia Woolf's writing is aesthetically complex, politically engaged, and remains relevant today - an astonishing achievement. This thesis begins by asking how and why this is the case, and thinks through Woolf's relationship to history as a means of suggesting some answers. References to the past abound in Woolf's fiction in the form of meaningful names, stories, myths, and national histories. I am especially interested in allusions that are not immediately obvious, but still work to convey something about human nature. These were sometimes inspired by artifacts in museums, or by articles in magazines or newspapers, or literature she owned, or borrowed, or was being written by her contemporaries - sources that a careful researcher can track down. Other references are more difficult to prove; for example, they may have come from travel experiences related by friends, or personal experiences not recorded in her diary. In this case we need to balance circumstantial evidence, common sense, and an understanding of the spirit and concerns of the age. In the first chapter I highlight Woolf's early interest in the tension between fact and fiction as it is expressed in her 1906 short story, "The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn". The chapter serves as way of demonstrating my process. I point out the interplay between form, content, and autobiography that is in her other work. In short, a good deal of what is imagined may have been inspired by personal experience and real historical material. The next three chapters reveal new character types and source material for Jacob's Room, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves - the novels in which Woolf worked out what I have called her "mythical method". I end by inviting scholars to reconsider tensions in her work such as fact and fiction, self and other, art and politics from a new angle: not only as thematic preoccupations but also as crucial to thinking of - to borrow from Gertrude Stein - composition as a form of explanation. Woolf's project in fiction was to figure out what modernism can and should do. Although it is not necessary for all readers to do the kind of research demonstrated here in order to understand the novels, having an awareness of this work is important. This new way of looking at how and why Woolf wrote both in and outside of time as part of the process of composition makes us think again about the reasons that we should care so much about "Mrs. Brown". It helps us appreciate that the project of conveying both the ephemeral and temporal qualities of human experience is what makes the study of literary modernism (and its current global, transnational forms) a dynamic, political, and expanding phenomenon today.
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Gasiorek, Andrew B. P. (Andrew Boguslaw Peter). "A crisis of metanarratives : realism and innovation in the contemporary English novel." Thesis, McGill University, 1990. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=74280.
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Critics of the English novel, arguing that it is underpinned by liberalism, frequently claim that the crisis of realism disclosed in the work of many contemporary writers derives from a concomitant crisis of liberalism. Liberalism's dissolution is thus seen to prefigure the death of the novel. This dissertation contends that realism cannot be equated with liberalism and that the contemporary crisis of representation signals a broader crisis of metanarratives.Focussing on selected novels of five post-war English novelists--B. S. Johnson, Doris Lessing, John Berger, Iris Murdoch, and Angus Wilson--I argue that their different responses to the crisis of representation show that it is not a crisis of liberalism alone. Johnson rejects realism for epistemological reasons; Lessing and Berger question it on political grounds; Murdoch and Wilson combine its strengths with a self-reflexive awareness of its weaknesses. I suggest that Murdoch's and Wilson's novels, which argue that fiction does not reflect reality but endows it with meaning and which are at once representational and metafictional, offer the most fruitful ways of acknowledging the crisis of representation while refusing to be paralyzed by it.
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Dixon, Marzena M. "The structure and rhetoric of twentieth-century British children's fantasy." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 1992. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/14858.
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This thesis discusses twentieth century children's fantasy fiction. The writers whose creative output is dealt with include Penelope Lively, Alan Garner, Susan Cooper, Pat O'Shea, Peter Dickinson, T.H.White, Lloyd Alexander and, to a lesser extent, C.S.Lewis and J.R.R.Tolkien. These authors have been chosen because their books, whilst being of a broadly similar nature, nevertheless have a sufficient diversity to illustrate well many different important aspects of children's fantasy. Chapter I examines the sources of modern fantasy, presents the attitudes of different authors towards borrowing from traditional sources and their reasons for doing so, and looks at the changing interpretation of myths. Chapter II talks about the presentation of the primary and secondary worlds and the ways in which they interact. It also discusses the characters' attitudes towards magic. Chapter III looks at the presentation of magic, examines the traditional fairy-tale conventions and their implementation in modern fantasies, and discusses the concepts of evil, time, and the laws governing fantasy worlds. Chapter IV deals with the methods of narration and the figure of the narrator. It presents briefly the prevailing plot patterns, discusses the use of different kinds of language, and the ideas of pan-determinism and prophecy. The concluding chapter considers the main subjects and aims of children's fantasy, the reasons why the genre is so popular, and its successes and failures.
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Sun, Christine Yunn-Yu. "The construction of "Chinese" cultural identity : English-language writing by Australian and other authors with Chinese ancestry." Monash University, School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics, 2004. http://arrow.monash.edu.au/hdl/1959.1/5438.
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Wong, Chi-keung Frederick, and 黃志強. "Postmodernism, drama, language: Waiting for Godot and Inadmissible evidence revisited." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 1994. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31951053.
Full textBooks on the topic "English literature – 20th century – History and criticism"
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Blamires, Harry. Twentieth-century English literature. 2nd ed. London: Macmillan Education, 1986.
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Martin, Dodsworth, ed. The Penguin history of literature. London: Penguin, 1994.
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P, Rama R., ed. Critical interactions: Reading 20th century literary texts. Jaipur, India: Pointer Publishers, 1992.
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Trudeau, Lawrence J. Twentieth-century literary criticism. Detroit, Mich: Gale, 2011.
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Wiszniowska, Marta. Studies in 20th century literary-cultural Britain. Warszawa: Wydawn. Uniwersytetu Kardynała Stefana Wyszyńskiego, 2011.
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S, Pathak R. Profiles in literary courage: Studies in English literature. Delhi: Academic Foundation, 1992.
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Todorov, Tzvetan. Literature and its theorists: A personal view of twentieth-century criticism. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1987.
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Miller, J. Hillis. Tropes, parables, performatives: Essays on twentieth-century literature. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.
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Miller, J. Hillis. Tropes, parables, performatives: Essays on twentieth-century literature. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990.
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Bernard, Bergonzi. The myth of modernism and twentieth century literature. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986.
Find full textBook chapters on the topic "English literature – 20th century – History and criticism"
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Haltrin-Khalturina, Elena V. "From the English Renaissance Literary History: Sherry, Puttenham, Spenser, and Shakespeare on Fictions." In “The History of Literature”: Non-scientific sources of a scientific genre, 132–58. A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.22455/978-5-9208-0684-0-132-158.
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A survey of academic histories of literature published in the 19th and 20th centuries in different countries reveals that, while thoroughly covering the English Renaissance poetics, the scholarship allows for a variety of views on Tudor literary theory and on what constitutes literary canon. Considering this variety of views, we also have to be aware of two different perspectives on the large body of literary art of the 16th-century: the present-day and the Elizabethan. Drawing on a substantial number of sources, we offer a general account of influential theoretical (poetological and rhetorical) works known in the 16th-century Great Britain, including those written in English. Also of note are educational treatises, “mirror” literature, and metaliterary comments withing literary works. Authors of those treatises used to interpret fiction as something feigned, counterfeit — an attitude informing ludic passages in Spenser and Shakespeare. Whereas the techniques of fashioning fictions by way of employing figures of feigned/counterfeit representation were addressed in detail by such critics as R. Sherry and G. Puttenham, the poets — Spenser and Shakespeare — seemed to be testing these techniques in practice. Our study pays particular attention to methods used by Spenser and Shakespeare when creating simulated, fictional reality.
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Ayers, David. "Literary criticism and cultural politics." In The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature, 379–95. Cambridge University Press, 2005. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/chol9780521820776.023.
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Vinogradov, Igor A. "“Taras Bulba” and Russian History of the 19th–20th Centuries." In Literary Process in Russia of the 18th–19th Centuries. Secular and Spiritual Literature. Issue 3, 97–168. A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.22455/lit.pr.2022-3-97-168.
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The article is devoted to the study of readers’ receptions of N.V. Gogol “Taras Bulba” in Russia. This work, imbued with a deep religious and patriotic intention, occupies such a significant place in Russian culture that the reviews of readers and critics, the assessments and interpretations of its researchers, dramatizations in the theater, opera and ballet, etc. allows to analyze not only history of the story’s existence, but also to trace the key moments of Russian life in the second half of the 19th–20th centuries. The interaction of the patriotic story’s spiritual lyricism with the contradictory socio-political processes of the era identifies the most significant features of the poetics of Gogol’s work. Enthusiastically received by contemporaries, including A.S. Pushkin, “Taras Bulba” was subsequently met with hostility from domestic liberalradical and Polish nationalist criticism. Continuing to be one of the favorite works of the domestic and foreign readers, the story after 1917 was removed from the Soviet school curriculum and again restored in rights only during the Great Patriotic War. The article presents a detailed analysis of the assessments and interpretations of “Taras Bulba” for more than a century and a half.
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France, Peter, and Kenneth Haynes. "Philosophy, History, and Travel Writing." In The Oxford History Of Literary Translation In English, 473–504. Oxford University PressOxford, 2006. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199246236.003.0011.
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Abstract The translation of non-fiction (a category invented in the nineteenth century and developed for the use of libraries) is represented in this chapter by philosophy, history, biography, political and social criticism, and the literature of travel and exploration, the last being a capacious genre, combining science with historical and philosophical reflections. Such works accounted for more than a third of the published translations in the years examined in Chapter 4, above, and they include several popular and critical successes, such as the several histories by Guizot or Humboldt’s Cosmos. The discussion of classical philosophy in this first section, emphasizing the influence of ideas, is meant to complement the discussion in Chapter 5, which treats classical works as literature; Lucretius is discussed in both places.
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Day, Gary. "F. R. Leavis: criticism and culture." In Literary Theory and Criticism, 130–39. Oxford University PressOxford, 2006. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199291335.003.0010.
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Abstract Why include F. R. Leavis in a history of criticism and theory? Because he was the most influential critic of his day. It is no exaggeration to say that, in a career spanning more than forty years, from the late 1920s to the mid-1970s, Leavis changed the perception of English literature and professionalized its study. Following T. S. Eliot’s lead, he redefined English poetry in terms of the seventeenth-century metaphysical tradition of John Donne rather than the nineteenth-century Romantic one of Wordsworth. In typically robust fashion, Leavis also proposed a ‘great tradition’ of novelists—Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad—that critics have often used as evidence for their claim that Leavis was a dogmatic figure with only a limited view of literature.
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Schoenfeldt, Michael. "Impractical criticism: close reading and the contingencies of history." In Texts and readers in the Age of Marvell, 17–32. Manchester University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.7228/manchester/9781526113894.003.0002.
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Over the last seventy years, the discipline of English literature has been marked by an unnecessary and largely counterproductive tension between aesthetics and history. For many politically oriented critics, aesthetics was either uninteresting or implicated in the elite practices they deliberately opposed. And for those who focused on aesthetics, history frequently seemed like a distraction from what made the work of art a special kind of utterance, separate from other modes of language. This chapter revisits some of the signal literary engagements in the latter half of the long twentieth century, in order to consider what has been accomplished, what we have left out, and where we may be going next. With reference to writers from Donne and Herbert to John Milton, the chapter suggests, finally, that our analyses have too frequently ignored the decidedly impractical pleasure that emerges from literary activity, and argues that by bringing our own pleasure out of the closet, we can begin to restore to literary criticism some of the visceral thrill that drew us to it in the first place.
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Russo, Daniel. "AN ALTERNATIVE SPELLING FOR ENGLISH: CONTEMPORARY APPROACHES AND SIMPLIFICATION CRITERIA." In JEZIK, KNJIŽEVNOST, ALTERNATIVE/LANGUAGE, LITERATURE, ALTERNATIVES - Jezička istraživanja, 313–28. Filozofski fakultet u Nišu, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.46630/jkaj.2022.19.
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The history of English spelling is characterised by periods of discontinuity and a slow and relentless shift from a phonemic orthography to a morphophonemic system. There have been two periods when spelling reform of the English language has attracted particular interest: the first was from the middle of the 16th to the middle of the 17th century, when a number of publications and dictionaries outlining proposals for reform were published; the second was between the 18th and early 20th centuries and linked to the development of phonetics as a science. For example, Noah Webster’s dictionary included an essay on the oddities of modern orthography and his proposals for reform (some of which would become hallmarks of American English spelling). The purpose of this study is to review proposals for English-language spelling reform since the 1950s – New Spelling, Regularised English, Spelling Reform 1, Cut Spelling, Shavian, Interspel, and the Petersonian English Alphabet – to identify their main common traits by highlighting the underlying ideas of simplification. All the models under consideration show a preference for a phonemic spelling system as an ideal in the direction of linguistic simplicity.
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Rogachewskaya, Marina S. "History of Fiction as the History of Human Consciousness (Based on D. Lodge’s Work “Consciousness and the Novel”)." In “The History of Literature”: Non-scientific sources of a scientific genre, 318–33. A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.22455/978-5-9208-0684-0-318-333.
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Fiction and the relevant conceptualizing academic discipline have been developing in parallel. Human consciousness is simultaneously a tool for understanding the world and its artistic representation and the object of human comprehension of our inner nature. Consciousness has been represented in fiction beginning from its perception as a material substance in the Middle Ages, through naming the emotions, expansion of the range of feelings depicted in the Renaissance literature, through the first-person narration and identification of the thought and the word, towards the discovery of the unconscious and the ways of its representation in the epoch of Modernism, and equation of the processes of consciousness and the principles of functioning of the artificial intelligence during the Postmodern period. Consciousness as a tool became an object of artistic discovery in the 20th century inspiring the emergence of the “novel of consciousness” genre. The English writer and critic D. Lodge in his work “Consciousness and the Novel” expounded the basic caveats about human consciousness, drawing attention to the contingence of fiction and science, as well as fiction and the history of its studies.
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Vozar, Thomas Matthew. "Conclusion." In Milton, Longinus, and the Sublime in the Seventeenth Century, 147–48. Oxford University PressOxford, 2023. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198875949.003.0006.
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Abstract The conclusion briefly reviews the book’s contributions to Milton criticism, classical reception studies, and the history of ideas. It highlights the bibliographical appendix, which supplies a study of copies of Longinus traced to seventeenth-century private libraries and documents the wide dissemination of several editions among various English book owners before the appearance of Boileau’s 1674 translation, and the textual appendix, which provides an edition of the Lansdowne Longinus, a previously unknown seventeenth-century English translation of the Peri hupsous discovered in a manuscript at the British Library. Finally, it gestures to the importance of Milton’s sublimity for his place in the canon of English literature.
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Bazaz, Abir. "A New Literature for a Naya Kashmir." In The Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures. Oxford University Press, 2023. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197647912.013.12.
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Abstract The history of Kashmiri literature from the 14th to the 20th centuries was shaped by its relations with cosmopolitan literatures (in Sanskrit, Persian, and English) and the political languages of antinomian religion. It is against this background of fluid relations between the vernacular and the cosmopolitan as well as the literary and the religious that a modern Kashmiri literature emerged in the early 20th century. The author does not intend in this chapter to offer a narrative of modern Kashmiri literature but to read a moment of transition in its history in order to delimit the horizon against which it can be read. This moment of transition is the shift from progressivism to modernism in modern Kashmiri poetry. The chapter turns to the tension between progressivism and modernism in Kashmiri poetry in order to draw out the persistence of the mystical as a theme in Kashmiri literature from the 14th century to the present. It contends that modernism in Kashmiri literature is marked by a turn to the existential-political ideas of premodern Kashmiri poetry, which reverses a trend toward materiality in Kashmiri progressive poetry in the 1940s and early 1950s. It argues that this shift toward a mystical modernism was catalyzed by political despair in Kashmir after the arrest of the popular Kashmiri nationalist leader Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah in 1953. The persistence of the theme of the mystical in modern Kashmiri literature can then be understood in relation to the political upheavals that gave rise to it.