Brill Academic Pub

Ellie Ragland-Sullivan

Mary E. Ragland

A Psychological Approach to Literary Character

Rabelais and Panurge

Annual Colloquium in Nineteenth-Century French Studies

The result of interdisciplinary collaboration rarely undertaken in such a systematic manner.Confrontations brings together literary critics, historians, and art historians to reflect on a cluster of themes inspired by the commemoration of the centenary of the Dreyfus Affair. From literary expressions of revolt in all its excess — and nuance — to the complexities of political confrontations illuminated by analyses of “J'Accuse...!”, this book explores the tensions and dissent kindled throughout the century by rhetorical, artistic, and political audaciousness. These essays invite the reconsideration of diverse forms of opposition, repression, and resistance, from the most blatant to the most subtle, as expressed through a variety of objects: word, act, and image become political gestures, just as politics is inspired by artistic and literary creation. After examining diverse forms of textual negotiation, the book explores acts of defiance and concludes with a discussion of a range of polemics, including but not limited to the Dreyfus Affair. This volume represents a reference source rich in new perspectives on the emblematic controversies of the nineteenth century —, literary, artistic, social, and political.

Politics and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-century France : Selected Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth Annual Colloquium in Nineteenth-Century French Studies, The Pennsylvania State University, State College PA, 22-25 October 1998

Confrontations

The Documentary Impulse in French Literature

Ethnography in French Literature

Historical Figures in French Literature

Louis Wirth Marvick

Poetry and music have seldom been more closely associated than at the end of the nineteenth century, and the texts in which Baudelaire and Wagner, Mallarmé and Scriabin, Maeterlinck and Debussy evoked the reader's and the listener's states of mind are unusually rich in suggestion. Can poetry combine, as music seems to do, the transcendent satisfaction of an all-inclusive viewpoint with the excitement and uncertainty of an unfolding narrative? Can it partake of music's power in order to give a face to the idea, and substitute, without disappointing, a definite variation for the ineffable theme? Symbolist writers intent on achieving musical effects in words looked for ways to overcome the hard division of subjects at the foundation of language, and the strategies they invented, while not always successful, show their supreme expectations concerning the receptive capability of their audience and an unqualified belief in the transforming power of their art. Students of aesthetics, of French and comparative literature should find something of interest in this provocative and original book. For ease of reference, a detailed abstract of the contents is provided, along with English translations of all quotations in other languages.

A Study in the Musical Context of Symbolist Poetics

Waking the Face that No One is

Brian Joseph Levy

This book offers a close analysis of the Old French fabliaux, that medieval corpus of short comic tales in narrative verse celebrated (sometimes notorious) for their irreverence and sexual content. It picks out certain key images - such as gambling, illness, and damnation - which develop into themes and motifs running through all the texts, and which add layers of ironic patterning to the essential subject-matter and narrative of each fabliau. These elements, in many respects the 'small print' of the joke, furnish the comic text with many rhythms and echoes, all contributing to the ludic, adversarial nature of the text. They are extremely flexible, serving as a rhetoric of depiction that extends from broad comic motif to the lightest triggering of a mocking smile. This volume will be of interest to all students of medieval culture, Old French literature, and the development of the short or comic narrative.

Patterns and Images in the Old French Fabliaux

The Comic Text

Contemporary Western societies are currently witness to a crisis of masculinity but also to an intriguing diversification of images of masculinity. Once relatively stable regimes of masculine gender representation appear to have been replaced by a wider spectrum of varieties of masculine lifestyles taken up by the media and the market, to produce new and immensely flexible forms consumerised gender hegemony. The essays in Subverting Masculinity concentrate on contemporary film, literature and diverse forms of popular culture. The essays show that the subversion of traditional images of masculinity is both a source of gender contestation, but may equally be susceptible to assimilation by new hegemonic configurations of masculinity. Subverting Masculinity maps out the ongoing relevance of gender politics in contemporary culture, but also raises the question of increasingly unclear distinctions between hegemonic and subversive versions of masculinity in contemporary cultural production. Subverting Masculinity will be of interest to students and teachers of gender, cultural, film and literary studies. cultural articulations of gender relations in modern society. The series publishes searching and challenging work in current gender studies combining an interdisciplinary approach with a rigorous critique of various cultural media and their modes of production and consumption. Publications interrogate the cultural forms which articulate, legitimise, construct, contest or transform gender configurations in the modern age.

Hegemonic and Alternative Versions of Masculinity in Contemporary Culture

Subverting Masculinity

French Literature In/and the City

Phillip Winn

le héros fin de sexe

Sexualités décadentes chez Jean Lorrain

From the contents: Memory and dream in Nabokov's short fiction (B. Wyllie). - Nabokov's approach to the supernatural in the early stories (J.W. Connoly). - Nabokov's Christmas stories (R.H.W. Dillard). - Art and marriage in Vladimir Nabokov's Music and in Lev Tolstoy's The Kreutzer sonata (N.W. Balestrini). - How they brought the bad news to Mints: Breaking the news (S.G. Kellman). - Alone in the void: Mademoiselle O (J.E. Rivers). - Nabokov's Vasily Shishkov: an author-text interpretation (M.D. Shrayer). - Ville scripts: games of double-crossing in Vladimir Nabokov's The assistant producer (C. Moraru).

The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

Torpid Smoke

Patrick Bridgwater

Kafka, Gothic and Fairytale is an original comparative study of the novels and some of the related shorter punishment fantasies in terms of their relationship to the Gothic and fairytale conventions. It is an absorbing subject and one which, while keeping to the basic facts of his life, mind-set and literary method, shows Kafka's work in a genuinely new light. The contradiction between his persona with its love of fairytale and his shadow with its affinity with Gothic is reflected in his work, which is both Gothic and other than Gothic, both fairytale-like and the every denial of fairytale. Important subtexts of the book are the close connexion between Gothic and fairytale and between both of these and the dream. German text is quoted in translation unless the emphasis is on the meaning of individual words or phrases, in which case the words in question are quoted and their English meanings discussed. This means that readers without German can, for the first time, begin to understand the underlying ambiguity of Kafka's major fictions. The book is addressed to all who are interested in the meaning of his work and its place in literary history, but also to the many readers in the English and German-speaking worlds who share the author's enthusiasm for Gothic and fairytale.

Kafka, Gothic and Fairytale

Brill Academic Pub

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