Joyce, imperialism, & postcolonialism

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John A. Ochoa

"Going beyond the simple narrative of self-defeat, this book presents a model of failure as a source of knowledge and renewed self-awareness. Studying the relationship between national identity and failure, John Ochoa revisits the foundational texts of Mexican intellectual and literary history, the "national monuments," and offers a new vision of the pivotal events that echo throughout Mexican aesthetics and politics."--BOOK JACKET.

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Steven J. Belluscio

"Explores the challenges of subjective passing narratives written during the height of literary realism. Discusses racial and ethnic differences, assimilation, passing, and identity by comparing African-American narratives of James Johnson, Nella Larson, and George Schuyler and "white" ethnic (Jewish-American and Italian-American) narratives by Mary Antin, Anzia Yezierska, and Guido d'Agostino"--Provided by publisher.

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Peggy Fitzhugh Johnstone

George Eliot has been widely praised both for the richness of her prose and the universality of her themes. In this compelling study, Peggy Fitzhugh Johnstone goes beyond these traditional foci to examine the role of aggression in Eliot's fiction and to find its source in the author's unconscious sense of loss stemming from traumatic family separations and deaths during her childhood and adolescence. Johnstone demonstrates that Eliot's creative work was a constructive response to her sense of loss and that the repeating patterns in her novels reflect the process of release from her state of mourning for lost loved ones. How then does Eliot's internalized aggression, rooted in her early life, find its way into her characters? How and why is it, in turn, denied by the author? And finally, how does the process of writing fiction help resolve it? Eliot's inner rage, Johnstone argues, was transformed into works of art and gradually dissipated as she developed her creative gifts and finally achieved her sense of identity as an artist. The Transformation of Rage explores the connections between self-disorder and aggression, anxiety and creativity, and narcissism and mourning in the full range of Eliot's novels - Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Romola, Felix Holt, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda. It will appeal to a broad audience, including those interested in the nineteenth-century British novel, the life and work of George Eliot, and the interdisciplinary study of literature and psychoanalysis.

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Pin-chia Feng

This study traces the textual construction of identity in the female Bildungsroman of Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston. Deploying the "politics of rememory" in their textual representation of female development, Morrison and Kingston unearth the multiple layers of repressed memories, including personal stories, specific cultural history, and racial experiences of African- and Asian-American women. This book analyzes the working through of repressed memories in Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Sula, and Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior and China Men. The gap between Bildung and anti-Bildung in these texts highlights the multiple oppression faced by women of color and interrogates the established standards and value system of the hegemonic culture.