Mapping the fiction of Cristina Fernández Cubas

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Nigel Harkness

"Whereas the centrality of femininity to nineteenth-century French fiction has been the focus of widespread critical attention, masculinity has, until recently, received little sustained treatment in either the literary or socio-historical domains. In this book, Nigel Harkness uses the fiction of George Sand (1804-76), the pre-eminent woman writer of the period, to explore questions of masculinity as they pertain to the nineteenth-century French novel, and to map out new approaches to the study of literary masculinity." "Drawing on contemporary theories of gender and narrative, Harkness reveals how Sand's novels repeatedly focus on a nexus of language, masculinity and power, in which narrative is both a vehicle for the expression of manhood, and a site where masculinity is discursively performed. Masculinity is thus reconfigured in Sand's fiction as an identity constituted as much through words as through actions. Analysis of these performances of masculinity offers fresh insights into gendered processes of literary representation in the nineteenth-century French novel."--Jacket.

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Jana Evans Braziel

"By exploring the breadth of Jamaica Kincaid's writings, this book reveals her work's transmutations of genre, specifically those of autobiography, biography, and history in relation to the forces of creation and destruction in the Caribbean. Jana Evans Braziel examines Kincaid's preoccupation with genealogy, genesis, and genocide in the Caribbean; her adaptations of biblical texts for her literary oeuvre; and her authorial deployments of the diabolic as frames for both rethinking the boundaries of genre and altering notions of subjectivity, objectivity, self, and other." --Book Jacket.

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Paul Debreczeny

This study of the effect of literature on readers, both as individuals and as members of social groups, focuses on Russia's national poet, Alexander Pushkin, as a model for investigating the aesthetic and social functions of literature. The individual reader's response to the literary text is demonstrated in Part One through a broad range of memoirs, diaries, and correspondences in which Russian readers recorded their reactions to Pushkin. Part Two exposes the extent to which individuals' aesthetic responses are conditioned by their social environment. The aura surrounding the personality of an author is the subject of Part Three, in which the author shows how Pushkin's death in a duel with a foreigner contributed to his emergence as a symbol of the Russian nation, and how deep-seated anxiety about national identity gave rise to the Pushkin myth and to the canonization of the poet as martyr. Throughout the book, theoretical arguments are buttressed by close readings of Pushkin's works, especially The Prisoner of the Caucasus, Eugene Onegin, Poltava, Egyptian Nights, and several lyric poems.

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James Ferguson

This comprehensive overview of William Faulkner's short fiction is a systematic study of this body of work, which Faulkner produced over a period of forty years. The author examines Faulkner's struggle to master the special problems posed by the genre. The book is organized topically. A chronological survey of Faulkner's career as a writer of short fiction is followed by chapters devoted to aspects of Faulkner's craft: thematic patterns, points of view, and other technical and formal patterns. The author offers a frank assessment of Faulkner's failures and successes as a writer of short fiction.