Reading myth

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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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J. Douglas Kneale

Often Regarded as a turning point in literary history, Romanticism is the period when writers such as Wordsworth and Coleridge renounced the common legacy of poets and sought to create a new literature. Despite their emphasis on originality, genius, and spontaneity, the first-generation Romantics manifested a highly intertextual style that, while repressing certain classical and neoclassical literary conventions, revealed a deep dependence on those same rhetorical practices. Combining original and close readings of the texts with a larger sweep of genre studies, Douglas Kneale brings to light new and unexpected convergences in the Romantic tradition.

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Christopher Fox and Brenda Tooley

Walking Naboth's Vineyard brings together nine prominent scholars to present new and valuable perspectives on the work of Jonathan Swift. In recent years Swift has been increasingly reconsidered and recast as a distinctly Irish writer, and there is little doubt that his artistic career was shaped by Ireland's troubled political life. Literary critics and scholars, as well as scholars of Irish literature, will find this collection unique in that it explores Swift's life and writing in a distinctively Irish context and considers how Swift was influenced as a member of a population that was divided against itself, colonized by a neighboring kingdom, and politically and culturally marginalized. These essays demonstrate how, despite Swift's ambivalence about his Irish nationality, he found Ireland's worldly position a close parallel to his own complex position in the political and cultural worlds in which he lived.

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edited and with introductions by Susan Wood

A collection of twenty-four essays concerned with writing in general, the field of fantasy and science fiction, and with the author's own writing.