Skeptical Selves

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Frederick J. Marker, Christopher Innes

This collection of essays, drawn from scholarship over the last forty years, explores the drama of four of the most influential proponents of modernism in European drama: Ibsen, Strindberg, Pirandello, and Beckett. Although there are other dramatists who also contributed to Modernism, these four illustrate widely different and contrasting aspects of the movement. Since discussions of Modernism are generally restricted to poetry, novels, or the fine arts (painting, sculpture), examining theatre from this perspective covers new ground.

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Kevin J.H. Dettmar

The literary world has in the past two decades celebrated the centenaries of Joyce, Eliot, and Pound, the three pillars of Anglo-American modernism. Only now, Kevin J.H. Dettmar contends, are we starting to appreciate "what was apparent to the Modernists all along - that the monuments of High Modernism already contained within them the seeds of their own de(con)struction." The contributors to Rereading the New: A Backward Glance at Modernism argue that we are in the midst of a critical paradigm shift. First literary critics greeted the birth of modernism with outrage, decrying its anarchy; then the New Critics sought to control it with interpretation. Today, critics are beginning to rediscover modernism's inherent anarchy, this time from the postmodernist perspective. The result is the emergence of a new way of reading - and writing about - modernism. The book collects essays by established scholars as well as fresh new voices that provide a variety of perspectives on modernism. The first section, "Inventing Modernism," shows how modernist writers worked together to craft a coherent identity; the second, "Modernist Aesthetics," critiques Lyotard and other theorists on the assumptions underlying modernist texts. In "Modernism and Mass Culture," we see how Stein, Lawrence, and Eliot reacted to a burgeoning mass culture, while "Rereading the New" provides postmodernist readings of Conrad, Woolf, and Djuna Barnes, as well as Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.

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Christopher Palmer

"Philip K. Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern examines a wide range of Dick's work, including his short stories and posthumously published realist novels. Christopher Palmer analyses the puzzling and dazzling effects of Dick's fiction, and argues that at its heart is a clash between exhilarating possibilities of transformation, and a frightening lack of ethical certainties. Dick's work is seen as the inscription of his own historical predicament, the clash between humanism and postmodernism being played out in the complex forms of the fiction. The problem is never resolved, but Dick's ways of imagining it become steadily more ingenious and challenging."--BOOK JACKET.

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Daniel Muñoz Sempere, Gregorio Alonso García (eds

"Desde toreros hasta dramaturgos, curas y buscavidas, literatos y científicos ... Así de variopinto fue el grupo de españoles que se embarcó rumbo a Londres tras la contrarrevolución fernandina y el comienzo de la Década Ominosa (1814 y 1823). Este libro ofrece una visión panorámica de sus trayectorias vitales centrándose en sus andanzas en la capital del imperio británico en el primer tercio del siglo XIX. El rasgo común a todos ellos fue su amor a la libertad, entendida como rechazo frontal al despotismo y la defensa de las medidas liberales que se recogían en la Constitución de Cádiz de 1812"--Page 4 of cover.