The keyboard sonatas of Joseph Haydn

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Renée R. Curry

"Just as the cultural background of readers shapes how they respond to texts, the context in which writers live shapes what they write. When a context is dominant within a culture, the effects of that context upon an author may be taken for granted and thus overlooked. Race is a powerful factor in shaping literary works. Literature by black writers, for example, often reflects the experiences of African Americans. At the same time, though perhaps less obviously, literature by white writers may similarly reflect the experience of being white. This book argues that H.D., Elizabeth Bishop, and Sylvia Plath wrote from an unproclaimed dominant white perspective that becomes evident in their poetry. Loosely delineated, writing white constitutes writing authored from an acknowledged or unacknowledged white perspective; writing that implies or explicitly delivers the concept of whiteness to a text; writing that remains unconcerned with white racial politics internal and external to the text; and writing that uses the word white to maintain ideological systems of mastery and dichotomy. This book examines numerous poems in terms of whiteness. Each chapter places one poet in the larger context of historical and cultural racial events prevalent during the time of her writing and explores the particular poems created and published during that period." -- Amazon.com

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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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Sherryll S. Mleynek

"Aristotle identifies "the transformation from ignorance to knowledge," or anagnorisis, as crucial to dramatic tension. Using the Biblical "garden" as the locus classicus of anagnorisis in Western narrative fiction, this study establishes the connection between knowledge and mortality in Genesis, and analyzes anagnorisis and mortality in three nineteenth-century British novels, Middlemarch, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and Pride and Prejudice, and in the "post-modern" novel Possession. Ultimately, it is a proof that the suffusing literary motif of "knowledge and mortality" is inescapable: it transcends fictional genre and period because the "knowledge of mortality" is humanity's most ontologically disturbing burden."--BOOK JACKET.

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Aijun Zhu

This book deconstructs the controversy of globally located Chinese women authors, including Maxine Hong Kingston (America), Wei Hui (Mainland China), Li Ang (Taiwan), and Li Bihua (Hong Kong). It vividly shows how these authors are trapped in a dilemma between feminism, nationalism, and neocolonialism complicated by the powerful influences of global popular culture. This book not only engages in the much debated major issues such as gender, nation, narration and globalization, but more profoundly, it also points out the cultural and political significance of literary and cultural criticism, a much neglected area of research. The author's detailed examination of Chinese nationalism from the perspectives of gender and globalization shows her sharp awareness of the changing geopolitical mapping of Chineseness. Critics of Chinese literature and culture will benefit from this work in this era of social and political changes.