In her analysis of the South African novelist J. M. Coetzee's literary and intellectual career, Jane Poyner illuminates the author's abiding preoccupation with what Poyner calls the "paradox of postcolonial authorship". Writers of conscience or conscience-stricken writers of the kind Coetzee portrays, whilst striving symbolically to bring the stories of the marginal and the oppressed to light, always risk reimposing the very authority they seek to challenge. From Dusklands to Diary of a Bad Year, Poyner traces how Coetzee rehearses and revises his understanding of the ethics of intellectualism in parallel with the emergence of the "new South Africa". She contends that Coetzee's modernist aesthetics facilitate a more exacting critique of the problems that encumber postcolonial authorship, including the authority it necessarily engenders. Poyner is attentive to the ways Coetzee's writing addresses the writer's proper role with respect to the changing ethical demands of contemporary political life. Theoretically sophisticated and accessible, her book is a major contribution to our understanding of the Nobel Laureate and to postcolonial studies.
Informed by theories of the visual, knowledge and desire, The Postcolonial Eye is about the 'eye' and the 'I' in contemporary Australian scenes of race. Specifically, it is about seeing, where vision is taken to be subjective and shaped by desire, and about knowing one another across the cultural divide between white and Indigenous Australia. Writing against current moves to erase this divide and to obscure difference, Alison Ravenscroft stresses that modern Indigenous cultures can be profoundly, even bewilderingly, strange and at times unknowable within the terms of 'white' cultural forms. She argues for a different ethics of looking, in particular, for aesthetic practices that allow Indigenous cultural products, especially in the literary arts, to retain their strangeness in the eyes of a white subject. The specificity of her subject matter allows Ravenscroft to deal with the broad issues of postcolonial theory and race and ethnicity without generalising. This specificity is made visible in, for example, Ravenscroft's treatment of the figuring of white desire in Aboriginal fiction, film and life-stories, and in her treatment of contemporary Indigenous cultural practices. While it is located in Australian Studies, Ravenscroft's book, in its rigorous interrogation of the dynamics of race and whiteness and engagement with European and American literature and criticism, has far-reaching implications for understanding the important question of race and vision.
Oliver Lovesey examines the conundrum of the postcolonial intellectual, a central yet critically overlooked figure in the postcolonial project. He focuses on Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o within his cultural, historical, and intellectual contexts, primarily with respect to his non-fictional prose writings, including his neglected early journalism and his most recent autobiographical and theoretical work. Lovesey argues for Ngũgĩ’s position as a major postcolonial theorist who helped establish postcolonial studies.
Contributing an original dimension to the study of women in 16th-century England, this pioneering work examines the largest corpus of women’s private writings available: their wills. Through an intensive analysis of more than 1200 wills, women from all parts of the country and all strata of society are revealed as articulate, opportunistic, and capable individuals who, despite legal and cultural limitations, exercised authority over their own lives and influenced the lives of their heirs after their death.
In Paise of the First Edition... `Essential reading for therapists, counsellors, supervisors, trainers and health care workers... It is a book which will help us all to guard the high professional and ethical standards to which responsible workers aspire, and which all our clients are entitled to expect' - British Journal of Guidance & Counselling `Highly recommended. Essential on every counselling course reading list as well as on counsellors' own bookshelves' - Counselling, The Journal of the British Association for Counselling This highly acclaimed guide to the major responsibilities which trainees and counsellors in practice must be aware of be
The Single Homemaker and Material Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century represents a new synthesis of gender history and material culture studies. It seeks to analyse the lives and cultural expression of single men and women from 1650 to 1850 within the main focus of domestic activity, the home. Whilst there is much scholarly interest in singleness and a raft of literature on the construction and apprehension of the home, no other book has sought to bring these discrete studies together. Similarly, scholarly work has been limited in evaluating gendered consumption practices during the long eighteenth century because of an emphasis on the homes of families. Analysing the practices of single people emphasises the differences, but also amplifies the similarities, in their strategies of domestic life.
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