Rebecca Colesworthy's Books

Returning the Gift

Modernism and the Thought of Exchange

By: Rebecca Colesworthy

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Returning the Gift

Modernism and the Thought of Exchange

By: Rebecca Colesworthy

From debates about reparations to the rise of the welfare state, the decades following World War I saw a widespread turn across disciplines to questions about the nature and role of gifts: What is a gift? What do gifts mean and do? Which individuals and institutions have the authority to give? Marshalling wide-ranging interdisciplinary research, Returning the Gift argues that these questions centrally shaped literary modernism. The book begins by revisiting the locus classicus of twentieth-century gift theory -- the French sociologist Marcel Mauss's 1925 essay, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. His title notwithstanding, the gift Mauss envisions is not primitive or pre-capitalist, but rather a distinctively modern phenomenon. Subsequent chapters offer sustained, nuanced readings of novels and nonfiction by Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Gertrude Stein, and H.D. from the 1920s to 1940s, underscoring the ways their writing is illuminated by contemporaneous developments in the social sciences, economics, and politics, while also making a case for their unique contributions to broader debates about gifts. Not only do these writers insist that literature is a special kind of gift, but they also pose challenges to the gift's feminization in the work of both their Victorian forebears and contemporary male theorists. Each of these writers uses tropes and narratives of giving -- of hospitality, sympathy, reciprocity, charity, genius, and kinship -- to imagine more egalitarian social possibilities under the conditions of the capitalist present. The language of the gift is not, as we might expect, a mark of hostility to the market so much as a means of giving form to the 'society' in market society -- of representing everyday experiences of exchange that the myth of the free market works, even now, to render unthinkable.

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Page Count

436

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0191084352

ISBN 13

9780191084355

Returning the Gift

Modernism and the Thought of Exchange

By: Rebecca Colesworthy

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Returning the Gift

Modernism and the Thought of Exchange

By: Rebecca Colesworthy

From debates about reparations to the rise of the welfare state, the decades following World War I saw a widespread turn across disciplines to questions about the nature and role of gifts: What is a gift? What do gifts mean and do? Which individuals and institutions have the authority to give? Marshalling wide-ranging interdisciplinary research, Returning the Gift argues that these questions centrally shaped literary modernism. The book begins by revisiting the locus classicus of twentieth-century gift theory — the French sociologist Marcel Mauss's 1925 essay, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. His title notwithstanding, the gift Mauss envisions is not primitive or pre-capitalist, but rather a distinctively modern phenomenon. Subsequent chapters offer sustained, nuanced readings of novels and nonfiction by Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Gertrude Stein, and H.D. from the 1920s to 1940s, underscoring the ways their writing is illuminated by contemporaneous developments in the social sciences, economics, and politics, while also making a case for their unique contributions to broader debates about gifts. Not only do these writers insist that literature is a special kind of gift, but they also pose challenges to the gift's feminization in the work of both their Victorian forebears and contemporary male theorists. Each of these writers uses tropes and narratives of giving — of hospitality, sympathy, reciprocity, charity, genius, and kinship — to imagine more egalitarian social possibilities under the conditions of the capitalist present. The language of the gift is not, as we might expect, a mark of hostility to the market so much as a means of giving form to the 'society' in market society — of representing everyday experiences of exchange that the myth of the free market works, even now, to render unthinkable.

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Page Count

282

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0191084344

ISBN 13

9780191084348

Unholy Trinity

State, Church, and Film in Mexico

By: Rebecca Janzen

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Unholy Trinity

State, Church, and Film in Mexico

By: Rebecca Janzen

Rebecca Janzen brings a unique applied understanding of religion to bear on analysis of Mexican cinema from the Golden Age of the 1930s onward. Unholy Trinity first examines canonical films like Emilio Fernández's María Candelaria and Río Escondido that mythologize Mexico's past, suggesting that religious imagery and symbols are used to negotiate the place of religion in a modernizing society. It next studies films of the 1970s, which use motifs of corruption and illicit sexuality to critique both church and state. Finally, an examination of films from the 1990s and 2000s, including Guita Schyfter's Novia que te vea, a film that portrays Mexico City's Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jewish communities in the twentieth century, and Carlos Carrera's controversial 2002 film El crimen del padre Amaro, argues that religious imagery—related to the Catholic Church, people's interpretations of Catholicism, and representations of Jewish communities in Mexico—allows the films to critically engage with Mexican politics, identity, and social issues.

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Page Count

213

Publisher

State University of New York Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1438485328

ISBN 13

9781438485324

The Young Rebecca

Writings of Rebecca West 1911-17

By: Rebecca West

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The Young Rebecca

Writings of Rebecca West 1911-17

By: Rebecca West

In 1916, when Rebecca West was not yet twenty-five years old, George Bernard Shaw wrote: 'Rebecca can handle a pen as brilliantly as ever I could and much more savagely.' These early writings, collected ehre for the first time, established Rebecca West's reputation as a brilliant journalist and a dedicated yet undogmatic feminist and socialist. From the age of nineteen, writing articles for The Freewoman, and later the Clarion, she displayed her characteristic fierce intelligence, her passion and her biting wit in articles on women's suffrage, imperialism, the Labour Party, and trade unionism as well as literature, religion, domesticity, men and crime. Whether reviewing the latest novel by H.G. Wells ('the sex obsession that lay clotted on Ann Veronica... like cold white sauce'), describing police brutality against suffragettes ('An Orgy of Disorder and Cruelty'), or arguing for better conditions for working women ('Women ought to understand that in submitting themselves to this swindle of underpayment, they are not only insulting themselves, but doing a deadly injury to the community'), she demonstrated again and again a characteristic fearlessness and a formidable grasp of events. Including a short story, 'Indissoluble Matrimony', which appeared in the historic first issue of Blast, and a biographical essay of great psychological penetration on the suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, this exhilerating collection introduces the early work of one of the most distinguished writers of our time and provides a portrait of a fascinating and turbulent period of British political and literary history.

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Page Count

402

Publisher

Virago Modern Classics

Published Date

ISBN 10

0860683184

ISBN 13

9780860683186

Book's by Rebecca Colesworthy

Returning the Gift

Returning the Gift

Returning the Gift

Returning the Gift

Unholy Trinity

Unholy Trinity

The Young Rebecca

The Young Rebecca

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