Desperate Storytelling demonstrates how writers from Byron to Saul Bellow have embraced Cervantes's vision of the artist as creative exile, born to tell tales of valor and nobility yet doomed to recognize the world's banal reality. Forced to portray adventure in a reductive voice, these writers have immersed heroism in madness and narrative in mockery. Their fictions reflect an awareness of life's absurdities, yet a refusal to forsake the ideal. Reassessing the post-Romantic literary consciousness, Roger B. Salomon explores the many permutations of the mock-heroic mode, the complex aesthetic instrument brought into being by Cervantes, one by which a writer takes on a dual role as both nostalgic creator and ironic critic. The mock hero is almost by definition an outdated one, aligning his deepest emotional attachments to dead mythologies and forgotten codes of ethics; he is an alienated figure in a landscape hostile to the possibility of any kind of attainment. Just as Don Quixote's noble madness in an ignoble age invites both sympathy and derision, so later incarnations of the mock hero immerse the reader in a dialogue between the real and a faded ideal, between the sensible and the admirable. Describing a literary mode that joins heroic endeavor with its deflating results, Desperate Storytelling traces the adventures of literature's misplaced heroes from Nabokov's Berlin to Saul Bellow's Chicago, from James Joyce's Dublin to Mark Twain's Mississippi.
In a compact, readable, and accessible book, Roger B. Salomon explores the nature of horror in literature and in life. Rather than minimizing horror by narrowly associating it with psychological drives, persecution, or extremism, he approaches horror through the medium of narrative as a significant and enduring physical and metaphysical reality. Salomon focuses on fictions of horror, including eighteenth-century Gothic and nineteenth-century ghost stories. He does not, however, isolate literary examples from more general human issues, including religious belief. Mazes of the Serpent takes up examples of horror from historical and personal narratives—including battle memoirs and Holocaust testimonies—as Salomon identifies certain common themes and qualities that cross the boundary between fiction and actual human experience.
Australian Books and Authors in the American Marketplace 1840s–1940s explores how Australian writers and their works were present in the United States before the mid twentieth century to a much greater degree than previously acknowledged. Drawing on fresh archival research and combining the approaches of literary criticism, print culture studies and book history, David Carter and Roger Osborne demonstrate that Australian writing was transnational long before the contemporary period. In mapping Australian literature’s connections to British and US markets, their research challenges established understandings of national, imperial and world literatures. Carter and Osborne examine how Australian authors, editors and publishers engaged productively with their American counterparts, and how American readers and reviewers responded to Australian works. They consider the role played by British publishers and agents in taking Australian writing to America, and how the international circulation of new literary genres created new opportunities for novelists to move between markets. Some of these writers, such as Christina Stead and Patrick White, remain household names; others who once enjoyed international fame, such as Dale Collins and Alice Grant Rosman, have been largely forgotten. The story of their books in America reveals how culture, commerce and copyright law interacted to create both opportunities and obstacles for Australian writers.
In a compact, readable, and accessible book, Roger B. Salomon explores the nature of horror in literature and in life. Rather than minimizing horror by narrowly associating it with psychological drives, persecution, or extremism, he approaches horror through the medium of narrative as a significant and enduring physical and metaphysical reality. Salomon focuses on fictions of horror, including eighteenth-century Gothic and nineteenth-century ghost stories. He does not, however, isolate literary examples from more general human issues, including religious belief. Mazes of the Serpent takes up examples of horror from historical and personal narratives—including battle memoirs and Holocaust testimonies—as Salomon identifies certain common themes and qualities that cross the boundary between fiction and actual human experience.
Desperate Storytelling demonstrates how writers from Byron to Saul Bellow have embraced Cervantes's vision of the artist as creative exile, born to tell tales of valor and nobility yet doomed to recognize the world's banal reality. Forced to portray adventure in a reductive voice, these writers have immersed heroism in madness and narrative in mockery. Their fictions reflect an awareness of life's absurdities, yet a refusal to forsake the ideal. Reassessing the post-Romantic literary consciousness, Roger B. Salomon explores the many permutations of the mock-heroic mode, the complex aesthetic instrument brought into being by Cervantes, one by which a writer takes on a dual role as both nostalgic creator and ironic critic. The mock hero is almost by definition an outdated one, aligning his deepest emotional attachments to dead mythologies and forgotten codes of ethics; he is an alienated figure in a landscape hostile to the possibility of any kind of attainment. Just as Don Quixote's noble madness in an ignoble age invites both sympathy and derision, so later incarnations of the mock hero immerse the reader in a dialogue between the real and a faded ideal, between the sensible and the admirable. Describing a literary mode that joins heroic endeavor with its deflating results, Desperate Storytelling traces the adventures of literature's misplaced heroes from Nabokov's Berlin to Saul Bellow's Chicago, from James Joyce's Dublin to Mark Twain's Mississippi.
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