A strange rift in ordinary reality draws saloon owner Travis Wilder and ER doctor Grace Beckett into the otherworld of Eldh--a land of gods, monsters, and magic that is sorely in need of heroes.
Author: Mark Anthony
Publisher: Spectra
ISBN: 9780307795403
Category: Fiction
Page: 640
View: 488
A strange rift in ordinary reality draws saloon owner Travis Wilder and ER doctor Grace Beckett into the otherworld of Eldh--a land of gods, monsters, and magic that is sorely in need of heroes.Set in Russia and New York during the early twentieth century and touching on the hallmarks of the Progressive Era—the Women’s Trade Union League, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911, anarchist and socialist movements, ...
Author: Elana Dykewomon
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 9781480434226
Category: Fiction
Page: 406
View: 126
Winner of the Lambda Literary Award: “A page-turner that brings to life turn-of-the-century New York’s Lower East Side.” —Library Journal Born in a Russian-Jewish settlement, Gutke Gurvich is a midwife who immigrates to New York’s Lower East Side with her partner, a woman passing as a man. Their story crosses with that of Chava Meyer, a girl who was attended by Gutke at her birth and was later orphaned during the Kishinev pogrom of 1903. Chava has come to America with the family of her cousin Rose, and the two girls begin working at fourteen. As they live through the oppression and tragedies of their time, Chava and Rose grow to become lovers—and search for a community they can truly call their own. Set in Russia and New York during the early twentieth century and touching on the hallmarks of the Progressive Era—the Women’s Trade Union League, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911, anarchist and socialist movements, women’s suffrage, anti-Semitism—Elana Dykewomon’s Beyond the Pale is a richly detailed and moving story, offering a glimpse into a world that is often overlooked. “A wonderful novel.” —Sarah WatersThe word “woman” barely escaped beyond-the-pale. (152) The spatial metaphor neatly captures the substance of the crisis unleashed by these women's autonomous formulation of needs and behaviours in the novel. For “beyond the pale” ...
Author: Roberto del Valle Alcalá
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781000750898
Category: Literary Criticism
Page: 152
View: 248
Contemporary Capitalism, Crisis, and the Politics of Fiction: Literature Beyond Fordism proposes a fresh approach to contemporary fictional engagements with the idea of crisis in capitalism and its various social and economic manifestations. The book investigates how late-twentieth and twenty-first-century Anglophone fiction has imagined, interpreted, and in most cases resisted, the collapse of the socio-economic structures built after the Second World War and their replacement with a presumably immaterial order of finance-led economic development. Through a series of detailed readings of the words of authors Martin Amis, Hari Kunzru, Don DeLillo, Zia Haider Rahman, John Lanchester, Paul Murray and Zadie Smith among others, this study sheds light on the embattled and decidedly unstable nature of contemporary capitalism.Considering the book's title, one would expect the time line to begin in 1900; but in fact it begins in 1782.1 This is one ... 3 William Trevor's “Beyond the Pale” and Bernard MacLaverty's Cal, both of which take place in the 1970s, ...
Author: Margaret Hallissy
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 9781611176636
Category: Literary Criticism
Page: 216
View: 597
In Understanding Contemporary Irish Fiction and Drama, Margaret Hallissy examines the work of a cross-section of important Irish writers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries who are representative of essential issues and themes in the canon of contemporary Irish literature. Included are early figures John Millington Synge and James Joyce; dramatists Brian Friel, Conor McPherson, and Tom Murphy; and prize-winning contemporary fiction writers such as Edna O’Brien, Joseph O’Connor, William Trevor, Roddy Doyle, and Colum McCann. Each chapter focuses on one significant representative piece of contemporary Irish fiction or drama by filling in its cultural, historical, and literary background. Hallissy identifies a key theme or key event in the Irish past essential to understanding the work. She then analyzes earlier literary compositions with the same theme and through a close reading of the contemporary work provides context for that background. The chapters are organized chronologically by relevant historical events, with thematic discussions interspersed. Background pieces were chosen for their places in Irish literature and the additional insight they provide into the featured works.... Dykewomon's Beyond the Pale (1997). Chava, Kathleen, and Rose Stewart all become labor activists in New York, organizing sweatshop workers to strike for better wages, shorter hours, and safe workplaces. Because both novels revolve ...
Author: Linda Garber
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9783030854171
Category: Literary Criticism
Page: 195
View: 280
Novel Approaches to Lesbian History tells a tale about history and community in our allegedly post-identity era, examining contemporary novels that depict lesbian characters in recognizable historical situations. These imaginative stories provide a politically vital, speculative past in the face of a sketchy, problematic archive. Among the memorable characters in some 200 novels are pirates, cowgirls, and famous artists, ghosts and time travellers, immigrants and lovers. The best lesbian historical novels are conscientious and buoyant as they engage critical historiographical questions, but Novel Approaches also discusses the class and race biases that weigh on the genre. Some lesbian historical novels are based on archival evidence, others on conjecture or fantasy, but all convey the true fact that identity is elusive without a past, without which its future is nearly impossible.corpus of work by taking up two novels narrated by Conrad's most famous bachelor narrator and by grouping these two ... The ''I'' of the bachelor, a masculine subject position that is at once both within and beyond the pale, ...
Author: Katherine V. Snyder
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781139426244
Category: Literary Criticism
Page:
View: 818
Katherine Snyder's study explores the significance of the bachelor narrator, a prevalent but little-recognised figure in premodernist and modernist fiction by male authors, including Hawthorne, James, Conrad, Ford and Fitzgerald. Snyder demonstrates that bachelors functioned in cultural and literary discourse as threshold figures who, by crossing the shifting, permeable boundaries of bourgeois domesticity, highlighted the limits of conventional masculinity. The very marginality of the figure, Snyder argues, effects a critique of gendered norms of manhood, while the symbolic function of marriage as a means of plot resolution is also made more complex by the presence of the single man. Bachelor figures made, moreover, an ideal narrative device for male authors who themselves occupied vexed cultural positions. By attending to the gendered identities and relations at issue in these narratives, Snyder's study discloses the aesthetic and political underpinnings of the traditional canon of English and American male modernism.Thus under the opprobrious terms 'romance' and 'novel' they include: the artificial, idealistic, and long out of ... the (old) novel appears as beyond the pale, appropriately relegated to the curious heap of surpassed cultural forms.
Author: Richard W. F. Kroll
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781317896005
Category: Literary Criticism
Page: 320
View: 680
The English Novel, Volume I:1700 to Fielding collects a series of previously-published essays on the early eighteenth-century novel in a single volume, reflecting the proliferation of theoretical approaches since the 1970s. The novel has been the object of some of the most exciting and important critical speculations, and the eighteenth-century novel has been at the centre of new approaches both to the novel and to the period between 1700 and 1750. Richard Kroll's introduction seeks to frame the contributions by reference to the most significant critical discussions. These include: the question of whether and how we can talk about the 'rise' of the novel; the vexed question of what might constitute a novel; the relationship between the novel and possibly competing genres such as history or the romance; the relationship between early male writers like Defoe and popular novels by women in the early eighteenth century; the general ideological role played by novels relative to eighteenth-century culture (are they means of ideological conscription or liberation?); poststructuralist analyses of identity and gender; and the emergence of sentimental and domestic codes after Richardson. Since the modern European novel is often thought to have been formed in this period, these debates have clear implications for students of the novel in general as well as for those interested in the early enlightenment. Headnotes place each essay within the map of these wider concerns, and the volume offers a useful further reading list. Taken as a whole, this collection encapsulates the state of criticism at the present moment.In this account, the deep substructure of novel is cultural, reaching beyond the protagonists. ... as well as the treatment of this material in her book Journeys beyond the Pale: Yiddish Travel Writing in the Modern World (Madison: ...
Author: Miriam Udel
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472053056
Category: Literary Criticism
Page: 267
View: 911
It was only when Jewish writers gave up on the lofty Enlightenment ideals of progress and improvement that the Yiddish novel could decisively enter modernity. Animating their fictions were a set of unheroic heroes who struck a precarious balance between sanguinity and irony that author Miriam Udel captures through the phrase “never better.” With this rhetorical homage toward the double-voiced utterances of Sholem Aleichem, Udel gestures at these characters’ insouciant proclamation that things had never been better, and their rueful, even despairing admission that things would probably never get better. The characters defined by this dual consciousness constitute a new kind of protagonist: a distinctively Jewish scapegrace whom Udel denominates the polit or refugee. Cousin to the Golden Age Spanish pícaro, the polit is a socially marginal figure who narrates his own story in discrete episodes, as if stringing beads on a narrative necklace. A deeply unsettled figure, the polit is allergic to sentimentality and even routine domesticity. His sequential misadventures point the way toward the heart of the picaresque, which Jewish authors refashion as a vehicle for modernism—not only in Yiddish, but also in German, Russian, English and Hebrew. Udel draws out the contours of the new Jewish picaresque by contrasting it against the nineteenth-century genre of progress epitomized by the Bildungsroman. While this book is grounded in modern Jewish literature, its implications stretch toward genre studies in connection with modernist fiction more generally. Udel lays out for a diverse readership concepts in the history and theory of the novel while also explicating the relevant particularities of Jewish literary culture. In addressing the literary stylistics of a “minor” modernism, this study illuminates how the adoption of a picaresque sensibility allowed minority authors to write simultaneously within and against the literary traditions of Europe.beyond the pale of civilization in Latin America . As a first - person narrator who provides a link between antithetical geographical and cultural extremes , and who effectively goes back in time , from the modern city to the cyclic ...
Author: Gordon Brotherston
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521214785
Category: Literary Criticism
Page: 180
View: 730
This survey concentrates on the modern novel of Spanish-speaking America. Dr Brotherston starts with a long and suggestive introduction on the general topic 'settings and people', showing the growth of a sense of Latin American identity in the fiction produced in the continent as a whole. There follow detailed studies of individual modern novels, taken as representative of their time, their author, their country and the continent. A conclusion surveys and sums up these themes. The analytical studies of important and representative novels, related to each other in theme and preoccupation, the substantial quotations (in English), the notes and the useful bibliography, make this a book which gives students and other readers a well-considered introduction to the Spanish American fiction of this century.