Reading Graham Swift


Book Description

This collection of essays on Graham Swift’s fiction brings together the perspectives of renowned Swift scholars from around the world. Authors look at the swift’s oeuvre from different interpretative angles, combining a variety of critical and theoretical approaches. This book covers all of Swift’s fiction, including his novels and short stories; special emphasis, however, is on his most recent books. By approaching Swift’s work from a number of perspectives, the volume offers a synthetic overview of his literary output. In particular, it searches for thematic and formal continuities between his early and more recent fiction, and attempts to emphasize its new developments and interests.




Ethics and Trauma in Contemporary British Fiction


Book Description

Preliminary material /Editors Ethics and Trauma in Contemporary British Fiction -- INTRODUCTION /JEAN-MICHEL GANTEAU and SUSANA ONEGA -- READING TRAUMA IN PAT BARKER'S REGENERATION TRILOGY /LENA STEVEKER -- THE ETHICAL CLOCK OF TRAUMA IN EVA FIGES' WINTER JOURNEY /SILVIA PELLICER-ORTÍN -- “NOBODY'SMEAT”: REVISITING RAPE AND SEXUAL TRAUMA THROUGH ANGELA CARTER /CHARLEY BAKER -- “A NEW ALGEBRA”: THE POETICS AND ETHICS OF TRAUMA IN J.G. BALLARD'S THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION /JAKOB WINNBERG -- TRAUMA AS THE NEGATION OF AUTONOMY: MICHAEL MOORCOCK'S MOTHER LONDON /JEAN-MICHEL GANTEAU -- WHERE MADNESS LIES: HOLOCAUST REPRESENTATION AND THE ETHICS OF FORM IN MARTIN AMIS' TIME'S ARROW /MARÍA JESÚS MARTÍNEZ-ALFARO -- WORLDWAR II FICTION AND THE ETHICS OF TRAUMA /GERD BAYER -- A TERRIBLE BEAUTY: ETHICS, AESTHETICS AND THE TRAUMA OF GAYNESS IN ALAN HOLLINGHURST'S THE LINE OF BEAUTY /JOSÉ M. YEBRA -- “THE ETERNAL LOOP OF SELF-TORTURE”: ETHICS AND TRAUMA IN IANMCEWAN'S ATONEMENT /GEORGES LETISSIER -- CONJUNCTURES OF UNEASINESS: TRAUMA IN FAY WELDON'S THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY AND IN IAN MCEWAN'S ON CHESIL BEACH /ANGELA LOCATELLI -- REPRESENTING THE CHILD SOLDIER: TRAUMA, POSTCOLONIALISM AND ETHICS IN DELIA JARRETTMACAULEY'SMOSES, CITIZEN AND ME /ANNE WHITEHEAD -- THE TRAUMA PARADIGM AND THE ETHICS OF AFFECT IN JEANETTE WINTERSON'S THE STONE GODS /SUSANA ONEGA -- NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS /Editors Ethics and Trauma in Contemporary British Fiction -- INDEX /Editors Ethics and Trauma in Contemporary British Fiction.




Graham Swift


Book Description

This book offers an accessible critical introduction to the work of Graham Swift, one of Britain's most significant contemporary authors. Through detailed readings of his novels and short stories from The Sweet Shop Owner to The Light of Day, Daniel Lea lucidly addresses the key themes of history, loss, masculinity and ethical redemption, to present a fresh approach to Swift.




Trauma and Ethics in the Novels of Graham Swift


Book Description

This book offers a critical reading of the novels of Graham Swift in light of recent developments in literary theory and criticism. It shows how the novels elaborate an ethics of alterity by means of a detailed study of one of Swifts most persistent and fascinating yet all too often ignored concerns: the traumatic experience of reality. Swifts texts evoke the cultural pathologies of a nation (post-war Britain) and an era (modernity) through the narratives of individual characters who are struggling to come to terms with a traumatic personal and collective past. The author charts the entire trajectory of Swifts engagement with the perils, pitfalls and possibilities of navigating a post-traumatic condition, proceeding from an emphasis on denial in his early work, through an intense preoccupation with the demands of trauma in the middle-period novels (including Waterland), to a liberating insistence on regeneration and renewal in Last Orders and The Light of Day. By providing a w




Ethics in Culture


Book Description

Alongside the recent cultural turn in the humanities, there has been a noticeable return to ethical considerations. With regard to literature as well as other media, this has rekindled awareness of a tension, antagonism, or even disparity between ethics and aesthetics. This volume of articles takes a more systematic and cross-disciplinary approach to the widely mooted ethical turn in literature and other media than has been pursued so far. It brings together a wide range of critical perspectives from literary studies, media and cultural memory studies, and philosophy, tracing the complex and sometimes conflicting relationship between ethics and aesthetics in theoretical contexts and individual case studies as diverse as colonial architecture, nineteenth-century literary histories, and postmodern writing and art.




The Bloomsbury Companion to Holocaust Literature


Book Description

The Bloomsbury Companion to Holocaust Literature is a comprehensive reference resource including a wealth of critical material on a diverse range of topics within the literary study of Holocaust writing. At its centre is a series of specially commissioned essays by leading scholars within the field: these address genre-specific issues such as the question of biographical and historical truth in Holocaust testimony, as well as broader topics including the politics of Holocaust representation and the validity of comparative approaches to the Holocaust in literature and criticism. The volume includes a substantial section detailing new and emergent trends within the literary study of the Holocaust, a concise glossary of major critical terminology, and an annotated bibliography of relevant research material. Featuring original essays by: Victoria Aarons, Jenni Adams, Michael Bernard-Donals, Matthew Boswell, Stef Craps, Richard Crownshaw, Brett Ashley Kaplan and Fernando Herrero-Matoses, Adrienne Kertzer, Erin McGlothlin, David Miller, and Sue Vice.




Introduction to Ethical Literary Criticism


Book Description

This title is a thorough introduction to ethical literary criticism, defined as a critical methodology to interpret literature from the perspective of ethics, with the whole set of concepts and theories elucidated and textual analyses provided. While building on ideas from both western ethical criticism and the Chinese tradition of moral criticism, ethical literary criticism acts as a counterpoint to the former's lack of theoretical foundations and applicable methodologies and the latter's tendency to make subjective moral judgments. Developed into a coherent theoretical framework, it asserts the ethical nature and edifying function of literature and thereby seeks to highlight in the literary text the ethical relationship and moral order among human beings and within society in the historical context. Though provocative to a degree, the arguments and methodological toolbox used inject a unique ethical dimension into literary criticism and will help readers understand anew the ethical and social potency of literature. The book's theoretical elucidation, examples from practical criticism and introduction to key terminologies make this book an essential guide for students and general readers interested in ethical literary criticism and a valuable read for scholars of literary criticism, ethical criticism and literary theory.




Trauma and Romance in Contemporary British Literature


Book Description

"Drawing on a variety of theoretical approaches including trauma theory, psychoanalysis, genre theory, narrative theory, theories of temporality, cultural theory, and ethics, this book brings together trauma and romance, showing how romance strategies have become an essential component of trauma fiction in general and traumatic realism in particular"-- Provided by publisher.




Second World War in Contemporary British Fiction


Book Description

Focussing on the upsurge of interest in the Second World War in contemporary British novels, this monograph considers established writers, including Muriel Spark, Sarah Waters and Kazuo Ishiguro, as well as newer voices, such as Liz Jensen and Peter Ho Da




The 1980s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction


Book Description

How did social, cultural and political events in Britain during the 1980s shape contemporary British fiction? Setting the fiction squarely within the context of Conservative politics and questions about culture and national identity, this volume reveals how the decade associated with Thatcherism frames the work of Kazuo Ishiguro, Martin Amis, and Graham Swift, of Scottish novelists and new diasporic writers. How and why 1980s fiction is a response to particular psychological, social and economic pressures is explored in detail. Drawing on the rise of individualism and the birth of neo-liberalism, contributors reflect on the tense relations between 1980s politics and realism, and between elegy and satire. Noting the creation of a 'heritage industry' during the decade, the rise of the historical novel is also considered against broader cultural changes. Viewed from the perspective of more recent theorisations of crisis following both 9/11 and the 21st-century financial crash, this study makes sense of why and how writers of the 1980s constructed fictions in response to this decade's own set of fundamental crises.