Though central to contemporary debates over identity, politics, and culture, the concept of tradition often remains unexamined. In a series of readings that transgress cultural and disciplinary boundaries, Daniel Cottom subjects this concept to close scrutiny. He calls into question conventional accounts of tradition, with their reliance on standard oppositions between dogma and reason, animality and humanity, community and society, religion and science, and modernity and its predecessors. Tradition, as Cottom envisions it, is a complex of cultural forces that moves, divides, and undoes those it touches; it ravishes, is ravished, and is centrally etched with acts of ravishment. Engaging writers from William Shakespeare to John Ashbery and from Phillis Wheatley to Antonin Artaud, Cottom examines literary history within the contexts of war, rape, and slavery; education, technology, and sexuality; repetition, imitation, stereotypy, and travesty; censorship, grief, and ecstasy. He also evaluates the work of various theorists who address questions of tradition, such as Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, and Adrienne Rich. Cottom draws on works in social and cultural history as well as on literary texts from different eras, nations, and genres. At once using and critiquing contemporary literary and cultural theory, this eloquent book shows why tradition continues to be of compelling interest and importance.

An examination of two influential women writers in the mid-nineteenth century which challenges many common assumptions about the development of the Russian literary tradition

The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges is undoubtedly one of the defining voices of our age. Since the Second World War, his work has had an enormous impact on generations of writers, philosophers, and literary theorists. This guide offers a close reading of ten of Borges' greatest short stories, seeking to bring out the logic that has made his work so influential. The main section of the guide offers an analysis of such key terms in Borges' work as "labyrinth" and the "infinite" and analyzes Borges' particular narrative strategies. This guide also sets Borges' work within its wider literary, cultural and intellectual contexts and provides an annotated guide to both scholarly and popular responses to his work to assist further reading.

DIVA contribution to understanding life in Imperial Russia through the work of contemporary women journalists./div

The sites of inspiration documented in this book range from nineteenth century linguistic theory to postmodern strategies of conceptual writing, encompassing well known instances of modernist poetics (Mallarmé, Pound, Olson) alongside obscure but revealing figures like Otto Nebel and Henri-Martin Barzun.

Suppose that, before he is writing fiction, before he is writing drama, before he is writing any of the autonomous, highly polished pieces that make up his life work, Beckett is writing Beckett. What follows from this? In Beckett Writing Beckett, H. Porter Abbott argues that, by the time he had written Waiting for Godot, Beckett's art had crystallized as a life project keyed to the simultaneous action of writing and reading the self. How does such an interpretive shift change the way we see the salient features of Beckett's art: his extraordinary and persistent assaults on narrative, his restless exploration of genres and media, his attempts to exercise autocratic control over performance and publication, his increasingly musical formal structures, his tireless capacity to invent? How, moreover, does this view relate to the contempt for autobiography so pervasive in Beckett's work? In approaching these questions, Abbott seeks to redirect current discussion of such concepts as "the author" and "originality". Arguing on several widely contested fronts in Beckett criticism, including such vexed issues as Beckett's postmodernism, his politics, and his relation to his audience, Abbott develops an interpretive method grounded in the concept of "autographical action". The method allows Abbott to articulate the centrality of the inexhaustible strangeness of Beckett's work, and to do so without robbing that strangeness of its power to surprise.

"Marley was dead, to begin with." Why does the most beloved of Christmas books open with a death? What has death to do with Christmas and New Years, and with Dickens's Christmas books and stories over his entire life? This book starts at the Paris Morgue and takes Dickens through his Christmas experiences from childhood and beyond, his celebrations of the season, and the sorrows that he often reviews in the New Year. Robert L. Patten weaves together Dickens's life, career, writings, journalism, travel, theatrical presentations, and religious convictions to offer a richly designed and entertaining narrative, fulsomely illustrated, of the manifold ways Dickens figures the spirit and traditions of the winter holidays in Victorian England. Both the gothic of ghosts and retribution and what he saw as the grotesque of lower-class enjoyment surface importantly in Dickens's fantasies. This volume discloses many hitherto overlooked connections between Dickens's writings and life and arrives at some surprising conclusions about Dickens's imagination, understanding of the conditions and meaning of Christian life, and the failures of British society to meet the pressing needs of its people. Not only does it address the public reception of these writings; it also tracks the responses and understandings of Dickens's illustrators, friends who found novel ways of telling, and mis-telling, the stories.