Litteraturstudier: skønlitteratur og forfattere

This book, first published in 1999, addresses Beckett's visual and musical sensibilities, and examines his visionary use of such diverse modes of creative expression as stage, radio, television and film, when his medium was the written word. The first section of the book focuses on music; the second part analyses the visual arts; and the third part examines film, radio and television. This book uncovers aspects of his thinking on, and use of the arts that have been little studied, including the nonfigurative function of music and art in Beckett's work; the 'collaborations' undertaken by composers, painters and choreographers with his texts; the relation of his literary to his visual and musical artistry; and his use of film, radio and television as innovative means and celebration of artistic process.

This book, first published in 2000, features analyses about and by some of the most important Russian writers of the 1980s, a period of great changes in the cultural life of Russia when the controls of Soviet communism gave way to a wide diversity of unfettered writing. A variety of critical approaches matches the diversity of Russian writers considered here. The book features David Bethea's theoretical discussion of the work of the outstanding critic and cholar Iurii Lotman and a fascinating extending interview with leading poet Ol'ga Sedakova. Several writers and works receive their first scholarly analyses in English, such as Sasha Sokolov's complex postmodern novel, Between Dog and Wolf, Elena Shvarts's poetry, and Zinovii Zinik's work. Aleksandr Zinov'ev's prose is subjected to a searching formal analysis. The book contains an essay on the literary environment of the Moscow poet Mikhail Aizenberg, and a highly controversial article that reviews Russian writing as an extension of imperialism. Writers who for various reasons fell into opprobrium during the 1980s include the Soviet village writers and the late Andrei Siniavskii (Abram Tertz). A survey of urban prose in the late 1980s looks into an uncertain future, while playwright Viktor Slavkin represents the best of contemporary Russian drama.

Nuclear Cultures: Irradiated Subjects, Aesthetics and Planetary Precarity aims to develop the field of nuclear humanities and the powerful ability of literary and cultural representations of science and catastrophe to shape the meaning of historic events.

Combining narratological and stylistic methods, this book theorizes dual narrative dynamics comprised of plot development and covert progression, and demonstrates the consequences for the interpretation of literary works.

A book of social commentary informed by the history of England. It forms an analysis of the problems of newly industrialized England both by invoking historical events and by dissecting contemporary issues.

This collection of essays reveals the dynamic role of the late Qing novel in the process of modernization of Chinese fiction.

Scraps, tags, figments of the United Empire Loyalist heritage dot the Ontario landscape. Something of Loyalism lies in the very Ontario air and pervades the imagination of its people. In Gardens, Covenants, Exiles, Dennis Duffy sets out to describe and analyse the effects of Loyalism on the literary culture of Ontario. He explores the enduring nature of an attitude of mind whose historical origins lie in the Loyalist settlements in the forests of Upper Canada. No single source can explain a culture's characteristic way of viewing moral, social, and literary matters. This study, however, reveals how one historical event and the mythology it engendered have helped to shape a province and its literature. The collective experience of the Loyalists underlies Ontario's view of the Canadian destiny. Their defeat, exile, endurance, and their final mastery of a new land confirmed their belief that their own destiny lay within a larger imperial framework. But they lived at the same time as both North Americans and monarchists, victims and founders, heroes and the dispossessed. Writers in this culture, faced with the declining importance of the British connection and the rising of American presence, were ill-prepared by their political and imaginative lives to comprehend the vision of an independent nation. In our own time this has led to a renewed sense of fall, to a disillusionment that contrasts sharply with the feeling of 'paradise regained; that pervaded an earlier era. The book is a study of dislocation, seen through vignettes of various authors and their writings: William Kirby's The Golden Dog, Major Richardson's Wacousta, Charles Mair's Tecumseh, and the Jalna series by Mazode la Roche. Contemporary analogues of the Loyalist habit of mind are pursued in the works of George Grant, Dennis Lee, Al Purdy, and Scott Symons: the journey returns to its Loyalist starting point, in pain, loss, and the sense of a vanished home.Loyalism, both as fact and as myth, is one of the cultural forces that has given Ontario its sense of place. Professor Duffy concludes that in some way the culture of Upper Canada/Ontario remains continuous, that it has kept faith with its origins. His study heightens our understanding of a nation's roots. 

When this work was first prepared for publication in 1949 the Notebooks and Collected Letters were still in manuscript, and many of the printed works, if not unavailable, were scarce. The continuing publication of Coleridge's works has not lessened the demand for a general introduction to Coleridge's mind and its workings. Selections from works including The Friend, Essays on His Own Times, Aids to Reflection, the Statesman's Manual, Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, and Table Talk, and from other lesser known works are arranged by topic. The subjects – psychology, education, language, logic and philosophy, literary criticism, the arts, science, society, religion and his contemporaries – reflect the astonishing range of Coleridge's intellectual interests. The revised edition of this anthology is still the best introduction to the prose works of an inquiring spirit.There is a fine introductory essay, and each section has an introduction of its own. The annotation is apt, and the index efficient. The whole book, in short, has been ordered with the distinction which is characteristic of Professor Coburn.

The Works of Mencius provides an admirable insight into one of the streams of thought of the Chinese. This new translation, especially arranged and annotated aims at rendering an Archaic Chinese original in a modern and unadorned prose.