Baroque Fictions

Author : Margaret Elizabeth Colvin
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9401202222
Total Pages : 177 pages
Book Rating : 4.20/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Baroque Fictions written by Margaret Elizabeth Colvin and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is the first in-depth study of the French novelist Marguerite Yourcenar’s fiction to contend that the author’s texts exhibit in unexpected ways numerous characteristics of the neobaroque. This subversive, postmodern aesthetic privileges extravagant artistic play, flux, and heterogeneity. In demonstrating the affinity of Yourcenar’s texts with the neobaroque, the author of this study casts doubt on their presumed transparency and stability, qualities associated with the French neoclassical tradition of the past century, where the Yourcenarian œuvre is most often placed. Yourcenar’s election to the prestigious, tradition-bound French Academy in 1981 as its first female “immortal” cemented her already well-established niche in the twentieth-century French literary pantheon. A self-taught classicist, historian, and modern-day French moralist, Yourcenar has been praised for her polished, “classical” style and analyzed for her use of myth and universal themes. While those factors at first seem to justify amply the neoclassical label by which Yourcenar is most widely recognized, this study’s close reading of four of her fictions reveals instead the texts’ opacity and subversive resistance to closure, their rejection of stable interpretations, and their deconstruction of postmodern Grand Narratives. Theirs is a neobaroque “logic,” which stresses the absence of theoretical assurances and the limitations of reason. The coincidence of the new millennium — which in so many ways reflects Yourcenar’s disquieting vision — and her centenary in 2003 affords not so much an excuse to reject the author’s neoclassical label, but rather the obligation to reassess it in light of contemporary discourses. This study will be of interest to students of twentieth-century French fiction and comparative literature, especially that of the latter half of the twentieth century.

Author : Lois Parkinson Zamora
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 456 pages
Book Rating : 4.14/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Inordinate Eye written by Lois Parkinson Zamora and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Inordinate Eye traces the Baroque from a European colonizing instrument encoding Catholic and monarchical ideologies to a New World instrument of resistance to those same structures. Lois Parkinson Zamora shows that in the early decades of the twentieth century Latin American writers began to recuperate the hybrid forms of New World Baroque art and architecture for the purpose of creating a discourse of "counterconquest" - that is, a discourse of postcolonial self-definition aimed at disrupting entrenched power structures, perceptual categories, and literary forms."--BOOK JACKET.

Author : Mariko Ohara
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
ISBN 13 : 1452957185
Total Pages : 453 pages
Book Rating : 4.80/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Hybrid Child written by Mariko Ohara and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2018-06-15 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A classic of Japanese speculative fiction that blurs the line between consumption and creation when a cyborg assumes the form and spirit of a murdered child Until he escaped, he had been called “Sample B #3,” but he had never liked this name. That would surprise them—that he could feel one way or another about it. He was designed to reshape himself based on whatever life forms he ingested; he was not made to think, and certainly not to assume the shape of a repair technician whose cells he had sampled and then simply walk out of the secure compound. Artificial Intelligence is all too real in this classic of Japanese science fiction by Mariko Ōhara. Jonah, a child murdered by her mother, has become the spirit of an AI-controlled house where the rogue cyborg once known as Sample B #3 takes refuge and, making a meal of the dead girl buried under the house, takes Jonah’s form. On faraway Planet Caritas, an outpost of human civilization, the female AI system that governs society has become insane. Meanwhile, the threat of the Adiaptron Empire, the machine race that #3 was built to fight, remains. With the familiar strangeness of a fairy tale, Ōhara’s novel traverses the mysterious distance between body and mind, between the mechanics of life and the ghost in the machine, between the infinitesimal and infinity. The child as mother, the mother as monster, the monster as hero: this shape-shifting story of nourishment, nurture, and parturition is a rare feminist work of speculative fiction and received the prestigious Seiun (Nebula) Award in 1991. Hybrid Child is the first English translation of a major work of science fiction by a female Japanese author.

Author : Djelal Kadir
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
ISBN 13 : 0816615160
Total Pages : 190 pages
Book Rating : 4.62/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Questing Fictions written by Djelal Kadir and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible to scholars, students, researchers, and general readers. Rich with historical and cultural value, these works are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. The books offered through Minnesota Archive Editions are produced in limited quantities according to customer demand and are available through select distribution partners.

Author : Steve Wakefield
Publisher : Tamesis Books
ISBN 13 : 9781855661073
Total Pages : 242 pages
Book Rating : 4.71/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Carpentier's Baroque Fiction written by Steve Wakefield and published by Tamesis Books. This book was released on 2004 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Carpentier was one of the first novelists to introduce a version of magical realism and the neo-baroque into Latin American fiction. This study focuses on one of the first novelists to introduce a version of magical realism and the neo-baroque into Latin American fiction. Original research colours eyewitness accounts of Alejo Carpentier's travels through Spainbefore and during the Spanish Civil War and the inspiration that he drew from the Baroque architecture he encountered there. The origins of Carpentier's uniquely 'baroque' style are found in his endeavour to create a period ambience in his historical fictions through descriptions of visual arts and architectural settings, and parodies of the literary style of Spanish Golden Age writers. 'Medusa's gaze' is used as a metaphor for the petrifying power of theBaroque as a weapon of European dominance. By wielding the same weapon in an act of postcolonial defiance, Carpentier enabled a reassertion of Latin American culture, and laid the foundations for the 1960s 'Boom' in the Latin American novel. STEVE WAKEFIELD is Visiting Research Fellow at the University of New South Wales, Australia

Author : Susan Petit
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9027277745
Total Pages : 243 pages
Book Rating : 4.49/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Michel Tournier's Metaphysical Fictions written by Susan Petit and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1991-01-01 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study of the fictional themes and techniques of Michel Tournier reveals his profound radicalism as a social critic and novelist despite the seeming conventionality of his works. Guided by Tournier's essays and interviews, Petit examines his fiction in light of plot sources, philosophical and anthropological training, and his belief that fiction should change the world. Close study of Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique, Le Roi des aulnes, Les Météores, Gaspard, Melchior et Balthazar, and La Goutte d'or, as well as the short fiction in Le Coq de bruyère and Le Médianoche amoureux, shows Tournier's revolutionary conception of plot structuring as he develops key themes, whether religion, sensuality, or prejudice, in more than twenty years spent reconceiving the nature of fiction.

Author : Neal Stephenson
Publisher : Harper Collins
ISBN 13 : 0060833165
Total Pages : 480 pages
Book Rating : 4.69/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Quicksilver written by Neal Stephenson and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2006-01-31 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In which Daniel Waterhouse, fearless thinker and courageous Puritan, pursues knowledge in the company of the greatest minds of Baroque-era Europe -- in a chaotic world where reason wars with the bloody ambitions of the mighty, and where catastrophe, natural or otherwise, can alter the political landscape overnight.

Author : Neal Stephenson
Publisher : Harper Collins
ISBN 13 : 0061793388
Total Pages : 878 pages
Book Rating : 4.87/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Confusion written by Neal Stephenson and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 878 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the year 1689, a cabal of Barbary galley slaves -- including one Jack Shaftoe, aka King of the Vagabonds, aka Half-Cocked Jack -- devises a daring plan to win freedom and fortune. A great adventure ensues -- a perilous race for an enormous prize of silver ... nay, gold ... nay, legendary gold. In Europe, the exquisite and resourceful Eliza, Countess de la Zeur, is stripped of her immense personal fortune by France's most dashing privateer. Penniless and at risk from those who desire either her or her head (or both), she is caught up in a web of international intrigue, even as she desperately seeks the return of her most precious possession. Meanwhile, Newton and Leibniz continue to propound their grand theories as their infamous rivalry intensifies, stubborn alchemy does battle with the natural sciences, dastardly plots are set in motion ... and Daniel Waterhouse seeks passage to the Massachusetts colony in hopes of escaping the madness into which his world has descended. This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

Author : Alyssa Palombo
Publisher : St. Martin's Griffin
ISBN 13 : 1466882638
Total Pages : 384 pages
Book Rating : 4.38/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Violinist of Venice written by Alyssa Palombo and published by St. Martin's Griffin. This book was released on 2015-12-15 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like most 18th century Venetians, Adriana d'Amato adores music—except her strict merchant father has forbidden her to cultivate her gift for the violin. But she refuses to let that stop her from living her dreams and begins sneaking out of her family's palazzo under the cover of night to take violin lessons from virtuoso violinist and composer Antonio Vivaldi. However, what begins as secret lessons swiftly evolves into a passionate, consuming love affair. Adriana's father is intent on seeing her married to a wealthy, prominent member of Venice's patrician class—and a handsome, charming suitor, whom she knows she could love, only complicates matters—but Vivaldi is a priest, making their relationship forbidden in the eyes of the Church and of society. They both know their affair will end upon Adriana's marriage, but she cannot anticipate the events that will force Vivaldi to choose between her and his music. The repercussions of his choice—and of Adriana's own choices—will haunt both of their lives in ways they never imagined. Spanning more than 30 years of Adriana's life, Alyssa Palombo's The Violinist of Venice is a story of passion, music, ambition, and finding the strength to both fall in love and to carry on when it ends.

Author : Margaret Elizabeth Colvin
Publisher : Rodopi
ISBN 13 : 9042018380
Total Pages : 178 pages
Book Rating : 4.89/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Baroque Fictions written by Margaret Elizabeth Colvin and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2005 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is the first in-depth study of the French novelist Marguerite Yourcenar's fiction to contend that the author's texts exhibit in unexpected ways numerous characteristics of the neobaroque. This subversive, postmodern aesthetic privileges extravagant artistic play, flux, and heterogeneity. In demonstrating the affinity of Yourcenar's texts with the neobaroque, the author of this study casts doubt on their presumed transparency and stability, qualities associated with the French neoclassical tradition of the past century, where the Yourcenarian oeuvre is most often placed. Yourcenar's election to the prestigious, tradition-bound French Academy in 1981 as its first female "immortal" cemented her already well-established niche in the twentieth-century French literary pantheon. A self-taught classicist, historian, and modern-day French moralist, Yourcenar has been praised for her polished, "classical" style and analyzed for her use of myth and universal themes. While those factors at first seem to justify amply the neoclassical label by which Yourcenar is most widely recognized, this study's close reading of four of her fictions reveals instead the texts' opacity and subversive resistance to closure, their rejection of stable interpretations, and their deconstruction of postmodern Grand Narratives. Theirs is a neobaroque "logic," which stresses the absence of theoretical assurances and the limitations of reason. The coincidence of the new millennium -- which in so many ways reflects Yourcenar's disquieting vision -- and her centenary in 2003 affords not so much an excuse to reject the author's neoclassical label, but rather the obligation to reassess it in light of contemporary discourses. This study will be of interest to students of twentieth-century French fiction and comparative literature, especially that of the latter half of the twentieth century.