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The Modern Satiric Grotesque and Its Traditions
Thomas Mann predicted that no manner or mode in literature would be so typical or so pervasive in the twentieth century as the grotesque. Assuredly he was correct. The subjects and methods of our comic literature (and much of our other literature) are regularly disturbing and often repulsive—no laughing matter.
In this ambitious study, John R. Clark seeks to elucidate the major tactics and topics deployed in modern literary dark humor. In Part I he explores the satiric strategies of authors of the grotesque, strategies that undercut conventional usage and form: the de-basement of heroes, the denigration of language and ...Read More
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The Shriek of Silence: A Phenomenology of the Holocaust Novel
"In the Holocaust novel, silence is always a character, and the word is always its subject matter." So writes David Patterson in this profound and original study of more than thirty important writers. Contrary to existing views, he argues, the Holocaust novel is not an attempt to depict an unimaginable reality or an ineffable horror. It is, rather, an endeavor to fetch the word from silence and restore it to meaning, to resurrect the human soul, to regenerate the relation between the self and God, the self and other, the self and itself.
This book is less a critical study ...Read More
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Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel
Although much has been written about how the novel relates to the epic, the drama, or autobiography, no one has clearly analyzed the complex connections between prose fiction as it evolved before 1800 and the literature of travel, which by that date had a long and colorful history.
Percy Adams skilfully portrays the emergence of the novel in the fiction of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and traces in rich detail the history of travel literature from its beginnings to the time of James Cook, contemporary of Richardson and Fielding. And since the recit de voyage and the novel ...Read More
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