The Screwtape Letters as Epistolary Fiction

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-125
Author(s):  
Charles A. Huttar
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Critical Theory ◽  
Cultural Criticism ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Literary Heritage ◽  
Epistolary Fiction ◽  
Rich History

Epistolary fiction, often thought of as an eighteenth-century phenomenon, enjoys considerable vitality in our time and has attracted much welcome critical attention in recent years. The focus, however, has been on selected aspects of the epistolary tradition, to the neglect of others that are part of its rich history. At the same time, discussions of C. S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters (1942) have generally concentrated on its theological, moral, and satirical aspects, with little consideration of the generic identification declared in the book's title. Attention to its striking affiliations with the epistolary tradition in fiction sheds light on Lewis's artistry in the work, on current critical discourse concerning epistolarity, on Lewis's social and cultural criticism, and on his contributions to critical theory. In the present study, selected aspects of the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century epistolary tradition are briefly surveyed; then, matters of setting, plot, characterization (especially), and handling of viewpoint in The Screwtape Letters are considered, as well as its widespread debts to the literary heritage and its relationship to Lewis's own contributions as a literary scholar and critic. Attention is given to the implications of Lewis's original preface which has recently been discovered.

Orphans of the Empire: Lhasa’s Chinese Community from the Qing Era to the Early Twentieth Century

Modern China ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 009770042096992
Author(s):  
Huasha Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Influence ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Chinese Population ◽  
Chinese Community ◽  
Academic Assessment ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Traits ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

This article analyzes the transformation of Lhasa’s Chinese community from the embodiment of an expansionist power in the early eighteenth century to the orphan of a fallen regime after the Qing Empire’s demise in 1911. Throughout the imperial era, this remote Chinese enclave represented Qing authority in Tibet and remained under the metropole’s strong political and social influence. Its members intermarried with the locals and adopted many Tibetan cultural traits. During the years surrounding the 1911 Xinhai Revolution, this community played a significant role in a series of interconnected political and ethnic confrontations that gave birth to the two antagonistic national bodies of Tibet and China. The community’s history and experiences challenge not only the academic assessment that Tibet’s Chinese population had fully assimilated into Tibetan society by the twentieth century but also the widespread image of pre-1951 Lhasa as a harmonious town of peaceful ethnic coexistence.

scholarly journals 'Always think of the objects': Ekphrasis as aesthetics in the contemporary novel

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Lucy Eleanor Alston
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Infinite Jest ◽  
Contemporary Novel ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Temporal Qualities

<p>It is a commonplace that ekphrasis – the description in literature of a visual work of art – brings to the fore questions of representation and reference. Such questions are particularly associated with the ‘postmodern’; ekphrasis is thus often subsumed under the category of metafiction. There has been little critical attention, however, to how the ekphrastic mode might be understood in aesthetic terms. This thesis considers the nature of ekphrasis’s referential capacity, but expands on this to suggest a number of ways in which the ekphrastic mode evinces the aesthetic and ontological assumptions upon which a text is predicated. Two case studies illustrate how the ekphrastic mode can be figured to different effect. In comparing these two novels, this thesis argues that the ekphrastic mode makes clear the particular subject-object relations expressed by each. If Lukács is correct in asserting that the novel mode expresses a discrepancy between ‘the conventionality of the objective world and the interiority of the subjective one’, ekphrasis provides a fruitful but under-explored avenue for critical inquiry because, as a mode, it is situated at the point at which subject and object must converge. The first chapter of this thesis is concerned with Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), a novel that includes both traditional ekphrastic descriptions and embedded photographs and references to critical theory that function ekphrastically. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996) provides a contrast: the novel makes continued reference to film – a medium defined by its temporal qualities – but as used in the novel the ekphrastic mode implies a fixed, ahistorical schema. The implications that such differences have on the novel mode and critical discourse are explored in the final section of the thesis.</p>

Introduction

Ramus ◽  
1979 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-5 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. J. Boyle
Keyword(s):  
Complex System ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Central Position ◽  
Critical Gap ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Critical Activity ◽  
Stephen Spender ◽  
Positive Force

But chiefly dear for his gift to understand Earth's intricate, ordered heart, and for a vision That saw beyond an imperial day the hand Of man no longer armed against his fellow But all for vine and cattle, fruit and fallow, Subduing with love's positive force the land.C. Day Lewis, The Georgics, ‘Dedicatory Stanzas to Stephen Spender’ (1940)A collection of critical essays on Virgil's Georgics needs no defence. A great, a magnificent poem, widely read, if not universally applauded, the Georgics has received far less critical attention than either the Eclogues or the Aeneid. Index in part of the apparently uncongenial nature of ‘didactic’ verse, the relative dearth of critical activity on the poem is particularly to be regretted in view of the Georgics' chronologically central position in Virgil's poetic career, its crucial role in the development of his style and thought. Indeed, given the peculiar and self-conscious unity of Virgil's poetic oeuvre, its complex system of evolving themes, images, structures, its bonding, meditated network of inter-poem reference, the critical neglect which the Georgics has received — there are brilliant, recent exceptions — seems less omission, more outrage. Even the Georgics' influence on later European poetry — one thinks, for example, of the Italian humanists, Politian and Alamanni, the eighteenth century English poets, especially Thomson and Cowper, and that remarkable twentieth century English georgic, The Land, by Virginia Sackville-West — while not of the magnitude of that of either the Eclogues or the Aeneid, ought to have elicited a more substantial investigation of the poem than has transpired. No boast, Wilkinson's claim that his 1969 book on the Georgics was the first to appear in English was sad affirmation of this major critical gap.

Sacred Torrents in Modernity: German Jewish Philosophers and the Legacy of Secularization

transversal ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-44
Author(s):  
Nils Roemer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Martin Buber ◽  
Franz Rosenzweig ◽  
Critical Response ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Historical Progress ◽  
Fault Lines ◽  
German Jewish

AbstractThis article investigates the ongoing interaction between the Jewish sacred past and its modern interpreters. Jewish thinkers from the eighteenth century reclaimed these ideals instead of dismissing them. Sacred traditions and modern secular thought existed in their mutual constitutive interdependence and not in opposition. When the optimism in historical progress and faith in reason unraveled in the fin de siècle, it engendered a new critical response by Jewish historians and philosophers of the twentieth century. These critical voices emerged within the fault lines of nineteenth and early twentieth century Jewish anti-historicist responses. What separated twentieth-century Jewish thinkers such as Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Gershom Scholem from their nineteenth-century forerunners was not their embrace of religion but their critical stance toward reason and their crumbling faith in historical progress.

Yokes of Gold and Threads of Silk: Sino-Tibetan competition for authority in early twentieth century Kham

2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 963-1009 ◽  
Author(s):  
SCOTT RELYEA
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Indirect Influence ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

AbstractBeginning in the early eighteenth century, a bifurcated structure of authority in the Kham region of ethnographic Tibet frustrated attempts by both the Lhasa and Beijing governments to assert their unquestioned control over a myriad polities in the borderlands between Sichuan and Tibet. A tenuous accommodation of this structure persisted from the early eighteenth century until the first two decades of the twentieth century when powerful globalizing norms—territoriality and sovereignty—transformed both the understanding and expectations of territorial rule held by Qing and, later, Republican Chinese officials. Absolutist conceptions of these norms prompted an ambitious endeavour to shatter the bifurcated structure and undermine the Dalai Lama's spiritual influence on Kham society. Infrontier imperialism is used to analyse the incomplete implementation of resulting acculturative and incorporative policies, inflected by these two norms, which challenged the monasteries’ indirect influence on the lay rulers of Kham, initiating a struggle for authority that persists to this day.

North America

2021 ◽  
pp. 462-478
Author(s):  
James P. Byrd
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
North America ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Harriet Beecher Stowe ◽  
Mark Twain ◽  
New Divinity ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Academic Study

This chapter assesses the main strands of Edwards’s reception in North America from the eighteenth century through the early twentieth century. Most Americans did not know much, if anything, about Edwards until decades after his death, when various—often conflicting—views of Edwards appeared. New Divinity ministers expanded his theological vison while revivalists, including Charles G. Finney, enlisted Edwards’s legacy for their purposes, and thousands of evangelicals embraced Edwards’s Life of David Brainerd. Edwards intrigued (and offended) writers like Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe, and his condemnation of sin caught the interest of antislavery advocates in the Civil War. His legacy helped to shape the rise of American literature as a discipline, leading to the widespread academic study of Edwards that exploded in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with over 5000 books, dissertations, articles, and theses published on Edwards.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Fiona Cox ◽  
Elena Theodorakopoulos
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Classical Reception ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Simone Weil ◽  
Vera Brittain ◽  
Claude Cahun

The first half of this introduction provides some context for the variety of women’s responses to the Homeric epics discussed in the volume by tracing the origins of these responses back to earlier authors including Vera Brittain, Virginia Woolf, and Claude Cahun. It also discusses the paucity of critical attention paid to women’s receptions of Homer, and demonstrates how much is to be gained by rereading the Iliad and the Odyssey through the work of women writers since the early twentieth century. The second half offers an overview of the approaches and figures selected for discussion, women as diverse as Simone Weil and Kate Tempest, as Francisca Aguirre and Barbara Köhler, working in a variety of genres and radically altering the landscape of classical reception.

Manilamen and seafaring: engaging the maritime world beyond the Spanish realm

2012 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 364-388 ◽  
Author(s):  
Filomeno V. Aguilar
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
English Speaking World

AbstractAlthough the Philippines is hardly known for sending out migrants prior to the twentieth century, and even among seafarers only the galleon age is remembered, this article provides evidence of transcontinental maritime movements from the late eighteenth century until the early twentieth century. These migrants were known in the English-speaking world as Manilamen. Most were seafarers, but some became involved in pearl-shell fishing, while others engaged in mercenary activities. They settled in key ports around the world, their numbers in any one location fluctuating in response to changing circumstances. Despite relocation to distant places, the difficulties of communication, and the impetus toward naturalization, Manilamen seem to have retained some form of identification with the Philippines as homeland, no matter how inchoately imagined.

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