Looking Again: The Critical Heritage

2017 ◽  
pp. 21-28
Author(s):  
Jessica Gildersleeve
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Contemporary Literature ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Critical Heritage ◽  
Literature And Film ◽  
British Culture ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This chapter examines Don't Look Now (1973) in the context of Daphne Du Maurier's Gothic narratives, with particular emphasis on those which had previously been adapted to film, and Nicolas Roeg's earlier films, particularly those which deal with themes of trauma and violence. It proposes that Du Maurier and Roeg's works should be read within the context of mid- to late-twentieth-century British culture, considering them as particularly concerned to depict the cultural traumas of the period. Although there are some distinctive differences between the film and the story from which it is adapted, one must not forget that Don't Look Now is adapted from a literary text, and that this may have implications for the representations and adaptations of trauma in contemporary literature and film. The chapter then reviews the existing studies of the film and the story from which it is adapted. It interrogates Don't Look Now's critical heritage as both avoiding and approaching the ever-retreating position of the trauma-text: a simultaneous recognition and avowal of the film's horror and its anxieties.

Iris Murdoch (1919–1999)

Iris Murdoch ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Anne Rowe
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Personal Relationships ◽  
Social Boundaries ◽  
Iris Murdoch ◽  
Biographical Information ◽  
Media Attention ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
British Culture ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Iris Murdoch is introduced as a writer of brave and open –minded novels that are not only idiosyncratic in their dealing with issues that push against accepted moral and social boundaries but also relevant to the everyday experiences of all types of readers. With reference to significant biographical information the chapter suggests why her novels have carved out her place in British culture in the late twentieth century and outlines the ways in which her often tortuous personal relationships and complex personality are inextricably entwined with her art. The considerable media attention she has attracted since her death in 1999 is evaluated and the reasons for the fluctuations within the critical reception of Murdoch’s novels over four decades are explained. The introduction concludes with summaries of the following four chapters on Murdoch’s philosophy, theology, aesthetics and settings.

Collaboration

2020 ◽  
pp. 153-191
Author(s):  
Natalie Pollard
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
Sylvia Plath ◽  
Seamus Heaney ◽  
Ted Hughes ◽  
American Artist ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Century Poetry ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This chapter examines a particular instance of canonical late-twentieth-century poetry that shows close collaboration with the visual arts. It takes as a case study the work of Ted Hughes, who is often considered central to the development of the English poetic canon, in his collaboration with the American artist and publisher Leonard Baskin in producing the 1973 book, Cave Birds. The trade volume initially contained over ten of Baskin’s pen-and-ink images (which had inspired Hughes to pen his poems). Why, then, are Baskin’s artworks no longer published alongside Hughes’s poems? This chapter puts drawing and text back into dialogue, offering a sustained intra-artistic reading of an image-poem pair as it resonates with the vision of Michelangelo, Michael Ayrton, Giacometti, Sylvia Plath, and Seamus Heaney. Artwork and literary text interact before our viewing-reading eyes, performing an eloquent expression of the complexity of aesthetic co-constitution, across media and history.

Conclusion

2021 ◽  
pp. 237-242
Author(s):  
Laura Carter
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social History ◽  
Women's History ◽  
Mass Education ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
British Culture ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

The conclusion first summarises the book’s argument about the rise and fall of the ‘history of everyday life’ in British culture between 1918 and 1979. It then considers some educational connections between ‘history from below’ and the ‘history of everyday life’, suggesting that as universities became sites of mass education in the late twentieth-century, academic social history could more easily adopt the language of everyday life. Finally, the conclusion explores synergies between the ‘history of everyday life’ and feminist women’s histories of the 1970s and 1980s, re-asserting the centrality of women to the production and consumption of popular social history in twentieth-century Britain. An important legacy of the mid-century ‘history of everyday life’ is found in campaigns to bring women’s history into schools in London during the 1980s.

Varieties of Continua

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Hellman ◽  
Stewart Shapiro
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Intuitionistic Logic ◽  
Contemporary Literature ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
Standard Analysis ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Rapid Transition ◽  
Non Standard Analysis ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Two historical episodes form the background to the research presented here: the first is the remarkably rapid transition in the course of the nineteenth century from the ancient Aristotelian view that a true continuum cannot be composed entirely of points to the now standard, entirely punctiform frameworks for analysis and geometry found in modern texts (stemming from the work of Bolzano, Cauchy, Weierstrass, Dedekind, Cantor, et al.). The second is the mid-to-late twentieth-century revival of pre-limit methods in analysis and geometry using infinitesimals, viz. non-standard analysis due to Abraham Robinson, and the more radical smooth infinitesimal analysis based on intuitionistic logic. One goal of the present work is to develop a systematic comparison of these and related including (alternatives constructivist and predicative conceptions), balancing various trade-offs, helping articulate a modern pluralist perspective. A second main goal (pursued in the opening chapters) is to develop thoroughgoing regions-based theories of classical continua that are mathematically equivalent (inter-reducible) to the currently standard, punctiform accounts of modern texts. Although in this project the work has been preceded by various writings, as explained below, it is believed the theories developed here are more streamlined, unified, and comprehensive than others in the contemporary literature. Finally, the book considers various limitations of the systems developed and some of the more striking implications for contemporary philosophy stemming from the pluralism take we our work to support.

Nine Centuries of Man

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Gender Expectations ◽  
Court Records ◽  
The Past ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Police Reports ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Scottish History ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

What did it mean to be a man in Scotland over the past nine centuries? Scotland, with its stereotypes of the kilted warrior and the industrial ‘hard man’, has long been characterised in masculine terms, but there has been little historical exploration of masculinity in a wider context. This interdisciplinary collection examines a diverse range of the multiple and changing forms of masculinities from the late eleventh to the late twentieth century, exploring the ways in which Scottish society through the ages defined expectations for men and their behaviour. How men reacted to those expectations is examined through sources such as documentary materials, medieval seals, romances, poetry, begging letters, police reports and court records, charity records, oral histories and personal correspondence. Focusing upon the wide range of activities and roles undertaken by men – work, fatherhood and play, violence and war, sex and commerce – the book also illustrates the range of masculinities that affected or were internalised by men. Together, the chapters illustrate some of the ways Scotland’s gender expectations have changed over the centuries and how, more generally, masculinities have informed the path of Scottish history

Trey Ellis's Platitudes: Redefining Black Voices

2009 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-76
Author(s):  
Quan Manh Ha
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
Racial Issues ◽  
Black Voices ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
One Year ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Trey Ellis has emerged as a prominent African American writer of the late-twentieth century, despite the small number of his published works. “The New Black Aesthetic,” an essay that he first published in CaUaloo in 1989, one year after the publication of his first novel, Platitudes, stands as a manifesto that defines and articulates his perspective on the emerging black literary voices and culture of the time, and on “the future of African American artistic expression” in the postmodern era.1 According to Eric Lott, Ellis's novel parodies the literary and cultural conflict between such male experimental writers as lshmael Reed and such female realist writers as Alice Walker.2 Thus, Ellis's primary purpose in writing Platitudes is to redefine how African Americans should be represented in fiction, implying that neither of the dominant approaches can completely articulate late-twentieth-century black experience when practiced in isolation. In its final passages, Platitudes represents a synthesis of the two literary modes or styles, and it embodies quite fully the diversity of black cultural identities at the end of the twentieth century as it extends African American literature beyond racial issues. In this way, the novel exemplifies the literary agenda that Ellis suggests in his theoretical essay.

A New Denominational Historiography?

1995 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-263
Author(s):  
John F. Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Recent Analysis ◽  
General Factor ◽  
Religious Organization ◽  
Religious Institution ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
The Status ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
American Society ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Over the last decade, a noteworthy number of published studies have, in one fashion or another, been defined with reference to religious denominations. This is an arresting fact, for, coincidentally, the status of religious denominations in the society has been called into question. Some formerly powerful bodies have lost membership (at least relatively speaking) and now experience reduced influence, while newer forms of religious organization(s)—e.g., parachurch groups and loosely structured movements—have flourished. The most compelling recent analysis of religion in modern American society gives relatively little attention to them. Why, then, have publications in large numbers appeared, in scale almost seeming to be correlated inversely to this trend?No single answer to this question is adequate. Surely one general factor is that historians often “work out of phase” with contemporary social change. If denominations have been displaced as a form of religious institution in society in the late twentieth century, then their prominence in earlier eras is all the more intriguing.

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