Literature and politics today: the political nature of modern fiction, poetry, and drama

2016 ◽  
Vol 53 (06) ◽  
pp. 53-2471-53-2471
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Literature And Politics ◽  
Modern Fiction

scholarly journals Book Review: Literature and Politics Today: The Political Nature of Modern Fiction and Drama

2015 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 74
Author(s):  
Shannon Pritting
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Review Literature ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
The Political ◽  
University Of Arkansas ◽  
Politics And Literature ◽  
Literature And Politics ◽  
Modern Fiction ◽  
The University

The editor, M. Keith Booker, Professor of English at the University of Arkansas, has served as editor on many reference works in literature as well as many books on genres and literary movements, specific authors, and other critical works. Booker also edited the last reference work dedicated to literature and politics, Encyclopedia of Literature and Politics: Censorship, Evolution, and Writing, a three-volume set published in 2005 by Greenwood, which is surprisingly the only current reference work dedicated solely to examining the connection between literature and politics. There are many recent book-length critical works on literature and politics, but these monographs typically focus on a genre or other refined topic such as a literary movement or single author. The compact single-volume Literature and Politics Today is a welcome addition to reference work in literature and politics. Certainly, other reference works in literary criticism cover some of the topics related to the intersection of politics and literature, but do not have the political focus of Literature and Politics Today.

Stuart Succession Literature

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
British Literature ◽  
The Political ◽  
Literature And Politics ◽  
Distinct Category ◽  
Political Structures ◽  
Distinguished Group ◽  
Modern British Literature

Moments of royal succession, which punctuated the Stuart era (1603–1714), occasioned outpourings of literature. Writers, including most of the major figures of the seventeenth century from Jonson, Daniel, and Donne to Marvell, Dryden, and Behn, seized upon these occasions to mark the transition of power; to reflect upon the political structures and values of their nation; and to present themselves as authors worthy of patronage and recognition. This volume of essays explores this important category of early modern writing. It contends that succession literature warrants attention as a distinct category: appreciated by contemporaries, acknowledged by a number of scholars, but never investigated in a coherent and methodical manner, it helped to shape political reputations and values across the period. Benefiting from the unique database of such writing generated by the AHRC-funded Stuart Successions Project, the volume brings together a distinguished group of authors to address a subject which is of wide and growing interest to students both of history and of literature. It illuminates the relation between literature and politics in this pivotal century of English political and cultural history. Interdisciplinary in scope, the volume will be indispensable to scholars of early modern British literature and history as well as undergraduates and postgraduates in both fields.

scholarly journals SPLIT ENDS? LITERATURE AND POLITICS AT THEFIN DE SIECLE

2007 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 697-709
Author(s):  
Jock Macleod
Keyword(s):  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Modern Literature ◽  
The Political ◽  
Literature And Politics ◽  
The Real ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Split Ends ◽  
Bourgeois Culture ◽  
Long Course

AS AN UNDERGRADUATE IN THE1970s, my introduction to the 1890s was perfunctory. Squeezed into a couple of weeks in the middle of a year-long course on “Victorian and Modern Literature,” the literature of the decade was reduced to aestheticism and decadence and presented as something of a preliminary to the real business of modernism. Such a focus reflected the scholarship of the time, in which thefin de sièclewas constructed as a moment of transition, one in which the political and socio-ethical dimensions so central to high Victorian literature were evacuated, as arguments for the autonomy of art came to dominate the literary cultural landscape. The organising principle was one of bifurcation: the separating out ofavant gardefrom bourgeois culture, the high from the low and, of particular relevance to this essay, literature from politics.

scholarly journals “A Boot Stamping on a Human Face – For Ever”: George Orwell, Language, Literature, and Politics

2020 ◽  
Vol 39 ◽  
pp. 172-188
Author(s):  
Roberta Ferrari
Keyword(s):  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
George Orwell ◽  
The Political ◽  
Human Face ◽  
Literature And Politics ◽  
Language And Literature ◽  
The One ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
The Relationship

"Britain experienced the harshness of 20th-century dictatorship and censorship only obliquely, as a reflection of what was happening in several “elsewheres”. Yet, events such as the Spanish Civil War deeply affected a whole generation of young British writers who, after the period of elitist Modernism, were trying to reassert the political import of literature through a redefinition of the role of the artist as politically and socially engagé. George Orwell figures as one of the most disenchanted and lucid witnesses of this particular historical moment. In both his essays and journalistic articles, as well as in his narrative work, he continuously ponders over the relationship between political power and society on the one hand, and language and literature on the other, providing a most interesting analysis of the mechanisms that preside over this interaction."

Literature, Powerlessness, and Modernity: A Reading of Takeuchi Yoshimi's “What Is Modernity?”

2021 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 399-421
Author(s):  
Qin Wang
Keyword(s):  
Literary Analysis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Lu Xun ◽  
Political Condition ◽  
Literature And Politics ◽  
The World ◽  
Literary Resistance ◽  
Alternative Modernity

Abstract While the Japanese sinologist Takeuchi Yoshimi is frequently mentioned in discussions of “alternative modernity” on the part of Asia, people have not sufficiently addressed the asymmetrical relationship between literature and politics in Takeuchi's thinking, as his literary analysis is oftentimes associated with a Hegelian reading of subjectivity. Through a reading of Takeuchi's “What Is Modernity?,” published in 1948, this article examines Takeuchi's discourses on politics from a literary standpoint that is radically nondialectical and “powerless” with regard to “politics” as he understands it. Takeuchi's critique of modernity as well as his idea of Asian nationalism cannot do without his idiosyncratic understanding of literature, especially his reading of Lu Xun, and his insistence on the powerlessness of literary resistance. Takeuchi's literary reshuffling of the political, the article argues, opens up a horizon where the very historico-political condition of possibility of existing political institutionalizations can be put into reexamination—it helps us reconsider the concepts of relation, otherness, and equality, which are still in operation to frame our understanding of the world.

The Literary History of the Sahel

2021 ◽  
pp. 510-526
Author(s):  
Alioune Sow
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Social Evolution ◽  
The Political ◽  
Literature And Politics ◽  
Political Orientations ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Practices ◽  
Literary Networks ◽  
Cultural Developments

This chapter examines the singular relation between literature and politics as developed in the Sahel, and traces the specific literary configurations and cultural developments that derived from this relationship. In the wake of decolonization, and perhaps in contrast to other regions of the continent, the literary has dominated the cultural and political milieus of the Sahel, determined the political orientations of the newly emancipated territories at independence, and defined their cultural and social evolution. This relation to the literary has translated into the multiplication of solid literary networks, noticeable literary affinities and communities, and stimulated distinctive literary practices with the ambition of creating spaces in which literary dynamics and practices served social and political developments.

Byron’s Opposition

2019 ◽  
pp. 229-263
Author(s):  
John Owen Havard
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Test Case ◽  
Literature And Politics ◽  
Political World ◽  
Political Critique ◽  
The One ◽  
English Politics ◽  
George Iii

This chapter examines Byron’s poetry in relation to his continuing attachment to an oppositional ‘party’ role, on the one hand, and his cultivated detachment from English politics, on the other. Byron wrote The Vision of Judgment, his 1821 riposte to Robert Southey’s Tory celebration of the reign of George III, from what he described as a ‘Whig point of view’. Rather than aligning with the ‘devil’s party’ of a Satanic opposition or cultivating a checked-out, bemused, indifferent stance, that poem—in common with Byron’s late satirical poetry more widely—established a stance at once of crisp detachment and incipient political critique (one that, in consigning the political world left undone by George III to oblivion, looked back to preceding decades of oppositional dynamism). Byron thereby provides a test-case for this book’s wider arguments about the relationships between literature and politics—and more specifically between partisanship and disaffection—bringing into focus the contours of a combative, snarling ‘cynicism’ and ways of seeing beyond politics altogether.

scholarly journals Knowledge about literature and politics: How literature contributes to understand the political phenomena?

2007 ◽  
pp. 121-132
Author(s):  
Zoran Avramovic
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Analysis ◽  
The Political ◽  
General Knowledge ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Literature And Politics ◽  
Specific Relation ◽  
Basic Concepts ◽  
Concepts Of Knowledge

The author critically discusses the theses about the relation between literature and politics which were presented in Vojislav Stanovcic?s work ?A Contribution of the Historical and Literary Works to the Understanding of Political Phenomena?. The first part points to the basic concepts of knowledge, symbols, notions, truth, literature and politics. The second part includes the experimental analysis of the relation between literature and politics. The conclusion underlines the claim that there is no general knowledge about the link between literature and politics and that every specific relation should be discussed separately.

scholarly journals Litteraturens kritik. Franz Kafka og den kritiske sensibilitet

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (122) ◽  
pp. 293-320
Author(s):  
Isak Winkel Holm
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Franz Kafka ◽  
The Political ◽  
Jewish Literature ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Political Dimension ◽  
Literature And Politics ◽  
Critical Potential ◽  
German Jewish

The article discusses the usefulness of the concept of critique for the understanding of the relation between literature and politics. Exploring two recent books about the political dimension of Franz Kafka’s literary works – Vivian Liska’s When Kafka Says We: Uncommon Communities in German-Jewish Literature (2009) and Michael Löwy’s Franz Kafka: rêveur insoumis (2004) – the article distinguishes between two different understandings of critique: critique of ideology and post-structuralist critique. In Liska’s and Löwy’s interpretations of Kafka, these two standard understandings of critique are unable to grasp the critical potential of Kafka’s literary works in general and of Kafka’s short story “Fellowship” from 1920 in particular. Instead, based on Jacques Rancière’s concept of ‘dissensus’, the article puts forward a concept of critique based on the reader’s aesthetic experience of Kafka’s literary works.

James Arthur Diamond. Maimonides and the Hermeneutics of Concealment: Deciphering Scripture and Midrash in The Guide of the Perplexed. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. x, 235 pp.; Menachem Lorberbaum. Politics and the Limits of Law: Secularizing the Political in Medieval Jewish Thought. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. xii, 216 pp.

AJS Review ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 361-364
Author(s):  
Alfred Ivry
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Stanford University ◽  
State University ◽  
Literature And Politics ◽  
Jewish Thought ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Guide Of The Perplexed

The two books before us expand the horizons of Maimonidean studies, on the divergent planes of literature and politics. James Diamond's study of Maimonides' use of the Bible and midrash is a tour de force of literary analysis, while Menachem Lorberbaum offers in part a view of Maimonides' attitude to political authority of considerable relevance today.

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