BiblioVault - Books about Literary

A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY

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709 books about Literary and 6 start with J

709 books about Literary and 6 709 books about Literary
6 start with J start with J

J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual

Jane Poyner

Ohio University Press, 2006

A 2007 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title

In September 2003 the South African novelist J. M. Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, confirming his reputation as one of the most influential writers of our time. J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual addresses the contribution Coetzee has made to contemporary literature, not least for the contentious forays his work makes into South African political discourse and the field of postcolonial studies.

Taking the author’s ethical writing as its theme, the volume is an important addition to understanding Coetzee’s fiction and critical thinking. While taking stock of Coetzee’s singular, modernist response to the apartheid and postapartheid situations in his early fiction, the volume is the first to engage at length with the later works, Disgrace, The Lives of Animals, and Elizabeth Costello.

J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual explores Coetzee’s roles as a South African intellectual and a novelist; his stance on matters of allegory and his evasion of the apartheid censor; his tacit critique of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission; his performance of public lectures of his alter ego, Elizabeth Costello; and his explorations into ecofeminism and animal rights. The essays collected here, which include an interview with the Nobel Laureate, provide new vantages from which to consider Coetzee’s writing.

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The Javelin Thrower

Paolo Volponi

Seagull Books, 2018

As a boy growing up in rural Italy in the 1930s, Damìn is experiencing the first stirrings of adolescence when he accidentally sees his mother having sex with the local Fascist commandant. His pain, anger, and confusion are uncomfortably intertwined with a compulsion to watch them, which becomes an obsession.

Isolating himself from anyone who might help him understand what he’s feeling, he channels his fury into his javelin, getting better and better until he is a local champion. But his success is fleeting, as wholly confused and caught up in his own anger, he ends up betraying and humiliating his friends. The Javelin Thrower is the story of an erotic education turned tragic, poisoned by the darkness running through Mussolini’s Italy.

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The Jewish War and The Victory

Henryk Grynberg

Northwestern University Press, 2001

This epic tells the story of a Polish Jewish family struggling against nearly insurmountable odds. In The Jewish War, the family of a young Jewish boy hides throughout the countryside until the father is murdered. To escape, the mother and boy use forged papers and adopt a false life as the Catholic family of an officer captured by the Germans. The Victory picks up the story as the Red Army advances and the boy fights to reclaim his Jewishness amidst the horrors of the past and the choices of an agonizing present.

Rutgers University Press, 1990

The Juggler (La Jongleuse) is a "decadent" novel that was first published in 1900. Its author, Marguerite Vallette-Eymery (1860-1953), who used the pseudonym Rachilde, was a prolific novelist (over sixty works of fiction), playwright, literary critic and reviewer, and a forceful presence in French literary society of her time. The protagonist of the novel, Eliante Donalger, is in some sense an exaggerated double for her creator--bizarre in appearance, clothing, and interests. Instinctively grasping a medical and psychological truth that the turn-of-the-century scientific world was only beginning to understand, Eliante maintains that there is nothing "natural" about human sexual expression. She claims to be in love with an inanimate (though anthropomorphic and sexually ambiguous) object, a Greek amphora, and the novel traces the rivalry between this faithful partner and an ardent human suitor, a young medical student. It is only through juggling, both literally and metaphorically, that Eliante is able to use her seductive power to maintain desire. The surprise ending challenges the limits of such power in a controversial and surprising twist. Although Rachilde's work has been neglected in the past, the women's movement and feminist criticism have stimulated renewed interest in her fiction. The Juggler is a major rediscovery.

University of Nevada Press, 2006

This engrossing new novel by acclaimed author Susan Lang continues the saga of Ruth Farley, the fiercely independent young woman who was the protagonist of Small Rocks Rising, published by the University of Nevada Press in 2002. Ruth is still on her homestead at the end of a rugged canyon in California’s Mojave Desert, still struggling to survive on her own and to recover from a brutal rape and the murder of her lover. Now she must also face the responsibility of motherhood. The ensuing story expands Ruth’s world to encompass the panorama of Depression-era Southern California—miners and ranchers hanging on until times are better; Indians trying to preserve their ancient culture and identity; Okies, vagrants, and breadlines; the wealth and glitter of the movie industry; and narrow-minded small-town gossips. Ruth’s life also expands as she adjusts to motherhood, trying to maintain her autonomy and isolation and trying to preserve the tenuous web that links her to the seductive ruthlessness of the desert and to its ancient people and their wisdom. Ruth is one of the most engaging characters in recent fiction, complex and contradictory, stubborn and vulnerable, passionately in love with her austere desert home. Lang tells her story, the saga of a fully modern woman seeking her own identity and destiny against the turbulent, colorful setting of the rapidly changing twentieth-century West.