5448 books match the query 'History and criticism' and 307 start with m

cover of My Victorian Novel: Critical Essays in the Personal Voice

My Victorian Novel

Critical Essays in the Personal Voice

Annette R. Federico

University of Missouri Press, 2020

The previously unpublished essays collected here are by literary scholars who have dedicated their lives to reading and studying nineteenth-century British fiction and the Victorian world. Each writes about a novel that has acquired personal relevance to them––a work that has become entwined with their own story, or that remains elusive or compelling for reasons hard to explain.
 
These are essays in the original sense of the word, attempts: individual and experiential approaches to literary works that have subjective meanings beyond social facts. By reflecting on their own histories with novels taught, studied, researched, and re-experienced in different contexts over many years, the contributors reveal how an aesthetic object comes to inhabit our critical, pedagogical, and personal lives.
 
By inviting scholars to share their experiences with a favorite novel without the pressure of an analytical agenda, the sociable essays in My Victorian Novel seek to restore some vitality to the act of literary criticism, and encourage other scholars to talk about the importance of reading in their lives and the stories that have enchanted and transformed them.

The novels in this collection include:
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
The Duke’s Children  by Anthony Trollope
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Newcomes by William Makepeace Thackeray
Middlemarch  by George Eliot
Daniel Deronda by George Eliot
The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell
Bleak House by Charles Dickens
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
New Grub Street by George Gissing
The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
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cover of My Voice Is My Weapon: Music, Nationalism, and the Poetics of Palestinian Resistance

My Voice Is My Weapon

Music, Nationalism, and the Poetics of Palestinian Resistance

David A. McDonald

Duke University Press, 2013

In My Voice Is My Weapon, David A. McDonald rethinks the conventional history of the Palestinian crisis through an ethnographic analysis of music and musicians, protest songs, and popular culture. Charting a historical narrative that stretches from the late-Ottoman period through the end of the second Palestinian intifada, McDonald examines the shifting politics of music in its capacity to both reflect and shape fundamental aspects of national identity. Drawing case studies from Palestinian communities in Israel, in exile, and under occupation, McDonald grapples with the theoretical and methodological challenges of tracing "resistance" in the popular imagination, attempting to reveal the nuanced ways in which Palestinians have confronted and opposed the traumas of foreign occupation. The first of its kind, this book offers an in-depth ethnomusicological analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, contributing a performative perspective to the larger scholarly conversation about one of the world's most contested humanitarian issues.
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cover of Mysteries of Africa

Mysteries of Africa

Eugene Schleh

University of Wisconsin Press, 1991

The roles of Africans have changed over time in detective/mystery fiction, reflecting their changing real roles in the continent. These studies provide an entertaining way to follow that changed reality.
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cover of Mystery Fanfare: A Composite Annotated Index to Mystery and Related Fanzines 1963–1981

Mystery Fanfare

A Composite Annotated Index to Mystery and Related Fanzines 1963–1981

Michael L. Cook

University of Wisconsin Press, 1983

This work is a composite index of the complete runs of all mystery and detective fan magazines that have been published, through 1981. Added to it are indexes of many magazines of related nature. This includes magazines that are primarily oriented to boys' book collecting, the paperbacks, and the pulp magazine hero characters, since these all have a place in the mystery and detective genre.

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cover of Mysticism and Space: Space and Spatiality in the Works of Richard Rolle, The Cloud of Unknowing Author, and Julian of Norwich

Mysticism and Space

Space and Spatiality in the Works of Richard Rolle, The Cloud of Unknowing Author, and Julian of Norwich

Carmel Bendon Davis

Catholic University of America Press, 2008

Mysticism and Space examines the influence and representation of space in the texts of three medieval mystics, Richard Rolle, Julian of Norwich, and The Cloud of Unknowing author
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cover of Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative

Myth and Archive

A Theory of Latin American Narrative

Roberto González-Echevarría

Duke University Press, 1998

Myth and Archive presents a new theory of the origin and evolution of Latin American literature and the emergence of the modern novel. In this influential, award-winning exploration of Latin American writing from colonial times to the present, Roberto González Echevarría dispenses with traditional literary history to reveal the indebted relationship of the novel to legal, scientific, and anthropological discourses.
Providing ways to link literary and nonliterary narratives, González Echevarría examines a variety of archival writings—from the chronicles of the discovery and conquest of the New World to scientific travel narratives and records of criminal confessions—and explores the relationship of these writings to novels by authors such as García Márquez, Borges, Barnet, Sarmiento, Carpentier, and Garcilaso de la Vega. Moving beyond demonstrating that early forms of creative narrative had their geneses in the sixteenth-century authoritative discourse of the Spanish Empire, González Echevarría shows how this same originating process has been repeated in other key moments in the history of the Latin American narrative. He shows how the discourse of scientific discovery was the model for much nineteenth-century literature, as well as how anthropological writings on the nature of language and myth have come to shape the ideology and form of literature in the twentieth century. This most recent form of Latin American narrative creates its own mythic form through an atavistic return to its legal origins—the archive.
This acclaimed book—originally published in 1990—will be of continuing interest to historians, anthropologists, literary theorists, and students of Latin American culture.


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cover of Myth and Identity in the Epic of Imperial Spain

Myth and Identity in the Epic of Imperial Spain

Elizabeth B. Davis

University of Missouri Press, 2026

The first in-depth analysis of some of the most important epic poems of the Spanish Golden Age, Myth and Identity in the Epic of Imperial Spain breathes new life into five of these long- neglected texts. Elizabeth Davis demonstrates that the epic must not be overlooked, for doing so creates a significant gap in one's ability to appraise not only the cultural practice of the imperial age, but also the purest expression of its ideology.

Davis's study focuses on heroic poetry written from 1569 to 1611, including Alonso de Ercilla's La Araucana, undeniably the most significant epic poem of its time. Also included are Diego de Hojeda's La Christiada, Juan Rufo's La Austriada,. Lope de Vega's Jerusalén Conquistada, and Cristóbal de Virués's Historia del Monserrate.

Examining these epics as the major site for the construction of cultural identities and Renaissance nationalist myths, Davis analyzes the means by which the epic constructs a Spanish sense of self. Because this sense of identity is not easily susceptible to direct representation, it is often derived in opposition to an "other," which serves to reaffirm Spanish cultural superiority. The Spanish Christian caballeros are almost always pitted against Amerindians, Muslims, Jews, or other adversaries portrayed as backward or heathen for their cultural and ethnic differences.

The pro-Castilian elite of sixteenth-century Spain faced the daunting task of constructing unity at home in the process of expansion and conquest abroad, yet ethnic and regional differences in the Iberian Peninsula made the creation of an imperial identity particularly difficult. The epic, as Davis shows, strains to convey the overriding image of a Spain that appears more unified than the Spanish empire ever truly was.

An important reexamination of the Golden Age canon, Myth and Identity in the Epic of Imperial Spain brings a new twist to the study of canon formation. While Davis does not ignore more traditional approaches to the literary text, she does apply recent theories, such as deconstruction and feminist criticism, to these poems, resulting in an innovative examination of the material.

Confronting such issues as canonicity, gender, the relationship between literature and Golden Age culture, and that between art and power, this publication offers scholars a new perspective for assessing Golden Age and Transatlantic studies.

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