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4 books match the query 'Quicksand'

cover of Losing the Plot: Film and Feeling in the Modern Novel

Losing the Plot

Film and Feeling in the Modern Novel

Pardis Dabashi

University of Chicago Press, 2023

An examination of the relationship between literature and classical Hollywood cinema reveals a profound longing for plot in modernist fiction.

The modernist novel sought to escape what Virginia Woolf called the “tyranny” of plot. Yet even as twentieth-century writers pushed against the constraints of plot-driven Victorian novels, plot kept its hold on them through the influence of another medium: the cinema. Focusing on the novels of Nella Larsen, Djuna Barnes, and William Faulkner—writers known for their affinities and connections to classical Hollywood—Pardis Dabashi links the moviegoing practices of these writers to the tensions between the formal properties of their novels and the characters in them. Even when they did not feature outright happy endings, classical Hollywood films often provided satisfying formal resolutions and promoted normative social and political values. Watching these films, modernist authors were reminded of what they were leaving behind—both formally and in the name of aesthetic experimentalism—by losing the plot.
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cover of Quicksand

Quicksand

Emmanuel Bove

Northwestern University Press, 1991

After the fall of France, colorless Joseph Bridet determines to go to Vichy and ingratiate himself with the regime there as a first step towards escaping to England, only to discover that he agrees with the suspicious and pitiless world of the Petainists. 
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cover of Quicksand and Cactus

Quicksand and Cactus

Juanita Brooks

Utah State University Press, 1992

Juanita Brooks became one of the best-known historians of Mormon and Utah history. Her autobiography is a valuable source of information on early southern Utah and Mormon history.
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cover of Quicksand and Passing

Quicksand and Passing

Larsen, Nella

Rutgers University Press, 1986

"Quicksand and Passing are novels I will never forget. They open up a whole world of experience and struggle that seemed to me, when I first read them years  ago, absolutely absorbing, fascinating, and indispensable." —Alice Walker

"A tantalizing mix of moral fable and sensuous colorful narrative, exploring female sexuality and racial solidarity."—Women's Studies International Forum

Rutgers' all-time bestselling book, Nella Larsen's novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) document the historical realities of Harlem in the 1920s and shed a bright light on the social world of the black bourgeoisie. The novels' greatest appeal and achievement, however, is not sociological, but psychological. As noted in the editor's comprehensive introduction, Larsen takes the theme of psychic dualism, so popular in Harlem Renaissance fiction, to a higher and more complex level, displaying a sophisticated understanding and penetrating analysis of black female psychology.

Passing is now a major motion picture written, produced, and directed by Rebecca Hall. It premiered at Sundance in 2021 and is available on Netflix.

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