Linda Hutcheon

Neither a defense nor a denunciation of the postmodern, it continues Hutcheon's previous projects in studying formal self-consciousness in art, but adds to this both a historical and ideological dimension.

History, Theory, Fiction

A Poetics of Postmodernism

Siobhan O'Flynn

Persuasive and illuminating, 'A Theory of Adaptation' is a bold rethinking of how adaptation works across all media and genres that may put an end to the age-old question of whether the book was better than the movie, or the opera, or the theme park.

A Theory of Adaptation

This classic text remains one of the clearest and most incisive introductions to postmodernism. Perhaps more importantly, it is a compelling discussion of why postmodernism matters. Working through the issue of representation in art forms from fiction to photography, Linda Hutcheon sets out postmodernism's highly political challenge to the dominant ideologies of the western world. A new epilogue traces the fate of the postmodern over the last ten years and into the future, responding to claims that it has, once and for all, 'failed'. Together with the new epilogue, this edition contains revised notes on further reading and a fully updated bibliography. This revised edition of The Politics of Postmodernism continues its position as essential reading.

The Politics of Postmodernism

Linda Hutcheon, in this original study, examines the modes, forms and techniques of narcissistic fiction, that is, fiction which includes within itself some sort of commentary on its own narrative and/or linguistic nature. Her analysis is further extended to discuss the implications of such a development for both the theory of the novel and reading theory. Having placed this phenomenon in its historical context Linda Hutcheon uses the insights of various reader-response theories to explore the “paradox” created by metafiction: the reader is, at the same time, co-creator of the self-reflexive text and distanced from it because of its very self-reflexiveness. She illustrates her analysis through the works of novelists such as Fowles, Barth, Nabokov, Calvino, Borges, Carpentier, and Aquin. For the paperback edition of this important book a preface has been added which examines developments since first publication. Narcissistic Narrative was selected by Choice as one of the outstanding academic books for 1981–1982.

The Metafictional Paradox

Narcissistic Narrative

Joseph Natoli

These readings are organized into four sections. The first explores the wellsprings of the debates in the relationship between the postmodern and the enterprise it both continues and contravenes: modernism. Here philosophers, social and political commentators, as well as cultural and literary analysts present controversial background essays on the complex history of postmodernism. The readings in the second section debate the possibilityor desirabilityof trying to define the postmodern, given its cultural agenda of decentering, challenging, even undermining the guiding master narratives of Western culture. The readings in the third section explore postmodernisms complicated complicity with these very narratives, while the fourth section moves from theory to practice in order to investigate, in a variety of fields, the common denominators of the postmodern condition in action.

A Postmodern Reader

First published in 1988. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Mario J. Valdés

"The authors provide synoptic and wide-ranging discussions of each issue, and the interchange between the various authors in which they reflect on, argue with, and "rethink" each other's formulations reinforces the dialogic structure of the volume. A substantial afterword by a leading scholar rounds out the notable arguments contained in this book, a must-have for literary theorists and historians."--BOOK JACKET.

A Dialogue on Theory

Rethinking Literary History

Michael Hutcheon

An interdisciplinary study of the interconnected subtexts of erotic attraction, illness, and death in several 19th- and 20th-century operatic texts. This is an examination of how opera uses the singing body to give voice to the suffering person. It presents medical and literary sources to make sense of the changing depiction of disease in opera.

Desire, Disease, Death

Opera

In the mass media today, as well as in high art and academia, there seems to be what one recent magazine has called an irony epidemic. This collection of essays considers irony in its Canadian literary and artistic context, with titles such as “Who Says That Canadian Culture Is Ironic?” and “Ironies of Color in the Great White North: The Discursive Strategies of Some Hyphenated Canadians.”

Essays on Verbal and Visual Ironies in Canadian Contemporary Art and Literature

Double Talking

Northrop Frye

Shirley Neuman

Northrop Frye embellishes the theory of genre in "Henry James and the Comedy of the Occult." In "The Power of Postmodern Irony," Linda Hutcheon furthers her reputation as a theorist of contemporary culture, and Shirley Neuman investigates gender in writing and reading in "Autobiography, Mothers' Bodies, the Reproduction of Mothering."

Critical Essays

Genre, Trope, Gender

A Theory of Adaptation explores the continuous development of creative adaptation, and argues that the practice of adapting is central to the story-telling imagination. Linda Hutcheon develops a theory of adaptation through a range of media, from film and opera, to video games, pop music and theme parks, analysing the breadth, scope and creative possibilities within each. This new edition is supplemented by a new preface from the author, discussing both new adaptive forms/platforms and recent critical developments in the study of adaptation. It also features an illuminating new epilogue from Siobhan O’Flynn, focusing on adaptation in the context of digital media. She considers the impact of transmedia practices and properties on the form and practice of adaptation, as well as studying the extension of game narrative across media platforms, fan-based adaptation (from Twitter and Facebook to home movies), and the adaptation of books to digital formats. A Theory of Adaptation is the ideal guide to this ever evolving field of study and is essential reading for anyone interested in adaptation in the context of literary and media studies.

Bodily Charm is a passionate defense of opera as a living as well as live art. Written for both the opera lover and the specialist by a physician and a literary critic, it is an accessible and engaging interdisciplinary exploration of the operatic body—both the actual physical bodies of the singers and audience members and the represented body on stage in operas such as Death in Venice, Salome, Rigoletto, Der Ring des Nibelungen, and Elektra.

Living Opera

Bodily Charm

Our modern narratives of science and technology can only go so far in teaching us about the death that we must all finally face. Can an act of the imagination, in the form of opera, take us the rest of the way? Might opera, an art form steeped in death, teach us how to die, as this provocative work suggests? In "Opera: The Art of Dying" a physician and a literary theorist bring together scientific and humanistic perspectives on the lessons on living and dying that this extravagant and seemingly artificial art imparts. Contrasting the experience of mortality in opera to that in tragedy, the Hutcheons find a more apt analogy in the medieval custom of "contemplatio mortis"--a dramatized exercise in imagining one's own death that prepared one for the inevitable end and helped one enjoy the life that remained. From the perspective of a contemporary audience, they explore concepts of mortality embodied in both the common and the more obscure operatic repertoire: the terror of death (in Poulenc's "Dialogues of the Carmelites"); the longing for death (in Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde"); preparation for the good death (in Wagner's "Ring of the Nibelung"); and suicide (in Puccini's "Madama Butterfly"). In works by Janacek, Ullmann, Berg, and Britten, among others, the Hutcheons examine how death is made to feel logical and even right morally, psychologically, and artistically--how, in the art of opera, we rehearse death in order to give life meaning.

The Art of Dying

Poetica postmodernismului

The edge of irony, says Linda Hutcheon, is always a social and political edge. Irony depends upon interpretation; it happens in the tricky, unpredictable space between expression and understanding. Irony's Edge is a fascinating, compulsively readable study of the myriad forms and the effects of irony. It sets out, for the first time, a sustained, clear analysis of the theory and the political contexts of irony, using a wide range of references from contemporary culture. Examples extend from Madonna to Wagner, from a clever quip in conversation to a contentious exhibition in a museum. Irony's Edge outlines and then challenges all the major existing theories of irony, providing the most comprehensive and critically challengin theory of irony to date.

Linda Hutcheon

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