Pam Morris

This anthology provides a comprehensive selection of the writing by Bakhtin and of that attributed to Voloshinov and Medvedev. It introduces readers to the aspects most relevant to literary and cultural studies and gives a focused sense of Bakhtin's central ideas and the underlying cohesiveness of his thinking.

Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev, Voloshinov

The Bakhtin Reader

Is conflict inherent to the politics of borders? Recent global events, erupting from national, religious, class, racial and gender boundaries would suggest it is. From the inhumanity of post-Brexit British immigration policy to the violent suppression of women's freedom in Iran, to Russia's territorial invasion of Ukraine, and most immediately to the violent conflagration engulfing Palestine, border hostilities seem everywhere characterised by fearful and toxic intolerance of what is deemed other. This book examines the writing of award-winning European novelists to suggest an alternative perspective, one that redresses time-sanctioned hierarchies of mind over body, of ideals over physical reality. It explores novelistic representations of power, war, sacrifice, heroism, national history and identity, all issues more conventionally viewed within a male consensus. The fiction offers a cultural and imaginative response to border conflicts of all kinds, ethical, bodily, religious, and geographical, often drawing upon the writers' own personal experience of threatening divisions. Examining works by Virginia Woolf, Jenny Erpenbeck, Olga Tokarczuk, Herta Müller, Anna Burns, Chika Unigwe, Maylis de Kerangal, Magda Szabó, Elena Ferranti, Alki Zei, Elif Shafak, and Oksana Zabuzhko, it uses an integrated interdisciplinary approach to combine literary readings with detailed historical and political understanding of cultural context. Coming from many different cultures and histories, these writers speak a common condemnation of all hierarchies of worth and of exceptionalist identities whether sanctified by religion, nature, or tradition. Morris shows how their stories, read here in translation, also articulate a strikingly unified vision of a radical ecological understanding of human relations based on physical continuity and co-existence rather than borders dividing an idealised 'us' from a denigrated 'them'.

Border Politics in Novels by European Women in Translation

Literature and Feminism is an exemplary new introduction to feminist literary criticism and theory which assumes no previous knowledge of the field. Clear, informative and carefully structured, it provides a thorough guide to, and path through, one of the most important, but also most difficult, areas of contemporary literary studies.

An Introduction

Literature and Feminism

Austen and Woolf are materialists, this book argues. 'Things' in their novels give us entry into some of the most contentious issues of the day. This wholly materialist understanding produces worldly realism, an experimental writing practice which asserts egalitarian continuity between people, things and the physical world. This radical redistribution of the importance of material objects and biological existence, challenges the traditional idealist hierarchy of mind over matter that has justified gender, class and race subordination. Entering their writing careers at the critical moments of the French Revolution and the First World War respectively, and sharing a political inheritance of Scottish Enlightenment scepticism, Austen's and Woolf's rigorous critiques of the dangers of mental vision unchecked by facts is more timely than ever in the current world dominated by fundamentalist neo-liberal, religious and nationalist belief systems.

Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf and Worldly Realism

Lecturer in English Literature Pam Morris

Coming to prominence with the nineteenth-century novel, literary realism has most often been associated with the insistence that art cannot turn away from the more sordid and harsh aspects of human existence. However, because realism is unavoidably tied up with the gnarly concept of 'reality' and 'the real', it has been one of the most widely debated terms in the New Critical Idiom series. This volume offers a clear, reader-friendly guide to debates around realism, examining: *ideas of realism in nineteenth-century French and British fiction *the twentieth-century formalist reaction against literature's status as 'truth' *realism as a democratic tool, or utopian form. This volume is vital reading for any student of literature, in particular those working on the realist novel.

Pam Morris

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