Wim Tigges

An Anatomy of Literary Nonsense

... a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase in the mind itself. Thus Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce's Stephen Hero: defines the phenomenon that has ever since been known as the literary epiphany. The essays gathered in this volume comprise a wide survey of this phenomenon. With recurrent reference to its most famous creators, notably William Wordsworth, who was the first to consciously explore and delineate those momentous spots in time in his Prelude, Walter Pater, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, this book intends to provide a broad and unbiased exploration into the various types and categories of the moment of moment that can be distinguished, ranging from William Blake, Ann Radcliffe and Charles Maturin through the nineteenth-century sonnet tradition and the naturalistic novel to modernist and postmodernist exponents such as Ezra Pound and Elizabeth Bowen, Philip larkin and Seamus Heaney, and include contributions by acclaimed experts in the field such as Martin Bidney, Robert Langbaum, Jay Losey, and Ashton Nichols.

Aspects of the Literary Epiphany

Moments of Moment

Bundel opstellen over nonsensliteratuur, bepaalde aspecten daarvan en over het werk van bepaalde auteurs binnen het genre.

Explorations in the Field of Nonsense

P. Th. M. G. Liebregts

1994 marked the centenary of the deaths of Walter Pater, Christina Rossetti and Robert Louis Stevenson, and Beauty and the Beast is largely devoted to an exploration of aspects of their lives and their writings, and the role they played in the development of British literature. Both individually and as a group, these writers offer interesting opportunities to investigate a distinctive ambivalence in the literature of the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Thus we may observe how Pater as the founder of Aestheticism in British literature addressed the Victorian dilemma how to live in Marius the Epicurean; how Rossetti's poetry expresses both spiritual and erotic tendencies, while Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is perhaps the epitome of the fin-de-siècle tension between good and evil, beauty and beast. Yet the scope of this book also includes an examination of the relationships between these three authors and their contemporaries, and of their setting, on the British Isles as well as on the Continent. Thus George Moore makes his appearance, next to Anton Chekhov, Arthur Schnitzler, Oscar Wilde, Alain Fournier and Louis Couperus. The various discussions of these French, German, Russian, Italian, Irish and Dutch connections in this book reflect the international setting of the European fin-de-siècle as a background against which the theme of Beauty and the Beast is discussed. Contributors are: Wim Tigges, C.C. Barfoot, Jan Marsh, Valeria Tinkler-Villani, Amanda Gilroy, Peter van de Kamp, Billie Andrew Inman, Laurel Brake, Peter Costello, Ans Kabel, Douglas S. Mack, Tim Youngs, Neil Cornwell, Sjef Houppermans, Jacques B.H. Alblas, John Stokes, Susan de Sola Rodstein.

Christina Rossetti, Walter Pater, R.L. Stevenson and Their Contemporaries

Beauty and the Beast

Theo d'. Haen

Theo d' Haen

Configuring Romanticism focuses on the ways in which “Romanticism” continues to change shape in light of new discoveries, new readings, new approaches. To this end, some essays here gathered offer novel interpretations of Romantic “classics” such as Wordsworth, Blake, and Southey, or discuss the Celtic roots of Romanticism. Others address the relationship of Romantic literature, particularly the work of Scott, Shelley, and De Quincey, to issues of colonialism and imperialism. Yet others trace the “afterlife” of Romanticism and the Romantics, specifically Byron, Shelley, and Keats, in the writings of Leigh Hunt, Elizabeth Gaskell, James Thomson, Algernon Swinburne, William Michael Rosetti, James Clarence Mangan, Francis Parkman, Gilbert and Sullivan, and T.S. Eliot, as well as in Dutch nineteenth-century criticism. The volume closes with discussions of the Romantic aspects of World War II propaganda, twentieth-century translations of the Aeneid in view of Romantic principles, the Romantic face of recent Québecois fiction, and present-day film versions of Jane Austen's Emma.

Wim Tigges

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