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Literary Form (literary + form)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	100%

Selected Abstracts

The Law of the Land or the Law of the Land?: History, Law and Narrative in a Settler Society

HISTORY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 1 2004
Bain Attwood
This article considers the influence of a controversial historical work on the law, politics and society of a settler nation. It argues that the impact of Henry Reynolds's 1987 The Law of the Land on legal consideration of indigenous rights to land in Australia can be attributed to the fact that it is best described as juridical history. As such, it told a lego-historical story that provided the High Court of Australia with a new way of interpreting its own traditional narrative, which had long denied Aboriginal people their rights to land, thus enabling it to make a new determination of those rights as well as resolve a crisis of legitimacy for the law and the nation. This article also contends that this history-making came to be accepted by many settler Australians because it provided the nation with a newly redemptive, liberal myth narrative. It assesses the cost of a story of this kind, asking whether such simple histories can have an enduring effect, especially where their authors are reluctant to signpost the historical or literary form of their texts. Finally, it suggests that histories truer to the complexities of the past might produce better political and social outcomes. [source]

Who's Afraid of Eliza Haywood?

LITERATURE COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 4 2007
Margaret Case Croskery
Haywood's status within academic circles is still undergoing the type of canonical redistricting that makes more transparent the ideological tensions within competing standards of literary value. The curious patterns within her reception history, both in her own day and in the present, suggest both how much and how little has changed within commodity politics since the 1700s , when Haywood's publications helped to define the novel as a literary form , and today, when the definition of the ,literary' is once again in productive flux. [source]

The Shaman's Song and Divination in the Epic Tradition

ANTHROPOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS, Issue 2 2010
KURT CLINE
ABSTRACT Evidence of the intimate linkage of the shaman's song and divinatory procedures may be viewed in the ancient epics. These narrative poems contain structural and thematic elements recognizable from the shaman's song,in particular his or her voyage to the Otherworld and the guidance of oracular powers. In this paper, The Epic of Gilgamesh, Euripedes' Ion, and The Ozidi Saga (a living epic from West Africa) are examined as recuperations of the orally composed and transmitted song of the shaman. I argue that the epics,the origins of which predate their composition in literary form,bear witness to these most ancient and mysterious forms of linguistic expression. As depictions of Otherwordly journeys, they can be viewed through a metaphysic outside of time, rendering divination not only possible but inevitable, and necessitating a language of abstraction, allusion, and ambiguity. Today's experimental poetries may not all partake of a conscious recuperation of shamanic themes and forms, but they share an imaginary (yet not imagined) repositioning of reality, an open questioning of consensus forms of awareness, and an aesthetic shaping of what Jean Gebser calls "Integral Consciousness" (15), the simultaneous integration-disintegration of archaic, mythic, magic, and mental paradigms in an intensification of awareness which sees time as diaphanous, and Mind as a doorway between possibilities. [source]

Gothic and the Generation of Ideas1

LITERATURE COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 1 2007
Donna Heiland
Gothic writing has remarkable generative power: as Marshall Brown has described it, gothic is a genre with what he calls a teleology, whose "significance lies in what it enabled its future readers to see, in what arguments it provoked, and . . . in what dreams it stimulated" (xix). From a brief discussion of selected early studies of the gothic, this article moves on to consider the extraordinary development of gothic criticism from the 1970s on, when the emergence of feminist and post-structuralist criticism put gothic literature on the map in a new way. Tracing the development and imbrication of the many strands of gothic criticism yields a complex and at times paradoxical picture: gothic has been read as the most rigid and formulaic of literary forms but also as centrally engaged with the notably slippery concepts of sensibility and the sublime; as escapist and as grounded in the realities of human existence; as focused on the individual psyche and as socio-cultural critique; as commenting on class, on gender, on race; as engaged with questions of national, colonial, and post-colonial identity. The field is now so well developed that guidebooks and handbooks to both primary sources and critical approaches have emerged over the last few years to codify and make it accessible. And so the question arises: have we said all that we can about this genre or can we learn still more from it? The closing portion of this article suggests that we can, pointing to gothic and religion as an area of particular interest. Religious issues have been front and center in gothic writing from its inception, and criticism to date has opened up , but hardly exhausted , this potentially rich area of research. [source]

Five-Finger Exercises: Mika Waltari's Detective Stories

ORBIS LITERARUM, Issue 1 2004
Heta Pyrhönen
This essay addresses the question of what happens when authors import into their own culture a genre whose structures and conventions have been moulded in another culture. If the imported structures and conventions include a certain value system, does an author's adaptation cause them to express markedly different values than they do in their original context? I explore this question by analysing the detective stories by Mika Waltari, a reowned Finnish author, who used both the British whodunit and Edgar Allan Poe's Dupin stories as models. I first consider Waltari's use of specific generic conventions and consider the national values he makes them express. I then analyse Waltari's insertion of himself into the textual roles of detective and culprit in order to examine the link between writing detective stories and ideology. I show how Waltari creates a fundamental discrepancy between the whodunit world and the Finnish context in which he sets this world in order to emphasize the literariness of the imitated model. In his hands, writing detective stories becomes first and foremost a literary exercise that enables him to show his skilful, self-reflexive, and ironic play with literary forms and conventions. [source]