Theme parks, rainforests and sprouting wastelands : : European essays on theory and performance in contemporary British fiction / / edited by Richard Todd & Luisa Flora.

• Superior document: Costerus new series ; Volume 123
• TeilnehmendeR: Todd, Richard, 1949-; Flora, Luísa Maria Rodrigues, 1951-
• Place / Publishing House: Amsterdam ;, Atlanta, Georgia : : Brill,, [2000]; ©2000
• Year of Publication: 2000
• Language: English
• Series: Costerus ; Volume 123.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (240 pages)

This lively and fascinating new collection of European essays on contemporary Anglophone fiction has arisen out of the ESSE/3 Conference, which was held in Glasgow in September 1995. The contributors live and work in University English Departments in Bulgaria, Croatia, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, The Netherlands, Portugal and Spain, as well as in the United Kingdom itself. Essays on general theoretical aspects of the subject head and conclude the collection, and there are also essays on individual writers or groups of writers, such as John Fowles, A.S. Byatt, Charles Palliser, Peter Ackroyd, William Golding, Doris Lessing, Daphne du Maurier, Angela Carter and Christina Stead. The performative aspect of the subject-matter of these essays is balanced by a locational aspect, including utopian and dystopian writing in authors as diverse as Michael Crichton, Jenny Diski and Salman Rushdie, and the travel literature of Bruce Chatwin. These essays show theoretical alertness, but no single theoretical position is privileged. The aim of the collection is to provide an indication of the range of work being carried out throughout European academe on Anglophone (mainly British) writing today.

Table of Contents

Foreword. Daniela CARPI: Twentieth-Century Revision of Myth: the Myths of Writing. Pedro GALLARDO-TORRANO: Rediscovering the Island as Utopian Locus: Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park. Silvia CAPORALE BIZZINI: Language and Power in Jenny Diski's Rainforest. Andreas HÖFELE: Wasteland Sprouting: Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses and the Cityscapes of Modernism. Hartmut HIRSCH: 'A Novel of a Future': Textual Strategies and Political Discourse in Recent Utopian Fiction in English. Catherine BERNARD: Bruce Chatwin: fiction on the frontier. Tatjana JUKI_: From worlds to words and the other way around: the Victorian inheritance in the postmodern British novel. Margarita CHOUROVA: 'The Death of the Author' and the tragicomic allegory of William Golding's The Paper Men. Peter CONRADI: Angus Wilson: Impersonations. Isabel C. ANIEVAS GAMALLO: Motherhood and the fear of the Other: Magic, fable and the gothic in Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child. John MEPHAM: Conversation and Friendship in Doris Lessing's Novels. Sarah SCEATS: Flesh and Bones: Eating, not eating and the social vision of Doring Lessing. Susana ONEGA: Mirror Games and Hidden Narratives in The Quincunx. Agnes SURÁNYI: A Comparison of Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus and Christina Stead's Little Hotel. Avril HORNER and Sue ZLOSNIK: Daphne du Maurier: The French Connection. Chris WALSH: Postmodernist Reflections: A.S. Byatt's Possession. Christien FRANKEN: The Turtle and its Adversaries: Gender Disruption in A.S. Byatt's Critical and Academic Work. Marta Sofía LÓPEZ: Historiographic metafiction and resistance postmodernism. Index.