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This book provides a lucid, wide-ranging and up-to-date critical introduction to the writings of Hélène Cixous (1937–). Cixous is often considered ‘difficult’. Moreover she is extraordinarily prolific, having published dozens of books, essays, plays and other texts. Royle avoids any pretence of a comprehensive survey, instead offering a rich and diverse sampling. At once expository and playful, original and funny, this micrological approach enables a new critical understanding and appreciation of Cixous’s writing. If there is complexity in her work, Royle suggests, there is also uncanny simplicity and great pleasure. The book focuses on key motifs such as dreams, the supernatural, literature, psychoanalysis, creative writing, realism, sexual differences, laughter, secrets, the ‘Mother unconscious’, drawing, painting, autobiography as ‘double life writing’, unidentifiable literary objects (ULOs), telephones, non-human animals, telepathy and the ‘art of cutting’. Particular stress is given to Cixous’s work in relation to Sigmund Freud and Jacques Derrida, as well as to her importance in the context of ‘English literature’. There are close readings of Shakespeare, Emily Brontë, P. B. Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Lewis Carroll, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, for example, alongside in-depth explorations of her own writings, from Inside (1969) and ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (1975) up to the present. Royle’s book will be of particular interest to students and academics coming to Cixous’s work for the first time, but it will also appeal to readers interested in contemporary literature, creative writing, life writing, narrative theory, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, feminism, queer theory, ecology, drawing and painting.
); (2) to seek ‘realism’, often with an emphasis upon blood, severed heads, maiming, and brutality; (3) to focus on the bizarre features of the play, whether to single out the horrors in the Grand Guignol tradition or to treat the script as parody or burlesque (as in William Freimuth’s 1986–87 production for the Source Theatre Company of Washington, DC which, according to Margaret M. Tocci [ Shakespeare Bulletin , 5.2, March/April 1987, pp. 10–11] provided ‘liberal doses of knockabout farce and cheerful mayhem sprinkled
It is this encouragement to articulate and interrogate personal feeling that makes the Ignatian Exercises so useful to an investigation of the creation in English poetry of a new psychological realism and emotional integrity. I would suggest. I agree with Frank Brownlow’s point that poetry is not meditation, and that affective devotion per se was a central feature of the Counter
great a degree as himself, a love of the honest truth [realism]. With Nash, then, the novel of real life, whose invention in England is generally attributed to Defoe, begins.’ Jean Jusserand, Le roman au temps de Shakespeare (Paris: Asnières, 1887 ), 347–8 (my translation). Defoe published his first novel, Robinson Crusoe , only in 1719 when Nashe
assumes in The Golden Age and The Silver Age , as Tanya Pollard recalls in chapter 10 . This is all the more ironic in that it also applies to Diana and her followers in the previous scene who were, of course, performed by actors pretending to be women. At a key moment in the action, Heywood thus creates a distancing effect by choosing to recall boy actors’ concerns about the realism of their female impersonation as well as their anxieties about a possible impact on their masculinity, thereby reminding the audience that this is a play – a performance and a game
, irrespective of the quality of its verse. The book also has a fraught political and religious message that requires more study. On its surface and in more subtle ways, the work demonstrates a militant Protestant and pro-English mindset: Henry Sidney and his troops with their cross of St George confront papal hegemony on the green fringe of England’s nascent empire. Consequently, rather than emphasising the mimetic realism of the woodcuts, this chapter focuses on the religious content of the images, so as to stress their partly
Christian marriage at the end of The Taming of the Shrew , through the enforced silence of Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing , to Macbeth’s fatal association of the words ‘surcease’ and ‘success’ ( Macbeth , 1.7.4). In Love’s Labour’s Lost the impossibility of a teleologically authenticated ending is far more extreme than the mixture of realism and idealism that leaves doubts in the minds of spectators about the veracity of what they have just witnessed. Love’s Labour’s Lost gives ‘some thing to the woman’ – a
-white Leda, yet not even these lovers were ‘so white as these’; Spenser launders his swans beyond previous example and any sense of realism. Donne takes in these emblems of purity when describing his own swan: ‘A swan, so white that you may unto him / Compare all whitenesse, but himselfe to none, / Glided along’ (lines 232–4). 14 At one level, Donne’s swan confirms Carew’s analysis: where Spenser seems ‘windy’, Donne laconically juxtaposes a very white swan with its predatory instincts: ‘And with his arched necke this poore fish catch’d’ (line 235). Yet as John B. Bender
manner of Lucianic satire and the carnivalesque Spenser highlights Una’s ‘angels face’ (I.iii.4) in contrast with Duessa’s ‘rompe’ (I.viii.48). Bakhtin writes: ‘Finally, debasement is the fundamental artistic principle of grotesque realism; all that is sacred and exalted is rethought on the level of the lower bodily stratum or else combined and mixed with its images.’ See his Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 370–1. 58 Agnomination is listed by Sonnino under Adnominatio (Polyptoton) also known as Paronomasia. See Sonnino, A
ludicrous moments, as when Wendoll emerges in his nightshirt and runs off the stage – to escape being run through with Frankford’s sword: Enter WENDOLL , running over the stage in a nightgown, he [ FRANKFORD ] after him with his sword drawn; the Maid in her smock stays his hand and clasps hold on him. He pauses awhile. FRANKFORD : I thank thee, maid; thou, like the angel’s hand,Hast stay’d me from a bloody sacrifice. ( Woman Killed , xiii.sd, 62–3) As Alan C. Dessen points out, the issue here is not an attempt at ‘realism’, domestic or otherwise: instead