Leyla Ozgur Alhassen approaches the Qur'an as a literary, religious and oral text that affects its audience. She looks at how Qur'anic stories function as narrative: how characters and dialogues are ...portrayed; what themes are repeated; what verbal echoes and conceptual links are present; what structure is established; and what beliefs these narrative choices strengthen. Ozgur Alhassen argues that, in the Qur'an, some narrative features that are otherwise puzzling can be seen as instances in which God, as the narrator, centres himself while putting the audience in its place. In essence, this makes the act of reading an interaction between God and the audience.
Illuminating a powerful intersection between popular culture and global politics,Spies and Holy Warsdraws on a sampling of more than eight hundred British and American thrillers that are propelled by ...the theme ofjihad-an Islamic holy war or crusade against the West. Published over the past century, the books in this expansive study encompass spy novels and crime fiction, illustrating new connections between these genres and Western imperialism.
Demonstrating the social implications of the popularity of such books, Reeva Spector Simon covers how the Middle Eastern villain evolved from being the malleable victim before World War II to the international, techno-savvy figure in today's crime novels. She explores the impact of James Bond, pulp fiction, and comic books and also analyzes the ways in which world events shaped the genre, particularly in recent years. Worldwide terrorism and economic domination prevail as the most common sources of narrative tension in these works, while military "tech novels" restored the prestige of the American hero in the wake of post-Vietnam skepticism. Moving beyond stereotypes, Simon examines the relationships between publishing trends, political trends, and popular culture at large-giving voice to the previously unexamined truths that emerge from these provocative page-turners.
This book examines the staggering popularity of early-twentieth-century Russian detective serials, traditionally maligned as "Pinkertonovshchina," and posits the "red Pinkerton" as a vital "missing ...link" between pre- and post-Revolutionary popular literature.
The short story has become an increasingly important genre since the mid-nineteenth century. Complementing The Cambridge Introduction to the American Short Story, this book examines the development ...of the short story in Britain and other English-language literatures. It considers issues of form and style alongside - and often as part of - a broader discussion of publishing history and the cultural contexts in which the short story has flourished and continues to flourish. In its structure the book provides a chronological survey of the form, usefully grouping writers to show the development of the genre over time. Starting with Dickens and Kipling, the chapters cover key authors from the past two centuries and up to the present day. The focus on form, literary history, and cultural context, together with the highlighting of the greatest short stories and their authors, make this a stimulating and informative overview for all students of English literature.
Thomas Hardy’s fiction is examined in this book in the context of the seismic legal reforms of the nineteenth century as well as legal discourse in the literature of the era. The book examines the ...ways in which Hardy’s role as a magistrate and his interest in the law impacted fundamentally on his prose fiction. It demonstrates that throughout his prose fiction Hardy engages with contentious legal issues that were debated by legal professionals and literary figures of his day, and argues that Hardy used fiction as a forum to question the extent to which legal reform improved the lives of women and the working classes.
This book offers a study of Danish, Norwegian, Swedish and
French crime fictions covering a fifty-year period. From 1965 to
the present, both Scandinavian and French societies have undergone
...significant transformations. Twelve literary case studies examine
how crime fictions in the respective contexts have responded to
shifting social realities, which have in turn played a part in
transforming the generic codes and conventions of the crime novel.
At the centre of the book's analysis is crime fiction's negotiation
of the French model of Republican universalism and the Scandinavian
welfare state, both of which were routinely characterised as being
in a state of crisis at the end of the twentieth century. Adopting
a comparative and interdisciplinary approach, the book investigates
the interplay between contemporary Scandinavian and French crime
narratives, considering their engagement with the relationship of
the state and the citizen, and notably with identity issues (class,
gender, sexuality and ethnicity in particular).
