Haunted by Words : Scandalous Texts.
Title:
Haunted by Words : Scandalous Texts.
Author:
Miller, Alyson.
ISBN:
9783035105551
Personal Author:
Physical Description:
1 online resource (248 pages)
Contents:
cover -- Table of Contents 5 -- IntroductionHaunted by Words: Scandalous Texts 7 -- Chapter One - Unsuited to Age Group: The Anxietiesof Children's Literature 17 -- Framing the Child: Childhood, Children and Literature 19 -- Igniting Debate: The Scandalous Texts 24 -- 'Feel Yer Tits?': Sexual Content in Young Adult Literature 35 -- A Scandalous Absence: Controversy and Race 40 -- Masterpieces of Satanic Deception:Transgressing the Sacred 44 -- An Anxious Connection: Children and Literature 50 -- Chapter Two - Dismembering Women: Gender and Identityin Top-Notch Smut 53 -- Femmes Fatales: Madame Bovary, The Well of Loneliness and Lady Chatterley's Lover 56 -- Une Complicité Libertine: Reading Political Correctnessin 'Posh Porn' 70 -- 'I Am A Completely Demented Misogynist': Decoding American Psycho 82 -- 'This Is Not An Exit': Re-Drawing the Boundaries? 95 -- Chapter Three - The Art of Persuasive Lying: Faking it in Memoir 99 -- Fakes, Frauds and Forgery: Situating Literary Imposture 103 -- Reimagining the Unimaginable: Victims of History 114 -- Delusions of Domestic Tragedy: Victims of Abuse 135 -- Ethnic Vultures: Victims of Culture 151 -- Fake Revealing Fake: Authenticity as Effect 167 -- Chapter Four - From Holy Books to Satanic Verses: Confronting the Sacred 169 -- A Question of Faith: The Politics of Critique 173 -- A Battle of Facts: The New Religion of The Da Vinci Code 190 -- Drawing the Battlelines: The Politics of Nationhood 195 -- Out, Damn Whores: The Politics of Difference 209 -- The Atheist Possibility: Blaspheming Something New 219 -- Conclusion - This is a Story: (Re-)Narrating the World 225 -- Works Cited 229.
Abstract:
This book critically examines a wide range of contemporary literary scandals in order to identify the cultural and literary anxieties revealed by controversial works. It explores how scandal predominantly emerges in relation to texts which offer challenging representations concerning children, women, sexuality, religion and authenticity, and how literary controversies bring to the surface a series of concerns about the complex construction of identity, history and reality. Including works such as J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series (1996-2007), Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho (1991), James Frey's A Million Little Pieces (2003), Misha Defonseca's Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust (1997), Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses (1988) and Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy (1995-2000), the author analyses a broad spectrum of texts in order to examine why books continue to provoke public debate and outrage, and what the arguments surrounding scandalous works suggest about literature and the world.
Local Note:
Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2017. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.
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Electronic Access:
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