Theme (narrative)

About: Theme (narrative) is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 13050 publications have been published within this topic receiving 159511 citations. The topic is also known as: narrative theme.

Women living in paradox: loss and discovery in chronic illness.

Abstract: Six women with chronic illness engaged in multiple conversations with the investigator to help her understand what it is like to live with chronic illness. Phenomenologic writing and reflection were used to analyze the data. The story is guided by an integrating theme: Living in paradox circumscribes one's loss while enabling one to embrace new discoveries of self in the life world through unfolding awareness.

Newton, The Man

Abstract: It is with some diffidence that I try to speak to you in his own home of Newton as he was himself. I have long been a student of the records and had the intention to put my impressions into writing to be ready for Christmas Day 1942, the tercentenary of his birth. The war has deprived me both of leisure to treat adequately so great a theme and of opportunity to consult my library and my papers and to verify my impressions. So if the brief study which I shall lay before you to-day is more perfunctory than it should be, I hope you will excuse me.

Special Delivery: Epistolary Modes in Modern Fiction

Abstract: Though letter writing is almost a lost art, twentieth-century writers have mimed the epistolary mode as a means of reevaluating the theme of love. In "Special Delivery," Linda S. Kauffman places the narrative treatment of love in historical context, showing how politics, economics, and commodity culture have shaped the meaning of desire. Kauffman first considers male writers whose works, testing the boundaries of genre and gender, imitate love letters: Viktor Shklovsky's Zoo, Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita," Roland Barthes's" A Lover's Discourse," and Jacques Derrida's "The Post Card." She then turns to three novels by women who are more preoccupied with politics than passion: Doris Lessing's "The Golden Notebook," Alice Walker's "The Color Purple," and Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale." By juxtaposing these "women's productions" with the men's "production of Woman," "Special Delivery" dismantles the polarities between male and female, theory and fiction, high and low culture, male critical theory, and feminist literary criticism. Kauffman demonstrates how all seven texts mercilessly expose the ideology of individualism and romantic love; each presents alternate paradigms of desire, wrested from Oedipus, grounded in history and politics, giving epistolarity a distinctively postmodern stamp.

Introduction : Rebellious Parents in Central-Eastern Europe and Russia

Abstract: This chapter introduces the readers to the theme of a broad range of parental movements that have emerged in contemporary Central-Eastern Europe and Russia over the past two decades. Examples of su ...

The Power of culture : critical essays in American history

Abstract: "We are in the midst of a dramatic shift in sensibility, and 'cultural' history is the rubric under which a massive doubting and refiguring of our most cherished historical assumptions is being conducted. Many historians are coming to suspect that the idea of culture has the power to restore order to the study of the past. Whatever its potency as an organizing theme, there is no doubt about the power of the term 'culture' to evoke and stand for the depth of the re- examination not taking place. At a time of deep intellectual disarray, 'culture' offers a provisional, nominalist version of coherence: whatever the fragmentation of knowledge, however centrifugal the spinning of the scholarly wheel, 'culture'-- which (even etymologically) conveys a sense of safe nurture, warm growth, budding or ever-present wholeness--will shelter us. The PC buttons on historians' chests today stand not for 'politically correct' but 'positively cultural.'--from the Introduction More and more scholars are turning to cultural history in order to make sense of the American past. This volume brings together nine original essays by some leading practitioners in the field. The essays aim to exhibit the promise of a cultural approach to understanding the range of American experiences from the seventeenth century to the present. Expanding on the editors' pathbreaking "The Culture of Consumption," the contributors to this volume argue for a cultural history that attends closely to language and textuality without losing sight of broad configurations of power that social and political history at its best has always stressed. The authors here freshly examine crucial topics in both private and public life. Takentogether, the essays shed new light on the power of culture in the lives of Americans past and present. Richard Wightman Fox is professor of history and director of American Studies at Boston University. He is the author of "Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography." T. J. Jackson Lears, professor of history at Rutgers University, is a contributor to "The New Republic," "The Nation," and "Wilson Quarterly."