Name: The Beauty of Convention
SKU: 1-4438-5469-7
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The Beauty of Convention

Essays in Literature and Culture

Edited By: Marija Knežević, Aleksandra Nikcevic-Batricevic

£44.99

This volume explores the beauty of convention, viewing form as a keeper of meaning. It asks how conventions generate beauty and gain stability, examining literature, music, dance, and sculpture through diverse cultural and critical perspectives.

This volume addresses the beauty of convention not in an attempt to recapitulate established values (as, luckily, in literature and culture, there are not absolute…

This volume addresses the beauty of convention not in an attempt to recapitulate established values (as, luckily, in literature and culture, there are not absolute beauties that serve everyone and always), but as an aesthetic appreciation of form as a keeper of meaning and as an ethical post-cynical metadiscourse on human dependence on symbolic interaction and generic conventions. Looking into the artificial, invented, side of this concept, the book addresses such questions as: What is beauty by virtue of convention? How does convention generate beauty? How does it happen that a convention acquires a normative force? What is the nature and the “logic of situation” that leads to the arbitrary conventions? How are alternative conventions made? What is inertia, and what real joy or belief ensures the stability of convention? Is there a natural correctness that enables the stability of convention? How does convention determine linguistic meanings? Can interpretation avoid convention?

Without imposing one definition onto the reader, this volume presents an understanding of the stability of convention and how it generates beauty by employing numerous contemporary reading strategies and diverse cultural, ethnic, gender, psychological, and textual perspectives. Primary focus is given to various literary texts ranging from early classics to modernism and contemporary writing, though there are also discussions on other forms of human expressions, such as music, dance and sculpture. This book will contribute to the on-going discussion about the ambiguities inherent in the concept of convention, and, thus, stimulate intellectual confrontation and circulation of ideas within the fields of literature and culture.

Marija Krivokapić-Knežević teaches 19th- and 20th century British Literature at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Montenegro, where she also works as a Vice-Dean for Science and International Relations. Her publications focus on the work of D. H. Lawrence, but her recent interests also include contemporary Native American literature and travel writing. She is the co-editor of Culture-Bound Translation and Language in a Global Era; History, Politics, Identity: Reading Literature in a Changing World; Recounting Cultural Encounters, On the Borders of Convention; and The Face of the Other in Anglo-American Literature. She has also edited and co-edited a series of translations of British, Canadian, South African, and Native American authors, and is the current general editor of the linguistics and literature journal Folia linguistica et litteraria. She has also been a coordinator of an international project for the advancement of language studies, SEEPALS 2010–2013, financed by the European Commission.

Dr Aleksandra Nikčević-Batrićević teaches courses on American literature, American women poetry and feminist literary theory and criticism at the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Montenegro. Her publications include papers on Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, second wave feminism, Herman Melville and other American authors. She has edited and co-edited sixteen books, and is currently writing a book about the literary canon and feminist interventions in it.