Looking at travel writing by British women from the seventeenth century on, Karen R. Lawrence asks an intriguing question: What happens when, instead of waiting patiently for Odysseus, Penelope voyages and records her journey―when the woman who is expected to waitsets forth herself and traces an itinerary of her own?Lawrence ranges widely, discussing both fiction and nonfiction and traversing the genres of travel letters, realistic and sentimental novels, ethnography, fantasy, and postmodern narrative. In examining works as dissimilar as Margaret Cavendish's rendition of the Renaissance adventure narrative and Christine Brooke-Rose's postmodernist Between, she explores not only the significance of gender for travel writing, but also the value of travel itself for testing the limits of women's social freedoms and restraints.Lawrence shows how writings by Frances Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft, Sarah Lee, Mary Kingsley, Virginia Woolf, and Brigid Brophy reconceive the meanings of femininity in relation to such apparent oppositions as travel/home, other/self, and foreign/domestic. Despite the differences-historical, generic, political-among these writers, Lawrence maintains, they share common insights. Their accounts overturn the dichotomy between adventure and domesticity, demonstrating something illusory within both the stability of home and the freedom of travel.

Penelope Voyages: Women and Travel in the British Literary Tradition (Reading Women Writing)

Literature & Fiction

Lawrence, Karen R.

British & Irish

Cornell University Press

Looking at travel writing by British women from the seventeenth century on, Karen R. Lawrence asks an intriguing question: What happens when, instead of waiting patiently for Odysseus, Penelope voyages and records her journey―when the woman who is expected to waitsets forth herself and traces an itinerary of her own?
Lawrence ranges widely, discussing both fiction and nonfiction and traversing the genres of travel letters, realistic and sentimental novels, ethnography, fantasy, and postmodern narrative. In examining works as dissimilar as Margaret Cavendish's rendition of the Renaissance adventure narrative and Christine Brooke-Rose's postmodernist Between, she explores not only the significance of gender for travel writing, but also the value of travel itself for testing the limits of women's social freedoms and restraints.
Lawrence shows how writings by Frances Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft, Sarah Lee, Mary Kingsley, Virginia Woolf, and Brigid Brophy reconceive the meanings of femininity in relation to such apparent oppositions as travel/home, other/self, and foreign/domestic. Despite the differences-historical, generic, political-among these writers, Lawrence maintains, they share common insights. Their accounts overturn the dichotomy between adventure and domesticity, demonstrating something illusory within both the stability of home and the freedom of travel.

"The author of the acclaimed The Odyssey of Style in Ulysses here presents her thinking on James Joyce dating from that landmark work. Who’s Afraid of James Joyce? is consistently erudite and thought provoking."--John Gordon, Connecticut College
"Contains riches and will become an essential resource for new generations of Joyce critics looking to build on Lawrence's immense contributions to the field. The glittering intelligence of the individual pieces in this collection reminds us that each time Lawrence returns to Joyce's body of work, she manages not just to extract a creative reading, but to develop a fundamentally new way of approaching these immensely influential stories and novels."--Sean Latham, University of Tulsa
The development of Joycean studies into a respected and very large subdiscipline of modernist studies can be traced to the work of several important scholars. Among those who did the most to document Joyce's work, Karen Lawrence can easily be considered one of that elite cadre.
A retrospective of decades of work on Joyce, this collection includes published journal articles, book chapters, and selections from her best known work (all updated and revised), along with one new essay. Featuring engaging close readings of such Joyce works as Dubliners and Ulysses, it will be a welcome addition to any serious Joycean's library and will prove extremely useful to new generations of Joyce critics looking to build on Lawrence's expansive scholarship. Both readable and lively, this work may inspire a lifetime of reading, re-reading, and teaching Joyce.
A volume in The Florida James Joyce Series, edited by Sebastian D. G. Knowles

Who's Afraid of James Joyce? (Florida James Joyce)

History & Criticism

University Press of Florida

The development of Joycean studies into a respected and very large subdiscipline of modernist studies can be traced to the work of several important scholars. Among those who did the most to document Joyce's work, Karen Lawrence can easily be considered one of that elite cadre.A retrospective of decades of work on Joyce, this collection includes published journal articles, book chapters, and selections from her best known work (all updated and revised), along with one new essay. Featuring engaging close readings of such Joyce works as Dubliners and Ulysses, it will be a welcome addition to any serious Joycean's library and will prove extremely useful to new generations of Joyce critics looking to build on Lawrence's expansive scholarship. Both readable and lively, this work may inspire a lifetime of reading, re-reading, and teaching Joyce.

Techniques for Living: Fiction and Theory in the Work of Christine Brooke-Rose (THEORY INTERPRETATION NARRATIV)

Christine Brooke-Rose is a writer, critic, and narrative theorist whose extraordinarily varied body of work tests the relationship between twentieth-century theory and fiction in unparalleled ways. As they rupture “the relics of nineteenth-century ideologies,” Brooke-Rose’s fictional experiments offer new ways to theorize life and formulate conduct in the new world orders of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Specifically addressing the loss of our ability to differentiate reality from what she calls “the unreal,” her novels mime the various “deaths” and absences described in contemporary literary theory, registering these absences technically, ontologically, and emotionally in linguistic and grammatical “constraints.” Rather than melancholy or self-enclosed exercises, however, her writing draws creative vitality out of the loss and limitation it examines. Deploying twentieth-century discourses drawn from technology, literary theory, astronomy, evolutionary biology, and popular culture, her vital, often humorous, fictions offer survival strategies for the genre of the novel. They offer new forms for telling the human story within the unreality of contemporary life. In Techniques for Living: Fiction and Theory in the Work of Christine Brooke-Rose, Karen R. Lawrence explains how Brooke-Rose’s career invites revision of contemporary literary histories and theories of postmodernism. With her highly original narrative forms, Brooke-Rose significantly contributes to the radical evolution of narrative in modernism’s wake. In its singular focus on the lively and prolific experiments of this writer/critic/theorist, Techniques for Living lays the groundwork for further challenges to our generalized versions of postmodernism, as it also provides a fascinating reading of a highly original writer.

Ohio State University Press

Race riots. Labor strikes. Women’s battle for the vote. The aftermath of the Great War. The transformative events and harsh realities of the year 1919 still reverberate a century later. Nineteen Nineteen, published to accompany a centennial exhibition of the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, explores the institution and its founding through the lens of this single, tumultuous year. The fully illustrated catalog features works from The Huntington’s vast collections of books, manuscripts, photographs, ephemera, and art, many of them never exhibited or published before. Highlights include German propaganda posters, labor manifestos, personal mementos from suffrage campaigns, firsthand chronicles of World War I and the papers of T.E. Lawrence (better known as “Lawrence of Arabia”). Artworks by Abraham Walkowitz, John Singer Sargent, Joseph Pennell, Earl Horter, and David Bomberg respond to the unsettling experience of modern life and to a postwar world desperately trying to piece its shards back together. James Glisson is the Interim Chief Curator of American Art at The Huntington. Jennifer A. Watts is Curator of Photography and Visual Culture at The Huntington. Karen R. Lawrence assumed her position as the ninth president of The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens on Sept. 1, 2018, following a decade as president at Sarah Lawrence, a small, highly regarded liberal arts college in Yonkers, New York.

Nineteen Nineteen

Arts & Photography

Watts, Jennifer A.

Glisson, James

Angel City Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Lawrence, Karen R.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Lawrence, Karen R.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Lawrence, Karen R.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Penelope Voyages: Women and Travel in the British Literary Tradition (Reading Women Writing)

Penelope Voyages: Women and Travel in the British Literary Tradition (Reading Women Writing)

Who's Afraid of James Joyce? (Florida James Joyce)

Who's Afraid of James Joyce? (Florida James Joyce)

Techniques for Living: Fiction and Theory in the Work of Christine Brooke-Rose (THEORY INTERPRETATION NARRATIV)

Techniques for Living: Fiction and Theory in the Work of Christine Brooke-Rose (THEORY INTERPRETATION NARRATIV)

Nineteen Nineteen