Ralph Pordzik Book order

The art of writing is in fact largely the perversion of words, and I would even say that the less obvious this perversion is, the more thoroughly it has been done. (George Orwell) Contents: The Textual Kinetics of Orwell's Major Fiction - The Half-Buried Art of Sexual Innuendo. Reading Orwell's Queer Desire(s) - Nineteen Eighty-Four as Conversion Narrative - Orwell's Imperial Bestiary. Animal Agency and Cross-Species Interaction - The Poetics of Etcetera. Orwell's Literary Lists - Orwell's Sublime Perversions

In his new volume of poems, Ralph Pordzik explores the captivating tale of two exiled lovers separated by time and place, their mutual affection underminded by circumstances and the transformation of the world they inhabit. In a language at once graceful and penetrative, the poems look at the burden of love with a sad reasonableness and reveal their writer to be a quiet, touching poet of sifted realism and metaphoric zest.

It has long been a commonplace to argue that apocalyptic touched Victorian writers more profoundly than any other spiritual issue of the age. Doom and disaster seemed far more probable to them than any millennium, divine or earthly, they could imagine. This study attempts a short critical history of apocalyptic poetry written in the nineteenth century, arguing that Victorian poets gradually changed their view of the End and with it the literary forms in which it was to be explored and symbolized. In a series of transactions informed by scientific change and deeply affecting their aesthetic perception, they lost faith in the regenerating powers of myth and in the concept of the infinite according to which transcendence and cosmic transformation represented vital possibilities within a comforting spiritual vision of hope and renovation. The apocalyptic poem became a privileged site of negotiating the anxieties produced by continued economic and cultural revolution, incorporating memorable scenes of apocalypse or destruction on a cosmic scale but also leaving them tantalizingly unfinished at the threshold of a redeeming vision.

The aim of this book is to bring into focus some of the major moves in western discourses about tourism and travel writing from the early Victorian to the late modern or post-western age. It offers a series of readings connecting the work of travel writers as diverse as Alexander Kinglake, William Cobbett, George Henry Borrow, E. M. Forster and Bruce Chatwin to their respective cultural and material contexts. The grounding model is that of travel writing as a form of cultural intervention and the individual text as an artificial yet intermediary space that constantly stimulates the travellers' consciousness, moving them to revise judgements passed on their own as well as on the other culture. In individual chapters, the study explores different stages of revision in travel discourse since the late-romantic age, surveys new touristic models installed in the place of received notions of picturesque or adventurous travel and analyses the role of exotic and nostalgic registers in the construction of cultural value.

The Quest for Postcolonial Utopia is a critical introduction to utopian and dystopian fiction written in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Africa, and India. It outlines the development of utopian writing over the last thirty years and analyzes the relationship between postcolonial and utopian issues foregrounded in these works. Based on a comparative approach that takes into account the different traditions the texts are derived from, this book examines the function of utopian alternatives and dystopian anxieties in the writings of a wide range of well-known authors such as Janet Frame, David Ireland, J M Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Peter Carey, Rodney Hall, Buchi Emecheta, Margaret Atwood, Glenda Adams, John Cranna, Suniti Namjoshi, Mike Nicol, Ben Okri, Gerald Murnane, and Timothy Findley.