Novel Approaches to Anthropology : Contributions to Literary Anthropology

This volume of interdisciplinary essays reflect current contributions to literary anthropology. Novel Approaches to Anthropology: Contributions to Literary Anthropology showcases the myriad ways that anthropologists bring their disciplinary perspectives, theories, concepts, and pedagogical strategies to interpreting fiction and travel writing written in the past and present. The authors integrate insights from the reflexive deconstructive turn in anthropology and from critical Marxist and feminist approaches that ground interpretation in the political, economic, and social constraints and experiences of everyday life. The contributors share the view that fiction, like all artistic expression, is rooted in specific historical and cultural contexts. Literature, like all artistic expression, stimulates a critical imagination by allowing readers to take a fresh look at their own society and culture. -- Publisher website. NOVEL APPROACHES TO ANTHROPOLOGY Contents List of Figures and Photograph Acknowledgments 1. Introduction: Anthropological Aspects of the Novel 2. A Shandean Description of Frakean "Ethnographic Behavior" 3. Reading Defoe, the Eighteenth-Century Master Story-teller 4. "A Genuine Victorian Oddity": Harriet Martineau's Fiction 5. Mark Twain's Weapon of Mass Destruction: "The Human Race Has Only One Really Effective Weapon and that Is Laughter" 6. The Creole Speaks: Daniel, Sandi, and the Other in Wide Sargasso Sea 7. Ethnografiction and Reality in Contemporary Irish Literature 8. Engaging Students with Fiction, Memoirs, and Film Index About the Contributors This volume of essays reflects current theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical approaches to literary anthropology. The interdisciplinary perspectives on novels and travel writing from the past and present are relevant to the social sciences and humanities including anthropology, sociology, political economy, history, cultural studies, literary criticism, gender, and women's studies