Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Fiction --- Thematology --- Spanish-American literature --- Spanish American fiction --- -Dictators in literature --- Spanish American literature --- History and criticism --- Dictators in literature. --- History and criticism. --- Dictators in literature

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Fictions of African Dictatorship examines the fictional representation of the African dictator and the performance of dictatorship across genres. The volume includes contributions focusing on literature, theatre and film, all of which examine the relationship between the fictional and the political. Among the questions the contributors ask: what are the implications of reading a novel for its historical content or accuracy? How does the dictator novel interrogate ideas of veracity? How is power performed and ridiculed? How do different writers reflect on questions of authority in the postcolony, and what are the effects on their stories and modes of narration? This volume untangles some of the intricate workings of dictatorial power in the postcolony, through twelve close readings of works of fiction.

African literature --- Dictators in literature. --- Dictators --- Tyrants --- Heads of state --- History and criticism.

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Dictators in literature --- Dictateurs dans la littérature --- Roa Bastos, Augusto Antonio. --- Carpentier, Alejo, --- García Márquez, Gabriel,

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Why do tyrants - of all people - often have poetic aspirations? Where do terror and prose meet? This book contains nine case studies that compare the cultural history of totalitarian regimes. The essays focus not on the arts, literature or architecture but on the phenomenon that many of history's great despots considered themselves talented writers. By studying the artistic ambitions of Nero, Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler, Mao Zedong, Kim Il-sung, Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Saparmurat Niyazov and Radovan Karadzic, the authors explore the complicated relationship between poetry and political violence, and provide a fascinating look at the aesthetic dimensions of total power. The essays make an important contribution to a number of fields: the study of totalitarian regimes, cultural studies, and biographies of 20th century leaders. They underscore the frequent correlation between tyrannical governance and an excessive passion for language, and demonstrate that the combination of artistic and political charisma is often effective in the quest for absolute power.

Sovereignty in literature. --- Dictators in literature. --- Politics and literature. --- Literature --- Literature and politics --- Political aspects --- Communism, Dictatorship, Fascism, Literature, Personality cult, Political violence, Totalitarianism.

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

When Nero took the stage, the audience played along--or else. The drama thus enacted, whether in the theater proper or in the political arena, unfolds in all its rich complexity in Actors in the Audience. This is a book about language, theatricality, and empire--about how the Roman emperor dramatized his rule and how his subordinates in turn staged their response. The focus is on Nero: his performances onstage spurred his contemporaries to reflect on the nature of power and representation, and to make the stage a paradigm for larger questions about the theatricality of power. Through these portrayals by ancient writers, Shadi Bartsch explores what happens to language and representation when all discourse is distorted by the pull of an autocratic authority. Some Roman senators, forced to become actors and dissimulators under the scrutinizing eye of the ruler, portrayed themselves and their class as the victims of regimes that are, for us, redolent of Stalinism. Other writers claimed that doublespeak--saying one thing and meaning two--was the way one could, and did, undo the constraining effects of imperial oppression. Tacitus, Suetonius, and Juvenal all figure in Bartsch's shrewd analysis of historical and literary responses to the brute facts of empire; even the Panegyricus of Pliny the Younger now appears as a reaction against the widespread awareness of dissimulation. Informed by theories of dramaturgy, sociology, new historicism, and cultural criticism, this close reading of literary and historical texts gives us a new perspective on the politics of the Roman empire--and on the languages and representation of power.

Latin literature --- Theater --- Emperors in literature --- Literature and history --- Role playing in literature --- Dictators in literature --- Theater audiences --- Communication --- Rhetoric, Ancient --- History and criticism --- History