Robert Burden

The past is a foreign country, a place of stories and secrets. James Stares has heard his English father talk about how the Great War affected the lives of his own father, mother and brother a lot; about how he met James’ mother in Cairo; about defending the Empire in Egypt at a time of rising unrest in the 1950s. But these stories are not all they seem. More than anything, James wonders why his mother’s Armenian culture plays so little part in his upbringing. Looking into his mother’s origins, James reaches out to his Armenian relatives in Canada, researching the circumstances of his maternal grandparents leaving Anatolia in a hurry in 1915… Yet much is left unsaid. We follow James as he digs deeply into his family’s past, the English and the Armenian, and in the process comes to a better understanding of himself…

Focusing on the significance of travel in Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence, Henry James, and Edith Wharton, Robert Burden shows how travel enabled a new consciousness of mobility and borders during the modernist period. For these authors, Burden suggests, travel becomes a narrative paradigm and dominant trope by which they explore questions of identity and otherness related to deep-seated concerns with the crisis of national cultural identity. He pays particular attention to the important distinction between travel and tourism, at the same time that he attends to the slippage between seeing and sightseeing, between the local character and the stereotype, between art and kitsch, and between older and newer ways of storytelling in the representational crisis of modernism. Burden argues that the greater awareness of cultural difference that characterizes both the travel writing and fiction of these expatriate writers became a defining feature of literary modernism, resulting in a consciousness of cultural difference that challenged the ethnographic project of empire.

Focusing on the significance of travel in Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence, Henry James, and Edith Wharton, Robert Burden shows how travel enabled a new consciousness of mobility and borders during the modernist period. For these authors, Burden suggests, travel becomes a narrative paradigm and dominant trope by which they explore questions of identity and otherness related to deep-seated concerns with the crisis of national cultural identity. He pays particular attention to the important distinction between travel and tourism, at the same time that he attends to the slippage between seeing and sightseeing, between the local character and the stereotype, between art and kitsch, and between older and newer ways of storytelling in the representational crisis of modernism. Burden argues that the greater awareness of cultural difference that characterizes both the travel writing and fiction of these expatriate writers became a defining feature of literary modernism, resulting in a consciousness of cultural difference that challenged the ethnographic project of empire.

This book addresses the important area of dyslexic children' s perception of themselves and how this is shaped by people and processes within their early school careers. It draws upon hitherto neglected psychological concepts such as self-efficacy, locus of control and learned helplessness to explain within a social-interactivist framework the powerful effect of self-perceptions on the social, emotional and academic development of dyslexics. Techniques for assessing these factors are described and research evidence is provided to demonstrate how a sense of dyslexic pride associated with positive academic outcomes can be achieved. The book is aimed at teachers, teacher-trainers, parents and academics researching developmental aspects of dyslexia, but combines scholarship and research in a manner that makes it accessible to adult dyslexics also.

In this study of D.H.Lawrence and critical theory, Robert Burden pays particular attention to the critical formations that underpin the reception history of the main novels, including the much maligned “leadership” novels, because strong readings have always contested the meaning and significance of Lawrence, and because there has been a persistent reluctance to approach his writing through post-structuralist theory. This study demonstrates in some detail that once Lawrence’s texts are the objects of the newer critical paradigms, their principles of coherence are understood differently; and that older notions of textual unity are displaced by aesthetic structures of degrees of generic and linguistic destabilization. This enables a radicalizing of Lawrence’s fiction by drawing out its deconstructive effects on his myth-making and essentialist notions of the self. The sexual identities represented in the fiction are read as experiments, or “thought adventures”, as Lawrence himself characterized his work. The different approaches to Lawrence’s writing in this study lead to a radical reassessment of his relationship to Modernism, especially in the light of the more elastic concept of Modernism in recent discussion, and one which traditional Lawrence scholars have ignored. What emerges is a more self-deconstructive Lawrence, with some surprising results.