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This book brings together ideas about time from narrative theory and philosophy. It argues that literary criticism and narratology have approached narrative primarily as a form of retrospect, and demonstrates through a series of arguments and readings that anticipation and other forms of projection into the future offer new analytical perspectives to narrative criticism and theory. The book offers an account of ‘prolepsis’ or ‘flashforward’ in the contemporary novel that retrieves it from the realm of experimentation and places it at the heart of a contemporary mode of being, both personal and collective, which experiences the present as the object of a future memory. With reference to some of the most important recent developments in the philosophy of time, it aims to define a set of questions about tense and temporal reference in narrative that make it possible to reconsider the function of stories in contemporary culture. The text also reopens traditional questions about the difference between literature and philosophy in relation to knowledge of time. In the context of these questions, it offers analyses of a range of contemporary fiction by writers such as Ali Smith, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Graham Swift.

This book traces the influence of empirical philosophy and associationist psychology on theories of literary creativity and on the experience of reading literature. It runs from David Hume's Treatise of Human Nature in 1739 to the works of major literary critics of the twentieth century, such as I.A. Richards, W.K. Wimsatt, and Northrop Frye. The author explores the ways in which associationist conceptions of literature gave rise to some of the key transformations in British writing between the romantic and modernist periods. In particular, he analyses the ways in which authors' conceptions of the form of their readers' aesthetic experience led to radical developments in literary style, from the fragmentary narrative of Sterne's Tristram Shandy in 1760 to Virginia Woolf's experiments in the rendering of characters' consciousness in the 1920s; and from Wordsworth's poetic use of autobiography to J.G. Frazer's mythic unconscious in The Golden Bough. Analyses are offered of the ways in which a wide variety of major British writers, including Scott, Lady Morgan, Dickens, Tennyson, Hardy, Yeats, Joyce, and Woolf developed their literary techniques on the basis of associationist conceptions of the mind, and of how modern literary criticism – from Arthur Symons to Roland Barthes – is founded on associationist principles. The book relocates the traditions of British writing within the neglected context of its native empirical philosophy, and reveals how many of the issues assumed to be products of ‘postmodern’ or ‘deconstructive’ theory have long been foregrounded and debated within the traditions of British empiricism.

Hélène Cixous, author of over forty works of fiction, was deemed by Derrida to be the greatest living writer in French in 1990. Consistent with this evaluation, her writing is renowned for its dense poetical texture and lyricism. At the same time, she has been described by one of Derrida's translator's, Peggy Kamuf, as 'one of our age's greatest semi-theoreticians'. Connecting these two views, this book argues for a consideration of her texts as ‘semi-fictions’. Telling stories is, irreducibly, part of what Cixous does. But for Cixous fiction is not only the creation of an imaginary world; it is also her way of engaging ethically with the difficulties of the real. This book offers an in-depth reading of five different texts, addressing the idiomatic specificity of individual works and investigating how the textual fabric unfolds. It shows that the narrative dimension to Cixous’s writing needs to be reckoned with as a key component of the way it troubles the borders between fiction and its others. By staging an encounter with something beyond itself, her fiction is the site of an active thinking. Each work is approached in relation to a particular theoretical question or discourse, to explore how Cixous tells stories that do more than tell stories.

This book enquires into the problem of various oppositions between pure entities such as nature and society, body and mind, science and the arts, subjectivity and objectivity. It examines how works of literature and cinema have contaminated constructions of the pure and the immune with their purported opposite. As an advanced critical introduction to the figure of contamination, the book makes explicit what so far has remained unarticulated—what has only been implied—within postmodern, poststructuralist and deconstructive theory. Combining theory with literary criticism, the book sheds light on how overlooked aspects of 'the novels of Henry James, Herman Melville and H. G. Wells question notions of natural order as well as an opposition between the subjective and the objective. It offers fresh readings of classic films and literary texts, including Vertigo and Moby Dick, with the aim to ground theoretical insights in close analysis. Key Features Critically engages with some aspects of contemporary theory that keep propounding a Cartesian notion of the mind’s control over the body Analyses how key thinkers such as Spinoza, Benjamin, Pasolini and Freud attempt to re-evaluate what Agamben calls ‘bare life’ Offers original readings of Pasolini’s notion of scandalo in terms of contamination Alerts us to the ways in which some aspects of contemporary posthumanism may merely reproduce the dialects of inclusion and exclusion which is still premised on traditional notions of purity and immunity

This book identifies and interprets the longstanding ideological and aesthetic dialogue between the literary imaginations of Anglo-Ireland and the Anglo-American South. It offers a rich comparative examination of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Irish and American Southern plantation literatures and their respective representations of race and nation, gender and sexuality, region and landscape, and the gothic imagination. Pairing major writers from both traditions, including Maria Edgeworth, William Faulkner, Oscar Wilde, Katherine Anne Porter and Elizabeth Bowen, the book shows how this transatlantic dialogue coalesced around questions of power, supremacy and gentility: writers in Anglo-Irish and Anglo-Southern literary traditions recognised and spoke to each other through the discourse of aristocracy. As it demonstrates, from the early nineteenth-century onwards, Irish and Anglo-Southern writers conducted a sustained exploration into constructions of aristocracy through the figure of the dissipated, deviant gentleman (or lady): the dandy. By augmenting literary analysis with a variety of historical, biographical, archival and visual materials, including nineteenth-century trade cards, original letters and twentieth-century photographic portraits, the book offers readers a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary illumination of transatlantic modernism.

This book takes Freud's work on the death-drive and compares it with other philosophies of death — those of Pascal, Heidegger and Derrida in particular. It also applies it in a new way to literature and art — to that of Shakespeare, Rothko and Katharina Fritsch, among others. The book asks whether artworks are dead or alive; if artistic creativity isn't actually a form of destruction; and whether our ability to be seduced by fine words means we don't put ourselves at risk of death. In doing so, the book proposes a new theory of aesthetics in which artworks and literary texts have a death-drive of their own, not least by their defining ability to turn away from all that is real, and where the effects of the death-drive mean that we are constantly living in imaginary, rhetorical, or ‘artistic’ worlds. The book also provides a valuable introduction to the rich tradition of work on the death-drive since Freud.

What sorts of things do we think about when we’re driving – or being driven – in a car? Drivetime seeks to answer this question by drawing upon a rich archive of British and American texts from ‘the motoring century’ (1900-2000), paying particular attention to the way in which the practice of driving shapes and structures our thinking. While recent sociological and psychological research has helped explain how drivers are able to think about ‘other things’ while performing such a complex task, little attention has, as yet, been paid to the form these cognitive and affective journeys take. Pearce uses her close readings of literary texts – ranging from early twentieth-century motoring periodicals, Modernist and inter-war fiction, American ‘road-trip’ classics, and autobiography – in order to model different types of ‘driving-event’ and, by extension, the car’s use as a means of phenomenological encounter, escape from memory, meditation, problem-solving and daydreaming. The textual case-studies include: H.V. Morton and Edwin Muir; Jack Kerouac and Patricia Highsmith; Neil Young and Joan Didion; Elizabeth Bowen and Rosamund Lehmann.

This book brings to light a history of English Renaissance Aeneids that has been lost from view. Previous monographs have explored the complete translations by Gavin Douglas (1513) and John Dryden (1697), but there has been little research focussing on the Aeneid translations which appeared in between. This book covers the period from the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign to the start of the English Civil War, during which time there were thirteen authors who composed substantial translations of Virgil’s epic. These translators include prominent literary figures — such as Richard Stanyhurst, Christopher Marlowe, and Sir John Harington — as well as colonists, schoolmasters and members of parliament. Rather than simply viewing these Aeneids as scattered efforts preceding Dryden and the ‘golden age’ of Augustan translation, this book argues that these works represent a recognisable and important period of English classical translation. Drawing on manuscripts and printed sources, the book sketches a continuous portrait of the English Aeneids as they developed through the ages of Elizabeth, James I and Charles I.

Beginning amidst the tombs of the ‘dead’ God, and the crematoria at Auschwitz, this book confronts Nietzsche's legacy through the lens of Plato. The key question is how authors can protect against the possible ‘deviant readings’ of future readers and assess ‘the risk of writing’. The author recommends an ethic of ‘discursive containment’. The ethical question is the question of our times. Within critical theory, it has focused on the act of reading. This study reverses the terms of inquiry to analyse the ethical composition of the act of writing. What responsibility does an author bear for his legacy? Do ‘catastrophic’ misreadings of authors (e.g. Plato, Nietzsche), which played a part in the establishment of totalitarian regimes such as Nazism, Fascism, and Communism, testify to authorial recklessness? These and other questions are the starting point for a theory of authorial ethics.

This study argues that the political and legislative process of forgetting internal differences undertaken in France after the civil wars of the sixteenth century leads to subtle yet fundamental shifts in the broader conception of the relationship between readers or spectators on the one hand, and history, on the other. These shifts, occasioned by the desire for communal reconciliation, will ultimately serve the ideologies of cultural and political absolutism. By juxtaposing representations of the French civil war past as they appear (and frequently overlap) in historiography and tragedy from 1550-1630, Forgetting Differences tracks changes in the ways in which history and tragedy sought to “move” readers throughout the period of the wars and in their wake. The shift from a politically (and martially) active reading of the past to a primarily affective one follows the imperative, so clear and urgent at the turn of the seventeenth century, to put an end to violent conflict. Subsequently, however, this orientation to both history and tragedy would be appropriated for other ends, utlimately helping to further absolutist ideologies of culture and politics that privileged affective over active readings of the past.