Browse

Alison Light - Inside History: From Popular Fiction to Life-Writing

Alison Light

Inside History addresses a number of the central preoccupations within feminist cultural criticism since the 1970s: the nature of writing by women and what women writers might or might not share; the ... More

Inside History addresses a number of the central preoccupations within feminist cultural criticism since the 1970s: the nature of writing by women and what women writers might or might not share; the place of such writing in any literary history or cultural analysis; the politics of popular culture and the question of pleasure; women’s relation to ideas of national identity, especially Englishness, and other forms of belonging; and finally, their contribution to life-writing. The volume offers a lively, wide-ranging way into feminist debates, touching on a number of major authors including Alice Walker, Virginia Woolf, Stevie Smith, and Caryl Churchill. It also explores genre fiction by authors such as Agatha Christie and Daphne du Maurier, and offers reflections on the writing of memoir, biography and the lives of so-called ‘ordinary people’. Chronologically arranged, the essays and short ‘think-pieces’ chart Alison Light’s own intellectual formation as a critic and writer within a wider collective politics. This is contextualised in an autobiographical introduction.Less

Carlyle, Emerson and the Transatlantic Uses of Authority: Literature, Print, Performance

Tim Sommer

This book examines the transatlantic writings and professional careers of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Building on recent research in literary studies, book history and cultural sociology, ... More

This book examines the transatlantic writings and professional careers of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Building on recent research in literary studies, book history and cultural sociology, it explores how a range of different forms of authority – literary, cultural, political, legal – impacted on Anglo-American writing, publishing and lecturing. The book retraces nineteenth-century debates about race and nationhood, analyses the relationship between cultural nationalism and literary historiography and sheds light on Carlyle’s and Emerson’s professional identities as publishing authors and lecturing celebrities on both sides of the Atlantic. It reads canonical texts in conjunction with less familiar sources such as book paratexts, lecture manuscripts and periodical writing to re-evaluate two of the period’s key authors. Situating textual production at the intersection of institutional spheres and professional networks, Carlyle, Emerson and the Transatlantic Uses of Authority sheds light on intellectual and material exchanges between Victorian and antebellum literature and culture. The book’s first part focuses on discourses of ethnic identity and constructions of literary history; part two examines Carlyle’s and Emerson’s engagement with the mid-century transatlantic print market; part three discusses their careers as lecturing intellectuals. Bringing together these subjects and moving into the latter half of the century, the book’s epilogue considers the impact of the American Civil War on transatlantic literary relations and explores Carlyle’s and Emerson’s posthumous canonisation on both sides of the Atlantic.Less

Cross-Channel Modernisms

Claire Davison

Derek Ryan and Jane A. Goldman (eds)

Described by Katherine Mansfield in 1921 as ‘a great cold sword between you and your dear love Adventure’, in the early twentieth century the English Channel, or ‘la Manche’ in French, represented ... More

Described by Katherine Mansfield in 1921 as ‘a great cold sword between you and your dear love Adventure’, in the early twentieth century the English Channel, or ‘la Manche’ in French, represented both a political and intellectual barrier between European avant-gardism and British restraint, and a bridge for cultural connection and aesthetic innovation. Organised around key terms ‘Translating’, ‘Fashioning’ and ‘Mediating’, this book presents ten original essays by scholars working on both sides of the Channel. Cross-Channel Modernisms historicises artistic exchanges in Britain, France and beyond, and proposes a rich conceptual apparatus of ‘crossings’ and ‘channels’ through which we can read modernism and understand it as emerging from, and intervening in, an always-already shifting, multivalent, international context.Less

D. H. Lawrence and the Literary Marketplace: The Early Writings

Annalise Grice

This is the first monograph to examine how D. H. Lawrence established a professional writing career. Despite the ‘materialist turn’ in modernist studies, the extent and depth of D. H. Lawrence’s ... More

This is the first monograph to examine how D. H. Lawrence established a professional writing career. Despite the ‘materialist turn’ in modernist studies, the extent and depth of D. H. Lawrence’s engagement with the literary marketplace has not been considered. The labelling of him as a working class ‘genius’ has concealed the question of how he became a published writer. Analysing the literary marketplace of the ‘long’ Edwardian period, this book assesses the circumstances for becoming an author at this time, examining Lawrence’s changing conceptions of what kind of writer he wanted to be and who he wanted to write for. It reconsiders the significance of Lawrence’s literary mentors Ford Madox Hueffer and Edward Garnett and recovers several figures (including Violet Hunt and Ezra Pound) whose significance for Lawrence’s career has been underestimated. The book evaluates how Lawrence’s work was marketed and received by the reading public in Britain and America, examining publishing houses (including Heinemann, Duckworth, T. Fisher Unwin and Mitchell Kennerley) and literary journals and magazines (such as the New Age, the English Review, Madame, Rhythm and Forum).Less

The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music

Delia da Sousa Correa (ed.)

The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music provides a pioneering interdisciplinary overview of the literature and music of nine centuries. Bringing together seventy-one newly commissioned ... More

The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music provides a pioneering interdisciplinary overview of the literature and music of nine centuries. Bringing together seventy-one newly commissioned chapters by specialists in literature and musicology, it presents the most recent interdisciplinary research. In five parts, the chapters cover relations between literature and music from the intermediality of the Middle Ages through to the broadening definitions of what constitutes ‘literature’ or ‘music’ in the present. The volume introduction and methodology chapters define key concepts for investigating the interdependence of the two art forms and a concluding chapter looks to the future of this interdisciplinary field. An editorial introduction to each historical part explains the main features of the relationships between literature and music in the period and outlines recent developments in scholarship. Contributions represent a multiplicity of approaches: theoretical, contextual and close reading. Case studies reach beyond literature and music to engage with related fields including philosophy, history of science, theatre, broadcast media and popular culture. The volume charts and extends work in this expanding interdisciplinary field and is an essential resource for researchers with an interest in literature and other media.Less

The Edinburgh History of Reading: Modern Readers

Mary Hammond (ed.)

Modern Readers explores some of the many different places and spaces in which reading has typically taken place between the eighteenth century and the present. Chapters in this volume explore reading ... More

Modern Readers explores some of the many different places and spaces in which reading has typically taken place between the eighteenth century and the present. Chapters in this volume explore reading in the bedrooms of the English upper classes, in large parts of nineteenth-century Africa, on-board ships and trains travelling the world, and in the libraries and private lives of both famous individuals and people new to reading. Methods range from the empirical to the scientific, from an analysis of crime and accident reports through individual reader testimony to the deconstruction of official propaganda about reading. Material examined includes marginalia, letters, diaries, posters, pamphlets and music texts, images of readers, and data drawn from cutting-edge projects on twenty-first-century reading groups. The volume encompasses a range of genres from science fiction to the classics, music and self-help.Less

Eliot and Beckett's Low Modernism: Humility and Humiliation

Rick de Villiers

Humility and humiliation have an awkward, often unacknowledged intimacy. Humility may be a queenly, cardinal, or monkish virtue, while humiliation points to an affective state at the extreme end of ... More

Humility and humiliation have an awkward, often unacknowledged intimacy. Humility may be a queenly, cardinal, or monkish virtue, while humiliation points to an affective state at the extreme end of shame. Yet a shared etymology links the words to lowliness and, further down, to the earth. In ascetic traditions painfully aware of humanity’s quintessence – ‘dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return’ – humiliation cultivates humility. Like the terms in question, T. S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett share an imperfect likeness. Between them is a common interest in states of abjection, shame and suffering – and possible responses to such states. Tracing the relation between affect, ethics, and aesthetics, Low Modernism demonstrates how these two major modernists recuperate the affinity between humility and humiliation.Less

Hazarding All: Shakespeare and the Drama of Consciousness

Sanford Budick

Hazarding All focuses on the second half of Shakespeare’s career, which pivots (even far more significantly than Stephen Greenblatt has noted) on the conceptual and theatrical breakthroughs ... More

Hazarding All focuses on the second half of Shakespeare’s career, which pivots (even far more significantly than Stephen Greenblatt has noted) on the conceptual and theatrical breakthroughs of Hamlet. The book is structured on a series of pairings of plays: Hamlet and As You Like It; The Merchant of Venice and Othello; and King Lear and The Winter’s Tale. Each pairing discloses Shakespeare’s effort to achieve intersubjectivity by negating the theatricalising impulses of the ego. He achieves this by means, in fact, of a highly demanding species of theatricalisation. In these texts Shakespeare’s language of theatrical representation, as well as the structure of theatrical scenes, repeatedly employs the figure of chiasmus to create an empty mid-space—a “negativity”—that is coordinated with an intricate language of the “nothing.” In partnership with the playwright, the spectator thus experiences this special “nothing” at the centre of these plays. The eclipsing of ego and the sharing of consciousness that result from this experience are at times incipiently experienced by characters within the plays. Yet the more significant achievement of this sharing of consciousness is generated between the consciousnesses of the playwright and the spectator, each in the condition of what Husserl would call onlookers (“God’s spies,” as Lear will phrase it) to the bracketed fictions of the plays themselves.Less

James Joyce and Cinematicity: Before and After Film

Keith Williams

This book investigates how the cinematic tendency of Joyce’s writing developed from popular media predating film. It explores Victorian culture’s emergent 'cinematicity' as a key creative driver of ... More

This book investigates how the cinematic tendency of Joyce’s writing developed from popular media predating film. It explores Victorian culture’s emergent 'cinematicity' as a key creative driver of Joyce’s experimental fiction, showing how his style and themes share the cinematograph’s roots in Victorian optical entertainment and science. The book’s scope reveals and elucidates Joyce's references to optical toys, shadowgraphs, magic lanterns, panoramas, photographic analysis and film peepshows; while abundant close analysis shows how his techniques elaborated and critiqued their effects on modernity’s ‘media-cultural imaginary’, making Joyce’s writing appear in advance of the narrative forms of early film itself. The introduction historicises the visual culture during Joyce’s youth, as well as optical science, Dublin’s first screenings and the context of his Volta Cinematograph. Chapter 1 focuses on the key role of magic lantern themes and techniques in Dubliners’ breakthrough into Modernist style and form. Chapter 2 how experiments in photographic analysis and reanimation of movement furnished a model for Joyce’s representation of the dynamic development of consciousness through the three versions of A Portrait of the Artist. Chapter 3 demonstrates how Joyce created a literary equivalent to the moving panorama in Ulysses, providing an influential template for immersive representations of the city in both Modernist fiction and film. Finally, a Coda qualifies ‘radiophonic’ readings of Finnegans Wake arguing instead that it extends Joyce’s interest in the history and future of cinematicity, through ‘verbal dissolves’ and engaging with the emergent medium of television.Less

Katherine Mansfield and Children

Gerri Kimber and Todd Martin (eds)

Virginia Woolf once remarked that Katherine Mansfield had ‘a kind of childlikeness somewhere which has been much disfigured, but still exists’. This ‘childlikeness’ is indeed a facet of Mansfield’s ... More

Virginia Woolf once remarked that Katherine Mansfield had ‘a kind of childlikeness somewhere which has been much disfigured, but still exists’. This ‘childlikeness’ is indeed a facet of Mansfield’s personality which permeates every aspect of her personal and creative life. It is present in her mature fiction, where some of her most well-known and accomplished stories, such as ‘Prelude’ and ‘At the Bay’, have children as protagonists; it is present in her early poetry, which includes a collection of poems for children intended for publication; it is also present in her juvenilia, where many of the stories she wrote from an early age for school magazines and other publications, feature children. Even as an adult, Mansfield’s love of the miniature, her delight in children in general, her fascination with dolls, all feature in her personal writing. Her relationship with John Middleton Murry was characterised by their mutual descriptions of themselves as little children fighting against a corrupt world. This volume – either directly or indirectly -- engages each of these aspects of the child in Mansfield’s work and life.Less

Neo-Avant-Gardes: Post-War Literary Experiments Across Borders

Bart Vervaeck (ed.)

This book explores the international relevance of the concept of neo-avant-garde for the study of post-war literary innovations covering North American, Latin American, Caribbean, Austrian, French, ... More

This book explores the international relevance of the concept of neo-avant-garde for the study of post-war literary innovations covering North American, Latin American, Caribbean, Austrian, French, British, Belgian, Dutch and German cases. Each of the twenty-one newly commissioned chapters combines theoretical reflection with practical analysis. Together, they provide a multi-faceted account of diverse group and trends, such as the New Realists, Black Arts Movement, Labris and the Vienna Group. They also focus on a wide range of authors, like Pierre Alferi, Amiri Baraka, Konrad Bayer, Mario Bellatín, Kamau Brathwaite, and Anna Kavan. In addition, they pay attention to specific techniques, including erasure, lyricisation, and montage, and to specific genres such as comic books, experimental fiction, and visual poetry. As a result, the book not only specifies the frame of the neo-avant-garde, but also shows its pertinence and its relation to the historical avant-garde, modernism, and postmodernism.Less

Performing Robert Burns: Enactments and Representations of the 'National Bard'

Ian Brown and Gerard Carruthers (eds)

This pioneering book explores varieties of performance – and their contexts – of Burns’s texts, specifically in song, in his local theatre and in public ceremonies or dramatisations of his work. It ... More

This pioneering book explores varieties of performance – and their contexts – of Burns’s texts, specifically in song, in his local theatre and in public ceremonies or dramatisations of his work. It discusses how aspects of such performances mediate versions of ‘Robert Burns’. It begins by paying close attention to how editors shape perceptions of Burns and his work by providing versions and selections of texts which become the ‘script’ through which performance of ‘Robert Burns’ is based. Eminent experts address how Burns has become both subject and object of performance since his death, through celebratory events like Burns Suppers or public procession, or as a dramatic theme on stage and screen. They explore popular representation of him and his work in music hall, pantomime, public ceremonial and folk song. The collection complements existing writing about Burns, offering deep insights into ways he provides matter for – and himself become material for – performance. It concludes with detailed exploration involving two leading modern interpreters, Jean Redpath and Sheena Wellington, of the performance of Burns’s songs, so complementing theoretical and historical study with insights derived from the work of such performers.Less

The Persian Presence in Victorian Poetry

Reza Taher-Kermani

The Persian Presence in Victorian Poetry surveys the variety of ways in which Persia, and the multitude of ideological, historical, cultural and political notions that it embodied, were received, ... More

The Persian Presence in Victorian Poetry surveys the variety of ways in which Persia, and the multitude of ideological, historical, cultural and political notions that it embodied, were received, circulated, and appropriated. The word ‘Persia’ to the Victorian was not just the name of a territorial entity but a matrix of different notions, created and crafted by a range of oral and written stories, themes and tropes. ‘Persia’ was a product of a mental vision with a long historical heritage, formed by a variety of sources, and circulating in different media. The Victorians responded to this heritage from different perspectives, marked by every shade of social class, religious affiliation, or political allegiance. This book charts this diversity of perceptions, exploring the ways in which ‘Persia’ figures in Victorian poetry across a broad range of works incorporating literary, historical, and cultural material.Less

Rereading Orphanhood: Texts, Inheritance, Kin

Diane Warren and Laura Peters (eds)

Building on the legacy of Laura Peters’ landmark work, Orphan Texts (2000), and extending its analyses to new work in family, marriage and kinship studies, Rereading Orphanhood: Texts Inheritance, ... More

Building on the legacy of Laura Peters’ landmark work, Orphan Texts (2000), and extending its analyses to new work in family, marriage and kinship studies, Rereading Orphanhood: Texts Inheritance, Kin explores the ways in which the figure of the literary orphan can be used to illuminate our understanding of the long nineteenth century, especially in relation to family and kinship. Contributors to this highly cohesive collection examine the shifting status of orphanhood as a cultural construction and show how much those fluctuating definitions reveal about the cultural preoccupations and anxieties of their day. Correspondingly, the sense that the orphan condition inflects the individual character’s thought processes and actions, throughout their lives, is also a recurrent trope in these chapters. Some contributors also emphasise the enduring influence of nineteenth-century conceptualisations of orphanhood and kinship, seen in, but not limited to, work on the posthuman and neo-Victorian texts. Read collectively, the chapters explore how orphan characters (both child and adult) contribute to discourses of gender, home, family, law, inheritance, class, illegitimacy, charity, notions of the human and the development of the novel, across a wide range of canonical and non-canonical texts. As Talia Schaffer notes: ‘This collection is theoretically astute and usefully varied, and will reward anyone interested in family dynamics in the literature of the nineteenth century’.Less

Samuel Beckett and Technology

Galina Kiryushina, Einat Adar, and Mark Nixon (eds)

This collection of essays is the first comprehensive discussion of the role technology plays in shaping Beckett’s trademark aesthetics. Samuel Beckett and Technology assembles an innovative and ... More

This collection of essays is the first comprehensive discussion of the role technology plays in shaping Beckett’s trademark aesthetics. Samuel Beckett and Technology assembles an innovative and diverse range of scholarly approaches to the topic, which collectively renegotiate our understanding of his work in prose, theatre, film, radio and television. What emerges from these discussions is the centrality of technology for Beckett’s creative imagination, a factor that is equally enabling as it is limiting. At the same time, the book reveals how theories of technology can yield new readings of the way Beckett responds to the conditions of technological modernity. As such, Beckett’s work is examined in its relation to historical and contemporary technologies, discourses of technicity and technē, post-humanism, and the digital age.Less

Sexual Desire and Romantic Love in Shakespeare: 'Rich in Will'

Joan Lord Hall

This book, which refers to every play in the canon as well as to Shakespeare’s narrative poems and several sonnets, begins by exploring how the signifier ‘will’ denotes sexual desire within ... More

This book, which refers to every play in the canon as well as to Shakespeare’s narrative poems and several sonnets, begins by exploring how the signifier ‘will’ denotes sexual desire within Shakespearean contexts. Unlike earlier treatments of sexuality in Shakespeare’s work, Joan Lord Hall’s study deals fully with how his plays and poems treat the issue of rape and sexual coercion—the potential violence of male desire. After exploring the dark side of ‘will’, the book analyses the playwright’s critique of idealistic Petrarchan and Neoplatonic conceptions of love that tend to bypass sexual desire. It also covers Shakespeare’s sceptical approach to ‘fancy’: infatuation driven by visual attraction. Central chapters discuss ways in which Shakespeare’s plays reflect early modern views on the role of sex and love in marriage, and they assess in greater detail than ever before how these texts show heterosexual relationships challenged by homoerotic attraction and same-sex friendship. Finally, the book explores in depth incestuous currents in in the plays—the issue of sexual desire within the family. Its eight chapters provide a comprehensive, fresh understanding of how Shakespeare presents and to some extent reconciles two areas that are often polarized in the early modern period: sexual desire and romantic love.Less

Short Form American Poetry: The Modernist Tradition

Will Montgomery

Discussion of the modernist line in American 20th century and contemporary poetry has been dominated by such long-form monuments as Pound’s Cantos, Williams’s Paterson, and Olson’s Maximus. This ... More

Discussion of the modernist line in American 20th century and contemporary poetry has been dominated by such long-form monuments as Pound’s Cantos, Williams’s Paterson, and Olson’s Maximus. This study analyses and discusses a countervailing tradition of short-form work. Beginning with Imagism, it argues that the short and short-lined poem is a central feature of American 20th-century poetry, lacking neither the intellectual ambition nor the expressive range of the well known epics. The counter-tradition it suggests runs from imagism through such key figures as Williams, Oppen, Niedecker, Creeley and Grenier, to the recent Pulitzer prize-winner Rae Armantrout. The book aims to expand our understanding of the speculative reach of poetry, combining discussion of themes of objecthood, cognition and language with insightful analysis of many short-form poems.Less