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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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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’.

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.

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.