Browse

This book examines why Beckett’s writing is so queer, so disabled and disabling. Why did Beckett write so soften about mental illness, disability, perversion? Why did he take such an interest in ‘abnormals’ and ‘degenerates’? How did he reconceive ‘the human’ in the wake of Hitler and Stalin? Drawing on Beckett’s voluminous archive, as well as his primary texts, the authors use psychoanalysis, queer theory, disability theory and biopolitics to push Beckett studies beyond the normal.

The collection of essays intends to show that everything about Byron’s poetic work baffles the scholarly desire for neat categorisations. Various attempts at re-mapping Romanticism have given ample evidence of the fact that, as one of the ‘big six’ in the Romantic canon, Byron outgrows Romanticism and epitomises the fallacious character of a period that has always been compared to a dangerous quicksand. In his self-incurred marginality, Byron subjects the entire genre of poetry to a severe process of deconstruction: his œuvre ranges from verse tale to “epic narratives”, versified romances and poems which subvert the rigorous metrical and formal requirements and turn poetic forms into leaky vessels of incoherent quotations, intertextual reference and Molly Bloomian soliloquies.Taking to his role as a cultural fence-sitter, scoffer and outsider who watches his literary ambience from the stern perspective of a Neo-Classicist, Byron unveils and lays bare the repressed strata of human savagery which Romantic poetry normally glosses over and ignores.Doing the exact opposite of what Novalis and others circumscribed as the ‘poeticisation’ of prosaic 19^th-century reality, Byron subscribes to the idea that man is irretrievably a bête humaine, much more akin to the liver-devouring vulture than to Prometheus. It is this premise of ontological marginality that is eventually reflected in all aspects of Byron’s textual, generic, thematic and topographical marginality.

F. Scott Fitzgerald is remembered primarily as a novelist, but he wrote nearly two hundred short stories for popular magazines such as the widely-read Saturday Evening Post. These stories are vividly infused with the new popular culture of the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s, from jazz and blues music to motion pictures and performing arts. This book demonstrates how popular culture had a deep impact on Fitzgerald’s work, not just in terms of evoking period detail, but by confirming Fitzgerald as an experimental writer whose popular short stories reflect the serious modernist concerns occupying writers such as Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Sherwood Anderson, Dorothy Parker, and Langston Hughes. This book explores how popular culture impacted on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s literary aesthetics on both thematic and formal levels, to a greater extent than previously recognised. Encompassing spheres of both American studies and cultural studies, this book offers a revisionist perspective on Fitzgerald’s short fiction of the interwar period, which is often overlooked in favour of the novels, especially The Great Gatsby. By exploring Fitzgerald’s fascination with leisure, specifically the intertwined cultural spheres of dance, music, theatre, and film, this book argues that he innovatively imported practices borrowed from other popular cultural media into his short stories, deploying disruptive techniques of ambiguity and parody that sit in tension with reader expectations of his lyrical style and the commercial publication contexts of his stories.

This book celebrates the theatrical excitement and philosophical meanings of human interaction in Shakespeare. On stage and in life, the face is always window and mirror, representation and presence. Essays examine the emotional and ethical surplus that appears between faces in the activity and performance of human encounter on stage. By transitioning from face as noun to verb – to face, outface, interface, efface, deface, sur-face – chapters reveal how Shakespeare's plays discover conflict, betrayal and deception as well as love, trust and forgiveness between faces and the bodies that bear them.

As the Irish Revival took shape and the Home Rule debate dominated UK politics, what was happening in Scotland? This book reveals distinct but comparable concerns with cultural defence and revivalism in fin-de-siècle Scotland, evident in the work of a number of writers and artists including Robert Louis Stevenson, Patrick Geddes, Fiona Macleod, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Mona Caird, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Duncan and various contributors to The Evergreen. Situating Scottish literature and art alongside international developments in culture, especially the rise of decadence, symbolism and Celticism, the book demonstrates the ways in which dissident fin-de-siècle styles and ideas supported and defined the Scottish Revival.

This book uncovers a range of new models for modern living that emerged in response to social, economic and political changes in nineteenth-century London, and investigates the literature that gave expression to their novelty. It brings together visual and literary representations to identify a series of new designs for domestic space that change the way people lived together in the metropolis, including model dwellings, women’s residences, settlement housing and the garden city suburb. It focuses on the ways that language shapes the built environment and domestic architecture in particular, but also attends to the ways that domestic practice shapes discursive patterns and literary representation. It argues that these new designs for urban living responded to shifting perspectives about gender, class and sexuality; but equally, it demonstrates that these innovations in domestic design forged opportunities for refashioning both individual and collective identities. Home and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Literary London offers readers a new blueprint for understanding the ways in which literature imaginatively and materially produce the city’s built environment. In so doing, it also indicates what resources the nineteenth-century city — and the literature that responded to it — can offer for thinking through the most urgent problems of today’s urban environment environments.

The Labour of Laziness in Twentieth-Century American Literature focuses on the issue of productivity, using the figure of laziness to negotiate the relation between the ethical and the aesthetic. This book argues that major twentieth-century American writers such as Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, John Barth, Donald Barthelme and David Foster Wallace provocatively challenge the ethos of productivity by filtering their ethical interventions through culturally stigmatised imagery of laziness. Ladyga argues that when the motif of laziness appears, it invariably reveals the underpinnings of an emerging value system at a given historical moment, while at the same time offering a glimpse into the strategies of rebelling against the status quo

U.S. Modernism at Continent’s End: Carmel, Provincetown, Taos historicizes and theorizes the significance of the early twentieth-century little arts colony as a uniquely modern social formation within a global network of modernist activity and production. Emphasizing communities rather than single artists, and modernist activity instead of products, this study considers modernism as social, aesthetic, and political processes that developed differentially in response to local and global pressures. In addition to offering a historical overview of the emergence of three critical sites of modernist activity—the little art colonies of Carmel, Provincetown, and Taos—this study offers new critical readings of major authors associated with those places: Robinson Jeffers, Eugene O’Neill, and D. H. Lawrence. Continent’s End tracks the radical thought and aesthetic innovation that emerged from these villages and reveals a surprisingly dynamic circulation of persons, objects, and ideas between the country and the city and back again, producing modernisms that were cosmopolitan in character yet also site-specific.

Material Poetics in Hemispheric America examines poets and artists in the Americas during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries to show how they worked to make language into material objects and material objects into language. It builds a theory of ‘material poetics’ that provides an alternative account of poetry in hemispheric America. It argues that by reframing American poetry to prominently include object-oriented practices within and beyond the United States, material poetry can be seen as representing a significant branch of the American poetic tradition. This book puts contemporary theories of objects and matter into conversation with a variety of American approaches to material poetics. These approaches result in one-word poems more concerned with the look of language than its meaning, artworks that invite viewers to physically engage with language, poems assembled from networks of out-of-place words and things, poetic monuments that meditate on (and take up) space, and poetry that attempts to materialise the remnants of lyrics and lives. By examining five case studies, drawn from Brazil, Chile, the United States, and Canada, it investigates five ways of conceptualizing these poetic objects—as autonomous, relational, assembled, architectural, and posthuman. Poets and artists featured include Haroldo de Campos, Décio Pignatari, Augusto de Campos, Ferreira Gullar, Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Pape, Juan Luis Martínez, Ronald Johnson, and Anne Carson.

Muriel Spark, Existentialism and the Art of Death traces Muriel Spark’s indebtedness to the tradition of Christian existentialism that derives from nineteenth century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Christian existentialism was well-established before Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir developed its influential atheistic version in the 1940s, and the book explores the ways in which Spark, in her novels and short stories, develops Kierkegaardian themes and techniques in celebration of the ‘leap to faith’. It also shows how Spark builds on Kierkegaard’s conception of the ‘aesthetic’ as the condition of secular, sensual existence, and the paradoxical condition of art, which cannot, in itself, escape the aesthetic but must point to its own entrapment within values that its author rejects. Kierkegaard’s ironic adoption of pseudonymous surrogate authors for many of his books is similar to the ways in which Spark endows her central characters with powers normally reserved to the author/narrator of a story. The book provides detailed analysis of these issues in many of Spark’s major novels in order to show her engagement with, and her rejection of, atheistic existentialism, and her insistence that art can only provide the consolation of a pseudo-eternity which distracts from the recognition of Christianity’s true eternity. In this sense, hers is an art of death – of her characters’ efforts to control death, and of the novel’s formal evasion of it.

This book posits the Aristotelian-Ciceronian notion of perfect male friendship as an independent poetic force within the development of Spanish literature in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Through a re-examination of Spanish critic Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce’s notion of the “tale of two friends” tradition, the book shows how the poetics of friendship evolves in relation to other key concepts from the period—most notably exemplarity and imitatio—in a series of carefully selected examples from several important genres including the pastoral novel, the picaresque, and the Spanish comedia. Particular attention is given to the trajectory whereby the highly formalized narrativization of the traditional Aristotelian paradigm for friendship gives way to representations of personal intimacy grounded in a recognition of the idiosyncratic particularity of human experience in the world beyond the text. This alternative modality for representing friendship, which encompasses a variety of relationships beyond the Aristotelian paradigm—between women, erstwhile lovers, and pícaros, to take just three examples—reaches its fullest expression in the depiction of the evolving intimacy that grows up between the two unlikely companions, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, whose shared experiences provide the main focus for Cervantes’s most important work.

Reading Machines in the Modernist Transatlantic provides a new account of aesthetic and technological innovation, from the Machine Age to the Information Age. Drawing on a wealth of archival discoveries, it argues that modernist avant-gardes used technology not only as a means of analysing culture, but as a way of feeding back into it. As well as uncovering a new invention by Mina Loy, the untold story of Bob Brown’s ‘reading machine’ and the radical technicities of African American experimentalists including Gwendolyn Bennett, Ralph Ellison and Langston Hughes, the book places avant-gardes at the centre of innovation across a variety of fields. From dazzle camouflage to microfilm, and from rail networks to broadcast systems, White explores how vanguardists harnessed socio-technics to provoke social change. Reading Machines argues that transatlantic avant-gardes deployed ‘techno-bathetic’ strategies to contest the dominance of the technological sublime. This major but hidden cultural narrative engaged with the messy particulars and unintended consequences of technology’s transduction in society. Techno-bathetic vanguardists including Futurists, Vorticists, Dadaists, post-Harlem Renaissance radicals and American Super-realists proposed new, non-servile ways of reading and doing technology. The books reveals how these formations contested the entrenched hierarchies of both the transatlantic Machine Age and technological sublime.

This book discovers within early modern revenge tragedy the surprising shaping presence of a wide array of classical philosophies not commonly affiliated with the genre. By recovering the pervasive influence of Aristotelian faculty psychology on The Spanish Tragedy, Aristotelian ethics on Titus Andronicus, Lucretian atomism on Hamlet, Galenic pneumatics on Antonio’s Revenge and Epictetian Stoicism on The Duchess of Malfi, this book reveals how the very atmospheres and ontological assumptions of revenge tragedy exert their own kind of conditioning dramaturgical force. The book also revitalises our understanding of how the Renaissance stage, even at its most lurid, functions as a unique space for the era’s practical, vernacular engagement with received philosophy.

While the twenty-first century has brought a wealth of new digital resources for researching late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century serials, the subfield of Romantic periodical studies has remained largely inchoate. This collection sets out to begin tackling this problem, offering a basic groundwork for a branch of periodical studies that is distinctive to the concerns, contexts and media of Britain’s Romantic age. Featuring eleven chapters by leading experts on the subject, it showcases the range of methodological, conceptual and literary-historical insights to be drawn from just one of the era’s landmark literary periodicals, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Drawing in particular on the trove of newly digitised content, specific essays model how careful analyses of the incisive and often inflammatory commentary, criticism and original literature from Blackwood’s first two decades (1817–37) might inform and expand many of the most vibrant contemporary discussions surrounding British Romanticism.

Charting the transatlantic movements of Scottish literature in the Age of Revolution, this book provides an in-depth examination of Scottish Romantic literary ideas on memory and their influence among various cultures in the British Atlantic. The book brings into relief a distinct Scottish historiography, in which a temporality of modernity takes shape in the forms, tropes and categories of a mode of historical understanding we now would term collective or cultural memory. The study traces this emergent mode in Scottish history writing, both fictional and non-fictional, as it circulated throughout the Atlantic world. It offers a threefold engagement with Scottish Romantic, transatlantic and memory studies while drawing from the perspectives and insights of other critical frameworks – such as indigenous, Black Atlantic and francophone Canada. Examining a range of writing modes such as memoirs, slave narratives and emigrant fiction in various regional and national contexts, the book covers familiar Scottish writers, such as Walter Scott and John Galt, and less familiar ones, such as Anne Grant, Thomas Pringle, and John Gabriel Stedman. It follows other recent studies in making the case for the Atlantic world as a critical site in the making of a culture of modernity while bringing to light the fundamental contribution of Scottish Romantic writing to this culture.

This book provides a sustained, formalist and theoretically-informed reading of the multiple body parts that litter the dialogue and action of Shakespeare’s history plays, including Henry V, Richard II, Richard III, King John, and the Henry IV plays. Starting with a literary critical analysis of these dislocated bodies, the book follows Shakespeare’s own relentless pursuit of a specific political question: how does human flesh, blood, and bone relate to sovereignty? Shakespeare’s treatment of the body is also read against two other bodies of work: early modern political writing, and twentieth- and twenty first-century critical theory. Like Shakespeare’s histories, these develop understandings of sovereign power through considerations of the body: from Jean Bodin’s inalienable sovereignty, located in the body of the monarch, through Hobbes’ mechanistic Leviathan, to Kantorowicz’s “two bodies” and Derrida’s “prosthstatics” in which forms of sovereign power are imagined as machine- or animal-like. Along the way, particular body parts – knees, hands, heads, and throats – come to the fore as particular objects of interest.

This revisionist study argues that the Essais of Montaigne—made available to Shakespeare and the English-reading world via John Florio’s translated Essayes in 1603—were a crucial factor in the composition of later Shakespearean drama. While the change in monarchy, the revived interest in judicial rhetoric, and the alterations in Shakespeare’s acting company undoubtedly helped shape plays such as Measure for Measure, King Lear, and The Tempest, this book contends that Shakespeare’s reading of Montaigne is an under-recognized driving force. Both authors quest for approaches to self, knowledge, and form that stress fractures, interruptions, and alternatives. Indeed, Montaigne himself claimed, in his “Of the Force of the Imagination,” that “Some writers there are, whose ende is but to relate the events. Mine, if I could attaine to it, should be to declare, what may come to passe….” In testing—essaying—Montaigne’s writing, Shakespeare, like his French forebear, focuses on possibility, multiple selves, and brave new worlds—what has not been but might yet be.