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Contemporary Scottish Writers and the Natural World examines the work of four Scottish poets – John Burnside, Kathleen Jamie, Robin Robertson and Kenneth White – in the light of philosophical considerations of the subject’s relation to the natural world and environmental thought. Drawing in particular on the phenomenological work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty on embodiment and Martin Heidegger on dwelling, the study explores the organic intimate interrelation between the self and the world, including human and non-human relations. The poets’ work is discussed in the context of the main premises of the phenomenological tradition that address the self’s relation with the world, focusing in particular on the sense of place, the vegetal and animal worlds, and foregrounding the dialogue between poetics, the subject and the landscape. The study considers a chiasmic human-non-human animal intertwining as particularly important in the poetry because of its lived experience of the world. Proposing a theoretically-informed discussion, which includes various modes of ecocritical apprehension, it analyses the subject’s perception of intimacy with the materiality of the natural world and the role of language in the registration of perceptual experience as explored in contemporary Scottish poetry.

Aladdin, Sinbad, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Scheherazade winding out her intricate tales to win her nightly stay of execution: the stories of the Arabian Nights are a familiar and much-loved part of the English literary inheritance. But how did these tales become so much a part of the British cultural landscape? This book identifies the nineteenth century as the beginning of the large-scale absorption of the Arabian Nights into British literature and culture. It explores how this period used the stories as a means of articulating its own experiences of a rapidly changing environment. It also argues for a view of the tales not as a depiction of otherness, but as a site of recognition and imaginative exchange between East and West, in a period when such common ground was rarely found.

This collection examines Bowen’s contribution to and place in twentieth-century literature through a re-evaluation of the ways her work can be seen as textually, politically, and theoretically ‘new’ by focusing on her engagements with processes of theory and thought, and the frequent attachment of these to ‘things.’ It presents new scholarship on Bowen’s inventiveness and uniqueness of style and fresh readings of her place in twentieth-century literature and history in order to rejuvenate and develop scholarship regarding an author consistently overshadowed by her contemporaries.

The first book-length study of connections between these two major authors, this book reads the highly descriptive impressionist fiction of Hardy and Conrad together in the light of a shared attention to sight and sound. By proposing ‘scenic realism’ as a term to describe their affinities of epistemology and literary art, this study seeks to establish that the two novelists’ treatment of the senses in relation to the physically encompassing world creates a distinctive outward-looking pairing within the broader ‘inward turn’ of the realist novel. This ‘borderland of the senses’ was intensively investigated by a variety of nineteenth-century empiricists, and mid- and late-Victorian discussions in physics and physiology are seen to be the illuminating texts by which to gauge the acute qualities of attention shared by Hardy’s and Conrad’s fiction. In an argument that re-frames the ‘Victorian’ and ‘Modernist’ containers by which the writers have been conventionally separated, thirteen major works are analysed without flattening their differences and individuality, but within a broad ‘field-view’ of reality introduced by late-classical physics. With its focus on nature and the environment, Hardy, Conrad and the Senses displays the vivid delineations of humankind’s place in nature that are at the heart of both authors’ works.

Recent scholarship on the complex relationship between Katherine Mansfield and her best-selling author cousin, Elizabeth von Arnim, has done much to shed light on the familial, personal and literary connections between these unlikely friends. Although their lives appeared to be very different (Mansfield’s largely one of penurious poor health, von Arnim’s chiefly one of robust privilege), we know that each of these women experienced the other as an influential presence. Moreover, Mansfield’s narrator in her early collection of short stories, In a German Pension (1911), bears marked resemblances with the protagonist of Elizabeth and her German Garden (1898), and von Arnim’s most radical novel, Vera (1921), was written at the height of her friendship with Mansfield. The final letter Mansfield ever wrote was to von Arnim and, following Mansfield's death in 1923, John Middleton Murry dedicated his posthumous collection of Mansfield’s poems as follows: ‘To Elizabeth of the German Garden who loved certain of these poems and their author’. This volume brings together contributions from leading scholars including Bonnie Kime Scott, Angela Smith and Andrew Thacker, including the prize-winning essay by Juliane Römhild and creative contributions from New Zealand writers Sarah Laing and Nina Powles.

This book investigates rhetorical and representational practices that were used to monitor English law at the turn of the seventeenth century. While the majority of Law and Literature studies characterise the law as a force of coercion and subjugation, this book instead treats in greater depth the law’s own vulnerability, both to corruption and to correction. The dominance of law in early modern life made its failings and improvements of widespread concern: it was a regular and popular focus of criticism. The terms and techniques of legal reform provided modes of analysis through which legal authorities and literary writers alike evaluated form and character. Legal reform, together with the conflicts and anxieties that inspired and sprang from it, were represented by courtly, coterie, and professional writers. Spenser’s Faerie Queene, the Gray’s Inn Christmas revels of 1594-5, Donne’s ‘Satyre V’, and Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and The Winter’s Tale all examine the potential, as well as the ethical and practical limitations, of legal reform’s contribution to local and national governance.

Placing literary creativity within a changing cultural and political context that saw the end of Margaret Thatcher and rise of New Labour, this book offers fresh interpretations of mainstream and marginal works from all parts of Britain. Based on a framework of thematically-structured accounts, the individual chapters cover national identity, ethnicity, sexuality, class, celebrity culture, history and fantasy in literature from Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and England. It offers its readers a comprehensive view of the changing and challenging literary landscape in this period, critically examining the fiction, poetry and drama as well as representative films, art and music. Placed within the broader context of a transformative political and cultural environment that included Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, Damian Hirst and Princess Diana, the book captures the energetic and sometimes provocative experimentation that typified the final decade of the twentieth century.

Exploring London's literary identity during the 1930s Anna Cottrell shows how vital writing was to the capital’s booming leisure scene on the eve of the Second World War. The book explores London and Londoners, with a focus on the way in which London's lower-middle-class citizens became inseparable from central London’s leisure scene in the period’s imagination. In contrast with Modernism’s flâneurs and flâneuses, the key figures of 1930s London literature were shop girls, clerks, dance hostesses, and financially insecure journalists whose leisure hours were spent in London’s cinemas, bars, and glittering teashops. Writing about this type of Londoner and her milieus was at the heart of the decade’s experiments in revitalising the British novel, which to many of the period’s writers and intellectuals appeared to lack energy and authenticity. Meticulous description was central to this project of re-energising British writing, and it is in passages describing London milieus such as the teashop and the Soho nightclub that this book locates the decade’s most original and astute meditations on modernity, mass culture, and the value of ordinary lives.

This book is a love story– no matter how embarrassing these words are to write or, perhaps, to read. In the most obvious sense, the book is a story about Sir George Scharf– Victorian antiquarian, man-about- London and founding director of the National Portrait Gallery– and his loving relationships with male friends. It is also, however, about other kinds of loves– George Scharf’s and our own. In Middlemarch, another (female) George reminds her readers of the existence of an alternative love plot, another beloved that must be ‘wooed with industrious thought and patient renunciation of small desires’. This is, of course, the plot of work or vocation: we see signs of this love in the playful curlicues of George Scharf’s drawings; in the time he spent each day sketching, reading, making notes and recording these activities in his diaries; in the attention he paid to the details of the portraits he examined, copied and arranged; and in the hard-won pocket money he expended travelling to great English country houses to catalogue their collections. The self-educated son of an immigrant artist, Scharf loved his work and the surprisingly elevated social life that grew up around it with titled friends and younger fellows.

Nineteenth-Century Settler Emigration in British Literature and Art takes an interdisciplinary approach, combining literary criticism, art history, and cultural geography, to argue that the demographic shift in the nineteenth century to settler colonies in Canada, Australia and New Zealand was also a textual one: a vast literature supported and underpinned this movement of people. Through its five chapters, Nineteenth-Century Settler Emigration brings printed emigrants’ letters, manuscript shipboard newspapers, and settler fiction into conversation with narrative painting and novels to explore the generic features of emigration literature: textual mobility, a sense of place and colonial home-making. Authors and artists discussed in this book include, among others, Ford Madox Brown, James Collinson, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Susannah Moodie, Catherine Helen Spence, Catharine Parr Traill and Thomas Webster. The book’s careful analysis of the aesthetics of emigration literature demonstrates the close relationships between textual and demographic mobilities, textual materiality and realism, and the spatial imagination.

Novel Institutions rethinks the politics of institutions by reinterpreting the most institutional of literary forms: nineteenth-century British realism. Although realist novels, like institutions, mediate social life through a set of formal conventions and informal expectations, they also offer strategies for more capacious political imagining through their prevalent anachronisms. These anachronisms—untimely chronologies, obsolete practices, and out-of-date characters—unsettle the shared time of institutions and the consensus it fosters. Paying unprecedented attention to Irish novels, this book argues that the movement between shared institutional time and anachronisms is more pronounced in realist novels from Ireland, where Britain relied on a dual logic of institutional assimilation and exclusion. But such movement does not mean Irish novels are anomalous: these novels make the tension between the shared time of institutions and the unruly politics of anachronism visible in English realist novels. The book concludes that we cannot escape institutions, but we can refuse the narrow political future that they work to secure.

Ovid was a multifaceted icon of lovesickness, endless change, libertinism, emotional torment and violence in early modern England. This collection uses adaptation studies in connection with other contemporary theoretical approaches to analyze early modern transformations of Ovid, providing innovative perspectives on the “Ovids” that haunted the early modern stage, while exploring intersections between adaptation theory and gender/queer/trans studies, ecofeminism, hauntology, transmediality, rhizomatics and more. The chapters explore Ovidian adaptations in the works of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, Mary Sidney Herbert, Lyly, Hewood, among others. The volume is divided into four sections: I. Gender/Queer/Trans Studies and Ovidian Rhizomes; II. Ovidian Specters and Remnants; III. Affect, Rhetoric, and Ovidian Appropriation; and IV. Ovid Remixed: Transmedial, Rhizomatic, and Hyperreal Adaptations.” Focusing on these larger topics, this book examines the multidimensional, ubiquitous role that Ovid and Ovidian adaptations played in English Renaissance drama and theatrical performance. The book contains chapters by Simone Chess, Shannon Kelley, Daniel G. Lauby, Deborah Uman, Lisa S. Starks, John S. Garrison, Catherine Winiarski, Jennifer Feather, John D. Staines, Goran Stanivukovic, Louise Geddes, Liz Oakley-Brown, Ed Gieskes, and Jim Casey.

From the Prime Meridian Conference of 1884 to the celebration of the millennium in 2000; from the fiction of Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf to the novels of William Gibson and W.G. Sebald, Reading the Times offers fresh insight into modern narrative. It shows how profoundly the structure and themes of the novel depend on attitudes to the clock and to the sense of history’s progress, tracing their origins in technologic, economic and social change. It offers a new and powerful way of understanding the relations of history with narrative form, outlining their development and demonstrating – through incisive analyses of a very wide range of texts from late C19th to early C21st – their key role in shaping fictional narrative throughout this period. The result is a highly innovative literary history of the twentieth-century fiction, based on an inventive, enabling method of understanding literature in relation to history – in terms, in every sense, of its reading of its times.

Robert Louis Stevenson, Collaboration, and the Construction of the Late-Victorian Author argues that understanding literary collaboration is essential to understanding Stevenson’s writings. Stevenson often collaborated with family and friends, sometimes acknowledged, and sometimes not. Early collaborations include three plays with his friend W. E. Henley. Later, he and his wife Fanny co-authored a volume of linked stories, More New Arabian Nights, also titled The Dynamiter (1885). Fanny also contributed to other work that did not bear her name, significantly the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), and he drew on her diaries for his Pacific writings. He collaborated most extensively with his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, with whom he wrote three novels: The Wrong Box (1889), The Wrecker (1892), and The Ebb-Tide (1894). Stevenson’s collaborations with Osbourne typify the critical problem my project addresses. Like Fanny Stevenson’s, Osbourne’s literary reputation has not been notable. Furthermore, there is evidence that Stevenson’s collaborations with Osbourne became frustrating. The core question this book addresses is this: why would this famous and successful author of Scottish literature practice a creative process that burdened him with inexpert collaborators? The answer to this question can be found in Stevenson’s novels, essays and plays, which dramatize the process of collaboration. Stevenson creates an alternate narrative of what it means to write—one that challenges commonly held assumptions about the celebrity cult of the author in Victorian literature, and notions of authorship more generally.

Written from various critical standpoints by internationally renowned scholars, Scottish Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion interrogates the ways in which the concepts of the Gothic and Scotland have intersected and been manipulated from the mid-eighteenth century to the present day. This interdisciplinary collection is the first ever published study to investigate the multifarious strands of Gothic in Scottish fiction, poetry, theatre and film. Its contributors – all specialists in their fields – combine an attention to socio-historical and cultural contexts with a rigorous close reading of works, both classic and lesser known, produced between the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries.

The Truth-Teller makes the case that Shakespeare repeatedly responds to sixteenth-century debates over the revolutionary potential of Cynic critical activity—debates that persist in later centuries and that inform major developments in Western intellectual history. To live one’s truth may have been a radical (and controversial) proposition for ancient Greek democracy, but Shakespeare reveals it to be an equally vexed task for drama, which aimed both to represent political truths and warn against the dangers of over-identifying with the figure of the lone truth teller. The book contends that aspiring critics from the sixteenth century to the present cathect onto the figure of the Cynic because they mistake literary character for viable political formula. Shakespeare, the book argues, works to diagnose this interpretive error through his Cynic characterizations of Lear’s Fool, Hamlet, and Timon of Athens. Offering new ways of thinking about early modernity’s engagement with classical models as well as literature’s engagement with politics, The Truth-Teller insists upon the necessity of literary thinking to political philosophy.

This volume brings together a range of essays by eminent and emergent scholars working at the intersection of modern literary, cinema and sound studies. By attending carefully to the dynamics and aesthetics of mediation, the essays in this collection explore the transformations of the rhythmic or metrical patterning of sound in a range of modern literary and cinematic forms produced from the 1890s through to the mid-twentieth century. The essays ask what specific sonorous qualities are capable of being registered by different modern media, and how sonic transpositions and transferences across media affect the ways in which human subjects attend to modern soundscapes. Script, groove, electrical current, magnetic imprint, phonographic vibration: sound traverses these and other material platforms to become an insistent ground-note of modern aesthetics, one not yet adequately integrated into critical accounts of the period. This collection addresses that lack through a wide-ranging investigation of the conditions under which modernists tapped technically into the rhythms, echoes and sonic architectures of their worlds.

Shakespeare scholars regularly encounter social justice issues in the material that we study and teach. Most often in the classroom our engagement with such issues takes the form of thematic identification and critical parsing. Yet we struggle to form more direct, material connections between coursework and social justice work. This book is for professors of early modern literature who want to heighten the intellectual impact of their courses by thoughtfully using their classrooms as laboratories for social formation and action. Much as Paolo Freire sought to reformat the relationship between teachers and students through his “pedagogy of the oppressed,” this book seeks to reformat the relationship between students and this challenging material in ways that move them and us toward social action. To that end, it offers a global perspective on Shakespeare and early modern literature, including competing “Renaissance world pictures,” non-canonical authors, and collaborative practices. Its 21 chapters describe and model ways of doing social justice work with and through early modern texts, and claim the academic—not merely social—benefits of integrating social justice work into courses.

Transgender and the Literary Imagination examines a selection of literary fiction by British, Irish and American authors first published between 1918 and 2000, each text featuring a protagonist (and in some cases two) whose gender identity differs from that assigned to them at birth: George Moore’s naturalistic novella set in an 1860s Dublin hotel, Albert Nobbs (1918); Angela Carter’s dystopian feminist fantasy The Passion of New Eve (1977); Jackie Kay’s contemporary fiction inspired by the life of a post-war jazz musician, Trumpet (1998); Patricia Duncker’s historical fiction based on the life of a nineteenth-century colonial military surgeon, James Miranda Barry (1999); David Ebershoff’s The Danish Girl (2000), a rewriting of the life of Lili Elbe, reputed to be the first person to undergo gender reassignment treatment. A key concern for this study is the way in which transgender lives – whether historical or fictional – have been ‘authored by others’: named, defined and appropriated in ways which obscure, displace or erase transgender experiences, identities and histories. By revisiting twentieth-century narratives and their afterlives, including stage and film adaptations, this book aims to examine the legacies of this representational history, exploring the extent to which transgender potential can be recovered and realised.

The first transnational and transmedia companion to the post-millennial Gothic. This book explores the post-millennial Gothic. It emphasises ‘new’ themes and emergent subgenres as well as revisions of the traditional Gothic, thus pressing readers to interrogate the multi-layered, multi-vocal conversations that occur within the Gothic in the new century. The areas of coverage engaged in this collection are parts of emerging interdisciplinary fields, and the book will thus be at the forefront of discussions about subgenres, such as Afro-futurism, Gothic comedy and Steampunk, as well as transnational and ethnic forms of the Gothic. It provides preeminent scholarship for those interested in discovering more about the development of the Gothic in recent years and its immediate relevance to our times. The 20 chapters provide the most detailed, demonstrate analytical exploration of this young field than ever before.