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About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time

Mark Currie

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 ... More

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.Less

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

American Gothic Culture: An Edinburgh Companion

Joel Faflak

Jason Haslam (ed.)

This Companion surveys the traditions and conventions of the dark side of American culture - its repressed memories, its anxieties and panics, its fears and horrors, its obsessions and paranoias. ... More

This Companion surveys the traditions and conventions of the dark side of American culture - its repressed memories, its anxieties and panics, its fears and horrors, its obsessions and paranoias. Featuring new critical essays by established and emerging academics from a range of national backgrounds, this collection offers new discussions and analyses of canonical and lesser-known literary and other works. Its scope ranges from the earliest manifestations of American Gothic traditions in frontier narratives and colonial myths, to its recent responses to contemporary global events. Moving from analyses of eighteenth-century literature to twenty-first century video games, and touching upon visual art, film, and television, serial killers, monsters, education and cityscapes, this Companion aims to demonstrate the centrality of the gothic to American culture writ large through four key sections: Gothic Histories, Gothic Identities; Gothic Genres, Gothic Sites; Gothic Media; and American Creatures.Less

Animalities: Literary and Cultural Studies Beyond the Human

Michael Lundblad (ed.)

Representations of animality continue to proliferate in various kinds of literary and cultural texts. This pioneering volume explores the critical interface between animal studies and animality ... More

Representations of animality continue to proliferate in various kinds of literary and cultural texts. This pioneering volume explores the critical interface between animal studies and animality studies, human-animal studies, and posthumanism, marking out the terrain in relation to twentieth-century literature and film. The range of texts considered here is intentionally broad, answering questions like, how do contemporary writers such as Amitav Ghosh, Terry Tempest Williams, and Indra Sinha help us to think about not only animals but also humans as animals? What kinds of creatures are being constructed by contemporary artists such as Patricia Piccinini, Alexis Rockman, and Michael Pestel? How do ‘animalities’ animate such diverse texts as the poetry of two women publishing under the name of ‘Michael Field’, or an early film by Thomas Edison depicting the electrocution of a circus elephant named Topsy? Connecting these issues to fields as diverse as environmental studies and ecocriticism, queer theory, gender studies, feminist theory, illness and disability studies, postcolonial theory, and biopolitics, the volume explores the future of what the introduction identifies as “animalities” in exciting new ways, highlighting the work of both internationally renowned figures and emerging scholars who go “beyond the human” in literary and cultural studies.Less

Associationism and the Literary Imagination: From the Phantasmal Chaos

Cairns Craig

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 ... More

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.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

Cixous's Semi-Fictions: Thinking at the Borders of Fiction

Mairéad Hanrahan

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 ... More

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.Less

The Concept of Conversation: From Cicero's Sermo to the Grand Siècle's Conversation

David Randall

The Concept of Conversation traces the rise of conversation from a minor mode of rhetoric to the point where rhetoric as a whole was redefined as conversation, and argues that this was the most ... More

The Concept of Conversation traces the rise of conversation from a minor mode of rhetoric to the point where rhetoric as a whole was redefined as conversation, and argues that this was the most important change in rhetoric during the centuries between 1400 and 1700. In the classical period, conversation referred to real conversations, conducted in the leisure time of noble men, and concerned with indefinite philosophical topics. Christianity inflected conversation with universal aspirations during the medieval centuries and the ars dictaminis, the art of letter writing, increased the importance of this written analogue of conversation. The Renaissance humanists from Petrarch onward further transformed conversation, and its genre analogues of dialogue and letter, by transforming it into a metaphor of increasing scope. This expanded realm of humanist conversation bifurcated in Renaissance and early modern Europe. The Concept of Conversation traces the way the rise of conversation spread out from the history of rhetoric to include the histories of friendship, the court and the salon, the Republic of Letters, periodical press and women. It revises Jürgen Habermas’ history of the emergence of the rational speech of the public sphere as the history of the emergence of rational conversation and puts the emergence of women’s speech at the centre of the intellectual history of early modern Europe.Less

Contaminations: "Beyond Dialectics in Modern Literature, Science and Film"

Michael Mack

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 ... More

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 immunityLess

Contemporary Scottish Poetry and the Natural World: Burnside, Jamie, Robertson and White

Monika Szuba

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 ... More

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.Less

Cultural Encounters with the Arabian Nights in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Melissa Dickson

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 ... More

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.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 Dandy in Irish and American Southern Fiction: Aristocratic Drag

Ellen Crowell

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 ... More

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.Less

Death-Drive: Freudian Hauntings in Literature and Art

Robert Rowland Smith

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 ... More

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.Less

Dreaming of Freedom in South Africa: Literature Between Critique and Utopia

David Johnson

Dreaming of Freedom in South Africa examines for the first time the many different texts imagining the future after the end of apartheid. Focused on well-known and obscure literary texts from the ... More

Dreaming of Freedom in South Africa examines for the first time the many different texts imagining the future after the end of apartheid. Focused on well-known and obscure literary texts from the 1880s to the 1970s, as well as the many manifestos and programmes setting out visions of the future, this book charts the dreams of freedom of five major traditions of anti-colonial and anti-apartheid resistance: the African National Congress (ANC), the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU), the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM) and the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC). The works of a number of South African literary figures are discussed, including Olive Schreiner, S. E. K. Mqhayi, Alan Paton, Karel Schoeman, Jordan Ngubane, Winnifred Holtby, Ethelreda Lewis, Dora Taylor, Livingstone Mqotsi, Peter Abrahams, Richard Rive, Lauretta Ngcobo and Bessie Head. Political thinkers analysed include Nelson Mandela, R. F. A. Hoernlé, Albert Luthuli, Clements Kadalie, A. W. G. Champion, Edward Roux, James La Guma, Alfred Nzula, I. B. Tabata, Ben Kies, Anton Lembede, A. P. Mda and Robert Sobukwe. The theoretical dimensions of the study are orientated in relation to major Marxist critics of utopianism like Marx, Friedrich Engels, Leon Trotsky and Ernst Bloch, as well as to thinkers like Hannah Arendt, Immanuel Wallerstein, James C. Scott and Jay Winter. More than an exercise in historical excavation, Dreaming of Freedom in South Africa raises challenging questions for the post-apartheid present.Less

Drivetime: Literary Excursions in Automotive Consciousness

Lynne Pearce

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 ... More

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.Less

The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts

Catherine Brown and Susan Reid (eds)

This book includes twenty-eight chapters by specialists from across the arts, reassessing Lawrence’s relationship to aesthetic categories and specific art forms in their historical and critical ... More

This book includes twenty-eight chapters by specialists from across the arts, reassessing Lawrence’s relationship to aesthetic categories and specific art forms in their historical and critical contexts. A new picture of Lawrence as a multi-disciplinary artist emerges, expanding from traditional areas of enquiry in prose and poetry into the fields of drama, painting, music, dance, sculpture, architecture, historiography, life writing and queer and Biblical aesthetics. The Companion explores topics such as Lawrence’s politics in his art, his representations of technology, his practice of revising and rewriting, his manifold modes of performance, and the relationship between his criticism and creation of prose, poetry and painting. Investigation of Lawrence’s engagements with the work and themes of his fellow modernists represents him as more ‘modernist’ and less anti-aesthetic than has hitherto been the case; and his attitudes towards the working-classes, and anticipation of the ideas of the Frankfurt School, modern ecocriticism and queer theory, are presented as revealing him to be more progressive than has previously been recognised. This interdisciplinary Companion also makes a strong case for Lawrence’s continuing aesthetic power, as represented by case studies of his afterlives in biofiction, cinema, musical settings and portraiture.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 Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities

Sarah Atkinson, Jane Macnaughton, Jennifer Richards, Anne Whitehead, and Angela Woods (eds)

The medical humanities, we claim, names a series of intersections, exchanges and entanglements between the biomedical sciences, the arts and humanities, and the social sciences. The Edinburgh ... More

The medical humanities, we claim, names a series of intersections, exchanges and entanglements between the biomedical sciences, the arts and humanities, and the social sciences. The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities introduces the ideas, individuals and scholarly approaches that are currently shaping the field. The medical humanities is an area of inquiry that is highly interdisciplinary, rapidly expanding and increasingly globalised. As this Introduction and the chapters that follow demonstrate, The Companion is both a reinvigoration and a critical reorientation of the medical humanities: an identification of new challenges for research, which also expands the methodologies, perspectives and practices that might be called upon to meet them.Less

The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and Contemporary Global Literature

Jeanne Dubino, Paulina Pajak, Catherine W. Hollis, Celiese Lypka, and Vara Neverow (eds)

This book considers the global responses Woolf’s work has inspired and her worldwide impact. The 23 chapters address the ways Woolf is received by writers, publishers, academics, reading audiences, ... More

This book considers the global responses Woolf’s work has inspired and her worldwide impact. The 23 chapters address the ways Woolf is received by writers, publishers, academics, reading audiences, and students in countries around the world; how she is translated into multiple languages; and how her life is transformed into global contemporary biofiction. The 24 authors hail from regions around the world: West and East Europe, the Middle East/North Africa, North and South America, East Asia and the Pacific Islands. They write about Woolf’s reception in Ireland, France, Italy, Germany, Poland, Estonia, Russia, Egypt, Kenya, Mexico, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, the United States, China, Japan and Australia. The Edinburgh Companion is dialogic and comparative, incorporating both transnational and local tendencies insofar as they epitomise Woolf’s global reception and legacy. It contests the ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ binary, offering new models for Woolf global studies and promoting cross-cultural understandings.Less