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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.

Ireland is a strange, but also a frightening, place – or so you are led to believe by popular culture which trades in a now traditional view of Ireland as a site of queer goings on. Recent horror films like Hellboy II merely recycle a very recognisable trope in cinematic tradition which associates Ireland with either quaint Celtic charm or grand Gothic guignol. While the cinematic incarnation of these Gothic Irish associations is relatively recent, it draws on a long history of such representations in literary terms, a tradition that goes back to the beginnings of the genre in the mid-eighteenth century. This version of Ireland as a Gothic madhouse had to be confronted by Irish writers, but rather than reject it a great many of them, on first glance, appear to have embraced it enthusiastically, allowing the tropes and themes of the Gothic to infect practically everything they wrote. This book provides a robustly theorised and thoroughly historicised account of the ‘beginnings’ of Irish Gothic fiction, maps the theoretical terrain covered by other critics, and puts forward a new history of the emergence of the genre in Ireland.

Espionage and Exile demonstrates that from the 1930s through the Cold War, British Writers Eric Ambler, Helen MacInnes, Ann Bridge, Pamela Frankau, John le Carré and filmmaker Leslie Howard combined propaganda and popular entertainment to call for resistance to political oppression. Instead of constituting context, the political engagement of these spy fictions bring the historical crises of Fascist and Communist domination to the forefront of twentieth century literary history. They deploy themes of deception and betrayal to warn audiences of the consequences of Nazi Germany's conquests and later, the fusion of Fascist and Communist oppression. Featuring protagonists who are stateless and threatened refugees, abandoned and betrayed secret agents, and politically engaged or entrapped amateurs, all in states of precarious exile, these fictions engage their historical subjects to complicate extant literary meanings of transnational, diaspora and performativity. Unsettling distinctions between villain and victim as well as exile and belonging dramatizes relationships between the ethics of espionage and responses to international crises. With politically charged suspense and narrative experiments, these writers also challenge distinctions between literary, middlebrow, and popular culture.

This book is conceived as a sustained critical study of John Keats’s collection of poems, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, And Other Poems (1820). It was published in the 2020 bicentenary. It treats the collection as an authorially organised and thematically unified volume rather than as a collection of occasional poems. An important thread, which I follow through the volume as a major unifying principle, has also gone largely unnoticed by critics, since it is not self-evident when we read the poems individually and outside the book’s overarching intellectual context. The guiding theme behind 1820 I propose, is the persistent emphasis on different shades and types of an ancient major medical condition and literary preoccupation in Renaissance and Romantic poetry, namely melancholy, which was of interest to Keats through his medical training, temperament, and his delighted reading of Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy. This emotional area was considerably richer and more complex than today’s paler reflection in the word ‘melancholy’, and it could range between suicidal thoughts, love illness, manic hilarity, and inspired creativity in poetry, art and music. In this design the clinching closure comes with ‘Ode on Melancholy’, which exuberantly attributes value to the emotional state as a form of creative inspiration driving the 1820 volume.

John Macrone (1809-1837), Dickens's first publisher, was also Scott's first biographer. His unfinished life of Scott, filled with unique anecdotes and sidelights on the reception of the Waverley Novels, is here published for the first time, with an introduction which covers his career and personality in detail.

The Frankfurt School theoretical tendency and the individual thinkers connected with it have exercised an enormous influence across a broad spectrum of contemporary cultural scholarship. Modernist studies have been no exception in this regard. The more that modernist studies in recent years have taken shape as a distinct field of inquiry, the more intensely have contemporary scholars looked to the Frankfurt School legacy to explain key problems that arise in their research and teaching. In the specific case of modernism, however, there exists an even stronger motivation for the interest and influence of Frankfurt School critical theory: the close, multifaceted attention the Frankfurt School thinkers gave to the nature of modernity and the social, political, and aesthetic implications of it. Arguably, there is an “elective affinity” between the culture of artistic modernism, which responds to and artistically reshapes typical experiences of modernity, and Frankfurt School critical theory, which takes modern experience and its transformations as a primary object of critical reflection. Just as modernist artists responded to new modern experiences by reconceiving the style, form, and criteria of value for works of art, so too the key figures of the Frankfurt School developed daringly innovative, interdisciplinary critical approaches to the emerging phenomena of modern life. Coming out of and responding to the same matrix of problems, modernism and Frankfurt School theory exhibit parallel, complementary styles of thought in their respective figural and theoretical idioms.

This innovative book examines the development of modernism in four European cities: London, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna. Focusing upon how literary and cultural outsiders represented various spaces in these cities, it draws upon contemporary theories of affect, mood, and literary geography to offer an original account of the geographical emotions of modernism. It considers three broad features of urban modernism: the built environment of the particular cities, such as cafés or transport systems; the cultural institutions of publishing that underpinned the development of modernism in these locations; and the complex perceptions of writers and artists who were outsiders to the four cities. Particular attention is thus given to the transnational qualities of modernism by examining figures whose view of the cities considered is that of migrants, exiles, or strangers. The writers and artists discussed include Mulk Raj Anand, Gwendolyn Bennett, Bryher, Blaise Cendrars, Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, Christopher Isherwood, Hope Mirlees, Noami Mitchison, Jean Rhys, Sam Selon, and Stephen Spender.

This book argues for a generative relationship between economic thought and dramatic form in early modern English drama by examining representations of economic exchange in plays and mercantile treatises written in the early decades the seventeenth century when economic thinkers associated with “mercantilism” were re-examined how they conceptualised and depicted commerce as a system. Treatises by Thomas Milles, Gerard Malynes, Edward Misselden, and Thomas Mun are considered alongside plays by William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, Walter Mountfort, Thomas Heywood, Ben Jonson, Philip Massinger, and Richard Brome. Adapting approaches pioneered by scholars of Science Studies and the Rhetoric of Economics, Bradley Ryner compares the formal features of mercantile treatises and plays. He argues that Renaissance playwrights crafted absorbingly self-reflexive models of economic exchange by making productive use of the imperfection of their metaphors, the representational instability of their props and characters, the necessarily limited vantage points of their audiences, and the interpretive energies and generic expectations of these audiences. He shows how these techniques facilitated thinking through questions that were pertinent to seventeenth-century audiences, such as how to conceptualise royal finanace, currency exchange, global trade, and poverty as part of a systemic totality -- an ‘economy’ in the modern sense.

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.

Scottish Colonial Literature is a comprehensive study of Scottish colonial writing before 1707. It brings together previously dispersed sources to argue for a tradition of Scottish colonial literature before the Union of Parliaments. It introduces the term colonial utopian literature to frame the intricate relationship between colonialism and utopianism in the seventeenth century. Offering case studies relating to colonial undertakings at Nova Scotia (1620s), East New Jersey (1680s) and at the Isthmus of Panama, then known as Darien (1690s), Scottish Colonial Literature explores how literature and culture shaped Scotland's colonial ventures in the seventeenth century. In addition, it considers works written in the larger context of the Scottish Atlantic so as to illuminate how the Atlantic shaped seventeenth-century Scottish literature and vice versa. One key question running through the book is the relationship between art and ideology. Textual narratives were powerful instruments of empire-building throughout the early modern period. This book focuses on utopianism as a framework that authors used to claim power over the Atlantic. In the Scottish context, the intersections between utopianism and colonialism shed light on the ambiguous narratives of possession and dispossession as well as internal and external colonialism in Scottish colonial writing of the seventeenth century. Scottish Colonial Literature enters debates about Scotland's position in colonial and postcolonial studies through its focus on pre-1707 Atlantic literature.

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 explains how, under the influence of the new “mental materialism” that held sway in mid-Victorian scientific and medical thought, the Brontës and George Eliot in their greatest novels broached a radical new form of novelistic moral psychology, one that was no longer bound by the idealizing presuppositions of traditional Christian moral ideology, and which is closely related to Nietzsche’s physiological theory of will to power (itself directly influenced by Herbert Spencer). On this reading, the Brontës and George Eliot participate, with Flaubert, Baudelaire, and Nietzsche, in the beginnings of the modernist turn toward a strictly naturalistic moral psychology, one that is “non-moral” or “post-moral.”

This book examines how Thomas Hardy’s role as an acting magistrate and his lifelong interest in the law impacted on his prose fiction. Hardy’s novels and short stories are examined in the context of debates surrounding some of the seismic legal reforms of the nineteenth century, namely the birth of adversarial trial procedure, the evolving definition of legal insanity, the campaign for legal equality for married women, and heightened discussion over land law reform. This book situates Hardy’s treatment of these issues in the context of debate in Parliament, the press, periodicals and sensation fiction. While noting the influence of sensation fiction on his literary output, this study argues that Hardy rejects the conventional endings of realist and sensation fiction to provoke his readership to examine legal questions which he leaves unanswered in a modernist form of training in judicial reasoning.

Writing Black Scotland: Race, Nation and the Devolution of Black Britain examines Blackness in devolutionary Scottish writing, bringing together two established contemporary literary-critical fields – Black British and Scottish literature – with significant implications for both. The book focuses on key literary works from the 1970s to the early 2000s, which emerge from and shape a period of history defined by post-imperial adjustment: a new British state politics of race centred on multiculturalism, the changing status of the Union, and the expanding racial diversity of Scotland itself. The book suggests that the larger world context of Black politics shaped the priorities of Scottish writers in the 1980s and 1990s, at the same time that Black writers were rising to prominence in Scottish letters. Following the referendum on devolved government in 1997, race and racism became even more important negotiations in the national space, evidenced by case studies of three texts directly addressing Blackness in Scotland. This ‘devolving’ of Black Britain parallels the shifting constitutional arrangements in contemporary Britain, implicating not only Scotland but Black British literary studies, which have largely left the integrity of the Union undisturbed. Writing Black Scotland critiques that unifying Britishness, recognisable in a confident state multiculturalism, with reference to the constitutional challenge from Scotland.