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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

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

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

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 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

Elizabeth Bowen: Theory, Thought and Things

Jessica Gildersleeve and Patricia Juliana Smith (eds)

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’ ... More

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.Less

The English Aeneid: Translations of Virgil 1555-1646

Sheldon Brammall

This book brings to light a history of English Renaissance Aeneids that has been lost from view. Previous monographs have explored the complete translations by Gavin Douglas (1513) and John Dryden ... More

This book brings to light a history of English Renaissance Aeneids that has been lost from view. Previous monographs have explored the complete translations by Gavin Douglas (1513) and John Dryden (1697), but there has been little research focussing on the Aeneid translations which appeared in between. This book covers the period from the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign to the start of the English Civil War, during which time there were thirteen authors who composed substantial translations of Virgil’s epic. These translators include prominent literary figures — such as Richard Stanyhurst, Christopher Marlowe, and Sir John Harington — as well as colonists, schoolmasters and members of parliament. Rather than simply viewing these Aeneids as scattered efforts preceding Dryden and the ‘golden age’ of Augustan translation, this book argues that these works represent a recognisable and important period of English classical translation. Drawing on manuscripts and printed sources, the book sketches a continuous portrait of the English Aeneids as they developed through the ages of Elizabeth, James I and Charles I.Less

The Ethics of Writing: Authorship and Legacy in Plato and Nietzsche

Sean Burke

Beginning amidst the tombs of the ‘dead’ God, and the crematoria at Auschwitz, this book confronts Nietzsche's legacy through the lens of Plato. The key question is how authors can protect against ... More

Beginning amidst the tombs of the ‘dead’ God, and the crematoria at Auschwitz, this book confronts Nietzsche's legacy through the lens of Plato. The key question is how authors can protect against the possible ‘deviant readings’ of future readers and assess ‘the risk of writing’. The author recommends an ethic of ‘discursive containment’. The ethical question is the question of our times. Within critical theory, it has focused on the act of reading. This study reverses the terms of inquiry to analyse the ethical composition of the act of writing. What responsibility does an author bear for his legacy? Do ‘catastrophic’ misreadings of authors (e.g. Plato, Nietzsche), which played a part in the establishment of totalitarian regimes such as Nazism, Fascism, and Communism, testify to authorial recklessness? These and other questions are the starting point for a theory of authorial ethics.Less

Forgetting Differences: Tragedy, Historiography, and the French Wars of Religion

Andrea Frisch

This study argues that the political and legislative process of forgetting internal differences undertaken in France after the civil wars of the sixteenth century leads to subtle yet fundamental ... More

This study argues that the political and legislative process of forgetting internal differences undertaken in France after the civil wars of the sixteenth century leads to subtle yet fundamental shifts in the broader conception of the relationship between readers or spectators on the one hand, and history, on the other. These shifts, occasioned by the desire for communal reconciliation, will ultimately serve the ideologies of cultural and political absolutism. By juxtaposing representations of the French civil war past as they appear (and frequently overlap) in historiography and tragedy from 1550-1630, Forgetting Differences tracks changes in the ways in which history and tragedy sought to “move” readers throughout the period of the wars and in their wake. The shift from a politically (and martially) active reading of the past to a primarily affective one follows the imperative, so clear and urgent at the turn of the seventeenth century, to put an end to violent conflict. Subsequently, however, this orientation to both history and tragedy would be appropriated for other ends, utlimately helping to further absolutist ideologies of culture and politics that privileged affective over active readings of the past.Less

The Gothic and Theory: An Edinburgh Companion

Jerrold E. Hogle and Robert Miles (eds)

Each essay in this collection, after the introduction, focuses on a particular kind of theory-Gothic relationship, every one of which has a history and each of which is still being explored in ... More

Each essay in this collection, after the introduction, focuses on a particular kind of theory-Gothic relationship, every one of which has a history and each of which is still being explored in enactments of the Gothic and of theory today. Rather than recounting how different schools of theory and criticism have viewed the Gothic, these chapters argue how Gothic and theory have defined and affected - and still define and affect -- each other in particular aesthetic, intellectual, and cultural realms. In each case, the Gothic is revealed as containing and inciting the very theoretical schemes and assumptions that have purported to explain it from particular perspectives. Hence the Gothic, as it has progressed across Western and world history, emerges as both a producer of what each school of theory promulgates and an active Gothic-izer of each scheme, thereby advancing the development of every theoretical enterprise in Gothic works. This approach allows each essayist to reflect from the perspective of 2018-19 on how a particular realm of theory has opened up forms of the Gothic to our understandings and to the wider possibilities of Gothic texts (broadly defined) as performers of "cultural work." But it equally enlists each of them to explain how those very openings are incipient in forms of the Gothic and how the Gothic can also question existing theoretical claims, challenge them, and reorient them.Less

Hardy, Conrad and the Senses

Hugh Epstein

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 ... More

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.Less