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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

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

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

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

Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics: For de Man

Andrzej Warminski

This volume explicates Paul de Man's late project of a critique of aesthetic ideology and attempts to extend it in ways productive for critical thought. After a reading of de Man's work in all its ... More

This volume explicates Paul de Man's late project of a critique of aesthetic ideology and attempts to extend it in ways productive for critical thought. After a reading of de Man's work in all its rigour — and hence also the aesthetic theory of Kant, Schiller, and Hegel — the book goes on to uncover a ‘material moment’ in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit that lives on in Marx and in the Marxist tradition. It also elucidates de Man's critical reading of Heidegger on the example of Hölderlin — a moment essential for de Man's shifts to the question of rhetoric and then to the question of ideology — and ends with a reading of Derrida's ‘last’ text on de Man and its uncanny self-inscription in Rousseau's episode of the stolen ribbon.Less

Illness as Many Narratives: "Arts, Medicine and Culture"

Stella Bolaki

Illness narratives have become a cultural phenomenon in the Western world but their analysis continues to be framed by the context of biomedicine, the doctor-patient encounter and the demands of ... More

Illness narratives have become a cultural phenomenon in the Western world but their analysis continues to be framed by the context of biomedicine, the doctor-patient encounter and the demands of medical training. This reductive attitude prevents the inclusion of more formally experimental genres, different themes and interdisciplinary methods within the field. It also perpetuates the view of the medical humanities as a narrow area of study largely serving the needs of medicine. Exploring the aesthetic, ethical and cultural importance of contemporary representations of illness across different arts and media, this book intervenes in current debates in medical humanities/medical education by emphasising more critical as opposed to instrumental approaches. Opening up the category of illness narrative to consider forms beyond literature, Illness as Many Narratives includes chapters on photography, artists’ books, performance art, film, theatre, animation and online narratives. The book examines different physical and mental illness experiences in both autobiographical and collaborative/relational narratives and offers new close readings of diverse works by Jo Spence, Sam Taylor-Wood, Martha A. Hall, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Wim Wenders, Lisa Kron and others. Approaching illness and its treatments as a multiplicity and situating them in relation to aesthetics, theory, radical pedagogy, politics and contemporary cultural concerns, Illness as Many Narratives demonstrates how bringing in diverse materials and engaging with multiple perspectives can help the arts, cultural studies and the medical humanities to establish critical conversations and amplify the goals and scope of their respective work.Less

Imagining Surveillance: Eutopian and Dystopian Literature and Film

Peter Marks

Imagining Surveillance provides the first extensive and intensive study of surveillance as depicted and assessed in literature and film. Focusing on the utopian genre (which includes positive ... More

Imagining Surveillance provides the first extensive and intensive study of surveillance as depicted and assessed in literature and film. Focusing on the utopian genre (which includes positive eutopias and negative dystopias), this book offers an in-depth account of how creative writers, filmmakers and thinkers have envisioned other worlds in which surveillance operates, for good and ill. It explores how surveillance scholars have utilized these fictional works in understanding the myriad implications of surveillance in the contemporary world. From Thomas More’s Utopia to recent novels and films such as Dave Eggers’ The Circle and Spike Jonze’s Her, Imagining Surveillance traces the long history of surveillance in imaginative texts well before and after George Orwell’s iconic Nineteen Eighty-Four. The book argues that creative texts have long offered subtle, complex and provocative readings of surveillance that investigate the human dimension of this fast-developing, at times invisible, and undoubtedly transformative element of twenty-first century life. Novels and films supply scenarios and narratives that prompt readers and viewers to consider the personal, ethical, social and political questions proliferating surveillance raises. With chapters on the relationships between surveillance and visibility, spaces, identities, technologies, and the shape of things to come, Imagining Surveillance establishes itself at the leading edge of the emerging cultural studies of surveillance.Less

In Memory of Jacques Derrida

Nicholas Royle

Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) was the most original and inspiring writer and philosopher of our time. In a series of essays that are at once self-contained and intricately linked, the author of this ... More

Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) was the most original and inspiring writer and philosopher of our time. In a series of essays that are at once self-contained and intricately linked, the author of this book explores the legacies of Derrida's thinking in the context of philosophy, language, globalisation, war, terrorism, justice, the democracy to come, poetry, literature, memory, mourning, the gift, friendship and dreams. He allows us to appreciate how much Derrida's work has altered the ways we read and think. Autobiography, children's literature, the Gothic and modernist fiction, for example, figure together with philosophy, queer studies, speech act theory and psychoanalysis. The writings of Horace Walpole, Herman Melville, E. M. Forster, Elizabeth Bowen, Joe Brainard and David McKee are put in play alongside Shakespeare. The book suggests that one of Derrida's most profound legacies has to do with the combination of responsibility and freedom his work inspires for both reading and writing. It offers an overview of Derrida's work while also tracing directions in which it might productively be read in the future.Less

Intelligence and Metadrama in the Early Modern Theatre

Bill Angus

Intelligence and in the Early Modern Theatre explores intrinsic connections between early modern intelligencers and metadrama in the plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. It offers insight into why ... More

Intelligence and in the Early Modern Theatre explores intrinsic connections between early modern intelligencers and metadrama in the plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. It offers insight into why the early modern stage abounds with informer and intelligencer figures. Analysing both the nature of intelligence at the time and the metadrama that such characters generate, the book highlights the significance of intrigue and corruption to dramatic narrative and structure. This study of metadrama reveals some of the most fundamental questions being posed about the legitimacy of authority, authorship, and audience interpretation in this seminal era of English drama.Less

The Judicial Imagination: Writing After Nuremberg

Lyndsey Stonebridge

This book tells the story of the struggle to imagine new forms of justice after Nuremberg. Returning to the work of Hannah Arendt as a theoretical starting point, the author traces an aesthetics of ... More

This book tells the story of the struggle to imagine new forms of justice after Nuremberg. Returning to the work of Hannah Arendt as a theoretical starting point, the author traces an aesthetics of judgement in post-war writers and intellectuals, including Rebecca West, Elizabeth Bowen, Muriel Spark and Iris Murdoch. Writing in the false dawn of a new era of international justice and human rights, these complicated women intellectuals were drawn to the law because of its promise of justice, yet critical of its political blindness and suspicious of its moral claims. Bringing together literary-legal theory with trauma studies, the book argues that today we have much to learn from these writers' impassioned scepticism about the law's ability to legislate for the territorial violence of our times.Less