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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

Afromodernisms: Paris, Harlem and the Avant-Garde

Fionnghuala Sweeney and Kate Marsh (eds)

The ten chapters in this book stretch and challenge current canonical configurations of modernism in two key ways: by considering the centrality of black artists, writers, and intellectuals as key ... More

The ten chapters in this book stretch and challenge current canonical configurations of modernism in two key ways: by considering the centrality of black artists, writers, and intellectuals as key actors and core presences in the development of a modernist avant-garde; and by interrogating ‘blackness’ as an aesthetic and political category at critical moments during the twentieth century. The book explores the term ‘Afromodernisms’ and addresses together the cognate fields of modernism and the black Atlantic.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

American Modernism's Expatriate Scene: The Labour of Translation

Daniel Katz

This study takes as its point of departure an essential premise: that the widespread phenomenon of expatriation in American modernism is less a flight from the homeland than a dialectical return to ... More

This study takes as its point of departure an essential premise: that the widespread phenomenon of expatriation in American modernism is less a flight from the homeland than a dialectical return to it, but one which renders uncanny all tropes of familiarity and immediacy that ‘fatherlands’ and ‘mother tongues’ are traditionally seen as providing. In this framework, similarly totalising notions of cultural authenticity are seen to govern both exoticist mystification and ‘nativist’ obsessions with the purity of the ‘mother tongue.’ At the same time, cosmopolitanism, translation and multilingualism become often eroticised tropes of violation of this model, and in consequence, simultaneously courted and abhorred, in a movement which, if crystallised in expatriate modernism, continued to make its presence felt beyond. Beginning with the late work of Henry James, this book goes on to examine at length Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, to conclude with the uncanny regionalism of mid-century San Francisco Renaissance poet Jack Spicer, and the deterritorialised aesthetic of his peer, John Ashbery. Through an emphasis on modernism as a space of generalized interference, the practice and trope of translation emerges as central to all of the writers concerned, while the book remains in constant dialogue with key recent works on transnationalism, transatlanticism and modernism.Less

The American Short Story Cycle

Jennifer J. Smith

The American Short Story Cycle spans two centuries to tell the history of a genre that includes major and marginal authors, from Washington Irving through William Faulkner to Jhumpa Lahiri. The short ... More

The American Short Story Cycle spans two centuries to tell the history of a genre that includes major and marginal authors, from Washington Irving through William Faulkner to Jhumpa Lahiri. The short story cycle rose and proliferated because its form compellingly renders the uncertainties that emerge from the twin pillars of modern America culture: individualism and pluralism. Short story cycles reflect how individuals adapt to change, whether it is the railroad coming to the small town in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919) or social media revolutionizing language in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010). Each chapter examines how cycles use temporal and spatial settings and characterization to link the stories within. Doing so reveals that authors turn to the cycle when exploring identities—be they gendered or ethnic—in flux and when experimenting with the conventions of narrative unity, from regionalist through modernist to contemporary writers. This book constructs a history of community, family, and time in American culture through one of the nation’s most popular, yet unrecognized genres. Combining new formalism in literary criticism with scholarship in American Studies, this book gives a name and theory to the genre that has fostered the aesthetics of fragmentation, as well as recurrence, that characterize fiction today.Less

American Snobs: Transatlantic Novelists, Liberal Culture and the Genteel Tradition

Emily Coit

Arguing that Henry Adams, Henry James and Edith Wharton articulated their political thought in response to the liberalism that reigned in Boston and, more specifically, at Harvard University, ... More

Arguing that Henry Adams, Henry James and Edith Wharton articulated their political thought in response to the liberalism that reigned in Boston and, more specifically, at Harvard University, American Snobs shows how each of these authors interrogated that liberalism's arguments for education, democracy and the political duties of the cultivated elite. Coit shows that the works of these authors contributed to a realist critique of a liberal New England idealism that fed into the narrative about 'the genteel tradition', which shaped the study of US literature during the twentieth century.Less

9/11 and the Literature of Terror

Martin Randall

This book explores the fiction, poetry, theatre and cinema that have represented the 9/11 attacks. Works by Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Don DeLillo, Simon Armitage and Mohsin Hamid are discussed in ... More

This book explores the fiction, poetry, theatre and cinema that have represented the 9/11 attacks. Works by Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Don DeLillo, Simon Armitage and Mohsin Hamid are discussed in relation to the specific problems of writing about such a visually spectacular ‘event’ that has had enormous global implications. Other chapters analyse initial responses to 9/11, the intriguing tensions between fiction and non-fiction, the challenge of describing traumatic history and the ways in which the terrorist attacks have been discussed culturally in the decade since September 11. The book: contributes to the growing literature on 9/11, presenting an overview of some of the main texts that have represented the attacks and their aftermath; focuses on Don DeLillo, adding to the literature surrounding this major American novelist; focuses on Martin Amis, adding to the growing critical work on this much-discussed British novelist and essayist; and provides a critical analysis of the Oscar-winning film Man on Wire, regarding its oblique references to 9/11.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

Antonia White and Manic-Depressive Illness

Patricia Moran

Misdiagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia instead of what was bipolar or manic-depressive illness, Antonia White turned repeatedly to psychoanalysis and Catholicism to resolve the emotional ... More

Misdiagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia instead of what was bipolar or manic-depressive illness, Antonia White turned repeatedly to psychoanalysis and Catholicism to resolve the emotional conflicts that she believed were the cause of her tumultuous moods, her inexplicable behaviour and her writer’s block. This study rereads White’s writing within the context of manic-depressive illness to show how the misdiagnosis of her illness shaped the identity narratives White constructed in her life-writing and then used as the basis of her strongly autobiographical fiction. White’s self-narratives have skewed critical interpretations of her work; at the same time, her fiction has not been studied as expressive of affective disorder. By contextualising White’s work within the contexts of manic-depression and narrative identity, this study proposes a new model for reading White; documents the complex interplay of biological, psychological and environmental factors involved in affective disorder; and historicises the diagnosis and treatment of White’s illness in medical, psychoanalytic and Catholic contexts.Less

Artful Experiments: Ways of Knowing in Victorian Literature and Science

Philipp Erchinger

What is the connection between Victorian writing and experiment? Artful Experiments seeks to answer this question by approaching the field of literature and science in a way that is not so much ... More

What is the connection between Victorian writing and experiment? Artful Experiments seeks to answer this question by approaching the field of literature and science in a way that is not so much centred on discourses of established knowledge as it is on practices of investigating what is no longer or not yet knowledge. The book assembles various modes of writing, from poetry and sensation fiction to natural history and philosophical debate, reading them as ways of knowing or structures in the making, rather than as containers of accomplished arguments or story worlds. Offering innovative interpretations of works by George Eliot, Robert Browning, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and others, alongside in-depth studies of philosophical and scientific texts by writers such as John S. Mill, Thomas H. Huxley, George H. Lewes and F. Max Müller, Artful Experiments explicates and re-conceives the relations between the arts and the sciences, experience and language as well as practice and theory. For many Victorians, the book argues, experimentation was just as integral to the making of literature as writing was integral to the making of science.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

Atlantic Citizens: Nineteenth-Century American Writers at Work in the World

Leslie Eckel

This rediscovery of the bold cosmopolitan activism and professional literary adventures of six American writers argues that antebellum authors never imagined ‘America’ without thinking of other ... More

This rediscovery of the bold cosmopolitan activism and professional literary adventures of six American writers argues that antebellum authors never imagined ‘America’ without thinking of other nations and never defined it outside the context of a network of global relationships. As this book challenges theories of national exceptionalism, it also questions the exceptional status of literature itself. By looking beyond authors’ familiar literary works, this study illuminates their practices of Atlantic citizenship. From leading authors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Ralph Waldo Emerson to popular writer Grace Greenwood, the figures who animate this book shape their careers in the fields of education, journalism, public lecturing, and editing in productive relation to their development as imaginative writers. To see Frederick Douglass as a fiery newspaper editor as well as an autobiographer, to witness Margaret Fuller reporting from the front lines of battle in revolutionary Rome as well as writing her country’s first feminist treatise, and to witness Walt Whitman co-producing foreign editions of his work with British poets as well as exuberantly breaking free from verse strictures on the page is to comprehend more fully the ways in which these writers acted in the transatlantic sphere. By doing so, they are able to achieve critical distance from the United States and, paradoxically, to catalyse its ongoing growth.Less

Autobiographical Identities in Contemporary Arab Culture

Valerie Anishchenkova

This study of Arab autobiographical discourse investigates various modes of cultural identity which have emerged in Arab societies in the last 40 years. During this period, autobiographical texts ... More

This study of Arab autobiographical discourse investigates various modes of cultural identity which have emerged in Arab societies in the last 40 years. During this period, autobiographical texts moved away from exemplary life narratives and toward more unorthodox techniques, such as erotic memoir writing, postmodernist self-fragmentation, cinematographic self-projection, and autobiographical blogosphere. The book argues that the Arabic autobiographical genre has evolved into a mobile, unrestricted category arming authors with narrative tools to articulate their selfhood. Reading works from such Arab nations as Egypt, Iraq, Morocco, Syria, and Lebanon, the author connects the century's rapid political and ideological developments to increasing autobiographical experimentation in Arabic works. The scope of the study also forces a consideration of film and cyber forms of self-representation as new autobiographical sub-genres. The monograph offers a novel theoretical framework to these diverse modes of autobiographical cultural production and situates Arabic autobiographical discourse as an integral part of global identity-making cultural production.Less

Beckett Beyond the Normal

Seán Kennedy (ed.)

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 ... More

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.Less

Beckett's Breath: Anti-Theatricality and the Visual Arts

Sozita Goudouna

Samuel Beckett, one of the most prominent playwrights of the twentieth century, wrote a thirty-second playlet for the stage that does not include actors, text, characters or drama but only stage ... More

Samuel Beckett, one of the most prominent playwrights of the twentieth century, wrote a thirty-second playlet for the stage that does not include actors, text, characters or drama but only stage directions. Breath (1969) is the focus and the only theatrical text examined in this study, which demonstrates how the piece became emblematic of the interdisciplinary exchanges that occur in Beckett's later writings, and of the cross-fertilisation of the theatre with the visual arts. The book attends to fifty breath-related artworks (including sculpture, painting, new media, sound art, performance art) and contextualises Beckett's Breath within the intermedial and high-modernist discourse thereby contributing to the expanding field of intermedial Beckett criticism.Less

Beckett's Thing: Painting and Theatre

David Lloyd

Samuel Beckett was deeply engaged with the visual arts and individual painters, including Jack B. Yeats, Bram van Velde, and Avigdor Arikha. The book explores what Beckett saw in their paintings that ... More

Samuel Beckett was deeply engaged with the visual arts and individual painters, including Jack B. Yeats, Bram van Velde, and Avigdor Arikha. The book explores what Beckett saw in their paintings that would come to shape his own dramas as visual artworks. It explains what visual resources Beckett found in these particular painters rather than in the surrealism of Masson or the abstraction of Kandinsky or Mondrian. The analysis of Beckett’s visual imagination is based on his quite extensive art criticism and on close analysis of the paintings that he would actually have viewed. Lloyd shows how Beckett’s fascination with these painters illuminates the ‘painterly’ qualities of his theatre and the philosophical, political and aesthetic implications of Beckett’s highly visual dramatic work. These implications center on his interrogation of the philosophical, political and aesthetic limits of representation in the wake of decolonization, fascism and world war. The book argues that in place of the subject-object relation that underpins modern concepts of representation, Beckett seeks to present the human as a thing in a world reduced to thingliness.Less

Blasted Literature: Victorian Political Fiction and the Shock of Modernism

Deaglan O Donghaile

This book examines types of political and literary disruption. Between 1880 and 1915, a range of writers exploited terrorism's political shocks for their own artistic ends. Drawing on late-Victorian ... More

This book examines types of political and literary disruption. Between 1880 and 1915, a range of writers exploited terrorism's political shocks for their own artistic ends. Drawing on late-Victorian ‘dynamite novels’ by authors including Robert Louis Stevenson, Tom Greer and Robert Thynne, radical journals and papers, such as The Irish People, The Torch, Anarchy and Freiheit, and modernist writing from H. G. Wells and Joseph Conrad to the compulsively militant modernism of Wyndham Lewis and the Vorticists, the book maps the political and aesthetic connections that bind the shilling shocker closely to modernism.Less

The Blind and Blindness in Literature of the Romantic Period

Edward Larrissy

This book examines the philosophical and literary background to representations of blindness and the blind in the Romantic period. In detailed studies of literary works the author shows how the topic ... More

This book examines the philosophical and literary background to representations of blindness and the blind in the Romantic period. In detailed studies of literary works the author shows how the topic is central to an understanding of British and Irish Romantic literature. While he considers the influence of Milton and the ‘Ossian’ poems, as well as of philosophers including Locke, Diderot, Berkeley and Thomas Reid, much of the book is taken up with new readings of writers of the period. These include canonical authors such as Blake, Wordsworth, Scott, Byron, Keats and Percy and Mary Shelley, as well as less-well-known writers such as Charlotte Brooke and Ann Batten Cristall. There is also a chapter on the popular genre of improving tales for children by writers such as Barbara Hofland and Mary Sherwood. The author finds that, despite the nostalgia for a bardic age of inward vision, the chief emphasis in the period is on the compensations of enhanced sensitivity to music and words. This compensation becomes associated with the loss and gain involved in the modernity of a post-bardic age. Representations of blindness and the blind are found to elucidate a tension at the heart of the Romantic period, between the desire for immediacy of vision on the one hand and, on the other, the historical self-consciousness that always attends it.Less

The Body in Arabic Love Poetry: The 'Udhri Tradition

Jokha Alharthi

This book radically re-interprets the nature of medieval Arabic love poetry in the classical age. It challenges stereotypical ideas about the absence of the body in ʿUdhri love poetry. Investigating ... More

This book radically re-interprets the nature of medieval Arabic love poetry in the classical age. It challenges stereotypical ideas about the absence of the body in ʿUdhri love poetry. Investigating the ʿUdhri tradition through close readings of the classical 10th-century Arabic sources including anthologies such as the Kitab al-Aghani, the book contributes to literary studies on the representations of the body. It also includes close readings of difficult literary texts in classical Arabic including the work of ʿUrwah b. Hizam, Majnun Layla,  Qays b. Dharih, Jamil Buthaynah and Kuthayyir ʿAzzah.  The author re-appraises the relationship between love, poetry and Arab society in the 8th to 11th centuries. She avoids familiar clichés about the purity of love in ‘Udhri poetry. Broadly speaking, this book is an Arabic counterpart to the western medieval concept of unconsummated courtly love. It questions the traditional much-vaunted emphasis on chastity and the assumption that this poetry omits any concept of the body. Less