Literary companions, book reviews and guides Books

Book SynopsisA novel is among the most intricate of human creations, the result of thousands of choices and decisions. In How to Reread a Novel, Matthew Clark explicates the intricacies of fiction writing through practical analysis of the resources of narration, demystifying some of the tools novelists use to build worlds.Trade Review“In this refreshingly down-to-earth and approachable book, Matthew Clark focuses on the handling of rhetorical figures and narrative situations in a wide range of authors from Homer to Toni Morrison, revealing in detail the mechanisms by which literary effects are created. Lucidly written, patiently argued, and deeply grounded in a lifetime of literary experience, How to Reread a Novel can change the way we read, amplifying both our understanding and our pleasure.” - Peter J. Rabinowitz, author of Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book SynopsisTo discover how women constructed their own mythology of the West, Kolodny examines the evidence of three generations of women's writing about the frontier. She finds that, although the American frontiersman imagined the wilderness as virgin land, an unspoiled Eve to be taken, the pioneer woman at his side dreamed more modestly of a garden to be cultivated.

Read more less

a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

Read more less

a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

Read more less

Book SynopsisTrade ReviewIn this much anticipated work, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg takes up Crevecoeur's challenge 'What then is the American, this new man?' and boldly answers: A deeply divided subject of This Violent Empire, this United States. In exposing republican citizens' desires and fears, she not only opens up new realms of thought and inquiry--she makes clear that no genuine understanding of the new nation can overlook the profoundly confounded and contested cultural construction of 'the American, this new man.'--Michael Meranze, University of California, Los Angeles|""Smith-Rosenberg maps the genesis of a historical dilemma, how the United States' vaunted diversity and emphasis on unity often function in bitter opposition. Historically rich and theoretically sophisticated, This Violent Empire studies the social, material, urban, intercultural, and international contexts through which an impossibly unified American identity was imagined in the magazines, literature, and art of the early United States.""--Dana D. Nelson, Vanderbilt University|""Scholars of the new nation and its culture have been waiting twenty years for this book--and it is well worth the wait. We will no longer hear that the most powerful actors of the 'founding' did not think or talk creatively about Indians, or slaves, or women. This Violent Empire reaches deep into the national psyche and broadly into the cultural practices that defined Americans and their 'Others' in a formative period; it is a tour de force of political and cultural analysis that informs us all.""--David Waldstreicher, Temple University

Read more less

Book SynopsisThrough careful reading of Luis Cernuda's later poetry, written after 1936, Alexander Coleman argues that Luis Cernuda was a poet whose primary impulse in his art was the suppression of the subjective and the consequent objectivization of poetry.

Read more less

Book SynopsisPhilip Stewart demonstrates that in each of three novels - Marivaux's La Vie de Marianne, Diderot's La Religieuse, and Rousseau's Julie ou la Nouvelle Heloise - the characters' sincerity disguises how incompletely the meaning of their own experience is resolved.

Read more less

a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

Read more less

a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe renowned scholar Rüdiger Safranski's Romanticism: A German Affair both offers an accessible overview of Romanticism and, more critically, traces its lasting influence, for better and for ill, on German culture. This is essential reading for anyone interested in the power of art, culture, and ideas in the life of a nation.

Read more less

Book SynopsisPresents the first systematic study of cultural images of Andalusia as Spain's Orient and the impact they have had on nation-building and modernization. José Luis Venegas deftly explores Spain's shifting engagements with oriental identity and otherness by looking at a territory that is institutionally embedded in the nation-state while symbolically placed between inclusion and abjection.

Read more less

Book SynopsisExamines the transformation, in both aesthetics and infrastructure, of Mexican fiction since the late 1970s. During this time a framework has emerged characterized by the corporatization of publishing, a frictional relationship between Mexican literature and global book markets, and the desire of Mexican writers to break from dominant models of national culture.Trade ReviewStrategic Occidentalism is a landmark study in contemporary Mexican literature that combines exhaustive, original research with clear thinking and stylish prose. Sanchez Prado establishes critical dialogues with major theorists in world, Latin American, and Mexican literary studies, but does so in constructively critical ways. "" - Brian Price, author of Cult of Defeat in Mexico's Historical Fiction: Failure, Trauma, and Loss

Read more less

Book SynopsisExplores human consciousness in its most basic sense: the awareness, at any given moment, that we live and feel. Such awareness, it argues, is distinct from the categories of selfhood to which it is often assimilated, and can only be uncovered at the margins of first-person experience. What would it mean to be conscious without being a first person - to be conscious in the absence of a self?Trade ReviewThis is important and original work, argued with passion, eloquence, and style, and it will meet an interested audience in the growing group of Renaissance and early modern scholars interested in affects, environments, cognition, and phenomenology."" - Julia Lupton, author of Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life

Read more less

Book SynopsisReconsiders the literary works of the Viennese satirist, journalist, and playwright Karl Kraus (1874-1936). Ari Linden reads Kraus's work both on its own terms and alongside philosophy and critical theory, yielding a portrait of Kraus as an irrepressible figure in the modernist tradition.Trade ReviewAri Linden's Karl Kraus and the Discourse of Modernity offers an illuminating view onto Kraus's three major creative works, The Last Days of Mankind, Cloudcuckooland, and The Third Walpurgisnacht. Linden's principal contribution is an original analysis of Kraus's use of language in its relation to his contemporary reality-and in particular World War I, the creation of the Austrian Republic in the 1920s, and the era of National Socialism." - Michael W. Jennings, coauthor of Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life "Ari Linden's Karl Kraus and the Discourse of Modernity offers a compelling portrait of Kraus as a cultural critic in dark times, whose work runs parallel to other major figures of modernism. Linden offers measured assessments of Kraus's successes and limitations, his power and powerlessness, and what they offered, and continue to offer, to later generations of readers and critics." - Kirk Wetters, author of The Opinion System: Impasses of the Public Sphere from Hobbes to Habermas "Enormously erudite and enviably conversant with critical theory, Ari Linden convincingly argues that modernism cannot be fully understood without taking account of the towering - but still often neglected - figure of Karl Kraus." - William Collins Donahue, author of Holocaust as Fiction: Bernhard Schlink's "Nazi Novels" and Their FilmsTable of Contents Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction: Toward a Krausian Theory of Modernity 1. Reciting War: The Last Days of Mankind (1915-22) 2. On Birds, Wars, and Fragile Republics: Cloudcuckooland (1923) 3. "Where Illegality Becomes the Law": The Third Walpurgis Night (1933/52) 4. "A Monstrous Non-Entity": Kierkegaard, Kraus, and Benjamin 5. "Origin is the Goal": Adorno and Kraus Coda: "Shadows Cast Bodies": Kraus and Posterity Bibliography Notes Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisThrows fresh light on the intellectual exchange and disagreements between Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, the problematic conjunction of secular reason and negative theology in their thinking, and their appropriations of ancient and modern legacies.Trade ReviewTrenchant, lucid, and compelling. This book is a rare achievement: a study by an extraordinarily gifted literary and philosophical thinker who patiently and carefully elucidates notoriously obscure and challenging texts, fully cognizant of the larger intellectual claims informing them and his readings of them. The book alters and deepens our understanding of Adorno and Benjamin, reveals new depths to their implicit dialogue with each other within their writings, and demonstrates how their work continues to provide insights and inspiration for the study of literary narrative." - Henry W. Pickford, author of Thinking with Tolstoy and Wittgenstein: Expression, Emotion, and Art (Northwestern University Press, 2016)Table of Contents Frequently Cited Texts Introduction 1. Benjamin's Hard Caesura: The Hopeful Narrator of Elective Affinities 2. Adorno's Hard Caesura: The Impassive Homeric Narrator 3. Adorno's Soft Caesura: The Immanent Utopia of Penelope's Remark 4. Benjamin's Soft Caesura: The Immanent Utopia of the Embedded Novella Conclusion Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisExamines the fear of materiality in German-language realist and postrealist literature. The book argues that with German literature's turn in the mid-nineteenth century to the depiction of the profane, sensual world, anxiety emerged about the terms of that depiction.Trade ReviewAt the Limit of the Obscene is a masterful study of the concept of obscenity, in both its historical and theoretical permutations, as it played out in the tradition of nineteenth-century German realist literature and its afterlife in the early twentieth century. Weitzman moves with enviable grace through the German intellectual tradition from Kant forward, weaving in references to legal cases and contemporary critical interventions, and with great originality leads the discussion into the equally important tradition of French phenomenology." - Eric Downing, author of The Chain of Things: Divinatory Magic and the Practice of Reading in German Literature and Thought, 1850-1940"In her impeccably researched and elegantly written book, Weitzman uses the category of the obscene to unlock Poetic Realism's contradictions as well as its solutions. Mandatory reading for all those interested in 19th-century German prose and, more generally, in questions of materialism and literature." - Eva Geulen, author of The End of Art: Readings in a Rumor after HegelTable of Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: 'Scenes that do not belong in the light of day' 1. Against Nature: Adalbert Stifter 2. Base Matter: Gustav Freytag 3. Iconoclasm and Iconolatry: Theodor Fontane 4. Presence as Profanation: Arno Holz 5. Dead Ends: Gottfried Benn 6. Filth: Franz Kafka Coda: "As if she were saying something shameless" Notes Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisIncorporates sources from philosophy, criminology, psychology, and history to argue that Dostoevsky's thinking about punishment was shaped not only by his Christian ethics but also by the debates on penal theory and practice unfolding during his lifetime.Table of Contents Introduction Chapter 1: The Scaffold and the Rod: Dostoevsky on the Death Penalty and Corporal Punishment Chapter 2 : "Squaring the Circle": The Justice of Punishment Chapter 3: Foregoing Punishment: Dostoevsky’s Third Category and the Case of Ekaterina Kornilova Chapter 4: "A Mummy" or a "Resurrected" Self? Chapter 5: "India Rubber," the "Living Soul," and the Process of Moral Change Chapter 6: Approximations of Justice: The Novel in the CourtroomAfterwordNotesBibliography

Read more less

Book SynopsisPresents a new theory of textual endings in eighteenth-century literature and thought. Analysing works by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Heinrich von Kleist, Oliver Simons shows how the emergence of new kinds of literary endings around 1800 is inextricably linked to the history of philosophical and scientific concepts.Trade Review“This is a well written and forcefully argued study that succeeds in bringing out an important and heretofore unrecognized curve of literary-historical development across what must be regarded as the most significant phase of German cultural history. Simons’s command of the scholarship is exemplary, combining close textual analysis with a broad view of literary and intellectual history. The book’s contribution to current discussions in the scholarship—about the historical study of form and the place of the history of knowledge in literary historical study—is substantial.” —David E. Wellbery, editor-in-chief of A New History of German Literature“Simons operates on an elaborate and cutting-edge theoretical level. The readings in the book can be described as combining new formalist thinking with historical epistemology in the tradition of Foucault and the New Historicism. Simons’s book is innovative and exemplary at the same time, and this, in my view, is an enormous accomplishment.” —Rüdiger Campe, author of The Game of Probability: Literature and Calculation from Pascal to Kleist""This thought-provoking book greatly enriches our understanding of a key juncture in literary history by drawing attention to the ways in which literary genres, patterns of emplotment, and syntactical structures follow, critique, and complicate forms of reasoning in an age that glorifies reason and despairs of it in turn."" —Márton Dornbach, author of The Saving Line: Benjamin, Adorno, and the Caesuras of Hope (Northwestern University Press, 2021)Table of Contents Acknowledgements Introduction: Thinking Through Conclusions 1. Lessing’s Form of Reason 2. Goethe and the Powers of Conclusion 3. Kleist’s Genres Literary Conclusions: From Urteilskraft to Schlusskraft Notes Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisReconstructs lost Formalist theories of authorship, of the psychology of narrative structure, and of the social spread of poetic innovations. By recontextualising Russian Formalism within this philological paradigm, the book highlights the aspects of Formalism's legacy that speak to the priorities of twenty-first-century literary studies.Trade Review“Merrill's book is a major reinterpretation of the early stages of literary theory in Russia and their wider impact. Her narrative is attentive to detail, while remaining sure-footed when capturing the bigger picture. A rewarding piece of research that makes a strong contribution to the field.” —Galin Tihanov, author of The Birth and Death of Literary Theory: Regimes of Relevance in Russia and Beyond“With impressive erudition and admirable lucidity, Jessica Merrill offers a strikingly novel reconstruction of Russian Formalism, placing it in a rich and largely neglected historical context. Her extended discussions of folklore and folkloristics, of the emphasis on the spoken as well as the written word, of the relevance of psychological theories and of contemporary politics, force us to reconsider the movement, its achievements, and its legacy. The book is a major contribution to the study of Western literary theory, and more generally, to twentieth-century intellectual history.” —Michael Wachtel, author of The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Poetry“The Origins of Russian Literary Theory is remarkable for the lucidity of its composition. This clear and wide-ranging book makes an original and significant contribution to the study of Russian Formalism and Czech Structuralism, and thereby also to our understanding of the history of literary theory in the twentieth century—and perhaps its future in the twenty-first.” —Ilya Kliger, author of The Narrative Shape of Truth: Veridiction in Modern European Literature“Merrill’s book attests to the inspiring vitality of Russian Formalism for contemporary literary studies. It approaches this subject from a new and insightful perspective and provides provocative vistas on this seminal school of criticism.” —Peter Steiner, author of Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics“The Origins of Russian Literary Theory focuses on the role of comparative philology in the formation of Formalist concepts. The author efficiently considers both branches of the Formalist School—OPOIAZ and the Moscow Linguistic Circle—and explores why they favored folklore studies and sociolinguistic disciplines, such as dialectology (a fact largely disregarded in previous scholarship). As it is quite a departure from the traditional narrow view of Russian Formalism, Merrill’s book is a fascinating read for both literary theorists and intellectual historians.” —Igor Pilshchikov, coeditor of Epokha “ostraneniia” (The Age of “Estrangement”: Russian Formalism and Contemporary Humanities)Table of Contents Acknowledgements Note on the Text Introduction: The Philological Paradigm 1.Comparative Philology 2.The Author as Performer 3.The Psychology of Poetic Form 4.Inside the Moscow Linguistic Circle: Poetic Dialectology 5.Structuralisms Conclusion: Formalism and Philology in the Twenty-First Century Appendix Notes Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisRevisits A Theory of Literary Production (1966) to show how Pierre Machereyâs remarkable - and still provocative - early work can contribute to contemporary discussions about the act of reading and the politics of formal analysis.Trade Review“With its exquisitely written preface and stimulating contributions by Macherey and other scholars, this collection brings long-overdue attention to the neglected and misunderstood elements of Macherey’s work, making that work a timely rejoinder to debates on a range of vital issues: reading and discursivity, the relationship between literature and philosophy, the politics of form and formalism, and the legacy of the Althusserian project. At a time when anti-intellectualism holds thought in its sway, in academe as elsewhere, the interventionist import of this volume cannot be overstated.” —Rey Chow, author of A Face Drawn in Sand: Humanistic Inquiry and Foucault in the Present“Bringing together a stellar cast of writers and scholars, this collection offers a most eloquent testimony to the lasting enigma of Pierre Macherey’s brilliant if also frequently misread first book, A Theory of Literary Production. Audrey Wasser and Warren Montag prove the continued relevance of Macherey’s proposal in the context of French Marxism and its creative dialogue with psychoanalysis, the history of the sciences, and the critique of ideology.” —Bruno Bosteels, author of The Actuality of CommunismTable of Contents Preface - Warren Montag and Audrey Wasser Postface to Pour une thÉorie de la production littÉraire (2014) - Pierre Macherey 1. Why Read, Macherey? - Audrey Wasser 2. Spoken and Unspoken - Ellen Rooney 3. Baudelaire’s Shadow: On Poetic Determination - Nathan Brown 4. What is Materialist Analysis? Pierre Macherey’s Spinozist Epistemology - Nick Nesbitt 5. Blackness: N’est Pas? - David Marriott 6. What Do We Mean When We Speak of the Surface of a Text? - Warren Montag 7. Reading Althusser - Pierre Macherey 8. Between Literature and Philosophy: An Interview with Pierre Macherey - Pierre Macherey and Joseph Serrano Bibliography of Works by Pierre Macherey Notes Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisLike so many other elements of his work, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s deliberate deployment of provocation was both prescient and precocious. In this book, Lynn Ellen Patyk singles out these forms of incitement as a communicative strategy that drives his paradoxical art.Table of Contents Introduction. “Why don’t we reduce all this reasonableness to dust”: An Introduction to Dostoevskian Provocation Chapter 1. “Or I am not I”: Ontological Provocation in The Double Chapter 2. “I’ll say it in the whole world’s face”: Provoking Confession and Provoking Comedy in Notes from Underground Chapter 3. “That a girl!” Dostoevsky’s Feminist Provocation in The Idiot Chapter 4. “No one is pleased and everyone is angry”: The Diary of a Right-Wing Provocateur Chapter 5. “But the Devil was overcome”: The End of Provocation in The Brothers Karamazov Conclusion. “I came not to send peace”: Problems in Dostoevsky’s Provocative Authorship

Read more less

Book SynopsisTrade ReviewClearly written, convincingly argued, and transformative.”—Nicholas Allen, author of Modernism, Ireland and Civil War “Goes beyond ‘statism’ and postnationalism toward a cosmopolitics of Irish transnationalism in which national belonging and national identity are permanently in transition.”—Gregory Castle, author of The Literary Theory Handbook “Shows how three important Irish writers crafted forms of cosmopolitan thinking that spring from, and illuminate, the painful realities of colonialism and anti-colonial struggle.”—Marjorie Howes, author of Colonial Crossings: Figures in Irish Literary History “Asserting the simultaneity of national and global frames of reference, this illuminating book is a fascinating and timely contribution to Irish Modernist Studies.”—Geraldine Higgins, author of Heroic Revivals from Carlyle to Yeats

Read more less

Book SynopsisTrade ReviewOriginal and significant. This book shows us how Conrad and Joyce manipulate representations of imperialist belief in the sacred to indict Western culture for its racist colonization. This striking reading of modernism emphasizes Conrad's and Joyce's use of chaos in general and pilgrimage in particular in terms of mapmaking, racial denigration, and strategies of power. Szczeszak-Brewer makes spectacular connections between sacred language, nation building, and literary representation." - Georgia Johnston, author of The Formation of Twentieth-Century Queer Autobiography

Read more less

a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

Read more less

Book SynopsisPresents, in a single volume, key seminal essays in the study of James Joyce. Representing important contributions to scholarship that have helped shape current methods of approaching Joyce's works, the volume reacquaints contemporary readers with the literature that forms the basis of ongoing scholarly inquiries in the field.

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book SynopsisReveals how literary works from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries frequently challenged the prevailing view of masochism as a deviant behaviour, an opinion supported by many sexologists and psychoanalysts in the 1800s. In these texts, Jennifer Mitchell highlights everyday examples of characters deriving pleasure from pain.

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn this collection of essays representing fifty years of scholarship on Laurence Sterne, Melvyn New brings Sterne into conversation with other authors - both his contemporaries, such as James Boswell and Samuel Richardson, and modernists, such as Marcel Proust and James Joyce.

Read more less

a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

Read more less

Book SynopsisExamines the ways in which the concept of consent is used to map and regulate sexual desire, gender relationships, global positions, technological interfaces, relationships of production and consumption, and literary and artistic interactions. From philosophy to literature, psychoanalysis to the art world, Querying Consent addresses the most uncomfortable questions about consent today.Trade Review“Querying Consent gathers contributions that represent a diversity of perspectives on the multi-faceted issue of consent. The collection combines updated discussions on classical controversies with cutting edge and thought-provoking new questions altogether to a timely, much needed intervention and interrogation into the field of study on consent. An intriguing anthology that challenges the reader to think further and into new directions.”— Robin Bauer, author of Queer BDSM Intimacies: Critical Consent and Pushing Boundaries “A welcome interdisciplinary dialogue on the limits, exclusions, and paradoxes of consent, this volume poses delightfully challenging questions in a range of idioms and contexts. What does consenting to consent as an elementary relational paradigm prevent us from doing, seeing, knowing? Querying Consent could not be more timely.”— Tim Dean, author of Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking "The essays collected in Querying Consent variously call attention to situations in which what might seem to be consent could in fact be construed to as something closer to coercion--not just in sexual interactions, but in everything from software user agreements to the fine print in authorization forms for medical treatment." — Harper's MagazineTable of ContentsContents Introduction: The Subject of Consent Jordana Greenblatt and Keja Valens Part 1: Consent, Power, and Agency Chapter 1: Consent, Command, Confession Karmen MacKendrick Chapter 2: The Gender of Consent in Patmore, Hopkins, and Marie Lataste Amanda Paxton Chapter 3: Consensual Sex, Consensual Text: Law, Literature, and the Production of the Consenting Subject Jordana Greenblatt Chapter 4: Consent and the Limits of Abuse in Their Eyes Were Watching God and “Ain’t Nobody’s Business if I Do” Keja Valens Part 2: Consent, Violence, and Refusal Chapter 5: The Seduction of Rape as Allegory in Postcolonial Literature Justine Leach Chapter 6: Willful Creatures: Consent, Response, and Animal Will in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles Kimberly O’Donnell Chapter 7: Consenting to Read: Trigger Warnings and Textual Violence Brian Martin Chapter 8:Blue is the Warmest Color, Luce Irigaray, and the Question of Consent Caroline Godart Part 3: Consent, Personhood, and Property Chapter 9: The Art of Consent Drew Danielle Belsky Chapter 10: Sardanapalus’s Hoard: Queer Possession in Henry James's Aspern Papers Annie Pfeifer Chapter 11: Queering and Quartering Informed Consent: Genomic Medicine and Hyperreal Subjectivity Graham Potts Chapter 12: Vulnerabilities: Consent with Pfizer, Marx, and Hobbes Matthias Rudolf Chapter 13: “I Never Heard Anything So Monstrous!”: Developmental Psychology, Narrative Form, and the Age of Consent in What Maisie Knew Victoria Olwell Notes on Contributors Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisExamines the ways in which the concept of consent is used to map and regulate sexual desire, gender relationships, global positions, technological interfaces, relationships of production and consumption, and literary and artistic interactions. From philosophy to literature, psychoanalysis to the art world, contributors address the most uncomfortable questions about consent today.Trade Review“Querying Consent gathers contributions that represent a diversity of perspectives on the multi-faceted issue of consent. The collection combines updated discussions on classical controversies with cutting edge and thought-provoking new questions altogether to a timely, much needed intervention and interrogation into the field of study on consent. An intriguing anthology that challenges the reader to think further and into new directions.”— Robin Bauer, author of Queer BDSM Intimacies: Critical Consent and Pushing Boundaries “A welcome interdisciplinary dialogue on the limits, exclusions, and paradoxes of consent, this volume poses delightfully challenging questions in a range of idioms and contexts. What does consenting to consent as an elementary relational paradigm prevent us from doing, seeing, knowing? Querying Consent could not be more timely.”— Tim Dean, author of Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking "The essays collected in Querying Consent variously call attention to situations in which what might seem to be consent could in fact be construed to as something closer to coercion--not just in sexual interactions, but in everything from software user agreements to the fine print in authorization forms for medical treatment." — Harper's MagazineTable of ContentsContents Introduction: The Subject of Consent Jordana Greenblatt and Keja Valens Part 1: Consent, Power, and Agency Chapter 1: Consent, Command, Confession Karmen MacKendrick Chapter 2: The Gender of Consent in Patmore, Hopkins, and Marie Lataste Amanda Paxton Chapter 3: Consensual Sex, Consensual Text: Law, Literature, and the Production of the Consenting Subject Jordana Greenblatt Chapter 4: Consent and the Limits of Abuse in Their Eyes Were Watching God and “Ain’t Nobody’s Business if I Do” Keja Valens Part 2: Consent, Violence, and Refusal Chapter 5: The Seduction of Rape as Allegory in Postcolonial Literature Justine Leach Chapter 6: Willful Creatures: Consent, Response, and Animal Will in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles Kimberly O’Donnell Chapter 7: Consenting to Read: Trigger Warnings and Textual Violence Brian Martin Chapter 8:Blue is the Warmest Color, Luce Irigaray, and the Question of Consent Caroline Godart Part 3: Consent, Personhood, and Property Chapter 9: The Art of Consent Drew Danielle Belsky Chapter 10: Sardanapalus’s Hoard: Queer Possession in Henry James's Aspern Papers Annie Pfeifer Chapter 11: Queering and Quartering Informed Consent: Genomic Medicine and Hyperreal Subjectivity Graham Potts Chapter 12: Vulnerabilities: Consent with Pfizer, Marx, and Hobbes Matthias Rudolf Chapter 13: “I Never Heard Anything So Monstrous!”: Developmental Psychology, Narrative Form, and the Age of Consent in What Maisie Knew Victoria Olwell Notes on Contributors Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisStudy of the sea - both in terms of human interaction with it and its literary representation - has been largely ignored by ecocritics. In Shakespeare's Ocean, Dan Brayton foregrounds the maritime dimension of a writer whose plays and poems have had an enormous impact on literary notions of nature and, in so doing, plots a new course for ecocritical scholarship.

Read more less

Book SynopsisSir Isaac Newton's publications, and those he inspired, were among the most significant works published during the long eighteenth century in Britain. Reading Popular Newtonianism focuses on the reception of Newton's works in a context framed by authorship, print, editorial practices, and reading.

Read more less

a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

Read more less

Book SynopsisEstablishing the “dandy” as a kind of shorthand for a diverse range of traits and tendencies, including gentlemanliness, rebelliousness, androgyny, theatricality, and extravagance, Len Gutkin traces Victorian aesthetic precendents in the work of the modernist avant-garde, the noir novel, Beatnik experimentalism, and the postmodern thriller.

Read more less

Book SynopsisExamines Langston Hughes's associations with a number of black writers from the Caribbean and Africa, exploring the implications of recognising these multiple facets of the African American literary icon and of taking a truly transnational approach to his life, work, and influence.Trade ReviewIn this important, original, thoroughly researched work, Shane Graham documents Langston Hughes’s extensive role and influence in the mid-twentieth-century rise of postcolonial Caribbean and African literatures. Drawing on extensive archival research, a clearly articulated theoretical framework, and persuasive close textual analyses, he explains how Hughes’s representations of Africa and blackness changed over time as a result of his interactions with writers from Africa and the Caribbean. The scholarship is solid, and exhibits familiarity with and command of an impressive range of primary sources as well as secondary sources on black Atlantic literatures, translation, and postcolonial theory.

Read more less

Book SynopsisProvides a wide-ranging interdisciplinary study of live stage musicals from the mid- to late-twentieth century adapted from British literature written between 1837 and 1886. Investigating musical dramatizations of a range of works, Sharon Aronofsky Weltman reveals what these musicals teach us about the Victorian books from which they derive.

Read more less

Book SynopsisJane Tompkins, a literature professor and author, thought she knew what reading was until, struck by a debilitating illness, she finds herself reading day and night because it is all she can do. A lifelong lover of books, she realizes that if you pay close attention to your reactions as you read, literature can become a path of self-discovery.Trade ReviewTompkins’ book has something of the charge of a detective story, as she moves from book to book in search of herself and her past. Her account of illness has the shape of a novel. … She is a direct and generous narrator. ‘The thing is not to be afraid,’ she writes. ‘When a book upsets or troubles you, you need to find out why.’ A disarmingly intimate chronicle of reading as self-discovery. Reading Through the Night is a perfect book for anyone who believes literature should amount to more than diversion and fodder for term papers.... Tompkins becomes our own suffering servant, though perhaps less a [Kurt] Wallander than a bedridden Alice James, nearly forgotten in the shadow of celebrated men, but scribbling all the while to produce something equally essential, equally profound. A woman lies in bed, reading. She isn’t well, and some days reading is all she can do. As she reads she comes to understand a lot about herself—her upbringing, her fears and her envy, her privileges, her life’s steps and missteps. She is not reading for culture or academic privilege. She is reading to save her life. I loved reading with Tompkins as she lingers over books by Naipaul, Theroux, Dickinson, and Patchett and lets their stories open windows of all kinds. Every book group in the country should be reading Reading through the Night, for the conversations it will provoke, for the reading it will inspire, and for its captivating wisdom and grace. A surprising, ambitious memoir that raises important questions about what it is that we are doing when we read. Through a series of literary adventures Tompkins shares a journey to new self-knowledge. Her story will engage all book lovers for whom reading is a lifeline. Reading through the Night is a vital manifesto on the importance of reading. It is not simply a reminder that literature can enrich us; it is a statement about the ability to live a rich and fulfilling life of the mind even when the body betrays us. Jane Tompkins guides us through what might have been a devastating loss—a disease that deprives her of her basic physical abilities—but instead becomes a new way of experiencing the world, and understanding her personal experience in the world, through a closer and more attentive relationship with words on the page. I have a profoundly altered appreciation for what literature offers us after reading this memoir. Some of the most memorable passages of the book focus on marriage: first those of Naipaul and Theroux, and then Tompkins’s own. (Her husband is the famous literary critic Stanley Fish.) Sheleads readers into multiple layers of meaning of love and forgiveness as perspectives shift, new memories appear, and images expand, illustrating the power of one large story that overcomes, or at least enlightens, a host of smaller and meaner ones. The title Reading Through the Night alludes to the sleepless hours that accompany the chronic fatigue from which Tompkins has long suffered, and also calls up for me the iconic image of the desolate David Copperfield, "sitting on my bed, reading as if for life." There's no "as if" about it: you read for life.

Read more less

Book SynopsisFrom the 1950s to the 1970s, the idea of independence inspired radical changes across the French-speaking world. Julie-Francoise Tolliver examines the links that writers from Quebec, the Caribbean, and Africa imagined to unite that world, illuminating the tropes they used to articulate solidarities across the race and class differences.

Read more less

Book SynopsisProvides the first book-length study of The Piazza Tales - Herman Melville’s only authorized collection of short fiction published in his lifetime - and the first book to explore the rich and varied subject of embodiment in any published collection of Melville’s stories.

Read more less

Book SynopsisDrawing inspiration from Timothy Morton's concept of the “mesh” as a metaphor for the human-nonhuman relationship in the face of climate change, Marco Caracciolo investigates how narratives in genres such as the novel and the short story employ formal devices to channel the entanglement of human communities and nonhuman phenomena.

Read more less

a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

Read more less

Book SynopsisExamines rum in anglophone Atlantic literature in the period of decolonization. This innovative study reveals rum's fascinating role in expressing the paradox of a postcolonial world still riddled with the legacies of colonialism.Trade ReviewFascinating and accessible, this important book situates rum as a potent economic, cultural, and specifically literary product in the Caribbean." - Supriya M. Nair, Tulane University, author of Pathologies of Paradise: Caribbean Detours"This outstanding and engaging study uses the lens of rum to untangle the legacies of Caribbean colonialism and to challenge discourse that has demonized and eroticized the Caribbean region. Drawing on popular novels and historical scholarship, this theoretically sophisticated study is grounded in postcolonial studies, literary criticism, alcohol studies, and the anthropology of the Caribbean. Rum, according to Nesbitt, is simply "strange." However, a critical reading of rum histories offers Nesbitt a unique, and sometimes blurred, prism through which to confront colonial tropes and examine competing political dichotomies in the modern global community." - Frederick H. Smith, North Carolina A&T State University

Read more less

Book SynopsisRelates the life of Negley Farson, adventurer, iconoclast, best-selling writer, foreign correspondent, and raging alcoholic who died in oblivion. Born only a few years before Ernest Hemingway, Farson had a life trajectory that paralleled and intersected Hemingway's in ways that compelled writers to compare them.Trade ReviewNegley Farson lived his life like a headlong attack, and Rex Bowman and Carlos Santos keep pace with him. Almost Hemingway is a beautifully written account of an avatar of a vanishing breed—the adventurer. It is a distinct pleasure to barrel through Farson’s vivid life with the authors." - Mary Dearborn, author of Ernest Hemingway: A Biography"Almost Hemingway is a revelation and a page turner — the story of a 'mutinous existential renegade' who trekked the world by boat, car, train and horseback, won fame, faced dangers, wrote magnifient prose and lived by the creed that 'men who spent their time merely trying to get rich were pitiably dumb bastards.' Bowman and Santos capture Negley Farson's life in all its brilliance and daredeviltry. It's hard to put down a book that includes such lines as: 'After forcing Farson to make a drunken speech, the regiment carried him around the town square on their shoulders.'" - Michael Hudson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Monster: How a Gang of Predatory Lenders and Wall Street Bankers Fleeced America–and Spawned a Global Crisis"Negley Farson. The name alone conjures up the incredible life story. This twentieth century epic unfolds in the authors’ capable hands, sweeping across the continents and spanning two world wars, bringing back the romance and excitement of the foreign correspondent. In lively prose, the authors show how he lived by his wits, struggled with alcohol, and needed little more than a manual typewriter and a telephone to do his job." - Nicholas Reynolds, author of New York Times bestseller Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy: Ernest Hemingway's Secret Adventures, 1935-1961"Although Farson 'managed to hide the deepest parts of himself,' the authors draw on his memoirs, letters, and reportage to create a lively chronicle of his peripatetic adventures... A brisk tale of an eventful life." - Kirkus Reviews"A lively, engaging, and fast-paced tale of an incredible adventurer. Farson, the author of travel books published from the 1930s through the 1950s--ranging from the Caucasus to Africa, but also including a book on the Blitz and the apparently immortal Going Fishing--investigated the politics, the ordinary life, and the flora and fauna of almost every continent. He interspersed his observations about the lives of others with reports of his own daredevil expeditions crossing treacherous mountain paths and fording rushing streams." - Nancy L. Green, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, author of The Other Americans in Paris: Businessmen, Countesses, Wayward Youth, 1880-1941

Read more less

Book SynopsisOffers the first comparative study of Toni Morrison and Chinua Achebe. Surveying both writers’ oeuvres, Christopher Okonkwo examines significant relations between Achebe’s and Morrison’s personal backgrounds, career histories, artistic visions, and life philosophies, finding in them striking parallels.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe scene of some of London’s poorest, most crime-ridden neighborhoods, the East End of London has long been misunderstood as abject and deviant. Heidi Kaufman applies the resources of archives both material and digital to move beyond icon and stereotype to reveal a deeper understanding of East End literature and culture in the Victorian age.

Read more less

Book SynopsisDemonstrates that African elites successfully projected expressions of their sovereignty, wealth, right to power, geopolitical clout, and religious exceptionalism into Europe long before Europeans entered sub-Saharan Africa.

Read more less