Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000 Books
The University of Chicago Press Queer Nations Marginal Sexualities in the Maghreb
Book SynopsisAgainst a background of independence from France, Jarrod Hayes uses literary analysis to examine how Francophone novelists from the Maghreb imagined a diverse nation peopled by those excluded by the dominant political discourses, especially those breaching traditional sexual norms.
£28.00
The University of Chicago Press Queering the Underworld
Book SynopsisTales of "how the other half lives" experienced a surge in popularity. People looking to go slumming without leaving home turned to these narratives for revelations of underworld and sordid details about the deviants who populated it. This book explores how a group of authors manipulated this genre to evade the confines of sexual identification.Trade Review"Herring presents a sustained and well-written argument, working closely and effectively with a range of texts. His interesting and informative book attempts an important - and welcome - intervention into our present historical moment, when the potentially emancipatory project of queer politics threatens to collapse into a race to the altar." - Susan Edmunds, Syracuse University"
£30.40
The University of Chicago Press A Transnational Poetics
Book SynopsisPoetry is often viewed as culturally homogeneous-stubbornly national, in T. S. Eliot's phrase, or the most provincial of the arts, according to W. H. Auden. But in A Transnational Poetics, Jahan Ramazani uncovers the ocean-straddling energies of the poetic imagination-in modernism and the Harlem Renaissance; in post-World War II North America and the North Atlantic; and in ethnic American, postcolonial, and black British writing. Cross-cultural exchange and influence are, he argues, among the chief engines of poetic development in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Reexamining the work of a wide array of poets, from Eliot, Yeats, and Langston Hughes to Elizabeth Bishop, Lorna Goodison, and Agha Shahid Ali, Ramazani reveals the many ways in which modern and contemporary poetry in English overflows national borders and exceeds the scope of national literary paradigms. Through a variety of transnational templates-globalization, migration, travel, genre, influence, modernity, decol
£24.00
The University of Chicago Press American Guides The Federal Writers Project and
Book SynopsisIn the midst of the Great Depression, Americans were nearly universally literateand they were hungry for the written word. Magazines, novels, and newspapers littered the floors of parlors and tenements alike. With an eye to this market and as a response to devastating unemployment, Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration created the Federal Writers' Project. The Project's mission was simple: jobs. But, as Wendy Griswold shows in the lively and persuasive American Guides, the Project had a profoundand unintendedcultural impact that went far beyond the writers' paychecks. Griswold's subject here is the Project's American Guides, an impressively produced series that set out not only to direct travelers on which routes to take and what to see throughout the country, but also to celebrate the distinctive characteristics of each individual state. Griswold finds that the series unintentionally diversified American literary culture's cast of characterspromoting women, minority, and rural
£91.00
The University of Chicago Press American Guides The Federal Writers Project and
Book SynopsisIn the midst of the Great Depression, Americans were nearly universally literateand they were hungry for the written word. Magazines, novels, and newspapers littered the floors of parlors and tenements alike. With an eye to this market and as a response to devastating unemployment, Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration created the Federal Writers' Project. The Project's mission was simple: jobs. But, as Wendy Griswold shows in the lively and persuasive American Guides, the Project had a profoundand unintendedcultural impact that went far beyond the writers' paychecks. Griswold's subject here is the Project's American Guides, an impressively produced series that set out not only to direct travelers on which routes to take and what to see throughout the country, but also to celebrate the distinctive characteristics of each individual state. Griswold finds that the series unintentionally diversified American literary culture's cast of characterspromoting women, minority, and rural
£31.00
The University of Chicago Press Between Silences A Voice from China Phoenix Poets
Book Synopsis
£23.00
The University of Chicago Press The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol
Book Synopsis
£23.00
The University of Chicago Press Forms of Expansion Recent Long Poems by Women
Book SynopsisContemporary American women are writing long poems in a variety of styles which repossess history, reconceive female subjectivity, and seek to revitalize poetry itself. This book explores this evolving body of work, offering revealing discussions of its diverse traditions and feminist concerns.
£30.40
The University of Chicago Press The Cure of Poetry in an Age of Prose Moral
Book SynopsisThe role of the poet, Mary Kinzie writes, is to engage the most profound subjects with the utmost in expressive clarity. The role of the critic is to follow the poet, word for word, into the arena where the creative struggle occurs. How this mutual purpose is served, ideally and practically, is the subject of this bracingly polemical collection of essays. A distinguished poet and critic, Kinzie assesses poetry's situation during the past twenty-five years. Ours, she contends, is literally a prosaic age, not only in the popularity of prose genres but in the resultant compromises with truth and elegance in literature. In essays on the rhapsodic fallacy, confessionalism, and the romance of perceptual response, Kinzie diagnoses some of the trends that diminish the poet's flexibility. Conversely, she also considers individual poetsRandall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop, Howard Nemerov, Seamus Heaney, and John Ashberywho have found ingenious ways of averting the risks of prosaism and preserving t
£30.00
The University of Chicago Press The Realistic Imagination English Fiction from
Book Synopsis
£38.00
The University of Chicago Press Local Transcendence Essays on Postmodern
Book SynopsisPostmodernity is lived, it seems, at the end of history. This book takes the pulse of such postmodern historicism by tracking two leading indicators of its acceleration in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: postmodern cultural criticism and digital information technology.Trade Review"This book is a reflection of and on a nearly twenty-year career. It is as much a work of history as of literary and cultural critique, as much a narrative and a piece of performance art as it is philosophical investigation and Nietzschean genealogy. Alan Liu is sui generis." - Marjorie Levinson, University of Michigan"
£76.00
The University of Chicago Press Local Transcendence Essays on Postmodern
Book SynopsisPostmodernity is lived, it seems, at the end of history. This book takes the pulse of such postmodern historicism by tracking two leading indicators of its acceleration in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: postmodern cultural criticism and digital information technology.Trade Review"This book is a reflection of and on a nearly twenty-year career. It is as much a work of history as of literary and cultural critique, as much a narrative and a piece of performance art as it is philosophical investigation and Nietzschean genealogy. Alan Liu is sui generis." - Marjorie Levinson, University of Michigan"
£28.00
The University of Chicago Press The Conquerors Phoenix Fiction
Book Synopsis
£27.00
The University of Chicago Press Queer Forster Worlds of Desire
Book SynopsisA radical revision of gay criticism, focusing on E.M. Forster's place in the emerging field of queer studies. This collection of essays situates Forster within the Bloomsbury Group, and examines his relations with major figures such as Henry James, Edward Carpenter and Virginia Woolf.Table of ContentsPreface Abbreviations 1: Introduction: Queer, Forster? Robert K. Martin, George Piggford. 2: "Queer Superstitions": Forster, Carpenter, and the Illusion of (Sexual) Identity Gregory W. Bredbeck 3: "Thinking about Homosex" in Forster and James Eric Haralson 4: The Mouse That Roared: Creating a Queer Forster Christopher Reed 5: Camp Sites: Forster and the Biographies of Queer Bloomsbury George Piggford 6: Fratrum Societati: Forster's Apostolic Dedications Joseph Bristow 7: "This is the End of Parsival": The Orphic and the Operatic in The Longest Journey Judith Scherer Herz 8: Breaking the Engagement with Philosophy Re-envisioning Hetero/Homo Relations in Maurice Debrah Raschke 9: Betrayal and Its Consolations in Maurice, "Arthur Snatchfold," and "What Does It Matter? A Morality" Christopher Lane 10: "Contrary to the Prevailing Current"? Homoeroticism and the Voice of Maternal Law in "The Other Boat" Tamera Dorland 11: To Express the Subject of Friendship: Masculine Desire and Colonialism in A Passage to India Charu Malik 12: Colonial Queer Something Yonatan Touval 13: "It Must Have Been the Umbrella": Forster's Queer Begetting Robert K. Martin Works Cited Contributors Index of Forster's Works General Index
£76.00
The University of Chicago Press Queer Forster Worlds of Desire The Chicago Series
Book SynopsisThis volume presents a revision of gay criticism and focuses on E.M. Forster's place in the emerging field of queer studies.
£28.00
The University of Chicago Press Apocryphal Lorca Translation Parody Kitsch
Book SynopsisFederico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936) had an enormous impact on the generation of American poets who came of age during the cold war, from Robert Duncan and Allen Ginsberg to Robert Creeley and Jerome Rothenberg. This book offers an exploration of the afterlife of this Spanish writer in the poetic culture of the United States.Trade Review"Apocryphal, American Lorca! Inviting us to consider how one culture reads another - how American poets read Spain through Lorca and Lorca through Spain - Jonathan Mayhew has given us an informative, thoughtful, fascinating, and often funny journey through translation, parody, and kitsch. No one could be better qualified to study Lorca's work as 'generative device' in English-language poetry and get at the mystery of how and what a poet can mean in a different cultural context." - Christopher Maurer, editor of Lorca's Collected Poems"
£46.55
The University of Chicago Press The Conflagration of Community Fiction before and
Book SynopsisChallenges Theodor Adorno's famous statement about aesthetic production after the Holocaust, arguing for the possibility of literature to bear witness to extreme collective and personal experiences. This title considers how novels about the Holocaust relate to fictions written before and after it.
£31.00
The University of Chicago Press Precision and Soul Essays and Addresses
Book SynopsisTable of ContentsForeword Introduction The Obscene and Pathological in Art Novellas Profile of a Program Politics in Austria The Religious Spirit, Modernism, and Metaphysics On Robert Musil's Books Political Confessions of a Young Man Moral Fruitfulness The Mathematical Man [On Criticism] The Goals of Literature [On the Essay] Literary Chronicle Commentary on a Metapsychics Sketch of What the Writer Knows [Psychology and Literature] Cinema or Theater Literati and Literature Anschluss with Germany Buridan's Austrian "Nation" as Ideal and as Reality Helpless Europe Mind and Experience The German as Symptom Toward a New Aesthetic Woman Yesterday and Tomorrow Ruminations of a Slow-witted Mind Address at the Memorial Service for Rilke in Berlin The Serious Writer in Our Time [Lecture, Paris] On Stupidity Appendix A. Musil's Sketch for an Introduction to a Planned Volume of Essays Appendix B. Dates of First Publication Notes
£30.00
The University of Chicago Press Africa WoMan Palava The Nigerian Novel by Women
Book SynopsisThis text presents eight Nigerian women writers and proposes a vernacular theory based on their work. Flora Nwapa, Adaora Lily Ulasi, Buchi Emecheta are some of the writers included. The importance of children and community in the literary tradition of African womanism is assessed.
£30.00
The University of Chicago Press Total Mobilization World War II and American
Book Synopsis
£25.99
The University of Chicago Press Radical Artifice Writing Poetry in the Age of
Book SynopsisThis text considers what happens when the "natural speech" model inherited from the Modernist poets comes up against the "natural speech" of the "Donahue" talk show, or again, how visual poetics and verse forms are responding to the languages of billboards and sound bytes.
£24.00
The University of Chicago Press Frank OHara Poet Among Painters
Book SynopsisPreviously known as an art-world figure, but now regarded as an important poet, Frank O'Hara is examined in this study. It traces the poet's French connection and the influence of the visual arts on his work. This edition includes a new introduction with a reconsideration of O'Hara's lyric.
£27.00
The University of Chicago Press Unoriginal Genius
Book SynopsisWhat is the place of individual genius in a global world of hyper-information - a world in which, as Walter Benjamin predicted more than seventy years ago, everyone is potentially an author? This title explores this intriguing development in contemporary poetry: the embrace of 'unoriginal' writing.Trade Review"Unoriginal Genius showcases, yet again, why Marjorie Perloff is the Peggy Guggenheim for the avant-garde in poetry. She demonstrates why lauded, modern poets (many of whom have questioned the values of both 'the original' and 'the creative') might prefer instead to 'cheat' on their assignments by handing in poems that steal words and remix lines, verbatim, from the databases of the dejadit. I recommend that every genius read this omnibus - then copy its poetics." - Christian Bok, University of Calgary"
£76.00
The University of Chicago Press It Was Fever That Made The World Phoenix Poets
Book SynopsisThis sophisticated first collection by Jim Powell synthesizes personal and world history to produce a compelling vision of the past, through verse letters to friends and relatives, translations of Horace, Propertius, Sappho, and others, and allusions to ancient figures of history and mythology. I find it difficult to overpraise the ease of this writing, which in one act combines succinct physical presentation and explanation of it. . . . It is perhaps here that Jim Powell, not yet forty, most shows his superiority to many of his contemporaries and seniors. He not only understands the way in which opposites are necessary to one another, he achieves his knowledge in the poem, and so we grasp it as we read.. . .he has tapped a subject matter that is endless and important, and by the thoroughgoingness and the subtlety of his exploration shows he has the power to do almost anything.Thom Gunn, Shelf LifeHis title burns away everywhere in the volume, in the fevers of eros, divination, memor
£21.00
The University of Chicago Press Poetry of Mourning The Modern Elegy from Hardy
Book SynopsisThrough readings of elegies, self-elegies, war poems and the blues, this book covers a wide range of poets, including Thomas Hardy, Wilfred Owen, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, W.H. Auden, Sylvia Plath and Seamus Heaney. It is grounded in genre theory and in the psychoanalysis of mourning.
£30.00
The University of Chicago Press The Hybrid Muse Postcolonial Poetry in English
Book SynopsisPostcolonial novelists such as Salman Rushdie and V.S. Naipaul are widely celebrated, yet the achievements of postcolonial poets have been strangely neglected. This work argues that postcolonial poets have also dramatically expanded the atlas of literature in English.
£30.00
The University of Chicago Press A Transnational Poetics
Book SynopsisUncovers the ocean-straddling energies of the poetic imagination - in modernism and the Harlem Renaissance; in post-World War II North America and the North Atlantic; and in ethnic American, postcolonial, and black British writing.Trade Review"In A Transnational Poetics, Jahan Ramazani continues to address an obvious but persistent imbalance in the American academy's understanding of world Anglophone literature. A distinguished success." - Michael North, University of California, Los Angeles"
£76.00
The University of Chicago Press Strange Likeness Description and the Modernist
Book SynopsisThe modern novel, so the story goes, thinks poorly of mere descriptionwhat Virginia Woolf called that ugly, that clumsy, that incongruous tool. As a result, critics have largely neglected description as a feature of novelistic innovation during the twentieth century. Dora Zhang argues that descriptive practices were in fact a crucial site of attention and experimentation for a number of early modernist writers, centrally Woolf, Henry James, and Marcel Proust. Description is the novelistic technique charged with establishing a common world, but in the early twentieth century, there was little agreement about how a common world could be known and represented. Zhang argues that the protagonists in her study responded by shifting description away from visualizing objects to revealing relationssocial, formal, and experientialbetween disparate phenomena. In addition to shedding new light on some of the best-known works of modernism, Zhang opens up new ways of thinking about description moTrade Review"In her consistently astute and beautifully written new book, Dora Zhang explores how three writers found ways to capture facets of experience that would seem to elude capture. . . . As a study of description in modernism, Strange Likeness performs a number of important critical interventions. . . . In this respect, her book reads as an appropriate, even emblematic, early entry in the Thinking Literature series, whose stated commitment is to the 'exploration of how literature thinks, and to the refinement of literary criticism as a mode of reasoning in and about the world.' But Strange Likeness seems to make a further, more specific wager: that literary study still has a place for, might indeed be energized by, a kind of book-length exploration that was once much more central to the discipline, in which the main concern is to describe how certain literary texts achieve what they achieve." -- Douglas Mao * Critical Inquiry *“Strange Likeness rearranges what we think we know about modernism’s relation to realism—and to questions of objectivity, psychology, social convention, and collective life. Zhang is a gifted critic, beautifully attentive to details and large patterns, precise in her analytic vocabulary, and admirably thorough in her range of theoretical and historical reference. Her lucid, ambitious book deserves to be widely read and debated.” * David Kurnick, Rutgers University *“A shrewd and splendid study, elegantly conceived, timely, and persuasive. Strange Likeness is at once an incisively close study of James, Proust, and Woolf, and a far-reaching account of the overlooked descriptive vocation of twentieth-century fiction. With unbroken lucidity and verve, Zhang offers a powerful revisionary reading of the modernist novel.” * Michael Levenson, University of Virginia *"For so long description has seemed the simplest part of what the novel does, the inert counterpart to narrated action and reflection. In overturning that assumption, Zhang gives us a whole new modernism and, in a way, a whole new novel, since the light cast by her utterly convincing readings of James, Proust and Woolf reflects both backward and forward across the entirety of its history. Strange Likeness models a form of criticism in which intensity and precision in the analysis of literary texts is what opens them anew to the most far-reaching questions of our relation to each other and to the physical world." * Mark McGurl, Stanford University *"Zhang listens to the echoes that surface readers miss in her exquisite analyses of the high modernist novel. Strange Likeness is above all a masterpiece of close reading." * ALH Online Review *"Assured in its learning, passionate about the authors it studies, and often a pleasure to read, Strange Likeness shows how much there is to say, still, about a high modernism fast receding into an ever more distant past." -- Len Gutkin * Modernism/modernity *"Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel breathes new life into the novelistic practice of description, which has so often taken a backseat to narration and plotted action. Zhang brings attention to the overlooked and often complex work that description does in the novel, focusing on one particular strand of Anglo-French literary modernism." * Studies in the Novel *Table of ContentsList of Abbreviations Introduction. “That Ugly, That Clumsy, That Incongruous Tool” 1. Toward a Theory of Description 2. James’s Airs 3. Proust and the Effects of Analogy 4. Feeling with Woolf 5. The Ends of Description Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index
£87.40
The University of Chicago Press Strange Likeness
Book SynopsisTrade Review"In her consistently astute and beautifully written new book, Dora Zhang explores how three writers found ways to capture facets of experience that would seem to elude capture. . . . As a study of description in modernism, Strange Likeness performs a number of important critical interventions. . . . In this respect, her book reads as an appropriate, even emblematic, early entry in the Thinking Literature series, whose stated commitment is to the 'exploration of how literature thinks, and to the refinement of literary criticism as a mode of reasoning in and about the world.' But Strange Likeness seems to make a further, more specific wager: that literary study still has a place for, might indeed be energized by, a kind of book-length exploration that was once much more central to the discipline, in which the main concern is to describe how certain literary texts achieve what they achieve." -- Douglas Mao * Critical Inquiry *“Strange Likeness rearranges what we think we know about modernism’s relation to realism—and to questions of objectivity, psychology, social convention, and collective life. Zhang is a gifted critic, beautifully attentive to details and large patterns, precise in her analytic vocabulary, and admirably thorough in her range of theoretical and historical reference. Her lucid, ambitious book deserves to be widely read and debated.” * David Kurnick, Rutgers University *“A shrewd and splendid study, elegantly conceived, timely, and persuasive. Strange Likeness is at once an incisively close study of James, Proust, and Woolf, and a far-reaching account of the overlooked descriptive vocation of twentieth-century fiction. With unbroken lucidity and verve, Zhang offers a powerful revisionary reading of the modernist novel.” * Michael Levenson, University of Virginia *"For so long description has seemed the simplest part of what the novel does, the inert counterpart to narrated action and reflection. In overturning that assumption, Zhang gives us a whole new modernism and, in a way, a whole new novel, since the light cast by her utterly convincing readings of James, Proust and Woolf reflects both backward and forward across the entirety of its history. Strange Likeness models a form of criticism in which intensity and precision in the analysis of literary texts is what opens them anew to the most far-reaching questions of our relation to each other and to the physical world." * Mark McGurl, Stanford University *"Zhang listens to the echoes that surface readers miss in her exquisite analyses of the high modernist novel. Strange Likeness is above all a masterpiece of close reading." * ALH Online Review *"Assured in its learning, passionate about the authors it studies, and often a pleasure to read, Strange Likeness shows how much there is to say, still, about a high modernism fast receding into an ever more distant past." -- Len Gutkin * Modernism/modernity *"Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel breathes new life into the novelistic practice of description, which has so often taken a backseat to narration and plotted action. Zhang brings attention to the overlooked and often complex work that description does in the novel, focusing on one particular strand of Anglo-French literary modernism." * Studies in the Novel *Table of ContentsList of Abbreviations Introduction. “That Ugly, That Clumsy, That Incongruous Tool” 1. Toward a Theory of Description 2. James’s Airs 3. Proust and the Effects of Analogy 4. Feeling with Woolf 5. The Ends of Description Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index
£24.00
The University of Chicago Press Act Like You Know
Book SynopsisTaking as his starting point African-American autobiography, Crispin Sartwell argues that there is a fundamental elusiveness to white identity. This theory is based on the concept that whiteness defines itself as normative, marking other identity as racial or ethnic deviations.
£26.00
University of Chicago Press Walter Benjamin
Book SynopsisSeven decades after his death, German Jewish writer, philosopher, and literary critic Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) continues to fascinate readers and influence academic writing, both stylistically and conceptually. This title offers a comprehensive and sophisticated introduction to the oeuvre of this perpetually relevant theorist.
£23.00
The University of Chicago Press Poetry and the Fate of the Senses
Book SynopsisWhat is the role of the senses in the creation and reception of poetry? This work traces the path of the aesthetic in search of an explanation for the role of poetry in culture. It draws on readings from the ancient Greeks to the postmoderns to explain how poetry creates meaning between persons.
£31.35
The University of Chicago Press Documentary Expression and Thirties America
Book SynopsisA comprehensive inquiry into the attitudes and ambitions that characterized the documentary impulse of the thirties. The subject is a large one, for it embraces (among much else) radical journalism, academic sociology, the esthetics of photography, Government relief programs, radio broadcasting, the literature of social work, the rhetoric of political persuasion, and the effect of all these on the traditional arts of literature, painting, theater and dance. The great merit of Mr. Stott's study lies precisely in its wide-ranging view of this complex terrain.Hilton Kramer, New York Times Book Review [Scott] might be called the Aristotle of documentary. No one before him has so comprehensively surveyed the achievement of the 1930s, suggesting what should be admired, what condemned, and why; no one else has so persuasively furnished an aesthetic for judging the form.Times Literary Supplement
£34.20
The University of Chicago Press Writing Ground Zero Japanese Literature the
Book SynopsisA study of the nuclear theme in Japanese intellectual and artistic life, recounting the history of Japanese public discourse around Hiroshima and Nagasaki from August 6, 1945, to the present day. It studies works from the earliest survivor writers up to Japanese intellectuals writing today.Table of ContentsPreface A Note on the Illustrations Introduction 1: Atrocity into Words 2: Genre and Post-Hiroshima Representation 3: The Three Debates 4: Hara Tamiki and the Documentary Fallacy 5: Poetry Against Itself 6: Ota Yoko and the Place of the Narrator 7: Oe Kenzaburo: Humanism and Hiroshima 8: Ibuse Masuji: Nature, Nostalgia, Memory 9: Nagasaki and the Human Future 10: The Atomic, the Nuclear, and the Total: Oda Makoto 11: Concluding Remarks: And Then Notes References Index
£76.00
The University of Chicago Press James Joyce and the Irish Revolution The Easter
Book SynopsisTrade Review“An important development in the understanding of the Irish relationship to Joyce’s work – and of his relationship to his native country. . . . For this superb, transformative undertaking the author deserves our gratitude.” * Dublin Review of Books *“The Easter Rising, far from being consigned to nostalgia, is seen as a catalyst for global processes of decolonization . . . [Gibbons’s] tracing of connections and influences—real, virtual, and suggestive—between revolution in the street and in the word results in richly layered and sometimes erudite chapters that repay close reading . . [and] open up many fascinating paths.” * Irish Times *"One of Ireland’s most profound if idiosyncratic cultural critics, Luke Gibbons, seeks to bring these two revolutions into the same framework in his important new work, James Joyce and the Irish Revolution: The Easter Rising as Modern Event. Through a series of engrossing vignettes drawn from a wide array of contemporary sources, he positions Joyce’s 'revolution of the word' under the light emitted by the 1916 Easter Rising and sets out to 'reclaim what was radical in the Irish revolution for a modernist project akin to that of Joyce’s.'" * Jacobin *“The interest key figures in the Rising and the subsequent War of Independence (1919–21) showed in Joyce’s work and its revolutionary potential is . . . compelling. For example, Gibbons shines a light on the Irish revolutionary leader Ernie O’Malley, who devoted considerable attention to Joyce . . . [Gibbons’s] case is unassailable. Political radicalism and radical art call one another to arms.” * Times Literary Supplement *“This is a study deserving of an audience beyond the confines of Irish literary criticism. Underscoring the electrifying analysis is the hard evidence of patient scholarship and profound insight that makes this book one of the most original interventions to appear during the Decade of Centenaries.” * History Ireland *“Gibbons examines how the aesthetic innovations in James Joyce’s Ulysses reflect the political turmoil of Ireland’s 1916 Easter Rising and subsequent War of Independence . . . with some eye-opening insights.” * Publishers Weekly *"This book is a ground-breaking and original addition to the decade of centenaries. Luke Gibbons’ familiarity with the ‘underworld’ figures of the anti-Treatyites and supporters, who understood Ulysses because of their lived experience, extends our understanding of the more commonly reported Free Staters’ refusal of Ulysses, mainly on moral censorship grounds. Replete with a superb index and 56 pages of exemplary footnotes, a study in themselves, it is a generous book. It is a work that manages to yoke modernist literary expression with a broad array of transnational political effects." * Australasian Journal of Irish Studies *“Gibbons may well be Ireland’s most brilliant literary and cultural critic: a distinctive voice and a decisive eye. Here, as always, Gibbons’s commentary ebbs around observed details with a verve worthy of Benjamin, as he makes clear not only that Joyce’s work was revolutionary but also that it was recognized as such by some of the revolutionaries themselves. This is an immensely rich and suggestive work, an instant classic of Irish literary criticism." -- Enda Duffy, University of California, Santa Barbara"This book positively bristles with intelligence and erudition. Gibbons reads Ulysses and the Easter Rising as compelling instances of an alliance between political radicalism and formal/technical innovation. At the same time, he decisively rewrites our understanding of Ulysses’s reception history, demonstrating that many of Joyce’s first interpreters saw his literary experiments as direct engagements with Ireland’s turbulent political history.” -- Marjorie Howes, Boston College“In this pioneering investigation, Gibbons has convincingly reinterpreted the Easter Rising as a global and modernizing event. His Joycean cast of characters—artists, freedom fighters, and a surprising number who were both—highlights the cultural aspects of the 1916 Rising in a new modernist and international vein.” -- Mary E. Daly, University College DublinTable of ContentsList of Figures Preface Abbreviations Introduction: James Joyce and the Irish Revolution 1. “Old Haunts”: Photographic Memory, Motion, and the Republic of Letters 2. Modern Epic and Revolution: Montage in the Margins 3. “A World That Ran Through Things”: Ulysses, the Easter Rising, and Spatial Form 4. The Easter Rising as Modern Event: Media, Technology, and Terror 5. “Paving Over the Abyss”: Ireland, War, and Literary Modernism 6. “Through the Eyes of Another Race”: Ulysses, Roger Casement, and the Politics of Humanitarianism 7. Transatlantic “Usable Pasts”: America, Literary Modernism, and the Irish Revolution 8. On Another Man’s Text: Ernie O’Malley, Politics, and Irish Modernism 9. Beyond Disillusionment: Desmond Ryan, Ulysses, and the Irish Revolution Acknowledgments Notes Index
£85.00
University of Chicago Press Odd Affinities
Book Synopsis
£85.00
The University of Chicago Press Novels by Aliens
Book SynopsisA wide-ranging account of the twenty-first century's fascination with the weird. Twenty-first-century fiction and theory have taken a decidedly weird turn. They both show a marked interest in the nonhuman and in the preternatural moods that the nonhuman often evokes. Writers of fiction and criticism are avidly experimenting with strange, even alien perspectives and protagonists. Kate Marshall's Novels by Aliens explores this development broadly while focusing on problems of genre fiction. She identifies three key generic hybrids that harness a longing for the nonhuman: the old weird, an alternative tradition within naturalism and modernism for the twenty-first century's cowboys and aliens; cosmic realism, the reach for words legible only from space in otherwise terrestrial narratives; and pseudoscience fiction, which imagines speculative futures beyond human life on earth. Offering sharp and surprising insights about a breathtaking range of authors, from Edgar Rice Burroughs to KazTrade Review"[An] excellent new book. . . . For Marshall. . . the Weird, in its many manifestations, stands at the center of contemporary literary culture — so long as we know where and how to see it." -- Jess Keiser * The Washington Post *“To a novelistic landscape populated by zombies, trees, amnesiacs, robots, and geological traces of an unimaginable past, you'll find no surer guide than Kate Marshall. But Novels by Aliens is an introduction to far more than the semi-human wilds of recent fiction. As we learn in these beautifully argued pages, the novel has been weird for centuries—indeed, perhaps never more than when it has most aimed to be realist. In retheorizing the form itself, Marshall demonstrates the importance of fictional thinking to contemporary dilemmas that themselves prove to be less novel than we often assume.” * Jennifer Fleissner, Indiana University Bloomington *“Marshall’s electrifying book takes us on a tour of early twenty-first-century novels that want to be narrated by Martians—but also landscapes, animals, monsters, artificial intelligences, and myriad other nonhuman entities. Though this desire for a radically external perspective often fails, novel forms of sentience, and the worlds they inhabit or imagine, come to structure thought experiments that speculate their way through problems as seemingly unrepresentable as human extinction. With an ambitious scope and synthetic skill, this book connects classic literary texts by writers such as Stephen Crane and Frank Norris to contemporary work by novelists such as Teju Cole, Colson Whitehead, and Marilynne Robinson. Novels by Aliens succeeds at making our world feel weirder and more alien in ways that ultimately make it far more available to thought.” * Patrick Jagoda, University of Chicago *“Dense yet expansive, this study illuminates whole worlds—and the very edges of the known world. Marshall has a preternatural gift for getting to the point. Read this whole book for a surefooted survey of the novel’s most exorbitant possibilities presented with peerless critical depth and balance. Ranging across the Wild Wests of capitalism before 1900 and after 2000, Marshall shows us novels aiming to cut loose from the human subject while remaining tethered to the genre histories of frontier naturalism and the old weird.” * Jed Esty, University of Pennsylvania *“Marshall remains the same scholar whose ‘The Old Weird’ made such a suggestive genealogy between the spooky aspects of Naturalism and the twenty-first century revival of gothic horror. Novels by Aliens is an impressive account that gives readers a way to consider the irony of the Anthropocene being an era both of exaggerated human agency (to mar the planet) and also an era where the truly picayune nature of human agency and importance within a vaster world/universe comes more clearly into view.” * John Plotz, English, Brandeis University *“A timely and insightful study. . . This book has the potential to transform novel theory and literary criticism generally and to illustrate the important contribution both fiction and literary theory have to make to debates concerning humanity’s most urgent and pressing issues.” * Priscilla Wald, author of "Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative" *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Dispatches from the Extinguished World 1 The Old Weird 2 Cowboys and Aliens 3 Cosmic Realism 4 The Novel in Geological Time 5 Pseudoscience Fictions 6 After Extinction Acknowledgments Notes Works Cited Index
£76.00
The University of Chicago Press So Black and Blue Ralph Ellison and the Occasion
Book SynopsisUsing Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and many of his essays as a starting point, Kenneth W. Warren argues that Ellison expresses the problem of who. or what could represent and speak for the Negro in an age of limited political representation.
£23.00
The University of Chicago Press At the Barriers
Book SynopsisMaverick gay poetic icon Thom Gunn (1929-2004) and his body of work have long dared the British and American poetry establishments either to claim or disavow him. This book surveys Gunn's career from his youth in 1930s Britain to his final years in California, from his earliest publications to his later unpublished notebooks.
£28.00
The University of Chicago Press The Key to the City Phoenix Poets
Book SynopsisThe Key to the City brings together work that has long been admired by readers of literary magazines and quarterlies. The collection opens with The Ruins, a group of poems set in poor neighborhoods in New York Citysome so cut off from midtown that they seem part of another continent or another age. The people in these poems are schoolgirls, a cleaning lady in the laundromat, derelicts, a prostitute stabbed in the street. Their interwoven voices contribute to a complex, grave vision of remote causes and immediate suffering in the city. The poems of the second section explore a broad range of experience: pregnancy and nursing, inward solitude, the textures of Renaissance painting and American landscapes.
£17.00
The University of Chicago Press Making England Western
Book SynopsisStates that the relationship between Britain and its colonies was primarily oppositional, based on contrasts between conquest abroad and domestic order at home. Revealing that romanticism provided a way to resist imperial logic about improvement and moral virtue, this book offers a study of both British literature and colonialism.Trade Review"Saree Makdisi has written a book that in its central line of argument and its detail is thoroughly original and compelling, deeply learned and detailed, erudite and entertaining. His skillful accounts of key romantic writers and detailed knowledge of English social history and place create a vivid picture of social life and conditions that few literary analyses can boast." (David T. Goldberg, University of California, Irvine)"
£28.00
The University of Chicago Press Bleak Liberalism
Book SynopsisWhy is liberalism so often dismissed by thinkers from both the left and the right? To those calling for wholesale transformation or claiming a monopoly on realistic conceptions of humanity, liberalism's assured progressivism can seem hard to swallow. Bleak Liberalism makes the case for a renewed understanding of the liberal tradition, showing that it is much more attuned to the complexity of political life than conventional accounts have acknowledged. Anderson examines canonical works of high realism, political novels from England and the United States, and modernist works to argue that liberalism has engaged sober and even stark views of historical development, political dynamics, and human and social psychology. From Charles Dickens's Bleak House and Hard Times to E. M. Forster's Howards End to Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, this literature demonstrates that liberalism has inventive ways of balancing sociological critique and moral aspiration. A deft blend of intellectual histo
£24.00
McGill-Queen's University Press Marina Warner and the Ethics of Telling Silenced
Book SynopsisA wide-ranging study of the influential British novelist and public intellectual writer Marina Warner and the ways she negotiates the dangers of appropriating voices through narrative, examining her writing from her early journalism to her novels, short stories, and studies of myths and fairy tales.Trade Review"Marina Warner and the Ethics of Telling Silenced Stories contributes substantively to Warner criticism and completely overhauls conventional conceptions of her writing. This is a hugely impressive, highly original book." Mike Marais, Rhodes University
£92.70
McGill-Queen's University Press A. Mary F. Robinson Victorian Poet and Modern
Book SynopsisThis critical biography of A. Mary F. Robinson traces her unorthodox journey through the literary circles of London and Paris as a writer of poetry and prose, a leading member of the Anglo-French community, and a significant contributor to the cultural and literary shift from nineteenth-century Victorianism to twentieth-century modernism.Trade Review"This book offers an organic approach to A. Mary F. Robinson, which is a major achievement in itself, given the considerable complexities of her life and work. Patricia Rigg's capacious and fascinating account will place Robinson prominently in late Victorian and early twentieth-century literary studies." Alison Chapman, University of Victoria and author of Networking the Nation: British and American Women's Poetry and Italy, 1840–1870"This is the most comprehensive study to date on A. Mary F. Robinson. Patricia Rigg should be congratulated for her painstaking, thorough research, which gathers previously unavailable archival material. Rigg gives attention to Robinson's complete oeuvre in both English and French, offering much new material on her work in French especially, for a richer sense of Robinson's full career." Emily Harrington, University of Colorado, Boulder, and author of Second Person Singular: Late Victorian Women Poets and the Bonds of Verse
£30.88
McGill-Queen's University Press Aesthetic Dilemmas Encounters with Art in Hugo
Book SynopsisHugo von Hofmannsthal is frequently portrayed as an aloof writer, out of step with modern sensibilities. Aesthetic Dilemmas re-evaluates his place in twentieth-century European Modernism by arguing that his work is not escapist but instead engages the consciousness of readers through dynamic encounters with works of art.Trade Review“Clear, sensible, effective, and persuasive. Burks is exceptionally skilled in her readings of Hofmannsthal's work, pointing out specific structural and rhetorical features in the texts while simultaneously drawing on wider generalities and theoretical observations to place her sensitive and convincing close readings into a larger literary and cultural context.” Vincent Kling, La Salle University
£81.90
McGill-Queen's University Press Touching Beauty The Poetics of Kim Th250y
Book SynopsisTouching Beauty is the first collection of critical essays on the work of Vietnamese-born Quebec author Kim Thúy. It examines the themes that have animated a literary career of global relevance and enduring value and encourages a deeper appreciation of her writing. Thúy contributes a previously unpublished poem and an extended interview.Trade Review“Kim Thúy is one of the best selling and most celebrated writers of the Vietnamese diaspora in Francophone literary history. Informed by diverse and refreshing perspectives and cogent analysis of the ideas, art, and textual details in Thúy's many works, Touching Beauty offers an overdue exploration of Thúy's fiction and development as a writer.” Xinyi Tan, Coastal Carolina University
£91.80
McGill-Queen's University Press Touching Beauty The Poetics of Kim Th250y
Book SynopsisTouching Beauty is the first collection of critical essays on the work of Vietnamese-born Quebec author Kim Thúy. It examines the themes that have animated a literary career of global relevance and enduring value and encourages a deeper appreciation of her writing. Thúy contributes a previously unpublished poem and an extended interview.Trade Review“Kim Thúy is one of the best selling and most celebrated writers of the Vietnamese diaspora in Francophone literary history. Informed by diverse and refreshing perspectives and cogent analysis of the ideas, art, and textual details in Thúy's many works, Touching Beauty offers an overdue exploration of Thúy's fiction and development as a writer.” Xinyi Tan, Coastal Carolina University
£27.90
Columbia University Press Robert Graves Essays on Modern Writers
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£15.00
