Literary theory Books

Book SynopsisThis open access book uses Swedish literature and the Swedish publishing field as recurring examples todescribe and analyse the role of the literary semi-peripheral position in world literature from various perspectives and on meso, micro and macro levels, using both quantitative and qualitative methods. This includes the role of translation in the semi-periphery and the conditions under which literature travels to and from that position. The focus is not on Sweden, as such, but rather on the semi-peripheral transitional space as exemplified by the Swedish case. Consisting of three co-written chapters, this study sheds light on what might be called the semi-peripheral condition or the semi-periphery as an area of transition. As part of the Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Dynamics in World Literatures series, it makes continuous use of the concepts of ''cosmopolitan'' and ''vernacular'' or rather, the processual terms, cosmopolitanization and vernacularization which provideTrade ReviewGo global or extend the local? This volume digs into the most fundamental questions about the construction of literary place, presenting an elaborate and multifaceted case study from the semi-periphery. It convincingly shows how translation-flows concern far more than numbers: they show a culture at work. * Anthony Pym, Distinguished Professor of Translation and Intercultural Studies, University of Melbourne, Australia *By framing Sweden as a "semi-peripheral" space of world literary networks, Northern Crossings opens up new cross-ways of scrutinizing translation-flows, creation of readerships and recognition of literary works through the Nobel Prize in the public sphere. An interesting co-authored work which underscores benefits of collaborative work in World Literature Studies. * B. Venkat Mani, Professor of German and World Literature, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, author of Recoding World Literature (2017), and co-editor, A Companion to World Literature (2020) *Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Series Introduction – The Cosmopolitan-Vernacular Dynamic: Conjunctions of World Literature Stefan Helgesson (Stockholm University, Sweden), Christina Kulberg (Uppsala University, Sweden), Paul Tenngart (Lund University, Sweden) and Helena Wulff (Stockholm University, Sweden) 1. Introduction: The Cosmopolitan, the Vernacular and the Semi-periphery 2. Infrastructure of the Semi-peripheral Exchange 3. Translators of Nobel Prize Literature 4. Translation Strategies to and from the Literary Semi-periphery: Reduction Retention, Replacement 5. Positioning the Swedish Literary Semi-periphery 6. General Conclusion References Index

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Book SynopsisRealism seems to be everywhere, both as a trending critical term and as a revitalized aesthetic practice. This volume brings together for the first time three aspects that are pertinent for a proper understanding of realism: its 19th-century aesthetics committed to making reality into an object of serious art; the experiments with and against realism by 20th-century modernist, postmodernist, or magical realist writing; and the politics of realism, especially its ambitions to map the complex realities produced by global capitalism and climate catastrophe. This juxtaposition of aesthetics, experiments, and politics unsettles the entrenched opposition between realism and experimental literature that tends to ignore the fact that realism, by virtue of its commitment to a changing material and social world, cannot be but continuously experimenting. The innovative chapters of this book address some of the pressing questions of literary and cultural studies today, like the complex relation Trade ReviewLiterary realism has never looked more exciting than now, thanks to timely and ambitious volumes such as this one. The collection ranges across multiple national and historical contexts to offer a substantial reassessment of the realist mode. Written with acuity and flair, the chapters in this book demonstrate that realism was more supple, experimental, and expansive than critics have tended to assume. * Benjamin Kohlmann, Professor of English Literature, University of Regensburg, Germany, and author of British Literature and the Life of Institutions: Speculative States (2021) *Realism: Aesthetics, Experiments, Politics is an exciting addition to the recent scholarship on the aesthetic, political, and theoretical possibilities of realist writing. Following a clear and engaging introduction, the chapters cover a broad historical and geographical range and offer new insights on realism’s relationship to modernism, postmodernism, magical realism, postcoloniality, global literature, climate fiction, experimental fiction, and more. In all, the book charts an exciting course for realist studies in the new millennium. * Ulka Anjaria, Professor of English, Brandeis University, USA, and author of Realism in the Twentieth-Century Indian Novel: Colonial Difference and Literary Form (2012) *Realism: Aesthetics, Experiments, Politics persuades us of the renewed energy and innovation in the plurality of realism. Casting realism as an aesthetic and political strategy, the book is broad in scope and the essays reinforce the capacity for foundational and contemporary realism to be both experimental and relevant. * Maggie Bowers, Senior Lecturer in English, University of Portsmouth, UK, and author of Magic(al) Realism: The New Critical Idiom (2004) *Table of ContentsList of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction: Realism, Political Aesthetics, and (New) Materialism (Jens Elze, Georg August University of Göttingen, Germany) Part I. Aesthetics 1. “Uses of ‘Realism’”: A Term in History and the History of a Term (Andreas Mahler, Free University of Berlin, Germany) 2. George Eliot’s Realisms (Nadine Böhm-Schnitker, Friedrich Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany) 3. Medical Realism and the Magic of Reality: Art and Insight in Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders and Émile Zola’s Le docteur Pascal (Maren Scheurer, Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany) 4. Conrad on Epidemics: From The Shadow-Line to Covid-19 (and Back) (Nidesh Lawtoo, KU Leuven, Belgium) Part II. Experiments 5. “Should I Call It Horror?”: Reflecting Realism by Exploring Contingency in Ror Wolf’s Adventure Series Pilzer und Pelzer (Barbara Bausch, Free University of Berlin, Germany) 6. Trawling Truth: B.S. Johnson’s Evacuation of Realist Epistemology (André Otto, Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany) 7. Cultural Realism: Reconsidering Magical Realism in Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine (Nasrin Babakhani, Georg August University of Göttingen, Germany) 8. Narrative as Realistic Thinking (Kai Wiegandt, Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, Germany) Part III. Politics 9. Realism for Sustainability (Caroline Levine, Cornell University, USA) 10. Network Realism/Capitalist Realism (Dirk Wiemann, University of Potsdam, Germany) 11. Postcolonial Realism and Rohinton Mistry’s Family Matters (Eli Park Sorensen, Chinese University of Hong Kong) 12. Settler-Colonial Realism: Naturalizing and Denaturalizing the Frontier (Hamish Dalley, Daemen College, USA) Notes on Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisAmanda Parrish Morgan is a Writing Instructor at Fairfield University and a Westport Writers' Workshop Instructor. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, Guernica, The Millions, The Rumpus, The American Scholar, Women's Running, JSTOR Daily, Ploughshares, and N+1, among other places.Trade ReviewFor Morgan, strollers aren't just tools we use, or products we buy; they're dense symbols, with no single or settled meaning, of our relationships to parenting. * New Yorker *Designed objects tell stories, and the stroller is no different - except perhaps that it's a typology that has received little sustained critical framing until this text. A compelling writer, Amanda Parrish Morgan deftly weaves together conversations around aspiration, accessibility, and aesthetics as they relate to this accouterment of modern parenthood and posits the stroller as a complex and sometimes confounding topic worthy of our attention and inquiry. This is an immensely readable volume, and we’re proud to have it on our bookshelves. * Michelle Millar Fisher and Amber Winick, authors of Designing Motherhood: Things That Make and Break Our Births *Part object history, part capitalist critique, a consistently acute and deeply felt depiction of the pleasures, traps, thrills, and dangers of early parenthood, Amanda Parrish Morgan's Stroller compellingly depicts the history and taxonomy of this most weighty and unruly device, ally, and antagonist. * Lynn Steger Strong, author of Want *Table of Contents1. Child-Friendly and Child-Centric 2. Carry the Baby 3. The Pram in the Hall 4. Prams of Good and Evil 5. The Years of Magical Worrying 6. Get Your Body Back 7. Strolling 8. A Taxonomy of Stroller as Metaphor Index

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.As a former world-ranked swimmer whose journey toward naturalization and U.S. citizenship began with a swimming fellowship, Piotr Florczyk reflects on his own adventures in swimming pools while taking a closer look at artists, architects, writers, and others who have helped to cement the swimming pool's prominent and iconic role in our society and culture.Swimming Pool explores the pool as a place where humans seek to attain the unique union between mind and body.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewHaving spent most of my life around a pool, no one would fault me taking it for granted. But Swimming Pool tells a unique and compelling story of the swimming pool, allowing me to appreciate that it’s more than just a place to cool off or go back and forth along a black line. Florczyk has done a remarkable job bringing to the surface the potentially unanticipated way that pools have affected us, for the good and the bad. * Rada Owen, USA Olympic Swim Team, 2000 *A beautifully associative work, in which Florczyk makes visible the often-hidden role that swimming pools have long played in the global artistic, cultural, and literary landscape. Whether shaped like kidney beans and back lit or of Olympic dimensions with the perfect gutters and that ever-present black line—whether sighted jewel-like from the air as signs of suburban ‘white flight,’ or drained, abandoned, and re-appropriated by the skateboarders who also surf—swimming pools are emblems of everything from sanctuary, to privilege, to athleticism, to leisure. Florczyk’s language flows around this object, and I encourage all readers to plunge in. * Emily Hodgson Anderson, Professor of English and College Dean of Undergraduate Education, University of Southern California, USA *Table of Contents1. Where Do You Swim? 2. What Is Your Pool? 3. Why Do You Swim? 4. Who Gets to Swim? Afterword: From Pool to Page Acknowledgments Notes Index

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.For a century, magazines were the authors of culture and taste, of intelligence and policy until they were overthrown by the voices of the public themselves online. Here is a tribute to all that magazines were, from their origins in London and on Ben Franklin's press; through their boom enabled by new technologies as creators of a new media aesthetic and a new mass culture; into their opulent days in advertising-supported conglomerates; and finally to their fall at the hands of the internet. This tale is told through the experience of a magazine founder, the creator of Entertainment Weekly at Time Inc., who was also TV critic at TV Guide and People and finally an executive at Condé Nast trying to shepherd its magazines into the digital age.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewFew people have thought as hard or as well about magazines as Jeff Jarvis does. He describes Magazine as an elegy, and it's a beautiful one, but it's so much more—a love letter to the heyday of a glorious form, a roundhouse punch thrown at those who failed as its custodians, an elegant and insightful history of a medium, and a vivid, funny, unsparing memoir. It's a pleasure to read him, and a privilege to learn from him. * Mark Harris, journalist and author of Mike Nichols: A Life (2021) *A starter, lover, student, and doubter of magazines, Jeff Jarvis is here to explain to us—in beautiful and entertaining prose—what the magazine was when it was great, and how the internet undid it, by wiring us together in a different way, and giving everyone a printing press. The call that magazines once answered is still heard, he argues. It is to ‘set the idea of community free from geography.' * Jay Rosen, Associate Professor of Journalism, New York University, USA *Having devoted a chunk of my life to writing for and editing magazines, I wondered whether Jeff Jarvis’s smart little chronicle, Magazine, would feel like nostalgia or PTSD. He opened so well, it ceased to matter. * The Common Reader *Table of Contents1. The End 2. The Beginning of the End 3. The Beginning 4. Magazines' Golden Century 5. Inside the Gilded Factory 6. Tangled in the Web 7. Next Bibliography Notes Index

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Book SynopsisIn The Arts of Cinema, Martin Seel explores film's connections to the other arts and the qualities that distinguish it from them. In nine concise and elegantly written chapters, he explores the cinema's singular aesthetic potential and uses specific examples from a diverse range of filmsfrom Antonioni and Hitchcock to The Searchers and The Bourne Supremacyto demonstrate the many ways this potential can be realized. Seel's analysis provides both a new perspective on film as a comprehensive aesthetic experience and a nuanced understanding of what the medium does to us once we are in the cinema.Trade ReviewIn his tremendously stimulating aesthetics of cinema, Martin Seel writes that films absorb the presence of the spectator more than all other works of art.... One of the merits of his book is that it is informed by a wide spectrum of film history, from the Marx Brothers to Fassbinder. * Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung *In his stimulating volume, the philosopher Seel looks for the essence and especially the particularity of the cinema, tracing the roots of cinema in other arts. According to Seel, film takes up elements from all of these arts and realizes its unique potential. Films like Hitchcock's North by Northwest or Antonioni's Zabriskie Point explode the boundaries of space and draw all of the spectator’s senses into it. * Deutschlandfunk [German Public Radio] *An exciting work of ‘philosophy meets cinema’—intellectually sophisticated but written in a rich, playful style—this book is both impressive and delightful. * academicworld.net *Seel grounds his philosophical work in close textual analysis of a small selection of representative films, including Hollywood classics, such as The Searchers; art films, such as Caché; and more recent action films, such as The Bourne Supremacy. As a work of philosophy and film theory, the book is notable for its lively engagement with complex ideas and for its inviting prose. It will appeal primarily to those with a strong interest in film aesthetics. * Choice *Anyone who studies, watches, or appreciates films for their beauty and artistic value will enjoy Seel's musings in philosophy and art. * Communication Booknotes Quarterly (CBQ) *Table of ContentsOpening Credits: Affairs—The Site of the Cinema—"Film"—The Course of Things—The Film Program 1. Film as Architecture: A Beginning—Division of Space—Ambient Sound—Some Opening Credits—Landscapes—Two Extremes—An Ending—Spatial Imagination—More Opening Credits 2. Film as Music: A Prelude—Time Connections—Action (1)—Double Motion—Action (2)—Spaces of Time—Higher Rhythm—Explosion 3. Film as Image: People Waiting—Pictorial Appearing—Image and Movement—Photography and Film—Another Trip— The Promise of Photography—Image Analysis—The Promise of Film—Another Ending 4. Film as Spectacle: Anarchy—Division of Space, Again—Virtuality—Sculpturality— Actors—Voices—Theatricality—Attractionism—Ecstasy 5. Film as Narrative: Three Films—Abstinence—Narrative Disposition—Telling Stories—Perspectivity—Filmic Storytelling—Cinema's Temporal Form—The Present Past 6. Film as Exploration: In Baghdad—Urban Landscapes—Realities—Processes of Documentation—A Double Promise—Techniques of Fiction— Questions of Style—Loss of Control—References to the World—The End 7. Film as Imagination: At Bakersfield—An Illusionistic Interpretation—The Figure of the Illusionist—Illusion and Immersion—Imagination Not Illusion—Photography and Film, Again—Twofold Attention—Illusion as a Technique—Caché 8. Film as Emotion: The End, Yet Again—The Illusionist's Final Appearance— Motion and Emotion—Corporeality—Sensate Understanding— Expressivity—Engagement—Twofold Attention, Again—Mixed Emotions—Godard 9. Film as Philosophy: Flashbacks—Another Affair—Three Dimensions—Cine- anthropology—Active Passivity—An Encore—Landscapes, Once Again Closing Credits: Notice—Thanks

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Book SynopsisIn The One, Other, and Only Dickens, Garrett Stewart casts new light on those delirious wrinkles of wording that are one of the chief pleasures of Dickens's novels but that go regularly unnoticed in Dickensian criticism: the linguistic infrastructure of his textured prose. Stewart, in effect, looks over the reader's shoulder in shared fascination with the local surprises of Dickensian phrasing and the restless undertext of his storytelling. For Stewart, this phrasal undercurrent attests both to Dickens's early immersion in Shakespearean sonority and, at the same time, to the effect of Victorian stenography, with the repressed phonetics of its elided vowels, on the young author's verbal habits long after his stint as a shorthand Parliamentary reporter.To demonstrate the interplay and tension between narrative and literary style, Stewart draws out two personas within Dickens: the Inimitable Boz, master of plot, social panorama, and set-piece rhetorical cadences, and a veTrade ReviewThe One, Other, and Only Dickens is sui generis... Stewart offers an exuberant appreciation of Dickens's language, a celebration of craft.... Stewart points toward a return to the pleasurable, slow reading of both criticism and primary texts, but Stewart champions sustained and passionate attentiveness as integral to that process. Stewart's lovely reading, and writing, will be a pleasure to readers who agree with Thackeray's 1847 appraisal of Dickens that 'There's no writing against such power as this-one has no chance!' * SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 *A series of compelling readings from the inklings of nebulous popular consensus. * Dickens Quarterly *Passage after passage of this kind not only leave you feeling as if you have consistently under-read Dickens, but also, retracing Stewart's granular detail, that Dickens is the unequaled master of English prose, the only peer in prose to Shakespeare in verse. * Victorian Studies *Table of ContentsForeword: Preparing the Way Introduction: Some "Reagions" for Reading 1. Shorthand Speech / Longhand Sound 2. Secret Prose / Sequestered Poetics 3. Phrasing Astraddle 4. Reading Lessens Afterword: "That Very Word, Reading" Endpiece: The One and T'Otherest Notes Index

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Book SynopsisIn The Ways of the Word, Garrett Stewart steps aside from theory to focus on the sheer pleasure of attentive reading and the excitement of recognizing the play of syllables and words upon which the best literary writing is founded. Emerging out of teaching creative writing and a broader effort to convene writers and critics, Stewart''s episodes in verbal attention track the means to meaning through the byways of literary wording.Through close engagement with literary passages and poetic instances whose imaginative demands are their own reward, Stewart gathers exhibits from dozens of authors: from Dickinson, Dickens, and DeLillo to Whitman, Woolf, and Colson Whitehead. In the process, idiom, tense, etymology, and other elements of expressive language and its phonetic wordplay are estranged and heard anew. The Ways of the Word fluidly and intuitively reveals a verbal alchemy that is as riveting as it is elusive and mysterious.Trade ReviewStewart is clearly having fun in this book, channeling techniques into his exposition with such parings as word's way and world's way, touchstone and touchtone, density and intensity, and epiphony and epiphany, to note just a few. Impressively erudite, this work will interest critics, creative writers, and literary-minded linguists. * Choice *

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Book SynopsisToday, churches, political parties, trade unions, and even national sports teams are no guarantee of social solidarity. At a time when these traditional institutions of social cohesion seem increasingly ill-equipped to defend against the disintegration of sociability, K. Ludwig Pfeiffer encourages us to reflect on the cultural and literary history of social gatherings—from the ancient Athenian symposium to its successor forms throughout Western history. From medieval troubadours to Parisian salons and beyond, Pfeiffer conceptualizes the symposium as an institution of sociability with a central societal function. As such he reinforces a programmatic theoretical move in the sociology of Georg Simmel and builds on theories of social interaction and communication characterized by Max Weber, George Herbert Mead, Jürgen Habermas, Niklas Luhmann, and others. To make his argument, Pfeiffer draws on the work of a range of writers, including Dr. Samuel Johnson and Diderot, Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust, Dorothy Sayers, Joseph Conrad, and Stieg Larsson. Ultimately, Pfeiffer concludes that if modern societies do not find ways of reinstating elements of the Athenian symposium, especially those relating to its ritualized ease, decency and style of interaction, they will have to cope with increasing violence and decreasing social cohesion.Trade Review"Sociability and Society switches with ease and elegance between theoretical argumentation, historical narrative, and literary criticism. An intensive, interesting, and inviting book for students of European cultural history, qualitative social theory, and literature."—Rüdiger Campe, Yale University"In this important and thought-provoking book, Pfeiffer tracks the history of the social form of the symposium and its multifarious successors. His open, essayistic style perfectly suits his protean subject matter."—Peter Gilgen, Cornell UniversityTable of Contents0. Introduction 1. Conceptualizing the Symposium 2. Power and Signs of Power in the Middle Ages 3. Sociability and the Humanities 4. The Splintering of Culture: Reading versus Salon 5. Proust and Nineteenth-Century Salons 6. The Silence of Power: English Clubs or Oligarchy versus Democracy 7. A Symptomatology of Critical Shifts 8. Securing Power and Auxiliary Evidence 9. The Paradigm of Isolation and Its Consequences: Joseph Conrad 10. Beyond the Sympotic: Aesthetic Productivity and Sociable Bonding in the Detective Novel 11. Consequences and Conclusion(s): The Anthropological-Institutional Trap and the Resurrection of Literature

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Book SynopsisRecent thinking has resuscitated civility as an important paradigm for engaging with a violence that must be deemed endemic to our lives. But, while it is widely acknowledged that civility works against violence, and that literature generates or accompanies civility and engenders tolerance, civility has also been understood as violence in disguise, and literature, which has only rarely sought to claim the power of violence, has often been accused of inciting it. This book sets out to describe the ways in which these words—violence, literature and civility—and the concepts they evoke are mutually entangled, and the uses to which these entanglements have been put. Simpson's argument follows a broadly historical trajectory through the long modern period from the Renaissance to the present, drawing on the work of historians, political scientists, literary scholars and philosophers. The result is a distinctly new argument about the complex and often mystified entanglements between literature, civility and violence in the anglophone Atlantic sphere. What now are our expectations of civility and literature, separately and together? How do these long-familiar but residually imprecise concepts stand up to the demands of the modern world? Simpson's argument is that, despite and perhaps because of their imperfect conceptualization, both persist as important protocols for the critique of violence.Trade Review"Among the most important literary historical considerations of violence and civility to emerge in recent decades, this remarkable, challenging book sustains the question of how—and at what cost—civility has been opposed to violence, and literature allied with civility."—Judith Butler, University of California, Berkeley"This timely, erudite work is not polemical, not a defense, but reflective—essayistic rather than thesis-driven. In these ways and more, the book enacts a form of civility that it characterizes and appreciates without idealizing."—Jonathan Arac, University of Pittsburgh"Engaging Violence is dialectical criticism at its best. It follows the overlapping histories of civility and literary pedagogy over time as both engage with different forms of violence, and it renders the complex historical process by which each term shifts as it moves between contexts but never admits of monolithic conclusions."—Kevis Goodman, Critical InquiryTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Civility and Literature and Their Discontents 2. Civil Beginnings 3. Philosophy Polite and Politic 4. The Displacement of Civility: Violence in a Widening World 5. Civility after 1989: Romancing Small Groups 6. The Reach of Literature

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Book SynopsisIn this new book Zygmunt Bauman and Riccardo Mazzeo examine the contentious issue of the relation between literature (and the arts in general) and sociology (or, more generally, a branch of the humanities claiming scientific status). While many commentators see literature and sociology as radically different vocations, Bauman and Mazzeo argue that they are bound together by a common purpose and a shared subject matter. Despite the many differences in terms of their methods and their ways of presenting their findings, novels and sociological texts are not at cross-purposes. Indeed, it is precisely their differences that make them at once indispensable to each other and mutually complementary.The writers of novels and of sociological texts may explore their world from different perspectives, seeking and producing different types of ‘data’, but their products bear the unmistakable marks of their shared origin. They feed each other and depend on each other in terms of their agenda, their discoveries and the contents of their messages. In a world characterized by the continuous search for new sensations and the fetishism of consumption, they bring fundamental existential questions back to the public agenda. Literature and sociology reveal the truth of the human condition only when they stay in one another's company, remaining attentive to each other's findings and engaged in a continuous dialogue. For only together can they rise to the challenging task of untangling and laying bare the complex intertwining of biography and history as well as of individual and society that totality we are constantly shaping while being shaped by it.Table of ContentsPreface Chapter 1 The Two Sisters Chapter 2 Salvation Through Literature Chapter 3 The Pendulum and Calvino's Empty Centre Chapter 4 The Father Problem Chapter 5 Literature and the Interregnum Chapter 6 The Blog and the Disappearance of Mediators Chapter 7 Are We All Becoming Autistic? Chapter 8 Metaphors of the 21st Century Chapter 9 Risking Twitterature Chapter 10 Dry and Damp Chapter 11 The Retrenchment within "Oneness" Chapter 12 Education, Literature, Sociology Notes Index

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Book SynopsisThis is the first edited collection of essays which focuses on the incest taboo and its literary and cultural presentation from the 1950s to the present day. It considers a number of key authors and artists, rather than a single author from this period. The collection exposes the wide use of incest and sexual trauma, and the frequency this appears within contemporary literature and related arts. Incest in contemporary literature discusses the impact of this change in attitudes on literature and literary adaptations in the latter half of the twentieth century, and early years of the twenty-first century. Although primarily concerned with fiction, the collection includes work on television and film. Authors discussed include Iain Banks, A.S. Byatt, Angela Carter, Simone de Beauvoir, Ted Hughes, Doris Lessing, Ian McEwan Iris Murdoch, Vladimir Nabokov, Andrea Newman and Pier Pasolini and Sylvia Plath.Table of ContentsIntroduction, Miles Leeson with Emma V. MillerPart I: Behind closed doors1. Text, image, audience: Adaptation and reception of Andrea Newman’s A Bouquet of Barbed Wire (1969) – Frances Pheasant-Kelly2. Assuming a ‘manly position’: The crisis of masculinity in Ian McEwan’s early fiction – Justine Gieni3. ‘Waking in the dark’: Remembering incest in A Thousand Acres (1991), Exposure (1993) and Beautiful Kate (2009) – Rebecca WhitePart II: Incest and the child protagonist4. ‘The word is incest’: Narrative, affect and judgement in and across the Lolitas – Matthew Pateman5. Appropriate or anathema? The representation of incest in children’s literature – Alice Mills6. ‘[B]orn to make a real life, however it cracks your heart’: creative women and daydreaming in Margo Lanagan’s Tender Morsels (2008) – Emma V. MillerPart III: Incest as a political conceit7. The desire for power and the power of desire: The case of Pier Paolo Pasolini – Michael Mack8. ‘Our close but prohibited union’: Sibling incest, class and national identity in Iain Banks’s The Steep Approach to Garbadale (2007) – Robert Duggan9. Is posthuman incest possible? Science fiction and the futures of the body – Alistair BrownPart IV: The rhetoric of narrating incest10. ‘Is’t not a kind of incest?’ Metaphor and relation in the poetry of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath – Charles Mundye11. ‘[T]he thing that makes us different from other people’: Narrating incest through ‘différance’ in the work of Angela Carter, A. S. Byatt and Doris Lessing – Emma V. Miller and Miles Leeson12. Avuncular ambiguity: Ethical virtue in Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince (1973) and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins (1954) – Miles LeesonIndex

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Book SynopsisLuminous presence: Derek Jarman's life-writing is the first book to analyse the prolific writing of queer icon Derek Jarman. Although he is well known for his avant-garde filmmaking, his garden, and his AIDS activism, he is also the author of over a dozen books, many of which are autobiographical. Much of Jarman's exploration of post-war queer identity and imaginative response to HIV/AIDS can be found in his books, such as the lyrical AIDS diaries Modern Nature and Smiling in Slow Motion. This book fully explores, for the first time, the remarkable range and depth of Jarman’s writing. Spanning his career, Alexandra Parsons argues that Jarman’s self-reflexive response to the HIV/AIDS crisis was critical in changing the cultural terms of queer representation from the 1980s onwards. Luminous presence is of great interest to students, scholars and readers of queer histories in literature, art and film.Table of ContentsIntroduction1 'The porter into forgotten landscapes': A finger in the fishes mouth2 Dancing Ledge: 'An autobiography at forty'3 Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio: 'Reading between the lines of history'4 Becoming Pasolini: Derek Jarman in Ostia5 Kicking the Pricks: 'Forward into an uncertain future...'6 Self-Projection in film: The Last of England and The Garden7 Modern Nature: Haunting, flowers and personal mythologies8 Queer Edward II: 'Are you a closet bigot?'9 At Your Own Risk: A Saint's Testament10 Smiling in Slow Motion: Testimony and elegy11 'A kind of bliss': Blue and Chroma12 Derek Jarman’s Garden: A therapy and a pharmacopoeiaConclusion: 'The past is the mirror'BibliographyFilmographyIndex

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Book SynopsisThis original and innovative book proposes ‘dismemory’ as a new form of intertextual engagement with Shakespeare by modern and contemporary Irish writers. Through reflection on these canonical writers and ranging across thirteen Shakespeare plays, Taylor-Collins demonstrates how Irish writers who helped to fashion and critique the Irish nation state carry an indelible, if often subdued, mark of Shakespeare’s early modern English influence.The volume overall renews and revitalises the Shakespeare–modern Ireland connection: Taylor-Collins reveals Hamlet’s hauntological legacy in Playboy of the Western World, Ulysses, and Ghosts; how the corporal economies that exert pressure from Coriolanus and Ben Jonson flicker through to the antiheroes in Beckett’s Three Novels; and how the landed legacies of territorial contests in Shakespeare are engaged with in Yeats’s poetry, and similarly how the diseased muddiness in Hamlet is addressed by Heaney.Trade Review'Breath-taking in an imaginative audacity tempered only by scholarly scruple, this study shows just how much of the modern Irish mind Shakespeare invented. Nick Taylor-Collins's text crackles with new ideas: it is a work of passion and truth. It shows just how deeply Irish writers illuminate the Bard who in turn lights up their texts. The author has the gift of explanation without simplification. Its writer combines a fine alertness to the nuances of language along with a deep understanding of the socio-cultural matrices out of which all literature springs. The result is a magnificent evocation of the ways in which writers take fire from one another ... and even reinvent their predecessors.'Declan Kiberd, Professor Emeritus, Notre Dame University -- .Table of ContentsIntroduction: Remembering memoryPart I: Ghosts1 ‘Go on from this’: J. M. Synge’s Playboy2 ‘Remember me’: Hamlet, memory, and Leopold Bloom’s poiesis3 ‘Someone wholly other’: John Banville’s GhostsPart II: Bodies4 ‘[M]y genius for forgetting’: Samuel Beckett’s theatrical bodies5 ‘Kate had herself sterilized’: O’Brien’s self-disciplining bodiesPart III: Land6 ‘[R]ights of memory’: W. B. Yeats, surface, and counter-memory7 ‘[D]ithering, blathering’: Seamus Heaney, the diseased word-hoard, and the HistorianConclusion: ‘I disremember’ ReferencesIndex

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Book SynopsisThis book considers melancholy language in representative works by several British women writers in late Stuart England. To understand how these women writers understood and reframed the discussion about melancholy and women’s experience of suffering in their art, it turns to the twentieth-century French feminist theorist Julia Kristeva, whose radical work on melancholy in Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (1989) provides an alternative psychoanalytic perspective for considering melancholy discourse created by women experiencing alienation, depression, and anguish in earlier periods. Kristeva offers a theoretical lens for understanding loss as a significant and ongoing perspective on life experience that finds expression through art and language. This text argues that early women writers created a new expressive mode, revising existing models to account for their own losses during a time of cultural and political transitioning in England. These writers provide a melancholy aesthetic in their works or depict depressed female figures reflecting artistic angst and a new discourse within language for articulating pain.

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Book SynopsisFreedom and Dialogue in a Polarized World argues that our most cherished ideas about freedom—being left alone to do as we please, or uncovering the truth—have failed us. They promote the polarized thinking that blights our world. Rooted in literature, political theory and Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of language, this book introduces a new concept: dialogic freedom. This concept combats polarization by inspiring us to feel freer the better able we are to see from the perspectives of others. To say that freedom is dialogic is to apply to it an idea about language. If you and I are talking, I anticipate from you a response that could be friendly, hostile, or indifferent, and this awareness helps determine what I say. If you look bored or give me a blank stare, I might not say anything at all. In this sense language is dialogic. The same can be said of freedom. Our decisions take into account the voices of others to which we feel answerable, and these voices coauthor our choices. In today’s polarized world, prevailing concepts of freedom as autonomy and enlightenment have encouraged us to take refuge in echo chambers among the like-minded. Whether the subject is abortion, terrorism, or gun control, these concepts encourage us to shut out the voices of those who dare to disagree. We need a new way to think about freedom. Freedom and Dialogue in a Polarized World presents riveting moments of choice from Homer’s Iliad, Dante’s Inferno, Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” and Morrison’s Beloved, in order to advocate reading for and with dialogic freedom. It ends with a practical application to the debate about abortion and an invitation to rethink other polarizing issues. For more information, please visit: http://dialogicfreedom.weebly.com/.Trade Review"To see true dialogue as a way of allowing conflicting voices to hear and understand one another is to offer hope of some resolution in our current world of polarization and impasse. Sharon's book on Freedom and Dialogue in a Polarized World does just that, by taking us back to some great debates of literary art, like Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, in which dialogic freedom takes the liberating form of seeking out a continuum of layers of knowing, as Portia and Shylock fail to navigate a way of transcending the hostility and cultural deafness that holds them apart. This thoughtful book is timely in the best sense." -- David Bevington, Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus, University of Chicago“In 1919, a dark year for Europe full of dire pronouncements on the ‘crisis of culture,’ Mikhail Bakhtin began to develop an arsenal of precious philosophical ideas by which civilization might better live: intuitive empathy, dialogue, a carnival fearlessness and sense of the cosmic whole, the unfinalizability of consciousness. Over the next three decades he illustrated their dynamics through the literary genius of Dostoevsky, Goethe, Rabelais. Sharon Schuman’s book adopts a similar technique. In successive chapters, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Melville, Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Toni Morrison provide the lens and morally textured background for the “life of an idea” that Schuman has fashioned out of Bakhtinian materials to address our present culture’s crisis of freedom. It is a conceptual crisis peculiar to a free society (in Stalinist Russia, Bakhtin would have gazed on it in wonder). The two definitions Schuman considers foundational in the West—freedom as autonomy and freedom as enlightenment—must be supplemented by a concept less devoted to the static comfort zone of each person’s individual rights and belief. Moving with the dissonant other, she suggests, is possible, interesting, and wise. Decision-making and freedom are both “two-sided acts.” An outsiderly or “alien” view on things is essential to our own. As the reader gradually and gratefully comes to see, assimilating these insights through literature makes them not just politically relevant, but immortal.” -- Caryl Emerson, A. Watson Armour III University Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Princeton UniversityTable of ContentsContents Preface Acknowledgements 1. Introducing Dialogic Freedom 2. A Father Begs for his Son’s Corpse in the Iliad 3. Passion and Freedom in Dante’s Inferno 4. Deaf to Shylock in The Merchant of Venice 5. The Virtuosity of Satan in Paradise Lost 6. Shaping the Master’s Vision in “Benito Cereno” 7. The Grand Inquisitor’s Silent Christ 8. Goading a Reader of “In the Penal Colony”` 9. Freedom Under Impossible Conditions in Beloved 10. Freedom Under Construction in a Polarized World Appendix A: Theoretical Roots of Dialogic Freedom Appendix B: Discussion Guide for Teachers, Students, and Book Groups Glossary Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisIn The Rest Write Back: Discourse and Decolonization, Esmaeil Zeiny brings together a collection of essays that interrogate the colonial legacies, the contemporary power structure, and the geopolitics of knowledge production. The scholars in this collection illustrate how the writing-back paradigm engages in a conversation and paves the way for a “dialogical and pluri-versal” world where the Rest is no longer excluded. Among the important features of this book is that it presents avenues for “decoloniality” and “epistemic disobedience.” This book will be of interest to scholars and students of all Social Science and Humanities disciplines but it is particularly important for those in the disciplines of sociology, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, literature, and theory and philosophy of Social Sciences and Humanities. Contributors include: Dustin J. Byrd, Ciarunji Chesaina, Hiba Ghanem, Mladjo Ivanovic, Masumi Hashimoto Odari, Arjuna Parakrama, JM. Persánch, Andrew Ridgeway, Rudolf J. Siebert, and Esmaeil Zeiny.Table of ContentsForeword: Whose Rest is Best? (Un)Learning Binaries from Subalternity Arjuna Parakrama Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction: The Rest and Decolonial Epistemologies Esmaeil Zeiny Part 1: Positioning New Paradigms1 Must Non-Europeans Think Like Us? A Critique of Modern Thoughtlessness in Western and Resten Societies Dustin J. Byrd 2 End or Continuation of World History: the European, Slavic and American World – A New Paradigm? Rudolf J. Siebert 3 Echoes of the Past: Colonial Legacy and Eurocentric Humanitarianism Mladjo Ivanovic Part 2: Positioning Counter-discourses4 Women Refashion Iran: Decolonizing the Rehistoricized Narratives Esmaeil Zeiny 5 African Literature: Leadership, Plight of the Majority and Hope Masumi Hashimoto Odari and Ciarunji Chesaina 6 Aesthetic Hospitality: Mustafa Saʾeed as Guest in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North Hiba Ghanem 7 The Rest in the White West: After the Empire is Buried, Shadows of Your Black Memory Are Born JM. Persánch 8 The Topography of Nostalgia: Imaginative Geographies and the Rise of Nationalism Andrew Ridgeway Index

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Book SynopsisEdited by rising Tunisian literary scholar Hassen Zriba, Postmodernism and Narratives of Erasure in Culture, Literature, and Language is a collection of interdisciplinary essays arguing that the concept of “erasure” is an essential analytical tool/mode of thought in shaping conceptualizations of change and continuity in subjects of human knowledge. It defines “erasure” as the act of deleting, of removing something, following the German philosopher Martin Heidegger in his book Being and Time, and proceeds with the French deconstructionist Jacques Derrida’s meaning of the inadequacy, but “necessariness,” of some words and concepts. In this volume’s working definition, “erasure” is vital to unlocking the paradoxical nature of the very subject under erasure, allowing us to move beyond fixed binary creations of meaning and significance. Accordingly, erasure substitutes the classical “metaphysics of presence” (fixed meaning) with an alternative “metaphysics of absence,” where meaning is always under construction. Signs are relational, not referential.This book is unique in its use of an interdisciplinary approach to detect how “erasure” emerges in language, culture, and literature. It examines how the concept shapes and is shaped by various discursive and critical formations in culture, language, and literature. Its major contribution is to expound a fundamental concept of postmodern theory that has been under-theorized to advance understanding the realities of our post-modern times.

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Book SynopsisSpatial Ecologies takes a new look at the “spatial turn” in French cultural and critical theory since 1968. Verena Andermatt Conley examines how Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, Jean Baudrillard, Marc Augé, Paul Virilio, Bruno Latour and Etienne Balibar reconsider the experience of space in the midst of considerable political and economic turmoil. The book considers why French critical theorists turned away from questions of time and looked instead toward questions of space. It asks what writing about space can tell us about life in late capitalism. Conley links this question to the problematic of habitality, taking us back to Heidegger and showing how it informs much of French theory. Building on the author's acclaimed earlier study Ecopolitics, Spatial Ecologies argues, through the voices of the authors taken up the eight chapters, for recognition of the virtue of spatial theory and its pragmatic applications in the global milieu. It will be required reading for scholars of literary and cultural theory, and twentieth- and twenty-first century French culture.Trade ReviewReviews'This is a working of wide-ranging and deep scholarship which brings together a range of important French thinkers for the first time within a critical, comparative argument. Spatial Ecologies makes a passionate and lucidly argued case for a renewed ecological thinking and a transformative critical practice.' Ian James'Spatial Ecologies is a tour de force analysis of all the major theorists/theories of space/spatiality in the contemporary era. It will become the new benchmark for work on space in critical and cultural theory.' Ian Buchanan'A novel explanation by a perceptive critic, wherein Conley ponders the 'spatial turn' in French critical theory from 1968 to 2012, and from Henri Lefebvre and Paul Virilio to Etienne Balibar. Assessing the postmodern experience of space and politics, economics and time, this book is an extraordinary reflection on questions of space in the epoch of late capitalism.' John Armitage, Times Higher Education'This book should be read by sociologists, philosophers, designers, architects, art historians (and historians), and anyone else intent on bridging the often-yawning gap between theory and practice as regards our existence in a simultaneously expanding and contracting world.'H-France Review Vol. 14, No. 90Table of Contents Introduction: Space as a Critical Concept 1. Henri Lefebvre: Lived Spaces 2. Michael de Certeau: Anthropological Spaces 3. Jean Baudrillard: Media Places 4. Marc Auge: Non-Places 5. Paul Virilio: Speed Spaces 6. Deleuze and Guattari: Space and Becoming 7. Bruno Latour: Common Spaces 8. Etienne Balibar: Spatial Fictions Conclusion: Future Spaces Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisBooker Prize winner and Living National Treasure, Thomas Keneally still divides critical opinion: he is both a morally challenging stylist and a commercial hack, a wise commentator on society and a garrulous leprechaun. Such judgements are located in the cultural politics of Australia but also linked to ideas about what a literary career should look like. ‘Thomas Keneally’s Career and the Literary Machine’ charts Keneally’s production and reception across his three major markets, noting clashes between national interests and international reach, continuity of themes and variety of topics, settings and genres, the writer’s interests and the publishers’ push to create a brand, celebrity fame and literary reputation, and the tussle around fiction, history, allegory and the middlebrow. Keneally is seen as playing a long game across several events rather than honing one specialist skill, a strategy that has sustained for more than 50 years his ambition to earn a living from writing.Trade Review‘Paul Sharrad skillfully combines insights from biography, literary history, book history and celebrity studies to trace changes in the production and reception of Thomas Keneally’s works both within Australia and internationally.’ —Elizabeth Webby AM FAHA, Professor Emerita, English Department, University of Sydney, Australia‘Paul Sharrad's landmark study of Thomas Keneally examines his writing in its multiple international and Australian contexts. Likely to be the indispensable evaluation of Keneally’s place in Australian culture.’ —Janet Wilson, Professor of English and Postcolonial Studies, University of Northampton, UK‘Paul Sharrad’s thorough and entertaining survey not only tells us much about Keneally we never knew before but also shows that the study of an author’s career can be a new way to measure the stature of a literary artist.’ —Nicholas Birns, Associate Professor, School of Professional Studies, New York University, USA‘In this important contribution to book history, Paul Sharrad applies the lens of the literary career to the prolific though often divisive work of Thomas Keneally, charting a course between literary and commercial fiction, history and fiction, authorship and celebrity, and the opposing frames of national and world literatures.’ —Robert Dixon, Professor of Australian Literature, University of Sydney, AustraliaTable of ContentsAcknowledgements; Introduction; 1. Beginnings; 2. The Collins Years; 3. To the Booker; 4. Afterwards; 5. Republic and Beyond; 6. Histories and Refugees; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.

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Book SynopsisAn Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. The legacy of the Second World War remains unsettled; no consensus has been achieved about its meaning and its lasting impact. This is pre-eminently the case in France, where the experience of defeat and occupation created the grounds for a deeply ambiguous mixture of resistance and collaboration, pride and humiliation, heroism and abjection, which writers and politicians have been trying to disentangle ever since. This book develops a theoretical approach which draws on trauma studies and hermeneutics; and it then focuses on some of the intellectuals who lived through the war and on how their experience and troubled memories of it continue to echo through their later writing, even and especially when it is not the explicit topic. This was an astonishing generation of writers who would go on to play a pivotal role on a global scale in post-war aesthetic and philosophical endeavours. The book proposes close readings of works by some of the most brilliant amongst them: Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Charlotte Delbo, Paul Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas, Louis Althusser, Jorge Semprun, Elie Wiesel, and Sarah Kofman.Trade ReviewReviews 'A very significant intervention in the field, likely to be a major point of reference for future work'Margaret Atack, University of Leeds'Traces of War: Interpreting Ethics and Trauma in Twentieth-Century French Writing provides a thoughtful and substantive analysis of a wide range of authors, texts, and major debates as it explores the traces of war found in literary works that do not explicitly mention World War II. ... It would make a useful introductory text because of the wide range of key figures and canonical texts addressed, as well as its overview of major debates and key issues present in both areas of study. At the same time, Davis’s discussions on ethics are particularly relevant to scholars in trauma studies, and his integration of archival material and unpublished documents offer thought-provoking ways of reframing texts for scholars in twentieth century French studies.' Heidi Brown, H-France Review'Reading Davis is like having secrets revealed by an expert analyst who, simultaneously, casts doubt on whether secrets can be fully revealed and on the truths that they contain. His readings of Sempru´n and Sarah Kofman at the end are fascinating: the relations between writer and text, and history and story, are handled in such a nuanced way that one gets both a profound picture of their lives and works and a sense that any picture is necessarily fictional and incomplete. This book is ‘traumatic hermeneutics’ at its most stimulating.' Max Silverman, French StudiesTable of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction: Don’t Mention the War Section A: Ethics, Trauma and Interpretation Chapter 1. Trauma and Ethics: Telling the Other’s Story Chapter 2. Traumatic Hermeneutics: Reading and Overreading the Pain of Others Section B: Writing the War: Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus Chapter 3. Sartre and Beauvoir: A Very Gentle Occupation? Chapter 4. Camus’s War: L’Etranger and Lettres à un ami allemand Chapter 5. Interpreting, Ethics and Witnessing in La Peste and La Chute Section C: Prisoners of War Give Philosophy Lessons Chapter 6. Life Stories: Ricoeur Chapter 7. Afterlives: Althusser and Levinas Chapter 8. Levinas the Novelist Section D: Surviving, Witnessing and Telling Tales Chapter 9. Testimony/Literature/Fiction: Jorge Semprun Chapter 10. Elie Wiesel: Witnessing, Telling and Knowing Chapter 11. Sarah Kofman and the Time Bomb of Memory Conclusion: Whose War, Which War? Bibliography

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Book SynopsisLife as Creative Constraint is the first book to focus on the extraordinary life-writing of the French experimental writing group, the Oulipo. The Oulipo's enthusiasm for literary games and formal gymnastics has seen its work caricatured as 'lifeless' - impressively virtuoso but more interested in form than content and ultimately disengaged from the world. This book examines a broad corpus of work by Georges Perec, Marcel Bénabou, Jacques Roubaud and Anne F. Garréta to show that, despite the group's early devotion to the radical impersonality of mathematics, later generations of oulipians have brought the group's fascination with systems, games and constraints to bear on autobiography. Far from being 'lifeless', oulipian constraints and concepts provide the tools that allow writers to engage critically and creatively with lived experience, and mine the potential of the autobiographical genre. The games played by these writers are not simply pastimes or cunning writing techniques, but modes of survival, self-examination, self-invention, and relating to the world and to others. As the title of Georges Perec’s masterpiece suggests, they are a mode d’emploi for life.Trade Review“This is an engaging, beautifully written, and carefully evidenced book. Written with great verve and confidence, Anna Kemp’s voice is lively, limpid, and persuasive. The book shines in its close textual analysis and fiercely intelligent interpretations."Amanda Crawley Jackson, University of SheffieldTable of ContentsIntroduction1. Playing and Being in Georges Perec2. The Potential Lives of Marcel Bénabou3. Personal Identity in Jacques Roubaud’s La Boucle4. Self-exposure and Self-erasure in Anne Garréta’s Pas un jourConclusion

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Book SynopsisBlack Intersectionalities: A Critique for the 21st Century explores the complex interrelationships between race, gender, and sex as these are conceptualised within contemporary thought. Markers of identity are too often isolated and presented as definitive, then examined and theorised, a process that further naturalises their absoluteness; thus socially generated constructs become socialising categories that assume coercive power. The resulting set of oppositions isolate and delimit: male or female, black or white, straight or gay. A new kind of intervention is needed, an intervention that recognises the validity of the researcher’s own self-reflexivity. Focusing on the way identity is both constructed and constructive, the collection examines the frameworks and practices that deny transgressive possibilities. It seeks to engage in a consciousness raising exercise that documents the damaging nature of assigned social positions and either/or identity constructions. It seeks to progress beyond the socially prescribed categories of race, gender and sex, recognising the need to combine intellectualization and feeling, rationality and affectivity, abstraction and emotion, consciousness and desire. It seeks to develop new types of transdisciplinary frameworks where subjective and political spaces can be universalized while remaining particular, leaving texts open so that identity remains imagined, plural, and continuously shifting. Such an approach restores the complexity of what it means to be human.Table of ContentsIntroduction: Monica Michlin (Université Paris-Sorbonne, France) and Jean-Paul Rocchi (Université Paris -Est Marne-la-Vallée, France) Exordium: Writing and the Relation: From Textual Coloniality to South African Black Consciousness Rozena Maart (University of KwaZulu Natal, Durban, South Africa) I) Challenging Hegemonic Gender Identities: Postcolonial Backlash & Being Proper: Femininity Blackness Sexuality and Transgender in the Public Eye Antje Schuhmann (Witwatersrand University, Johannesburg, South Africa) Productive Investments: Masculinities and Economies in Fisher’s The Walls of Jericho Eva Boesenberg (Humboldt-Universität, Berlin, Germany) ‘I Hugged Myself’: First-Person Narration as an Agential Act in Octavia Butler’s “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” Florian Bast (Universität Leipzig, Germany) II) Nonconformity and Narrative Theorizing: Benjamin Franklin’s Ethnic Drag—Notes on Abolition, Satire, and Affect Carsten Junker (Bremen University, Germany) “Weh eye nuh see heart nuh leap”: Claude McKay’s Literary Drag Performance in Banana Bottom Jarrett H. Brown (College of the Holy Cross, USA) The Souls of Black Gay Folk: The Black Arts Movement and Melvin Dixon’s Revision of Du Boisian Double Consciousness in Vanishing Rooms Charles Nero (Bates College, USA) III) Upsurges of Desire: “Risking Sensuality”: Toni Morrison’s Erotics of Writing Claudine Raynaud (Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier 3, France) Cultures of Melancholia: Theorizing Desire and the Black Body Laura Sarnelli (University of Naples “L’Orientale”, Italy) Richard Wright’s Poetics of Black Being: Metaphor, Desire, and Doing Rebecka Rutledge Fisher (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA) IV) Epistemological Genealogies and Prospections: On the Monstrous Threat of Reasoned Black Desire Lewis R. Gordon (University of Connecticut at Storrs, USA) Revising Jezebel Politics: Toward a New Black Sexual Ethic Jennifer S. Leath (Yale University, USA) The Challenge of Black Feminist Desire: Abolish Property Sabine Broeck (Bremen University, Germany)

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Book SynopsisThis is the most accessible and wide-ranging introduction to critical theory currently available. Providing a comprehensive overview of the practice, role and importance of theory across the humanities and social sciences, the book not only maps a notoriously complex area, but it also enables the reader to take the arguments and apply them in practice. Starting with an explanation of how theory relies on implicit assumptions that inform interpretations, the book moves on to depict the long-term philosophical problems that have fed into much twentieth century thinking and also more recent debates. The philosophical grounds of contemporary thought are traced from Plato through Descartes to the work of Heidegger and Freud and on to recent developments in structuralism and deconstruction that critically revise many of the previous terms of debate. The individual sections treat key concepts in detail and may be read independently. Sections that provide a thorough grounding in notions like the critical, theory, the political and modernity pave the way for in-depth accounts of the basic arguments of structuralism, psychoanalytic theory and deconstruction. Attention is paid to ensuring clarity throughout the book; the critical theory described is demonstrated via readings of verbal and visual texts. A serious guide to the practicalities of the use of critical theory in the humanities today this book should be on the shelves of all students of literature, cultural studies and social science.Trade Review'The great advantage of Contested Knowledge is that it is a genuinely critical guide to critical theory. Phillips explores theory since Kant, and is himself prepared to be appropriately critical of it. Yet he neither excludes those with no knowledge of theory or alienates those already familiar with its fundamentals. Contested Knowledge is thus a text which deserves to be strongly recommended.' Macdonald Daly, University of NottinghamTable of Contents How to Use This Book Part I: Introduction to Critical Theory 1. CriticalCritical, Metaphysics, Man, Crisis, Critique, Critical Theory, Postmodernism and Critical theory 2. RepresentationsBooks and Life, Truth, In between, To be, "Is" and "Ing" 3. Theory The Empirical and the Transcendental, What theory is and why it is necessary, Object and Concept, Analogy, Economy, Objects, Summary Part II: Philosophical Impossibilities 1. The AncientsPhilosophy, Deception, Socratic Dialogue, Plato's Theatre, Nous (Mind), Allegory, Contingency, Plato's Cave, Ideal Objects, Technology, The Visible and the Invisible, Analogy, The Divided Line, The Empirical and the Transcendental 2. Greek/Jew: Closure and Opening Greek, Binary Oppositions, Empirical/Transcendental Difference, Jew, The Law, Dogmatism and Criticism, Singularity and Plurality, Opening and Closure 3. Modernity Empiricism, Rationality, Freedom, Progress, Centrism, Ethnocentrism, Androcentrism, Phonocentrism, Logocentrism, Descartes' Judgement, Otherness, infinity and difference, How to not define the other Summary Cogito Ergo Sum, Frontiers, The Subject in Crisis, Authority and Enlightenment, Architectural Metaphors, Responsibility Part III: The Political 1. BeingRhetoric, The Being of Things, Being and Beings 2. The Political 3. False ConsciousnessFalse Consciousness, Figurative Language, Graven Images, Fetish, Logocentrism, Nomos, Access to the Transcendental Part IV: Structuralism 1. Saussure What is Structuralism? Where does structuralism come from? The Course in General Linguistics, Why "general", The Sign Signifier/Signified System and Utterance Difference' "To a Certain Extent", System and Difference, Developments in Structuralism, How Structuralism Works, An Exercise in Structuralism, Synchrony/Diachrony, System/Process, Paradigm/Syntagm 2. Levi-Strauss Structural Linguistics and Anthropology, Necessary Laws, Kinship Relations, Second Order First, The Elementary Unit of Kinship, Uncles with Attitude, The Incest Taboo-woman as symbol of exchange, The Structural Analysis of Myth, The Algorithm of Myth 3. JakobsonTwo Types of Aphasia, The Similarity Disorder, The Contiguity Disorder, Metaphor and Metonymy, The Map on the Wall Part V: Derrida and Deconstruction 1. The Text "Text", Derrida's work, Presence and Absence, The Way We Think, Structure, Play, The way of the text, Bricoleur and Engineer, Supplementarity, Radical Empiricism, "Something Missing" 2. Difference The Same, Différance, Difference a priori, A commentary on "Differance", What to Look for 3. Exemplification Deconstruction, Repetition and Writing, Superfluity and Writing, Alterity and Transcendence, Writing and Interpretation, Transcendental Contraband, Exemplification Part VI: Psychoanalysis 1. Freud and The Dreamwork Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory, The Unconscious since Freud, Dreams, Interpretation, The Dream Work, Condensation, Displacement, Overdetermination, Considerations of Representability, Kettle Logic 2. Lacan, Freud and Sexuality Lacan and Language, The Unconscious is the Discourse of the Other, The Unconscious is structured like a Language, Metaphor and Metonymy, Sexuality and Sexual Difference, Deferred Action, Sexuality, Oedipus, Sexual Difference, Cinema: Pleasure and Drive, The Ring 3. The Return to Melanie Klein Acquiring Knowledge, The Ruined World, Kleinian Scientificity, Armageddon, Soldier, Problems, The Knowledge Concluding Remarks

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Book SynopsisLeon Festinger’s 1957 A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance is a key text in the history of psychology – one that made its author one of the most influential social psychologists of his time. It is also a prime example of how creative thinking and problem solving skills can come together to produce work that changes the way people look at questions for good. Strong creative thinkers are able to look at things from a new perspective, often to the point of challenging the very frames in which those around them see things. Festinger was such a creative thinker, leading what came to be known as the “cognitive revolution” in social psychology. When Festinger was carrying out his research, the dominant school of thought – behaviorism – focused on outward behaviors and their effects. Festinger, however, turned his attention elsewhere, looking at “cognition:” the mental processes behind behaviors. In the case of “cognitive dissonance”, for example, he hypothesized that apparently incomprehensible or illogical behaviors might be caused by a cognitive drive away from dissonance, or internal contradiction. This perspective, however, raised a problem: how to examine and test out cognitive processes. Festinger’s book records the results of the psychological experiments he designed to solve that problem. The results helped prove the existence for what is now a fundamental theory in social psychology.Table of ContentsWays In to the Text Who was Leon Festinger? What does A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance Say? Why does A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance Matter? Section 1: Influences Module 1: The Author and the Historical Context Module 2: Academic Context Module 3: The Problem Module 4: The Author's Contribution Section 2: Ideas Module 5: Main Ideas Module 6: Secondary Ideas Module 7: Achievement Module 8: Place in the Author's Work Section 3: Impact Module 9: The First Responses Module 10: The Evolving Debate Module 11: Impact and Influence Today Module 12: Where Next? Glossary of Terms People Mentioned in the Text Works Cited

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Book SynopsisWhen it was published in 2008, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness quickly became one of the most influential books in modern economics and politics. Within a short time, it had inspired whole government departments in the US and UK, and others as far afield as Singapore. One of the keys to Nudge’s success is Thaler and Sunstein’s ability to create a detailed and persuasive case for their take on economic decision-making. Nudge is not a book packed with original findings or data; instead it is a careful and systematic synthesis of decades of research into behavioral economics. The discipline challenges much conventional economic thought – which works on the basis that, overall, humans make rational decisions – by focusing instead on the ‘irrational’ cognitive biases that affect our decision making. These seemingly in-built biases mean that certain kinds of economic decision-making are predictably irrational. Thaler and Sunstein prove themselves experts at creating persuasive arguments and dealing effectively with counter-arguments. They conclude that if governments understand these cognitive biases, they can ‘nudge’ us into making better decisions for ourselves. Entertaining as well as smart, Nudge shows the full range of reasoning skills that go into making a persuasive argument.Trade ReviewThaler and Sunstein create persuasive arguments and dealing effectively with counter-arguments. This little booklet explores this seminal work. It offers an additional learning resource structuring and explaining the main contents. It is structured in three main parts: influences, ideas, and impact.Lucia A. Reisch Journal of Consumer Policy Table of ContentsWays in to the Text Who are Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein? What does Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness Say? Section 1: Influences Module 1: The Author and the Historical Context Module 2: Academic Context Module 3: The Problem Module 4: The Author's Contribution Section 2: Ideas Module 5: Main Ideas Module 6: Secondary Ideas Module 7: Achievement Module 8: Place in the Author's Work Section 3: Impact Module 9: The First Responses Module 10: The Evolving Debate Module 11: Impact and Influence Today Module 12: Where Next? Glossary of Terms People Mentioned in the Text Works Cited

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Book SynopsisAmartya Sen’s Inequality Re-Examined is a seminal text setting out a theory to evaluate social arrangements and inequality. By asking the question, ‘equality of what’?, Sen shows that (in)equality should be assessed as human freedom; for people to have the ability to pursue and achieve goals they value or have reason to value. The text lays out the fundamental ideas to Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach. This approach is celebrated in diverse academic disciplines because of its specific contribution towards the improvement to debates on inequality beyond economic deprivation and utility measures. Furthermore, the arguments put forward by Sen in Inequality Re-Examined has had many practical applications throughout policy circles including the Human Development Index, the Multi –Dimensional Poverty Measure, the compilation of lists of capabilities and drawing further attention to human agency and democracy. Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1998 for his contribution to welfare economics; the core arguments of this work is found in this book.Table of ContentsWays In to the Text Who is Amartya Sen? What does Inequality Re-Examined Say? Why does Inequality Re-Examined Matter? Section 1: Influences Module 1: The Author and the Historical Context Module 2: Academic Context Module 3: The Problem Module 4: The Author's Contribution Section 2: Ideas Module 5: Main Ideas Module 6: Secondary Ideas Module 7: Achievement Module 8: Place in the Author's Work Section 3: Impact Module 9: The First Responses Module 10: The Evolving Debate Module 11: Impact and Influence Today Module 12: Where Next? Glossary of Terms People Mentioned in the Text Works Cited

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Book SynopsisTracing the shift from liberal to neoliberal education from the nineteenth century to the present day, this open access book provides a rich and previously underdeveloped narrative of value in higher education in England. Value and the Humanities draws upon historical, financial, and critical debates concerning educational and cultural policy. Rather than writing a singular defence of the humanities against economic rationalism, Zoe Hope Bulaitis constructs a nuanced map of the intersections of value in the humanities, encompassing an exploration of policy engagement, scientific discourses, fictional representation, and the humanities in public life. The book articulates a kaleidoscopic range of humanities practices which demonstrate that although recent policy encourages higher education to be entirely motivated by outcomes, fiscal targets, and the acquisition of employability skills, the humanities continue to inspire and aspire beyond these limits. This book is a historically-grounded and theoretically-informed analysis of the value of the humanities within the context of the market. Trade Review“Bulaitis’s analysis of the values conveyed both in higher education speech and policies provides a useful study of how they are perceived, imagined, and put into practice within the British neoliberal context. … Bulaitis has articulated very convincing academic arguments to explain the shift from liberal to neoliberal university values and debates. This book offers accurate, clear, and meaningful food for thought for those interested in the study of the processes of ‘marketisation’ and ‘economisation’ of higher education.” (Catherine Coron, Journal of British Studies, Vol. 60 (4), October, 2021)Table of ContentsChapter One: IntroductionPart I: The State of the DebateCritical University Studies The Public Value of the Humanities Social Impact Studies New Contributions Part II: The Relationship with the Past: From Liberal to Neoliberal EducationDescribing 2008-18 as the Present Moment in Higher EducationEconomic Value as a Monoculture under Neoliberalism The Dominance of Economic Value within Higher Education Arguing Against Crisis in the HumanitiesPart III: From Liberal to Neoliberal Education Articulating the Values of a Liberal Education Speaking of Liberal Values in the Neoliberal University Part IV: Chapter Synopses Chapter Two: A History of Payment by Results: Lowe’s Code (1862) and the Browne Report (2010)Introduction Part I: Lowe’s CodeThe Newcastle Commission Robert Lowe and Economic Motivations Critical Responses to Payment by Results Part II: The Browne Report Contextualising the Browne Report: The Move towards Minimal Government Involvement in Higher Education National Economic Motivations National Gains: The Debate Concerning Tangible Knowledge The Rise of Individualism and the Student as Consumer ConclusionChapter Three: Controversy and Conversation: The Relationship Between the Humanities and the SciencesIntroductionPart I: Policy and the Relationship between the DisciplinesPresent Policy PreferencesA Brief History of an Age-Old ArgumentPart II: The “Two Cultures Controversy”, Then and NowThe Birth of a Controversy The Form of the Debate The Two Cultures Today Part III: A Liberal Valuation: Arnold and Huxley’s Exchange The Start of a Conversation “Darwin’s Bulldog” and “Our Chief Apostle of Culture” Articulating the Value of a Liberal Education Conclusion Chapter Four: The Relationship between Academic Fiction and Academic LifeIntroduction Part I: Using Academic Fiction as a Discursive Tool Part II: Defining Academic Fiction Understanding the Appeal of Academic Fiction Situation and Settings for the Academic Novel Subject Matter and Style in Academic Fiction Part III: Investigation One: The Qualities of a Liberal Education The Qualities of an Education in Tom Brown at Oxford The Secret History: A Classical Education Out of Time Assessing the Value of the Humanities in Novels that Engage with Educational Principles from the Past Part IV: Investigation Two: Representing the Processes of Humanities Research Middlemarch and the Pursuit of the Key to All Mythologies Possession and the Processes of Scholarship Assessing the Value of the Humanities in Novels that Explore the Process of Writing and Research Part V: Investigation Three: Pressures of Economics in Education Jude the Obscure and Barriers to Education Frank Parkin’s The Mind and Body Shop: Everything for Sale The Future of a Liberal Education in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty ConclusionChapter Five: Impact and the Humanities: The Rise of Accountability in Public Cultural LifeIntroduction Part I: Debates in Public Access, Use, and Accountability in the Victorian Museum Defining Foucauldian Governmentality National Interests in the Public Museum: Governance and Powers of Display The British Museum: The Rise of Debates in Public Accountability and Access The Rise of Accountability: Quantification as Justification in the Victorian MuseumConclusions, Regarding the Victorian Public Museum Part II: Public Expenditure and Public Values“There is No Alternative”: The Rise of Economic Models of Valuation in the Cultural Sector New Public Management Responses from the Cultural Sector The Arts and the Economy Embroiled: The Rise of the Creative Industries Part III: REF-lections for the Academic Humanities Reinforcing National Interests within the Impact Agenda The Focus on Outputs and Impacts Misrepresents the Value of the Humanities “The System Does Not Speak for Me” The Humanities and the Creative Industries Part IV: A Response from the Humanities Conclusion Chapter Six: Conclusion Part I: Reflections on Questions of Value Part II: Future Directions for ResearchPart III: Voices of the Humanities, and a Call to ArmsPart IV: The Need for the Humanities in an Age of Populism

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Book SynopsisThis book updates our understanding of working-class fiction by focusing on its continued relevance to the social and intellectual contexts of the age of Trump and Brexit. The volume draws together new and established scholars in the field, whose intersectional analyses use postcolonial and feminist ideas, amongst others, to explore key theoretical approaches to working-class writing and discuss works by a range of authors, including Ethel Carnie Holdsworth, Jack Hilton, Mulk Raj Anand, Simon Blumenfeld, Pat Barker, Gordon Burn, and Zadie Smith. A key informing argument is not only that working-class writing shows ‘working class’ to be a diverse and dynamic rather than monolithic category, but also that a greater critical attention to class, and the working class in particular, extends both the methods and objects of literary studies. This collection will appeal to students, scholars and academics interested in working-class writing and the need to diversify the curriculum.Table of Contents1. Working-Class Writing and Experimentation - Ben Clarke.- 2. Interwoven Histories: Working Class Literature & Theory - Jack Windle.- 3. Meaning It: Everyday Hermeneutics and the Language of Class in Literary Scholarship - Cassandra Falke.- 4. Kings in Disguise and 'Pure Ellen Kellond': Literary Social Passing in the Early Twentieth Century - Luke Seaber.- 5. Democratic Art or Working-Class Literature? Virginia Woolf, the Women's Cooperative Guild and Literary Value in the 'Introductory Letter' - Natasha Periyan.- 6. The Bakhtin Circle in Caribbean London: Race, Class and Narrative Strategy - Matti Ron.- 7. 'Look at the State of this Place!': The Impact of Domestic Space on Post-War Class Consciousness - Simon Lee.- 8. Ethel Carnie Holdsworth's Helen of Four Gates: Recasting Melodrama in Novel and Cinematic Form - Pamela Fox.- 9. Representation of the Working Classes of the British Colonies and/as the Subalterns in Mulk Raj Anand's Coolie - Sabujkoli Bandopadhyay.- 10. London Jewish... and Working-Class? Social and Geographic Mobility in Simon Blumenfeld and Alexander Baron - Jason Finch.- 11. The Deindustrialist Novel: Twenty-first Century British fiction and the Working Class - Phil O'Brien.- 12. Working-Class Heritage Revisited in Alan Warner's The Deadman's Pedal - Peter Clandfield.- 13. Respectability, Nostalgia and Shame in Contemporary English Working-Class Fiction - Nick Hubble.

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Book SynopsisThe Work of Reading: Literary Criticism in the 21st Century is a sustained critical examination of the developments in the field of literary studies from the early 2000s onwards within the context of the systematic problems in the humanities. This volume analyzes the origins of the current methods—including New Historicism, empiricism, New Formalism, postcritique, and others—and posits alternatives to the present state of literary studies. At a time when many aspects of current methods show a desire to adopt values from other disciplines to solve internal crises, this volume advocates a renewed focus on questions of form by means of the praxis of aesthetic study, close reading, and other modes of engaging directly with literary texts. Table of ContentsChapter 1: Introduction: “Criticism Today: Form, Critique, and the Experience of Literature”, Derek Attridge.- Chapter 2: “Is the Author Still Dead?”, Henry Staten.- Chapter 3: “Criticism and Attachment in the Neoliberal University”, Mir Ali Hosseini.- Chapter 4: “Darkness Visible: The Contingency of Critique”, Ellen Rooney.- Chapter 5: “Reading by Example: Disciplinary History for a Polemical Age”, Doug Battersby.- Chapter 6: “Does Knowledge Still Have a Home in the Humanities?”, William Rasch.- Chapter 7: “‘Our Beloved Codex’: Frank Kermode’s Modesty”, Ronan McDonald.- Chapter 8: “Polonius as Anti-Close-Reader: Towards a Poetics of the Putz”, Rachel Eisendrath.- Chapter 9: “What Kind of Person Should the Critic Be?”, Simon Grimble.- Chapter 10: “‘Slow time,’ ‘a Brooklet, scarce espied’: Close Reading, Cleanth Brooks, John Keats”, Susan J. Wolfson.- Chapter 11: “Poem as Field, Canon as Crystal”, Anirudh Sridhar.- Chapter 12: “Criticism and the Non-I, or, Rachel Cusk’s Sentences”, Tom Eyers.- Chapter 13: “Ecocide and Objectivity: Literary Thinking in How the Dead Dream”, Anna Kornbluh.- Chapter 14: Afterword, Heather Dubrow.

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Book SynopsisLife Writing in the Posthuman Anthropocene is a timely collection of insightful contributions that negotiate how the genre of life writing, traditionally tied to the human perspective and thus anthropocentric qua definition, can provide adequate perspectives for an age of ecological disasters and global climate change. The volume’s eight chapters illustrate the aptness of life writing and life writing studies to critically reevaluate the role of “the human” vis-à-vis non-human others while remaining mindful of persisting inequalities between humans regarding who causes and who suffers damage in the Anthropocene age. The authors in this collection not only expand the toolbox of life writing studies by engaging with critical insights from the fields of posthumanism and ecocriticism, but, in turn, also enrich those fields by offering unique approaches to contemplate the responsibility of humans for as well as their relational existence in the posthuman Anthropocene.Trade Review“Life Writing in the Posthuman Anthropocene is a down-to-earth (quite literally) posthumanist account that substitutes speculative futurism for a much-needed socioecological sensitivity. Students of the aging process would be inspired by the ways in which their object is put into perspective … . The book would also benefit anyone interested in the intersection between environmental and biographical studies … .” (João Pedro Martinez Pinheiro, Anthropology & Aging, Vol. 44 (1), 2023)Table of Contents1. Introduction: Posthuman Life Writing and the Anthropocene – Ina Batzke, Linda M. Hess, and Lea Espinoza GarridoPart I: Rethinking the (Post-)Human in Life Writing 2. Relationality, Voice, and Decentralization: Recalibrating Narrative Perspectives in AliceWalker’s, Leslie Marmon Silko’s, and Mary Oliver’s Self-life-Writing – Katja Sarkowsky3. Living the Anthropocene: Ecofeminist/Posthuman Episteme in Helen Macdonald`s H is for Hawk – Monir Gholamzadeh Bazarbash4. Humanity, Life Writing, and Deep Time: Postcolonial Contributions – Renata Lucena Dalmaso5. Edges and Extremes in Ecobiography: Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun – Jessica WhitePart II: Rethinking Life Writing in a Post-Human Age6. The Big Picture: Sympoietic Becomings in Rachel Rosenthal’s Performance Art – Christina Caupert7. The Sentience of Sea Squirts: Underwater Lives and the Posthuman – Clare Brant8. Writing Life on Mars: Imaginaries of Extraterrestrial Colonization and Discourses of Planetarity and the NASA Mars Rover Missions – Jens Temmen

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Book SynopsisThis collection engages the work of Michael Oakeshott predominantly on the themes of his skepticism, politics, and aesthetics. An international set of authors engages and expands the analysis of Oakeshott’s writings in often neglected areas and topics and in ways that brings Oakeshott into conversation with a surprisingly diverse set of thinkers.Table of Contents1. Introduction. 2. Under the Law of Ruin: Practice, Aesthetics, and the Civil Association.3. Michael Oakeshott Philosopher of Skepticism: Conservative or Liberal?.4. Out of Rationalist Politics’ Crises: Popper and Oakeshott.5. A Conservative Landscape: From A Guide to the Classics to the “Claims of Politics”.6. The Art of the Scholar: Oakeshott’s Conservative Account of Liberal Learning.7. The Understanding of Rationalism in C.S. Lewis and Michael Oakeshott: Tradition, Experience, and the Reading of Old Books.8. Oakeshott, Strauss and the Romans.9. Authority: Fragments of the Good Regime.10. ‘That spirit of quiet’: Oakeshott, Keats and Sontag Towards a Philosophy of Silence.11. Oakeshott’s Theory of Poetry: A Corrective from Seamus Heaney.12. The Problem of a Pure Theory of Poetry.13. What can Contemporary Realists Learn from Montaigne? On the Significance of the Author of the Essais for Michael Oakeshott and Raymond Geuss

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Book SynopsisThis book explores pedagogical approaches to decolonising the literature curriculum through a range of practical and theoretically-informed case studies. Although decolonising the curriculum has been widely discussed in the academe and the media, sustained examinations of pedagogies involved in decolonising the literature at university level are still lacking in English and related subjects. This book makes a crucial contribution to these evolving discussions, presenting current and critically engaged pedagogical scholarship on decolonising the literature curriculum. Offering a broad spectrum of accessible chapters authored by experienced national and international academics, the book is structured into two parts, Texts and Contexts, presenting case studies on decolonising the literature curriculum which range from the undergraduate classroom, university writing centres, through to the literary doctorate.Table of ContentsIntroduction: Decolonising EnglishPart I Texts: Decolonising the Literature Canon Decolonising Pedagogical Approaches to Queer Postcolonial Texts Centring Women of Colour: Decolonising the Literature Curriculum with Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire and Bolu Babalola’s Love in Colour Smart Latinas Are Latinas: On Teaching Chicana/Latina Young Adult (YA) Literature as Feminist Resistance “Hard and Rocky” Soil: Decolonising the General Education Introduction to Literature Course with August Wilson’s Fences Redesigning the Curriculum: Teaching Multicultural Literature in Non-native English-Speaking University Settings in Turkey and Italy Part II Contexts: Beyond the Boundaries of Literary Texts Decolonising Wuthering Heights in the Semi-peripheral Classroom ‘Culinary Cultures’: Theorising Postcolonial Food Cultures A Border-Crossing Teaching Body: Reflections on a Decolonial Pedagogy for Literary Studies in a South African Context Teaching Academic Literacy in the Co-curriculum: Creating Culturally Safe Spaces Decolonising the Literary Doctorate

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Book SynopsisHydrocriticism and Colonialism in Latin America is organized around the critical and theoretical “turn” known as hydro-criticism, an innovative approach to the study of the ways in which bodies of water (oceans, seas, rivers, archipelagos, lakes, etc.) impact the study of history, culture, and society. This volume proposes a hydro-critical approach to issues related to the colonial period. The analysed texts demonstrate not only the presence of water and oceanic trajectories as metaphorical devices, but the inherent implication of navigation, ports, islandic territories, drainage systems, floodings and the like in configuration of collective imaginaries, from colonial times to the present. This book encompasses studies of the decisive role water played in the world view from/about the “New World” since the discovery, both for the monarchy and the church, and the impact of oceanic journeys for the advancement of colonization and slavery. In chapters that combine historical, linguistic, literary and ethnographic approaches, this volume constitutes an attempt to expand the scope and methodology of colonial studies. At the same time, the continuity of maritime perspectives reaches the analysis of contemporary literature, thus demonstrating the importance of this critical paradigm for the study of Caribbean cultures. In this respect, studies particularly illuminate the connection between popular beliefs and oceanic dimensions, as well as on issues of gender and ethnicity.Table of Contents1. Introduction: Texts, Textures, and Water Marks2. The Pacific Ocean as a Space of Freedom, Danger, and Economic Success for the Colonial Project in Verdadera descripción de la Provincia y Tierra de Las Esmeraldas3. English and Irish Missionaries in New Spain: A Hydrocolonial Reading of Religion and Empire4. On Paper Ships, Sailors, and Cosmographers: Spanish Maritime Narratives and Political Networks of an Imperial Project5. Imagining a Multi-Modal Digital Corpus of Early Modern Maritime Texts6. Alonso Ramírez’s Circumnavigation of the World (1675–1689) and the Universal Claim to the American Spirit in the Open Seas7. Pantitlán or Desagüe: Technology and Secularization in Colonial Mexico City8. “Water, Only Water on All Parts”: Re/imagining the Middle Passage in Teresa Cárdenas’ Mãe Sereia

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Book SynopsisThis open access book examines how the form of the list features as a tool for meaning-making in the genre of detective fiction from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. The book analyzes how both readers and detectives rely on listing as an ordering and structuring tool, and highlights the crucial role that lists assume in the reading process. It extends the boundaries of an emerging field dedicated to the study of lists in literature and caters to a newly revived interest in form and New Formalist approaches in narratological research. The central aim of this book is to show how detective fiction makes use of lists in order to frame various conceptions of knowledge. The frames created by these lists are crucial to decoding the texts, and they can be used to demonstrate how readers can be engaged in the act of detection or manipulated into accepting certain propositions in the text.Table of Contents1. Introduction: Reading Lists, Listing Clues.- 2. Defining Detective Fiction.- 3. Dossier Novels: The Reader as Detective.- 4. Manipulating Readers: The Novels of Agatha Christie.- 5. Excursus: The Thorndyke Novels and the Language of Science.- 6. Lists and Knowledge.- 7. Conclusion: Models of Knowledge in Detective Fiction.

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Book SynopsisTable of ContentsFrontmatter -- Acknowledgments -- Contents -- Introduction: Ekphrasis, Iconotexts, and Intermediality – the State(s) of the Art(s) -- Ekphrasis and Theories of Reading Visual Representations -- Iconolâtrie et iconoclastie de l’écriture libertine -- Ekphrasis as Art Criticism: Diderot and Fragonard’s “Coresus and Callirhoe” -- Ekphrasis and the Mimetic Crisis of Romanticism -- Ecritures de l’image chez Théophile Gautier -- Icono texts: The Eighteenth Century -- Watteau: The Aesthetics of Pleasure -- Sterne and Fragonard: “The Escapades of Death” -- The Harlot, Her Father, and the Parson: Representing and Interpreting Hogarth in the Eighteenth Century -- La mise en scène de la table de travail: poétologie et épistémologie immanentes chez Guillaume-Thomas Raynal et Alexander von Humboldt -- Icono texts: The Nineteenth Century -- The Strategic Withdrawal from Ekphrasis in Jane Austen’s Novels -- Appropriating Botticelli: English Approaches 1860–1890 -- Entering the Museum of Words: Browning’s “My Last Duchess” and Twentieth-Century Ekphrasis -- Oscar Wilde’s “Impression du matin” – an Intermedial Reading -- Iconotexts: Caricature -- Text as Design in Gillray’s Caricature -- The Battle of the Signs: Robert Crumb’s Visual Reading of James Boswell’s “London Journal” -- Bibliography -- List of Illustrations -- Notes on Contributors -- Index -- Colour Plates -- 418-420

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Book SynopsisCrucial Readings in Functional Grammar isan invaluable resource to anyone working in Functional Grammar, student and scholar alike. It contains important articles that have led to new avenues of research in the theory beyond Dik's two-volume Functional Grammar (1997), each concluded with a short paragraph with suggestions for further research. The book also contains an introduction to current Functional Grammar theory by the editors. Crucial Readings is unique in bringing together in one volume the various ideas that complement Dik's canonical presentation of the theory.The editorial contributionsprovide a comprehensive review of Functional Grammar publications.Trade Review"The book has been carefully edited. [...] In summary, Anstey and Mackenzie have produced a book that fulfils their main purpose in providing a set of key readings in FG which have retained their interest and influence to the present day. The volume ist a welcome addition to the literature."John H. Connolly in: Functions of Language 1/2008Table of ContentsIntroduction Matthew P. Anstey and J. Lachlan Mackenzie Layers and operators in Functional Grammar Kees Hengeveld Toward a unified analysis of terms and predications Jan Rijkhoff Parts of speech Kees Hengeveld Predicates as referring expressions M. Evelien Keizer Places and things J. Lachlan Mackenzie The hierarchical structure of the clause and the typology of adverbial satellites Simon C. Dik, Kees Hengeveld, Elseline Vester, and Co Vet Semantic content and linguistic structure in Functional Grammar. On the semantics of 'nounhood' Peter Harder On assigning pragmatic functions in English J.Lachlan Mackenzie and M. Evelien Keizer The utterance as unit of description: implications for Functional Grammar Mike Hannay The multilayered structure of the utterance Co Vet Functional grammar and lexematics in lexicography Leocadio Martín Mingorance

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Book SynopsisThis book presents reflections on the relationship between narratives and argumentative discourse. It focuses on their functional and structural similarities or dissimilarities, and offers diverse perspectives and conceptual tools for analyzing the narratives’ potential power for justification, explanation and persuasion. Divided into two sections, the first Part, under the title “Narratives as Sources of Knowledge and Argument”, includes five chapters addressing rather general, theoretical and characteristically philosophical issues related to the argumentative analysis and understanding of narratives. We may perceive here how scholars in Argumentation Theory have recently approached certain topics that have a close connection with mainstream discussions in epistemology and the cognitive sciences about the justificatory potential of narratives. The second Part, entitled “Argumentative Narratives in Context”, brings us six more chapters that concentrate on either particular functions played by argumentatively-oriented narratives or particular practices that may benefit from the use of special kinds of narratives. Here the focus is either on the detailed analysis of contextualized examples of narratives with argumentative qualities or on the careful understanding of the particular demands of certain well-defined situated activities, as diverse as scientific theorizing or war policing, that may be satisfied by certain uses of narrative discourse.Trade Review“Narration as Argument is an excellent and informative book that can spur trans-disciplinary conversations with scholars in Black studies, Marxist and feminist theories, literary studies, and media studies, just to name a few.” (Charles Athanasopoulos, Argumentation and Advocacy, Vol. 56 (3), 2020)“It seems clear that Paula Olmos has succeeded in her aim of exhibiting the wide range of approaches to the relation between narration and argument, given the variety of approaches to narration as argument exhibited in these twelve chapters. … She has reserved a table for everyone and bade them sit down side by side, in the hope that they will all begin to talk to one another. It’s a start.” (J. Anthony Blair, Argumentation, Vol. 33, 2019)Table of ContentsChapter 1. Introduction: Narratives, Narrating, Narrators; Paula Olmos.- Part I Narratives as Sources of Knowledge and Argument.- Chapter 2. Narratives and the Concept of Argument; Christopher Tindale.- Chapter 3. Arguing with Stories; Floris Bex and Trevor Bench-Capon.- Chapter 4. Narrative Fiction as a Source of Knowledge; Mitchell Green.- Chapter 5. Analogy, Presupposition and Transcendentality in Narrative Argument; Gilbert Plumer.- Chapter 6. Parables: Crossroads Between the Cognitive Theory of Metaphor and Argumentation Theory; Eduardo de Bustos.- Part II Argumentative Narratives in Context.- Chapter 7. Narratives and Pragmatic Arguments: Iven’s The 400 million; Paul van den Hoven.- Chapter 8. The Sample Convention, or, When Fictionalized Narratives. Can Double as Historical Testimony; Leona Toker.- Chapter 9. From Narrative Arguments to Arguments that Narrate; Adrien Frenay and Marion Carel.- Chapter 10. Narrative as Argument in Atul Gawande’s. “On Washing Hands” and “Letting Go”; James Phelan.- Chapter 11. On Thought Experiments and other Narratives in Scientific Argument; Paula Olmos.- Chapter 12. How to Win Wars: The Role of the War Narrative; Tone Kvernbekk and Ola Bøe-Hansen.

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Book SynopsisStephen Frosh is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, Universityof London, UK, and author of numerous books on psychoanalysis and psychosocial studies,including Hauntings: Psychoanalysis and Ghostly Transmissions (2013) and A Brief Introduction toPsychoanalytic Theory (2012).

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

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

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