Literary theory Books

Book SynopsisThis book considers Mansfield's ambivalent position as a colonial woman writer by examining her contributions to the political weekly The New Age, the avant-garde little magazine Rhythm and the literary journal The Athenaeum.

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Book SynopsisA pivotal work in the history of feminism and a groundbreaking intervention into film theory, Sexuality in the Field of Vision is a brilliantly original exploration of the interface between feminism, psychoanalysis, semiotics and film theoryTrade ReviewFormidably intelligent, eloquent, and knowledgeable. * City Limits *Jacqueline Rose has no peer among critics of her generation. The brilliance of her literary insight, the lucidity of her prose, and the subtlety of her analyses are simply breathtaking. -- Edward Said

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Book Synopsis[Cappello''s] excellent new book-length essay, Lecture... at once defends the lecture and calls for holistic and creative improvements to the form.—The AtlanticIn twenty-first century America, there is so much that holds or demands our attention without requiring it. Imagine the lecture as a radical opening.Mary Cappello''s Lecture is a song for the forgotten art of the lecture. Brimming with energy and erudition, it is an attempt to restore the lecture''s capacity to wander, question, and excite. Cappello draws on examples from Virginia Woolf to Mary Ruefle, Ralph Waldo Emerson to James Baldwin, blending rigorous cultural criticism with personal history to explore the lecture in its many formsfrom the aphorism to the noteand give new life to knowledge's dramatic form.

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Book SynopsisSocialist Cosmopolitanism offers an innovative interpretation of literary works from the Mao era that reads Chinese socialist literature as world literature. Nicolai Volland demonstrates that Chinese socialist literature was not driven solely by politics but by an ambitious—but ultimately doomed—attempt to redraw the literary world map.Trade ReviewNicolai Volland has tackled one of the most provocative issues in modern Chinese and world literature. Chinese socialist literature from the 1940s to the eve of the Great Cultural Revolution has for decades been interpreted solely in terms of propaganda. Volland argues for a more comprehensive understanding of its conception, production, circulation, and reception. Through the prism of socialist cosmopolitanism, Volland offers a new look at issues from translation to transculturation, from the technology of media to the politics of world literature. -- David Der-wei Wang, Harvard UniversityThis book should be required reading for anyone interested in the development of global literary systems in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Volland skillfully sketches the structure of a socialist literary world-system from the Chinese perspective, revealing exciting possibilities for world literature studies. As noteworthy for its sensitive readings of its texts as for its theoretical argument, Volland's book breaks important new ground. -- Alexander Beecroft, University of South CarolinaSocialist Cosmopolitanism forcefully intervenes in the study of modernity, crosscultural circulation, and Communist cultural institutions. The book contributes new paradigms to the study of modern China, world literature, and literary history and criticism. Volland argues that the Maoist "red classics" should be understood as part of the trajectory of literary development in China and abroad. Moreover, he shows that the Cold War ideological polarization was accompanied by a strong cosmopolitan impulse, one that has shaped literary works and the concept of literature itself. -- Yomi Braester, University of WashingtonAn engaging study of Chinese communist literature. * Hyperallergic *Theoretically informed, closely argued, and elegantly written. . . . Socialist Cosmopolitanism is a must-read for anyone interested in Chinese socialist culture and will undoubtedly further animate studies on cosmopolitanisms, transculturation, and world literature among scholars from across disciplines. -- Tie Xiao * Modern Chinese Literature and Culture *Nicolai Volland in Socialist Cosmopolitanism has taken on [a] herculean task, and he has succeeded with nuance and grace. -- Lisa Rofel * The China Journal *Within the growing body of scholarship reassessing the early years of the PRC in the bottom-up perspective of everyday history, Nicolai Volland’s study of the post-1949 literary system represents a valuable contribution. It provides new answers to questions about what ordinary people were commonly reading, how Chinese literature fitted into the new international cultural system centred on Moscow, and how Chinese writers were encouraged to contribute to building the new state. . . . Both historians and literature scholars will therefore find Volland’s study of great value in providing a richer, more nuanced picture of cultural production in the early PRC. -- Sebastian Veg * China Quarterly *[Socialist Cosmopolitanism] makes an important contribution to our understanding of both modern Chinese literature and global socialist culture, and is written in an extremely accessible voice that makes it a genuine pleasure to read. -- Krista Van Fleit * China Perspectives *This book is a valuable addition to Western studies of the culture of the early years of the People’s Republic. . . . Volland’s contribution demonstrates the international dimension of Chinese culture, in particular the profound influence of the Soviet Union, in this pivotal period. -- Richard King * Modern Language Quarterly *Socialist Cosmopolitanism enriches our understanding of the much discussed notion of 'world literature' by situating Chinese socialist literature as part of a transnational and pansocialist literary front. -- Gal Gvili * Comparative Literature Studies *Recommended. * Choice *Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. The Politics of Texts in Motion2. The Geopoetics of Land Reform in Northeast Asia3. Fictionalizing the International Working Class4. Soviet Spaceships in Socialist China5. Sons and Daughters of the Revolution6. Mapping the Brave New World of LiteratureConclusionNotesGlossary of Chinese CharactersBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisIn Suppose a Sentence, Brian Dillon turns his attention to the oblique and complex pleasures of the sentence. A series of essays prompted by a single sentence – from Shakespeare to Gertrude Stein, John Ruskin to Joan Didion – the book explores style, voice, and language, along with the subjectivity of reading. Both an exercise in practical criticism and a set of experiments or challenges, Suppose a Sentence is a polemical and personal reflection on the art of the sentence in literature. Whether the sentence in question is a rigorous expression of a state of vulnerability, extremity, even madness, or a carefully calibrated arrangement, Dillon examines not only how it works and why but also, in the course of the book, what the sentence once was, what it is today, and what it might become tomorrow.Trade Review‘Each chapter focuses on a sentence chosen not for its historical importance, nor for its connection to the book’s other essays, but simply out of love. As Dillon puts it, his chief criterion is a sense of “affinity.” What emerges is a record of appreciation, a rare treasure in an age that rewards bashing.’ — Becca Rothfeld, New York Times‘Essayist and critic Brian Dillon is in thrall to sentences. For a quarter of a century, he tells us in his marvelous new book, he has been collecting them, in “the back pages of whatever notebook I happen to be using,” ... The product of decades of close reading, Suppose a Sentence is eclectic yet tightly shaped. Mr. Dillon has a taste for the more eccentric prose stylists, and lights with delight upon the likes of John Ruskin ... His essay on Thomas De Quincey is a small masterpiece ... The best and certainly most beautiful piece in the book is on Roland Barthes, “the patron saint of my sentences” without whom “I would never have written a word.” It is easy to understand what Mr. Dillon means when he speaks of Barthes, one of whose books is called A Lover’s Discourse, as “the most seductive writer I know,” for Mr. Dillon’s own book is a record of successive enrapturings.’ — John Banville, Wall Street Journal ‘Dillon, with his Suppose a Sentence, a collection of reflections on the nature of the sentence, made me wonder why any of the rest of us bother trying to write non-fiction.’ — Ian Sansom, TLS‘The book has a lot of what I can only call pleasure—of the kind that I imagine athletes or dancers experience when they are doing what they do, which is then communicated to those watching them do it. I share with Dillon some misgivings about general theories and overarching ideas, but in thinking about the writing I enjoy most, this quality feels like the one constant: that the author takes some pleasure in using these muscles and finding them capable of what they are asked. That delight is evident both in the sentences Dillon looks at and in those he writes himself.’ — Hasan Altaf, Paris Review‘Reducing great writers and works to a single sentence is a provocative act, but one that in an age of 280-character opinions does not feel inappropriate. Used as we are to monosyllabic messaging and governance by tweet, it is an important reminder of the potential beauty, rather than mere convenience, that can be conjured in concision.[...] Suppose a Sentence is an absorbing defence of literary originality and interpretation, inviting us not just to take words as they first appear but to let them abstract themselves before our very eyes.’ — Chris Allnut, Financial Times‘Taking as his starting point a sentence that has intrigued him for years or, in some cases, come into his ken more recently, Brian Dillon in Suppose a Sentence ranges through the centuries exploring the associations of what he observes and discovers about his object of study and its writer, through biographical anecdote, linguistic speculation, and a look at related writings. This rich and various collection resembles a beguiling, inspiriting conversation with a personable and wry intelligence who keeps you happily up late, incites you to note some follow-up reading, and opens your eyes further to the multifarious syntactical and emotional capacities of even a few joined words of English. Enjoyable and thought-provoking reading!’ — Lydia Davis, author of Can’t and Won’t‘Dillon has brilliantly reinvented the commonplace book in this witty, erudite, and addictively readable guide to the sentences that have stayed with him over the years.’ — Jenny Offill, author of Weather

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Book SynopsisThough best known for his drama and fiction, Oscar Wilde was also a pioneering critic. He introduced the idea that criticism was an act of creation, not just appraisal. Wilde transformed the genre by extending its ambit beyond art to include society itself, all while injecting it with his trademark wit and style.Trade ReviewNo, it’s not poetry, but it’s the next best thing: prose that floats along on rhyme and rhythm…Rejoice in a book made up of what one essay calls ‘passages…[of]…pure and perfect beauty.’ * The Tablet *A remarkable collection…Students and scholars of literature will relish these witty, acerbic outings. * Publishers Weekly (starred review) *This is an absorbing volume for which all Wilde fans should be grateful. -- D. J. Taylor * Washington Examiner *A lucid guide to the dissident thought of Oscar Wilde, who attacked the genteel gender norms and philanthropic pieties of imperial Britain. At this moment of cultural crisis in the dwindling humanities, Wilde's eloquent defense of individualism, as well as his celebration of the beauty and power of art, could not be more timely. -- Camille Paglia, author of Sexual PersonaeWilde was a first-rate critic and an essayist and a thoughtful provocateur years before he became a successful playwright, a scandalous novelist, or a queer icon: he’s still a terrific critic today, with a range wider than almost anyone knows. Here are essays you’ve read if you care about Wilde already (‘The Decay of Lying’) and essays even scholars may not have seen. Here is the impossible socialist, anti-populist radical, anti-Platonic creator of Platonic dialogues, infinitely insatiable individualist, and, of course, ‘The Critic as Artist.’ If you’re like me, you owe it to yourself to return to him and check him out. We shall not see his like again. -- Stephanie Burt, author of Don’t Read PoetryIt is refreshing to see Wilde the critic take center stage. This is an astute selection showing the full range of the essays, dialogues, and reviews that helped make Oscar's name, brought together expertly by Nicholas Frankel, whose characteristically insightful introduction is essential reading. -- Kate Hext, author of Walter Pater

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Book SynopsisToy Stories: Analyzing the Child in Nineteenth-Century Literature explores the stakes of recurrent depictions of children’s violent, damaging, and tenuously restorative play with objects within a long nineteenth century of fictional and educational writing. As Vanessa Smith shows us, these scenes of aggression and anxiety cannot be squared with the standard picture of domestic childhood across that period. Instead, they seem to attest to the kinds of enactments of infant distress we would normally associate with post-psychoanalytic modernity, creating a ripple effect in the literary texts that nest them: regressing developmental narratives, giving new value to wooden characters, exposing Realism’s solid objects to odd fracture, and troubling distinctions between artificial and authentic interiority. Toy Stories is the first study to take these scenes of anger and overwhelm seriously, challenging received ideas about both the nineteenth century and its literary forms. Radically re-conceiving nineteenth-century childhood and its literary depiction as anticipating the scenes, theories, and methodologies of early child analysis, Toy Stories proposes a shared literary and psychoanalytic discernment about child’s play that in turn provides a deep context for understanding both the “development” of the novel and the keen British uptake of Melanie Klein’s and Anna Freud’s interventions in child therapy. In doing so, the book provides a necessary reframing of the work of Klein and Freud and their fractious disagreement about the interior life of the child and its object-mediated manifestations.Table of ContentsPreface: A Toy Is Being Beaten | ix Introduction: Child’s Play | 1 1 Proper Objects | 27 2 Possible Persons | 54 3 Our Plays | 82 4 Bildung Blocks | 110 Conclusion: Toy Stories | 137 Acknowledgments | 147 Notes | 149 Works Cited | 189 Index | 205

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Book SynopsisEd Simon is editor of Belt Magazine and emeritus staff writer at The Millions. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Paris Review Daily, The Public Domain Review, The Hedgehog Review, JSTOR Daily, McSweeney's, Jacobin, The New Republic, Religion Dispatches, Killing the Buddha, and The Washington Post, among dozens of others. He is the author of over a dozen books, including Pandemonium: A Visual History of Demonology.

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Book SynopsisThe Short Story after Apartheid offers the first major study of the anglophone short story in South Africa since apartheid’s end. By focusing on the short story this book complicates models of South African literature dominated by the novel and contributes to a much-needed generic and formalist turn in postcolonial studies. Literary texts are sites of productive struggle between formal and extra-formal concerns, and these brief, fragmentary, elliptical, formally innovative stories offer perspectives that reframe or revise important concerns of post-apartheid literature: the aesthetics of engaged writing, the politics of the past, class and race, the legacies of violence, and the struggle over the land. Through an analysis of key texts from the period by Nadine Gordimer, Ivan Vladislavić, Zoë Wicomb, Phaswane Mpe, and Henrietta Rose-Innes, this book assesses the place of the short story in post-apartheid writing and develops a fuller model of how artworks allow and disallow forms of social thought.Table of ContentsIntroduction: Long Story Short Nadine Gordimer: Past, Present, and Future A Moment’s Monument: Counter-Monuments in Ivan Vladislavić Zoë Wicomb and the “Problem of Class” Phaswane Mpe’s Aesthetics of Brooding Spatial Form in Henrietta Rose-Innes Conclusion: Small Medium at Large

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Book SynopsisIn this experimental work of ecocriticism, Vincent Bruyere confronts the seeming pointlessness of the humanities amid spectacularly negative future projections of environmental collapse. The vanitas paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries dazzlingly depict heaps of riches alongside skulls, shells, and hourglasses. Sometimes even featuring the illusion that their canvases are peeling away, vanitas images openly declare their own pointlessness in relation to the future. This book takes inspiration from the vanitas tradition to fearlessly contemplate the stakes of the humanities in the Anthropocene present, when the accumulated human record could well outlast the climate conditions for our survival. Staging a series of unsettling encounters with early modern texts and images whose claims of relevance have long since expired, Bruyere experiments with the interpretive affordances of allegory and fairytale, still life and travelogues. Each chapter places a vanitas motif—canvas, debris, toxics, paper, ark, meat, and light—in conversation with stories and images of the Anthropocene, from the Pleistocene Park geoengineering project to toxic legacies to in-vitro meat. Considering questions of quiet erasure and environmental memory, this book argues we ought to keep reading, even by the flickering light of extinction.Trade Review"If all images are vanitas, how should we look, in the Anthropocene present, at works from the past? Bruyere reveals a profound disruption in our ability to represent 'the world without us' with familiar tools of mastery or closure."—Karen Pinkus, Cornell University"Concise in form, its arguments well crafted, this book reads with inspired conviction. By way of reading the future past, Bruyere delivers a saga and a symptom of the state of things in the fragile world in which we live."—Tom Conley, Harvard University"Timely and provocative, this book deftly and courageously broaches the topic of human extinction while developing truly original philosophical arguments. There is no work that is able to approach the end-of-the-world theme with the pitch-perfect tone Bruyere brings to his discussion."—Lynne Huffer, Emory UniversityTable of ContentsPrologue: Of Skulls and Shells 1. Canvas 2. Debris 3. Toxics 4. Paper 5. Ark 6. Meat Epilogue: Light

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Book SynopsisVery Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring Imagination: A Very Short Introduction explores imagination as a cognitive power and an essential dimension of human flourishing, demonstrating how imagination plays multiple roles in human cognition and shapes humanity in profound ways. Examining philosophical, evolutionary, and literary perspectives on imagination, the author shows how this facility, while potentially distorting, both frees us from immediate reality and enriches our sense of it, making possible our experience of a meaningful world. Long regarded by philosophers as an elusive and mysterious capacity of the human mind, imagination has been the subject of extraordinary ambivalence, described as both dangerous and divine, as merely peripheral to rationality and as essential to all thinking. Drawing on philosophy, aesthetics, literary and cognitive theory as well as the human sciences, this book engages the dramatic conceptual history of imagination together Table of ContentsAcknowledgements 1: What is imagination? 2: Imagination in human evolution 3: From divine madness to cognitive power 4: The productive and aesthetic imagination 5: The augmentation of reality 6: Creativity from invention to wonder References and further reading

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Book SynopsisLively, original and highly readable, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory is the essential guide to literary studies. Starting at The Beginning' and concluding with The End', chapters range from the familiar, such as Character', Narrative' and The Author', to the more unusual, such as Secrets', Pleasure' and Ghosts'. Now in its sixth edition, Bennett and Royle's classic textbook successfully illuminates complex ideas by engaging directly with literary works, so that a reading of Jane Eyre opens up ways of thinking about racial difference, for example, while Chaucer, Monty Python and Hilary Mantel are all invoked in a discussion of literature and laughter.The sixth edition has been revised and updated throughout. In addition, four new chapters Literature', Loss', Human' and Migrant' engage with exciting recent developments in literary studies. As well as fully up-to-date further reading sections at the end of each chapter, the book contains a coTrade ReviewPraise for previous editions:‘This is a book which students in every introductory course on criticism and theory would benefit from having.’ Derek Attridge, University of York‘[Bennett and Royle have] cracked the problem of how to be introductory and sophisticated, accessible but not patronising.’ Peter Buse, English Subject Centre Newsletter‘Sparkling, enthusiastic and admirably well-informed.’ Hélène Cixous‘The best introduction to literary studies on the market.’ Jonathan Culler, Cornell University‘This excellent book is very well written and an outstanding introduction to literary studies. An extremely stimulating introduction.’ Robert Eaglestone, Royal Holloway College, University of London‘Fresh, surprising, never boring, and engagingly humorous, while remaining intellectually serious and challenging . . . This is a terrific book, and I’m very glad that it exists.’ Peggy Kamuf, University of Southern California‘An exceptional book. It is completely different from anything else currently available, refreshing, extremely well written and original in so many ways . . . It is quite the best introductory book that I have ever come across.’ Philip Martin, Sheffield Hallam University‘By far the best introduction we have, bar none. This unmatched book is for everyone: from those beginning literary study, through advanced students, and up to teachers; even those who, like me, have been pro- fessing literature for years and years.’ J. Hillis Miller, University of California‘All the chapters in the volume are illuminating, informative and original.’ Robert Mills, King’s College London‘I don’t know of any book that could, or does, compete with this one. It is irreplaceable.’ Richard Rand, University of Alabama‘Bennett and Royle have written a pathbreaking work’ Alan Shima, University of Gävle‘It is by far the best and most readable of all such introductions that I know of’ Hayden White, University of California at Santa Cruz‘The most un-boring, unnerving, unpretentious textbook I’ve ever come across.’ Elizabeth Wright, University of CambridgeTable of ContentsAlternative Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsHow to Read This BookTrigger Warning and Spoiler Alert The Beginning Literature Readers and Reading The Author The Text and the World The Uncanny Monuments Narrative Character Voice Figures and Tropes Creative Writing Feelings Loss Laughter The Tragic Wounds History Me Eco Animals Human Ghosts Body Moving Pictures Sexual Difference God Ideology Love Desire Queer Suspense Racial Difference Migrant The Colony Mutant The Performative Secrets Pleasure War The End GlossaryA Note on Texts UsedLiterary Works DiscussedBibliography of Critical and Theoretical WorksIndex

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Book SynopsisA provocative, highly accessible journey to the heart of Sophocles’ Antigone elucidating why it keeps resurfacing as a central text of Western thought and Western culture. There is probably no classical text that has inspired more interpretation, critical attention, and creative response than Sophocles’ Antigone. The general perspective from which the book is written could be summarized with this simple question: What is it about the figure of Antigone that keeps haunting us? Why do all these readings and rewritings keep emerging? To what kind of always contemporary contradiction does the need, the urge to reread and reimagine Antigone—in all kinds of contexts and languages—correspond? As key anchor points of this general interrogation, three particular “obsessions” have driven the author’s thinking and writing about Antigone. First is the issue of violence. The violence in Antigone is the opposite of “graphic” as we have come to know it in movies and in the media; rather, it is sharp and piercing, it goes straight to the bone. It is the violence of language, the violence of principles, the violence of desire, the violence of subjectivity. Then there is the issue of funerary rites and their role in appeasing the specific “undeadness” that seems to be the other side of human life, its irreducible undercurrent that death alone cannot end and put to rest. This issue prompted the author to look at the relationship between language, sexuality, death, and “second death.” The third issue, which constitutes the focal point of the book, is Antigone’s statement that if it were her children or husband lying unburied out there, she would let them rot and not take it upon herself to defy the decree of the state. The author asks, how does this exclusivist, singularizing claim (she would do it only for Polyneices), which she uses to describe the “unwritten law” she follows, tally with Antigone’s universal appeal and compelling power? Attempting to answer this leads to the question of what this particular (Oedipal) family’s misfortune, of which Antigone chooses to be the guardian, shares with the general condition of humanity. Which in turn forces us to confront the seemingly self-evident question: “What is incest?” Let Them Rot is Alenka Zupančič’s absorbing and succinct guided tour of the philosophical and psychoanalytic issues arising from the Theban trilogy. Her original and surprising intervention into the broad and prominent field of study related to Sophocles’ Antigone illuminates the classical text’s ongoing relevance and invites a wide readership to become captivated by its themes.Table of ContentsPreface | vii Prologue | 1 1. Violence, Terror, and Unwritten Laws | 9 2. Death, Undeadness, and Funeral Rites | 21 3. “I’d Let Them Rot” | 50 Works Cited | 83 Index | 85

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Book SynopsisAcclaimed critic Sianne Ngai theorizes the gimmick as an aesthetic category reflecting the fundamental laws of capitalism. Gimmicks make promises of saving labor and increasing value that we distrust but also find attractive. Exploring the use of this form, Ngai shows how its aesthetic dissatisfactions reflect deeper anxieties about capitalism.Trade ReviewA culmination of Ngai’s work as a critic…Ngai makes the case that the gimmick, whose value we regularly disparage, is of tremendous critical value. The gimmick, she contends, is the capitalist form par excellence…Ngai’s study lies somewhere between critical theory and Sontag’s best work. -- Andrew Koenig * Los Angeles Review of Books *One of the most creative humanities scholars working today…Ngai sets off on another mind-blowing exploration, this time drawing a line between our own judgements of productivity, as well as considering what entertainment is worth to us. My god, it’s so good. -- Olivia Rutigliano * Literary Hub *Theory of the Gimmick is a masterpiece—a culmination of the dazzling project begun in Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings and elaborated in Our Aesthetic Categories, both celebrated books that have anchored affect theory to a strong account of tone and form. It is a major advance in aesthetic theory, and Marxist theory in particular, one that could help us all get over our Frankfurt melancholy and down to the garrulous work of actually naming the dynamics that produce art and artistic judgment under capitalism. -- Christopher Nealon, author of The Matter of CapitalThe gimmick draws out our unease about capitalism’s seductions, deflating their lofty appeals with the suddenness of a punch line. It is an aesthetic category that dunks on capitalism’s too-good-to-be-true promises by dunking on itself…It is undeniable that part of what makes Ngai’s analyses of aesthetic categories so appealing—so appealing as to even appear to raise the esteem of the object under analysis—is simply her capacity to speak about them brilliantly. -- Jane Hu * Bookforum *In its extraordinary analysis of the gimmick as a compromised expression of what Walter Benjamin or Fredric Jameson have labeled the age of “late capitalism,” Ngai’s book—much like her previous book publications—is a stellar critique and rethinking of Continental aesthetic theory. …Ngai’s work will not and must not be bypassed by future theories of aesthetics and consumer capitalism, not least in American studies. -- Dustin Breitenwischer * Amerikastudien *Ngai exposes capitalism’s tricks in her mind-blowing study of the time- and labor-saving devices we call gimmicks. -- Katrina Forrester * New Statesman *Ngai tracks the gimmick through a number of guises: stage props, wigs, stainless-steel banana slicers, temp agencies, fraudulent photographs, subprime loans, technological doodads, the novel of ideas…[She] has slowly been building a reputation as one of America’s most original and penetrating cultural theorists. -- Charlie Tyson * Chronicle of Higher Education *Ngai is a keen analyst of overlooked or denigrated categories in art and life…Moves quickly from the fantastical contraptions of Rube Goldberg to the philosophical machinery in Kant or Marx that might explain their appeal…Highly original in theme and suggestive in approach. -- Brian Dillon * 4Columns *Ngai has done so much to illuminate. -- David Trotter * London Review of Books *Ngai’s penetrating and at times humorous work feels uncommonly generous at a deeply polarized moment when emotions run high and much theory and criticism has taken on an increasingly grave, moralizing tone…Explores across a remarkably broad range of works of art, film, and literature the ‘gimmick,’ a simultaneously attractive and repulsive form that links the aesthetic to the economic. -- Matthew Rana * Kunstkritikk *It is the simplicity and vernacular quality of Sianne Ngai’s central concept that elevates this book to a classic in the making. Ngai’s most important contribution to Marxist cultural and economic theory comes from her insight that—like the judgment of the beautiful for Kant—the gimmick is a subjective category, neither cognitive nor ethical, but historical through and through. The gimmick is a way to bring together the theory of the commodity with Kant’s category of judgment. Through Ngai, we are able to vernacularize Marx and to understand the most basic but enigmatic proposition: that truth and appearance are identical in the commodity. -- Timothy Bewes, author of Reification: Or, The Anxiety of Late CapitalismBooks of this ambition and accomplishment are rare! Theory of the Gimmick continues the work of Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and others in seriously putting together aesthetic theory and Marxist theories of capital. In an impossibly erudite, wide-ranging, and theoretically sophisticated argument, Ngai gives us a unique insight into the relationship between labor, time, and value in a capitalist economy. This book is a major event in American intellectual life. -- Jonathan Flatley, author of Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of ModernismThe whole book suggests that critique is an occasion for delight, as the explication of how the gimmicks Ngai finds everywhere from Henry James to a toy box reveal the inner workings of capital is accomplished with a joyful relentlessness. The book is a page turner. -- Theo Davis * American Literary History *[A] groundbreaking argument. * Choice *[Theory of the Gimmick] firstly offers an eminently usable theory of the gimmick, and secondly offers a series of masterful extensions of that theory in practically unrepeatable analyses of texts…where we witness, in addition to Ngai the theorist, Ngai the virtually peerless reader. -- Astrid Lorange * Sydney Review of Books *

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Book SynopsisSpectacles and Specters draws on theories of performativity to conceptualize the entanglements of law and political violence, offering a radical departure from accounts that consider political trials as instrumental in exercising or containing political violence. Legal scholar Başak Ertür argues instead that making sense of the often incalculable interpenetrations of law, politics, and violence in trials requires shifting the focus away from law’s instrumentality to its performativity. Ertür develops a theory of political trials by reconstructing and building on a legacy of critical thought on Nuremberg in close engagement with theories of performativity. She then offers original case studies that introduce a new perspective by looking beyond the Holocaust trials, to the Armenian genocide and its fragmentary legal aftermaths. These cases include the 1921 trial of Soghomon Tehlirian, the 2007-21 Hrant Dink Murder Trial, and the 2015 case before the European Court of Human Rights concerning the denial of the Armenian genocide. Enabling us to capture the various modalities in which the political emerges in, through and in relation to legal forms on the stage of the trial, this focus on law’s performativity also allows us to account for how sovereign schemes can misfire and how trials can come to have unintended political lives and afterlives. Further, it reveals how law is entangled with and perpetuates certain histories of violence, rather than simply ever mastering these histories or providing closure.Table of ContentsPreface | ix Introduction | 1 Performativity and Performance • Performativity and Errancy • Rethinking the Politics of Trials • Law and Violence: An Oblique Address PART I: A PERFORMATIVE THEORY OF POLITICAL TRIALS 1 Theorizing Political Trials | 21 Kirchheimer: Setting the Parameters • Judgment on Nuremberg • Arendt: A Trial of One’s Own? • The Breach That Speaks the Bind • Shklar: “There’s Politics and Politics” • Between Atrocity and Legal Violence 2 The Form and Substance of Doing Justice: Law, Performativity, Performance | 52 Not a Profound Word • Law and Performativity • Masquerade and Fate • The Trial: Performativity and Performance 3 Sovereign Infelicities | 76 Three Scenes • Sovereign Spectacles • Sovereign Performatives? • (Mis)Reading the Performative as Performance • Derrida’s Austin: Sovereign Pretensions • Performing the (Structural) Unconscious • Undoing Sovereignty PART II: TRACING THE SPECTERS IN THE SPECTACLES 4 Ghosts in the Courtroom: The Trial of Soghomon Tehlirian | 103 Talat • Tehlirian • Enter Ghost • The Telegrams • The Haunted Hunter • The Many Lives of Tehlirian • The Politics of Haunting 5 Spectral Legacies: Legal Aftermaths of the Armenian Genocide | 131 Legal Returns • Atemporal Histories of Terror • Process unto Oblivion • “Genocide” as Counter-Memory 6 Law of Denial: The Armenian Genocide before the European Court of Human Rights | 156 The Envoy • The Judge, The Historian, and the Politician • Judging the Presence of the Past Conclusion | 175 Acknowledgments | 187 Notes | 191 Index | 223

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewBarchas is indeed the ultimate Austen book hunter, and we are the grateful recipients of her obsession.—Austenprose - A Jane Austen BlogOver the last 25 years, amid the releases of various screen adaptations imagining new lives for her novels, the critical conversation around Jane Austen has been much occupied with the diverse responses of her diverse reading communities: academic and popular, elite and fan-based. Janine Barchas's exuberantly illustrated study, The Lost Books of Jane Austen, rides this wave with panache.—Kathryn Sutherland, New York TimesJanine Barchas leads her readers on a journey into the bibliographically uncharted land of unidentified reprints and cast-off mass-marketed paperbacks to discover who was reading Austen and when and why. As a study of packaging and design, it is lavishly illustrated, but that is a mere bonus to the author's brilliant thesis and erudite delivery. Even if Austen isn't your cup of tea, this volume will change the way you think about publishers and readers. It's a landmark in the scholarship of book history.—Rebecca Rego Barry, Fine Books & CollectionsFor all the Janeites on your list, reach for The Lost Books of Jane Austen . . . it's a fascinating, richly illustrated study of what we can learn from the numerous popular editions of Austen's novels that appeared during the 19th and 20th centuries.—Michael Dirda, The Washington PostIn addition to the vivid reproductions and Barchas' careful narrative of Austen's publishing history, The Lost Books of Jane Austen connects surviving cheap editions with their owners, and Barchas shares what she's found of their histories. It makes for an unexpectedly personal touch in this scholarly tome – one that makes you feel that any copy of Austen's work you have has value to history, and by extension, you do, too.—Robert Faires, The Austin Chronicle. . . a beautifully illustrated exploration, indeed compendium, of the popular editions of Austen's novels that have appeared over the last two centuries . . . The lesson of this delicious book is that [Jane Austen] was even more popular for even longer with an even greater variety of readers than we ever thought.—John Mullan, The GuardianThe history of Austen's popularity is the subject of Janine Barchas's important and groundbreaking The Lost Books of Jane Austen. Barchas is a book historian, with access to an extraordinary private collection of Jane Austen editions. Drawing on far-ranging evidence, she examines popular books that did not make it into scholarly libraries.—Paula Byrne, Times Literary SupplementCompelling reading, both as social history and as literary detective work . . . [The Lost Books of Jane Austen] will delight Janeites and bibliophiles in equal measure. An outstanding addition to any book-lover's library.—Jane Austen's Regency WorldIt's not hard to find books on books, but like any self-reflective medium, it's harder to find preaching that carries beyond the chorus. Remarkably, The Lost Books of Jane Austen by Janine Barchas a University of Texas English professor and Austen scholar finds something fresh to say about the exhaustedly-mined author. It's a visual study of Austen's publishing history that, in many ways, provides a wider history of how early popular novels traveled across borders and class.—Christopher Borrelli, Chicago TribuneBarchas provides the deep historical substratum that underlies [Austen's] enduring popularity and marketability.—Louis J. Kern, The Key ReporterIf you have any serious interest at all in Jane Austen, then YOU MUST READ THIS BOOK.—Susannah Fullerton, President of the Jane Austen Society of AustraliaI laughed, I cried, I learned — I was wowed!—Deborah Barnum, JASNA NewsBarchas has written a superbly original book, a work of literary archaeology, and the icing on the cake is that it's a beautifully produced publication in its own right – filled with over a hundred colour photographs of various editions of Austen that are as gorgeous as the couture on show in Emma, the latest film version of one of her novels.—Sean Sheehan, The PrismaA beautiful, completely unexpected (to me) spectacularly illustrated, wonderfully researched book about publishing, Jane Austen, her readership (and its academic misapprehension), and more. The pages turn themselves and there's a WOW! on every page, often several of them in a paragraph.—Jack Cella, The Book Beat[A] powerful, beautifully timed and precisely sequenced book.—Tony Voss, The Jane Austen Society of AustraliaAn enjoyable book to browse, with its beautiful illustrations, The Lost Books of Jane Austen describes a journey of hands-on research that may well kindle, or rekindle, enthusiasm for a form of archival work that often needs to leave the archives. The sheer amount of research is impressive, providing a slew of materials for further analysis and rediscovery work.—Modern Language Quarterlyboth entertaining and profound...The story Barchas tells is dynamic and playful, moving with the speed of the trains whose rise to prominence made the Railway Editions discussed throughout the book such a ready venue for the popular dispersal of Austen novels.—Erin M. Goss, European Romantic Reviewanother ground-breaking work.—Gill Ballinger, University of the West of England, Modern Language Review. . . a fascinating monograph that delves into the history of those forgotten books.—Raquel C. Pico, Yorokobu MagazineIlluminating....Barchas's observant eye for the details of fonts and engraving, her inventiveness and persistence of approach, allow her to build on the ironic tension between ephemera, preservation, and remembrance, offering an important alternative history not just of Austen's canonization but also of a lost diversity of readerships and the institutionalization and decay of literary scholarship.—Eighteenth-Century StudiesTable of ContentsPreface Vignette I. Marianne & Gertrude Introduction. Austen on the Cheap Vignette II. Emma at the Seaside Chapter 1. Paperback Fighter: Austen for the People Vignette III. The Old Sea Captain & William Price Chapter 2. Sense, Sensibility, and Soap: Lever Promotions in the 1890s Vignette IV. Charlotte & a Real Castle Chapter 3. Looking Divine: Wrapping Austen in the Religious Vignette V. Young Heman's Summer in Paris Chapter 4. Selling with Paintings: A Curious History of the Cheap Prestige Reprint Vignette VI. Lady Isabella's Mansfield Park Chapter 5. Pinking Jane Austen: The Turn to "Chick Lit" Vignette VII. Annie's Prized Gift CodaAcknowledgments Notes Selected Works Cited Index

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Book SynopsisIsabel Hofmeyr traces the relationship between print culture, colonialism, and the ocean through the institution of the late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British colonial custom houses, which acted as censors and pronounced on copyright and checked imported printed matter for piracy, sedition, or obscenity.Trade Review“As we have come to expect from Isabel Hofmeyr, Dockside Reading is dazzlingly creative, intellectually playful, and immaculately crafted. This is a brilliant history of the ideas and textual forms that emerged from the damp crates that customs officials scoured at the water’s edge for signs of contamination. Setting sail from South Africa, ranging across the world’s oceans, this is a quietly revolutionary, fully aquatic literary history for our times.” -- Sunil Amrith, Dhawan Professor of History, Yale University“What happens to books when they cross borders? Isabel Hofmeyr sets her radically new history of literature not in the library but at the dock. In pages where authors and scholars are upstaged by censors, customs officers, and even dockhands, she challenges literary critics to think beyond the text as a static entity tied to a single nation or a single landmass. This is that rare book that will make it impossible to continue doing business as usual—for literary critics, for legal scholars, and for book historians.” -- Leah Price, author of * What We Talk about When We Talk About Books: The History and Future of Reading *“Hofmeyr addresses themes that acknowledge but transcend the particularities of place, revealing instead the connecting threads that bind disparate parts of the world together.” -- Dane Kennedy * International Journal of African Historical Studies *“Hofmeyr’s scholarship is exemplary in its marriage of evocative detail with magisterial overview. She gives a compelling account of how customs procedure developed and changed over the course of almost a century. . . . She teaches us a new way to read.” -- Matthew P.M. Kerr * Modern Language Review *"[Hofmeyr's] work sheds important light on the interdependency between reading practices and the book as object. . . . Hofmeyr deftly interweaves her research into customs documents with environmental and postcolonial theory, animating what is usually perceived as a dull or colorless archive through semantic resignification." -- Neelam Srivastava * Journal of Postcolonial Inquiry *"In her stimulating investigation, Dockside Reading, Isabel Hofmeyr offers a fresh perspective on book history in the British Empire." -- Katharine Anderson * Journal of British Studies *"Hofmeyr has produced a remarkable volume combining elements of both historical and 'literary' scholarship. It is a must read for those who study English Literature, the British Empire, the history of material culture, and international trade transactions of both human and non-human 'cargo.'” -- Paul Chiudiza Banda * African Studies Review *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction. Hydrocolonialism: The View from the Dockside 1 1. The Custom House and Hydrocolonial Governance 27 2. Customs and Objects on a Hydrocolonial Frontier 39 3. Copyright on a Hydrocolonial Frontier 49 4. Censorship on a Hydrocolonial Frontier 63 Conclusion. Dockside Genres and Postcolonial Literature 77 Notes 85 Bibliography 103 Index 117

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Book SynopsisFrom medieval contemplation to the early modern cosmopoetic imagination, to the invention of aesthetic experience, to nineteenth-century decadent literature, and to early-twentieth century essayistic forms of writing and film, Niklaus Largier shows that mystical practices have been reinvented across the centuries, generating a notion of possibility with unexpected critical potential. Arguing for a new understanding of mystical experience, Largier foregrounds the ways in which devotion builds on experimental practices of figuration in order to shape perception, emotions, and thoughts anew. Largier illuminates how devotional practices are invested in the creation of possibilities, and this investment has been a key element in a wide range of experimental engagements in literature and art from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, and most recently in forms of "new materialism." Read as a history of the senses and emotions, the book argues that mystical and devotional practices have long been invested in the modulating and reconfiguring of sensation, affects, and thoughts. Read as a book about practices of figuration, it questions ordinary protocols of interpretation in the humanities, and the priority given to a hermeneutic understanding of texts and cultural artifacts.Trade Review"This is a truly original work, grounded in wonderfully wide and deep learning. It is also a profound reflection on the ethical life and the role figuration might play within it. There is nothing like it that I know of, nor could anyone without Largier's range of learning and depth of thought have written it."—Amy Hollywood, author of Acute Melancholia and Other Essays"Figures of Possibility is a singular achievement, both as a work of breathtaking scholarship and as a new and exciting theory of aesthetic experience. The writing is exceptionally clear; the prose is passionate, beautiful, and compelling. Largier turns rigorous scholarship on medieval and early modern mysticism into a new approach to reading literature and aesthetic experience."—Eric Santner, author of Untying Things Together"Figures of Possibility is an ambitious, original, and thought-provoking book."—Lieke Smits, Material Religion

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Book SynopsisFrom his arrival in Britain in the 1950s and involvement in the New Left, to founding the field of cultural studies and examining race and identity in the 1990s and early 2000s, Stuart Hall has been central to shaping many of the cultural and political debates of our time. Essential Essays—a landmark two-volume set—brings together Stuart Hall''s most influential and foundational works. Spanning the whole of his career, these volumes reflect the breadth and depth of his intellectual and political projects while demonstrating their continued vitality and importance.Volume 1: Foundations of Cultural Studies focuses on the first half of Hall''s career, when he wrestled with questions of culture, class, representation, and politics. This volume''s stand-out essays include his field-defining “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies';the prescient “The Great Moving Right Show,” which first identified the emergent mode of authoTrade Review"Anyone whose work is informed, 'in the last instance,' by Cultural Studies will find much that is helpfully familiar in it as well as new connections, new applications, new ways of '[penetrating] the disorderly surface of things to another level of understanding,' as Hall says, invoking Marx, in the epilogue. This seems especially urgent as the ascendancy of the far Right coincides with the wholesale neoliberalization of the humanities, as Hall predicted in his 'Theoretical Legacies' lecture. It is obviously not a question of 'going back' to Hall for a truer or more 'authentic' form of Cultural Studies than that in practice today. But there is much in his legacy that illuminates the dynamics of the present, and much to put into dialogue with contemporary scholarship and practice. Morley's collection reminds us how important it is for genuine intellectual work to articulate competing and contradictory paradigms together, to work, as Hall did, from the points of contestation and conflict rather than seek solace in abstractions. This, finally, is the 'essential' in the essays assembled here." -- Liane Tanguay * American Book Review *“Along with the other volumes that Duke University Press has published, these two books of collected essays are to be welcomed. They allow us to see a fertile mind in action, engaged in and with the real world. It is a model well worth emulating.” -- Michael W. Apple * Educational Policy *“As one of the foremost intellectuals of his generation, [Hall] has made an enormous contribution to cultural and political thought, and his work has had a lasting impact in both social sciences and the humanities…. This collection is a treasure trove of Hall’s intellectual and political offerings; I recommend it highly.” -- Avtar Brah * New West Indian Guide *"I have also narrated the effort it took for me to access his work to illustrate the importance of the Selected Writings now being released by Duke University Press. It is an event of profound historical significance that a new generation will be able to begin its political and theoretical education with systematic access to Hall’s writing. . . . The two-volume Essential Essays shows the broad scope of his work." -- Asad Haider * The Point *"It was one of Hall’s unique gifts to offer analysis of the moment as it unfolded before our eyes. I am sure I am not alone in having found his talks exhilarating in ways I could never quite understand, given that the news he relayed with such energy was almost unremittingly dire. Hall offered his readings as interpretation and self-commentary, tracing his own intellectual path." -- Jacqueline Hall * New York Review of Books *Table of ContentsA Note on the Text vii Acknowledgments ix General Introduction: A Life in Essays 1 Part I. Cultural Studies: Culture, Class, and Theory Introduction 27 1. Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, and the Cultural Turn [2007] 35 2. Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms [1980] 47 3. Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies [1992] 71 Part II. Theoretical and Methodological Principles: Class, Race and Articulation 4. The Hinterland of Science: Ideology and the Sociology of Knowledge [1977] 111 5. Rethinking the "Base and Superstructure" Metaphor [1977] 143 6. Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance [1980] 172 7. On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall by Larry Grossberg and Others [1986] 222 Part III. Media, Communications, Ideology, and Representation 8. Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse [originally 1973; republished 2007] 257 9. External Influences on Broadcasting: The External/Internal Dialectic in Broadcasting—Television's Double-Blind [1972] 277 10. Culture, the Media, and the "Ideological Effect" [1977] 298 Part IV. Political Formations: Power as Process 11. Notes on Deconstructing "the Popular" [1981] 347 12. Policing the Crisis: Preface to the 35th Anniversary Edition [2013] (with Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts) 362 13. The Great Moving Right Show [1979] 374 Index 393 Place of First Publication 411

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Book SynopsisRey Chow rearticulates the plight of the humanities in the age of global finance and neoliberal mores through a focus on Foucault's concept outside. She foregrounds a nonutilitarian approach, stressing anew the intellectual and pedagogical objectives fundamental to humanistic inquiry.Trade ReviewIn this lucid, concise, and passionate book, Rey Chow theorizes the dire effects of entrepreneurial capitalism in our digital age while showing how a humanistic intellectual should confront the essential problems created and obscured by that capitalism. This recovery of Foucault is brilliant, timely, and liberating. -- Paul A. Bové, author of Love's ShadowIn A Face Drawn in Sand, Rey Chow not only offers a provocative and original reading of Foucault but also mobilizes this reading to analyze some of the most important oppositions in literary studies today: close reading versus distant reading, surface reading with its re-aestheticization of the text versus STEM-inspired social science approaches, identity versus racialization, among others. Rather than attempt simply to adjudicate these conflicts in the interests of compromise, Chow reconstructs their theoretical and historical conditions of possibility to determine how these oppositions came to be posed in their current form. In doing so, she allows us to rethink them and perhaps better articulate the problems they seek to address. This is a much-needed book. -- Warren Montag, coauthor of The Other Adam SmithIf, as Foucault said, we have yet to cut off the head of the king, Chow offers the sharpest blade yet: critique forged in immanence. With the equanimity of a saint and the tenacity of a battle-scarred scholar, she puts a point on Foucault’s productive hypothesis: to denounce power is not to say no to it. The result is a compelling series of interventions into the fields of study that matter most for humanistic inquiry today: critical race studies, sound studies, media studies, transnational and global studies. Chow’s gift is a vision of what these fields might be, beheaded. -- Thomas Lamarre, author of The Anime Ecology: A Genealogy of Television, Animation, and Game MediaA Face Drawn in Sand cuts into the present with breathtaking clarity. Redeploying Foucault’s work in startling new ways, Chow engages everything from humanistic study in the neoliberal university to racism, sound theory, the digitized smart self, and sand painting. As brilliant as it is courageous, this book not only changes how we read Foucault. It teaches us how to think: how to press against the limits of our contemporary order. A tour de force! -- Lynne Huffer, author of Foucault's Strange ErosChow’s text accomplishes something rare these days: an original reading of Foucault that crackles with insight. * Critical Inquiry *Table of ContentsPart I. Humanistic Inquiry in the Era of the Moralist-EntrepreneurIntroduction: Rearticulating “Outside”Part II. Exercises in the Unthought1. Literary Study’s Biopolitics2. “There Is a ‘There Is’ of Light”; or, Foucault’s (In)visibilities3. Thinking “Race” with Foucault4. “Fragments at Once Random and Necessary”: The Énoncé Revisited, Alongside Acousmatic Listening5. From the Confessing Animal to the SmartselfCoda: Intimations from a Series of Faces Drawn in SandAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisA profound vision of the inseparability of Western philosophy and its living languageTrade Review"No one now writing on literature can match Steiner as polymath and polyglot, and few can equal the verve and eloquence of his writing." -- Robvert Alter - The Washington Post "Illumination and attractively undogmatic" -- The New Yorker

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Book SynopsisThis collection highlights the contributions of women writers, editors and critics to periodical culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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Book SynopsisAlbum provides an unparalleled look into Roland Barthes's life of letters. It presents a selection of correspondence, from his adolescence through the last years of his life. The first English-language publication of Barthes's letters, Album is a comprehensive testimony to one of the most influential critics of the twentieth century.Trade ReviewThe significance of this book—the first English-language publication of Barthes's correspondence—cannot be overestimated. Starting with Barthes's adolescence and the years in his late twenties spent in a sanatorium, these selected letters represent exchanges with longtime personal friends as well as many of the key figures of twentieth-century French intellectual history. -- Diana Knight, University of Nottingham[Album] offers charming insights into the famous literary critic’s development as a writer and thinker. . . . This new glimpse into a celebrated career will be rewarding to Barthes scholars. * Publishers Weekly *This wonderful book locates the elusive Roland Barthes—the very notion hints at its impossibility—in his various worlds: in the sanatorium, in literary and academic Paris, in the long escapade of structuralism and after. It succeeds in this attempt not by trying to define him but by allowing him to place himself among his friends and his books, among his colleagues and his projects. One of his dreams, he said, was ‘to disappear and still be close by.’ Here we begin to see how he managed to do just that. -- Michael Wood, Princeton UniversityRoland Barthes was my friend since 1957, though I’ve never had a friend whose offering exacted so little from anyone and so richly fulfilled the rewards of our intimacy—except for the pleasure of Roland’s texts, that are now beyond mourning. Roland arranged to take his mother and me from Paris to New York in the mid 1960s—her first visit since 1904 and her first air travel to the newly named Kennedy Airport, landing on top of a city Madame Barthes could never have imagined from her first encounter with it, and from then on everything was all pleasure. Moreover my discovery that his mother did not read his texts, and that Roland did not expect her to, eased some family tensions of my own. Roland was faithful to what Walter Pater, whom he had never heard of, calls “the administration of the visible”, for Roland adored the physical world: “Desire still irritates the non-will-to-possess by this perilous movement. I love you in my head, but imprison you behind my lips. I do not divulge. I speak silently to who is not yet or is no longer the other: I keep myself from loving you.” (A Lover’s Discourse.) The accents are those of Socrates, the first—as Roland was the latest—Docent of Desire. In his last letter, before he was run down by that laundry-truck: “Since Maman’s death there has been a scission in my life, in my psyche, and I have less courage to undertake things. Don’t hold it against me. Ne m’en veuille pas.” -- Richard Howard, Columbia UniversityAlbum is an enriching milestone. -- Neil Badmington * Times Literary Supplement *Album offers valuable insight, not only into the particulars of Barthes’s life, but also into the themes that haunted his writing, making it a worthwhile resource for Barthes scholars and ordinary readers alike. -- Ayten Tartici * Los Angeles Review of Books *The letters and manuscripts in this volume help the reader to understand not only the kinds of relationships that Barthes had, but also their nature. -- Nicholas P. Greco * ASAP/J *This publication underscores his contribution to 21st century French intellectual culture and his impact on literary studies. * Choice *The paradigmatic French intellectual, up close and intimate. -- Michael Dirda * The Washington Post *It does not propose to tell a story, but picks out moments, connections, elements of a life, and this is its contribution, methodological as much as it is informational, to Barthes studies. -- Callie Gardner * H-France *Rich in insights into Barthes's career, especially that of its ultimate phase. * American Book Review *The book can be read by everyone without any kind of difficulty. . . Highly recommended. -- Anna Maria Polidori * Articles and more.... *Table of ContentsForeword, by Éric MartyDeath of the FatherEncounter in the English Channel on the Night of October 26–27, 1916, Between German Destroyers and the Trawler Le MontaigneAcknowledgmentsNoteChronology1. From Adolescence to the Romance of the Sanatorium: 1932–462. The First Barthes3. The Great Ties4. A Few Letters Regarding a Few Books5. ExchangesNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisOffers the most comprehensive assessment yet of Lawrence?s relationship with the arts Places Lawrence in the context of the latest developments in fields including life writing, posthumanism, queer theory, and technology studiesConsiders Lawrence''s continued reception in other people''s art, and the nature of his relevance todayThis book includes twenty-eight innovative chapters by specialists from across the arts, reassessing Lawrence?s relationship to aesthetic categories and specific art forms in their historical and critical contexts. A new picture of Lawrence as an artist emerges, expanding from traditional areas of enquiry in prose and poetry into the fields of drama, painting, sculpture, music, architecture, dance, historiography, life writing and queer aesthetics. The Companion presents original research on topics such as Lawrence?s politics in his art, his representations of technology, his practice of revising and rewriting, and the relationship between his criticism and creation of prose, poetry and painting. This interdisciplinary Companion also makes a strong case for Lawrence?s continuing relevance and aesthetic power, as represented by case studies of his afterlives in biofiction, cinema, musical settings and portraiture.

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Public enemy. Crucial macronutrient. Health risk. Punchline. Moneymaker. Epidemic. Sexual fetish. Moral failing. Necessary bodily organ. Conveyor of flavor. Freak-show spectacle. Never mind the stereotype, fat is never sedentary: its definitions, identities, and meanings are manifold and in constant motion. Demonized in medicine and public policy, adored by chefs and nutritional faddists (and let's face it, most of us who eat), simultaneously desired and abhorred when it comes to sex, and continually courted by a multi-billion-dollar fitness and weight-loss industry, for so many people fat is ironically nothing more than an insult or a state of despair. In Hanne Blank''s Fat we find fat as state, as possession, as metaphor, as symptom, as object of desire, intellectual and carnal. Here, feeling fat and literal fat merge, blurring the boundaries and infusing one anotherTrade ReviewThroughout Fat, Blank beautifully disrupts and destabilizes the notion of fat and, in doing so, challenged me to think deeper about the category as a whole. * Fat Studies *Hanne Blank's characteristically honest, creative, wickedly funny, and sharply insightful voice comes through on every page of this eminently readable book. Blank reveals fat as polysemic, at once mundane and hidden, sexually charged, and socially vexed. Fat is a scholarly ethnography of an everyday object that manages to be a genuine page-turner. * Quill Rebecca Kukla, Professor of Philosophy and Senior Research Scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University, USA *Table of ContentsFrontispiece 1. Fact 2. Friend 3. Foe 4. Fetish 5. Figure Index

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Book SynopsisFeatures important philosophical papers of the brilliant American thinker Charles Sanders Peirce. This volume presents twenty-five key texts, chronologically arranged, beginning with Peirce's "On a New List of Categories" of 1867, and ending with the systematic presentation of his evolutionary metaphysics in the "Monist Metaphysical Series".

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Book SynopsisA captivating portrait of futurist artist Iliazd infused with the reflections of his accidental biographer on the stickiness of the genre. The poet Ilia Zdanevich, known in his professional life as Iliazd, began his career in the pre-Revolutionary artistic circles of Russian futurism. By the end of his life, he was the publisher of deluxe limited edition books in Paris. The recent subject of major exhibitions in Moscow, his native Tbilisi, New York, and other venues, the work of Iliazd has been prized by bibliophiles and collectors for its exquisite book design and innovative typography. Iliazd collaborated with many major figures of modern artPablo Picasso, Sonia Delaunay, Max Ernst, Joán Miro, Natalia Goncharova, and Mikhail Larionov, among others. His 1949 anthology, The Poetry of Unknown Words, was the first international anthology of experimental visual and sound poetry ever published. The list of contributors is a veritable Who's Who of avant-garde writing and visual art. And ITable of ContentsPreface Note on Spelling1. Encountering Iliazd: The Biographical Project2. 1894–1916: Childhood and Formative Years3. 1916–1920: Futurist Poetics4. 1920–1921: Transition: Tbilisi, Constantinople, Paris5. 1921–1926: Paris6. 1927-1946: Family, Fabric, and Fiction7. 1947-1950: Lettrist Provocations and Poetry of Unknown Words (Poésie de Mots Inconnus)8. 1951-1975: The Editions: Collaborations and Projects9. 1971–1972: A Life in Reverse10. A Place in HistoryPostscript: Recovering the Project Appendix. A Note on Recent Scholarship about IliazdNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisHarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics.

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Book SynopsisHarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics.People glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest neighbours'Rejecting the conventional narratives of the time, Middlemarch shows a realistic portrayal of Victorian village life. Peopling this ground-breaking work are Tertius Lydgate, a talented yet naive young doctor; Dorothea Brooke, stuck in a loveless marriage; and the religious hypocrite Bulstrode, hiding shocking crimes from his past.An intricate story weaving together many lives, Middlemarch is described as one of the best-loved novels of all time and heralded as one of the few English novels written for grown-up people' by Virginia Woolf. It is a richly nuanced drama that is a quintessential English classic.

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Book SynopsisHarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics.In a moment I was clutched by several hands, and there was no mistaking that they were trying to haul me back . . . You can scarce imagine how nauseatingly inhuman they looked those pale chinless faces and great, lidless, pinkish-grey eyes!An English scientist regales his dinner guests with the tale of his travels to the year 802,701, where he discovers that the human race has evolved into two distinct societies. The Eloi, elegant and peaceful, yet lacking spirit, are terrorised by the sinister, light-fearing Morlocks, who live underground, surrounded by industry. And when his time machine mysteriously vanishes, the scientist must descend to the realm of the Morlocks in order to find his only hope of escape . . .H. G. Wells is considered a founding father of modern science fiction, coining the term time machine' and popularising the idea of time travel in literature.

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Book SynopsisOne of the most powerful, perceptive and influential works of criticism in Western literary history In his near-contemporary account of classical Greek tragedy, Aristotle examines the dramatic elements of plot, character, language and spectacle that combine to produce pity and fear in the audience, and asks why we derive pleasure from this apparently painful process. Taking examples from the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, the Poetics introduced into literary criticism such central concepts as mimesis (''imitation''), hamartia (''error'') and katharsis (''purification''). Aristotle explains how the most effective tragedies rely on complication and resolution, recognition and reversals. The Poetics has informed thinking about drama ever since.Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Malcolm HeathTable of ContentsTranslated with an Introduction and Notes by Malcolm HeathIntroduction1. Human culture, poetry and the Poetics2. Imitation3. Aristotle's history of poetry4. The analysis of tragedy5. Plot: the basics6. Reversal and recognition7. The best kinds of tragic plot8. The pleasures of tragedy9. The other parts of tragedy10. Tragedy: miscellaneous aspects11. Epic12. Comedy13. Further reading14. Reference conventionsNotes to the IntroductionSynopsis of the PoeticsPOETICSNotes to the translation

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Book SynopsisThis anthology brings together core classical texts for understanding literature. The selections from Plato illustrate the poetic philosopher's surprising exclusion of poets from his ideal republic. In his response, Poetics, Aristotle draws on the works of the great Greek playwrights to defend the value of the art. Horace's The Art of Poetry is a vivid practitioner's guide that promotes a style of poetic craftsmanship rooted in wisdom, ethical insight, and decorum. Longinus's On the Sublime explores the nature of inspiration in poetry and prose. This volume is a work of great value and interest to classicists, students, and writers.In her Introduction, Penelope Murray compares and contrasts the viewpoints of these formidable critics as well as their impact on the Western tradition. This edition also includes a new bibliography and chronology and comprehensive notes to each of the texts.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisTable of ContentsIntroduction1. Homer and the Early Greek Poets2. Aristophanes3. Gorgias and the Sophists4. Plato5. Aristotle6. The Alexandrians7. Horace8. Longinus9. EpilogueFurther ReadingLiterary ChronologyPlatoIonRepublic 2Republic 3Republic 10AristotlePoeticsHoraceThe Art of PoetryLonginusOn the SublimeNotes

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Book SynopsisAccessing the huge selection of critical theory can be an intimidating experience. This acclaimed dictionary is an invaluable introduction to the theories and theorists in the field and will prove an authoritative resource for all students.Trade Review'extremely good...Bravo!' Professor Jonathan Culler 'This is an unusual instance of an academic reference book that I do believe doubles quite effectively as a textbook for students and I would recommend it unreservedly to anyone with an interest in theoretical matters, or just in the history of ideas.' Dr Duncan Wu, University of Cambridge

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Book Synopsis''A fascinating journey into our relationship with the physical book...I lost count of the times I exclaimed with delight when I read a nugget of information I hadn''t encountered before'' Val McDermid, The TimesMost of what we say about books is really about the words inside them: the rosy nostalgic glow for childhood reading, the lifetime companionship of a much-loved novel. But books are things as well as words, objects in our lives as well as worlds in our heads. And just as we crack their spines, loosen their leaves and write in their margins, so they disrupt and disorder us in turn. All books are, as Stephen King put it, ''a uniquely portable magic''. Here, Emma Smith shows us why.Portable Magic unfurls an exciting and iconoclastic new story of the book in human hands, exploring when, why and how it acquired its particular hold over us. Gathering together a millennium''s worth of pivotal encounters with volumes big and small, Smith reveals Trade ReviewIf you love books, you'll love Portable Magic -- Val McDermidFor many of us, books are the life we chose without thinking about it too much. Emma Smith's terrifically knowledgeable and thoughtful Portable Magic helps us understand every aspect of what our beloved books stand for. I for one am very grateful. What a delight this book is. -- Lynne TrussIrresistibly fascinating -- John CareyBrilliant... amusing, darkly sobering, and consistently fascinating ... a combination of deep scholarship and down-to-earth wit * Telegraph *Fun, playful, learned and accessible... Smith is herself a magical writer * BBC History Magazine *Smith's genius is to question as well as to value and register every contradiction - to make you, the reader, think without even suspecting that you are ... for communicating complex material in conversational, occasionally irreverent, prose -- Lucasta Miller * The Critic *Joyous ... thrilling ... A brilliantly written account of the book-as-material-object, and the slightly seedy pleasures of "bookhood" -- Kathryn Hughes * Guardian (Book of the Week) *Wildly entertaining ... This fascinating, slyly amusing book carries an undertow of personal affection for the curious, rectangular, multileaved objects with which we're so familiar * Sunday Times *Smith's enchanting book sparkles with gems of trivia that often conceal deeper truths about the evolution of reading and publishing. Fascinating, enlightening, funny and touching, this is indeed portable magic * Sydney Morning Herald *Emma Smith's history of the physical book is a thing to cherish ... witty and ingenious ... Smith reads with all her senses alert ... A wise, funny, endearingly personal book -- Peter Conrad * Observer *Anyone who's ever enjoyed the feel or indeed smell of a book should read Emma Smith's delightful and informative Portable Magic: A History of Books and Their Readers -- Lucasta Miller * Spectator Books of the Year *From bullet-stopping Bibles to tomes bound in human skin, Smith's history of books revels in their magic and malignity. It skewers our faith in the written word yet repays it handsomely * Telegraph *

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Book SynopsisThe acclaimed author presents his unique insights into the works of great Russian authors including Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Gorky, and Chekhov.In the 1940s, when Vladimir Nabokov first embarked on his academic career in the United States, he brought with him hundreds of original lectures on the authors he most admired. For two decades those lectures served as the basis for Nabokov's teaching, first at Wellesley and then at Cornell, as he introduced undergraduates to the delights of great fiction. This volume collects Nabokov's famous lectures on nineteenth-century Russian literature, with analysis and commentary on Nikolay Gogol's Dead Souls and The Overcoat; Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons; Maxim Gorky's On the Rafts; Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and The Death of Ivan Ilych; two short stories and a play by Anton Chekhov; and several works by Fyodor Dostoevsky, including Crime and Punishment, The

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Book SynopsisIn 1930, when Rabindranath Tagore met Paul and Edith Geheeb in Germany, they formed a fruitful and long-term association resulting in the exchange of ideas and vision. Tagore''s Brahmacharya Ashram, founded in 1901 in Shantiniketan, and the Geheeb''s Odenwaldschule, established in Germany in 1910 (thereafter the Ecole d''''Humanité in Switzerland, established in 1934 after the couple fled Nazi Germany), emerged from vastly different cultural backgrounds and social exigencies. Yet, they recognized striking similarities between their educational endeavours. The meeting also initiated a close association between India and Germany, with the Geheebs attracting many Indian intellectuals and Indophile Germans to their schools. This book explores the areas where the lives of the Geheebs and Tagore, and their respective circles, overlap. Rather than being a biography, a history, or a comprehensive description, this study is a comparison of Tagore and the Geheebs and their schools. Making use ofTrade ReviewKämpchen's book is full of research insights that only come with years of experience. * Razak Khan, German Historical Institute London Bulletin *

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Book SynopsisWhen Toni Morrison declares that she can''t wait for the ultimate liberation theory to imagine its practice and do its work, she raises an issue at the heart of modern political thought: How should we understand freedom? And what does freedom mean in the shadow of racial slavery and colonialism? In this study of Toni Morrison''s writing, Lawrie Balfour explores Morrison''s reflections on the idea of freedom in her novels and nonfiction. While Morrison''s literary achievements are widely celebrated, her political thought has yet to receive the same attention. Balfour shows how Morrison''s writing illuminates the meanings of freedom and unfreedom in a democratic society founded on both the defense of liberty and the right to enslavement. Morrison''s fiction and meditations on the power of language challenge wishful notions of color-blindness and complaints that it is time to move beyond thinking and talking about race. Her attentiveness to the experiences of people no one inquired of--esTrade ReviewToni Morrison is yet another brilliant contribution to Balfour's body of work examining the political thought of black intellectuals, DuBois, and Baldwin. It makes a tremendous contribution to Political Philosophy, Political Theory, Black Studies, and American Intellectual History. Morrison scholars will find it especially important as well. * Farah Jasmine Griffin, Columbia University *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Freedom and Word-Work 1.

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Book SynopsisFrom Zeus and Europa, to Diana, Pan, and Prometheus, the myths of ancient Greece and Rome seem to exert a timeless power over us. But what do those myths represent, and why are they so enduringly fascinating? Why do they seem to be such a potent way of talking about our selves, our origins, and our desires?This imaginative and stimulating Very Short Introduction goes beyond a simple retelling of the stories to explore the rich history and diverse interpretations of classical myths. It is a wide-ranging account, examining how classical myths are used and understood in both high art and popular culture, taking the reader from the temples of Crete to skyscrapers in New York, and finding classical myths in a variety of unexpected places: from arabic poetry and Hollywood films, to psychoanalysis, the bible, and New Age spiritualism. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized Table of ContentsForeword ; 1. Without bulls there would be no Europe ; 2. Contexts, then and now ; 3. Gods and heroes ; 4. Metamorphoses of mythology ; 5. On the analyst's couch ; 6. The sexual politics of myth ; 7. Mythology, spirituality, and the New Age ; Conclusion ; References and further reading ; Timeline

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Book SynopsisA witty, refreshing, and fun book on the experience of reading Marcel Proust that allows author and reader to meet and perhaps quarrel, perhaps agree, to go wherever their collaboration leads them, with language itself acting as a conduit.Table of ContentsPreface 1: Impossible Music 2: That Evening 3: Dreyfus Time 4: The Scenery of the Event 5: Profound Albertine 6: Proust's Law School 7: After the Ball

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Book SynopsisLyric and Liberalism in the Age of American Empire re-examines the work of Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Amiri Baraka, John Ashbery, and Jorie Graham, changing our understanding of their writing and the field of post-war American poetry.

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Book SynopsisDrawing on an ethnographic study of novel readers in Denmark and the UK during the Covid-19 pandemic, this book provides a snapshot of a phenomenal moment in modern history - showing what novels people turned to during the pandemic, how people experienced time during this period, and whether they chose to fill it with reading.Trade ReviewThis brilliantly written and meticulously researched book makes a major new contribution to literary studies. It demonstrates the value and importance of sociological approaches to reading in expanding the methods of the discipline and enabling new evidence-based insights into how lay readers read. It combines this with a sensitivity to text and temporality, narrative and nuance, that surely cannot but be approved of by even the most stalwart defenders of traditional literary critical methods. * Sarah Dillon, Professor of Literature and the Public Humanities, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge *How did the pandemic change our relationship to books? This eagerly awaited study does a deep dive into the role of literature in a time of crisis, looking closely at what and how people read in 2020 and 2021 as well as the times and places in which they picked up a book. The results are fascinating, revealing, and often unexpected * Rita Felski, University of Virginia *Did anyone actually spend the pandemic reading Proust? Find out in this intimate and revealing account of all the ways books kept us company during a time of almost unbearable isolation * Matthew Rubery, Queen Mary University of London *This is an extremely important book, mixing literary theory with qualitative and quantitive data in an innovative way in order to understand how and what we read during the pandemic, and what this means. It provides a vital insight into the life of literature during a crisis * Robert Eaglestone, Royal Holloway University of London *Overall, the book is a very timely contribution to discussions surrounding the seismic cultural and societal shifts triggered-or merely made visible-by the pandemic. The authors are well aware that their sample can shed light only on a slice of the reading public, but through their in-depth interviews and careful curation of the responses, we are treated to fascinating insights about readers and reading during the pandemic. Readers of the monograph will certainly think back to their own pandemic reading practices (and perhaps glance at their pandemic reading diaries?) as they peruse the pages of this tome. * Corinna Norrick-Rühl, University of Münster, Germany *Table of ContentsThe Readers Introduction 1: Time and What to Do in It 2: Plague Literature and the Question of Allegory 3: The Novel of Confinement 4: Old Books in New Times 5: Reading Outdoors 6: Reading Summer in Summer 2020 7: Reading the Romance 8: Reading About Race 9: Long Reads Appendix: The Surveys

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Book SynopsisSeldom has a royal court invited such intensive study as that of Henry VIII, or become so prominent in popular culture. Nonetheless, Intercultural Explorations and the Court of Henry VIII is committed to offering a fresh perspective on Tudor court culture, by using continental sources to contextualize, nuance, and challenge long-held perspectives that have been formed through the use of well-studied, Anglophone sources.Using a wide variety of textual sources, from ambassadorial correspondence, account books, household étiquettes, legal records, royal warrants, and marital contracts, to play texts and travel accounts, this study presents original research in history, literature, and cultural history.The case studies in Intercultural Explorations and the Court of Henry VIII address specific questions that challenge what we know or think we know about Tudor court culture. For example: was it good taste to bring a jester to a royal deathbed? Was John Blanke really the first black musician Table of ContentsIntroduction 1: Queen's Trumpet or Second Fiddle 2: Deathbed Foolery 3: Food for thought 4: Fashion Victims 5: Leaving an Impression Conclusion

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Book SynopsisAimé Césaire is due a major critical reinterpretation and that is exactly what this book carries out. Through an in-depth grasp of the trajectory and core significance of Césaire''s work, Jason Allen-Paisant highlights a set of links it makes between ''spirit,'' ''poetry,'' and ''knowing''. These explications, setting Césaire''s work in relation to a rigorously accounted for set of influences, reframe how we understand his writings, enhancing their philosophical, rather than merely political, aspects. Engagements with Aimé Césaire: Thinking with Spirits is about more than Negritude (which has come to mean something less than a deep poetic sensibility with its own aspirational aesthetics and metaphysics, and rather something more like a fantasy-ridden iteration of pan-Africanism). It shows an Aimé Césaire deeply relevant to today: to the crises of ecological collapse, capitalist dystopias, and ideologies predicated upon fear and the threat of foreigners; and to contemporary chatter arouTrade ReviewJason Allen-Paisant introduces us to a pedagogy of spirit in which the rigid divisions of Western thought, and the rigid Western interpretations of Aimé Césaire, are transformed into a homage to the daily inspirited materialities of African/diasporic social poiesis. The most original and inspiring reading of Césaire in decades. * Professor Stefano Harney, Academy of Media Arts Cologne - co-author of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study *Stunning, sensuous, and urgent, Jason Allen-Paisant's poetic meditation on the ecopoetics of Aimé Cesaire is also a wholly original philosophical inquiry into the shifting ways of being human under conditions of coloniality and climate catastrophe. He gives us a vibrant new language, deeply rooted in the ancestral lands and Black vitality of his native Jamaica, to engage the vibrational intelligence of the earth, and open ourselves to a regenerative ethics of life. * Professor Kris Manjapra, Northeastern University - author of Black Ghost of Empire: The Long Death of Slavery and the Failure of Emancipation *Beautifully written and propelled by a fascinating new approach and its direct intervention to Aimé Césaire's scholarship, Thinking with Spirits will cement Jason Allen-Paisant's reputation as a rigorous critical thinker. * Professor Frieda Ekotto, University of Michigan - author of Race and Sex Across the French Atlantic: The Color of Black in Literary, Philosophical and Theater Discourse *

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