Literary theory Books

Book SynopsisThreshold Phenomena reexamines Jacques Derrida's thinking of hospitality, from his well-known writings of the 1990s to his recently-published seminars on the same topic. The book follows Derrida's rereading of several central figures and texts on hospitality (Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus, Kant's Perpetual Peace, Levinas's Totality and Infinity) and his attempt to rethink questions surrounding not only private but also public hospitality in the form of immigration law, the contemporary treatment of migrants or stateless peoples, and the establishment of cities of asylum. Naas develops many of the central themes of Derrida's seminarthe relationship between hospitality and teletechnology (telephone, internet, cyberspace, etc.), the role of fatherlands and mother tongues in hospitality, questions of purity, immunity, and xenophobia, and the possibility of extending hospitality beyond the humanto animals, plants, gods, and clones. Reframing Derrida's approach to ethics, Naas reconsiders the relationship between hospitality and deconstruction, concluding that hospitality is not merely a theme to be treated by deconstruction but one of the best ways of describing its work. Naas's book turns around a figure that Derrida himself returns to several times throughout the seminar: the thresholda figure of hospitality par excellence, but also, in his seminars, another name for what Derrida in the 1960s began calling différance. Threshold Phenomena concludes that Derrida's seminar on hospitality is one of the best introductions we have to Derrida's work in general and one of the surest signs of its continuing relevance, a seminar that is at once fascinating and engaging in its own right and necessary for analyzing today's increasingly nationalistic and xenophobic political climate.

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Book Synopsis Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary Studies is a collection of interdisciplinary essays that examine the various contexts - political, social, and cultural - that have shaped the study of Canadian literature and the role it plays in our understanding of the Canadian nation-state. The essays are tied together as instances of critical practices that reveal the relations and exchanges that take place between the categories of the literary and the nation, as well as between the disciplinary sites of critical discourses and the porous boundaries of their methods. They are concerned with the material effects of the imperial and colonial logics that have fashioned Canada, as well as with the paradoxes, ironies, and contortions that abound in the general perception that Canada has progressed beyond its colonial construction. Smaro Kamboureli's introduction demonstrates that these essays engage with the larger realm of human and social practices - throne speeches, book clubs, policies of accommodation of cultural and religious differences, Indigenous thought about justice and ethics - to show that literary and critical work is inextricably related to the Canadian polity in light of transnational and global forces. Trade Review``Given the wide range of approaches and disciplines included in this volume, the index is particularly helpful in terms of orientation and contains not only major concepts and historical events related to Canadian studies, but also refers to important representatives of the Canadian literary scene. Moreover, each articles comes with an annotated section which, together with the overall bibliography, provides useful and interesting suggestions for further reading and discussion. The book's strengths certainly lie in the fact that it manages to emphasize the importance of the nation-state which, in spite of all cosmopolitan, global, and transnational developments at work, continues to serve as an important conceptual framework within the area of Canadian literary studies. Thus this volume is especially valuable for Canadian literary scholars and critics interested in the current debates centering on the nation with regard to (trans)national and global challenges.'' -- Felicitas Schweiker -- Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies, 25.2, September 2014Table of Contents Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary Studies, edited by Smaro Kamboureli and Robert Zacharias Preface Smaro Kamboureli and Robert Zacharias Introduction: Shifting the Ground of a Discipline: Emergence and Canadian Literary Studies in English Smaro Kamboureli National Literatures in the Shadow of Neoliberalism Jeff Derksen ""Beyond CanLit(e)"": Reading. Interdisciplinarity. Transatlantically. Danielle Fuller White Settlers and the Biopolitics of State Building in Canada Janine Brodie ""Some Great Crisis"": Vimy as Originary Violence Robert Zacharias Amplifying Threat: Reasonable Accommodations and Quebec's Bouchard-Taylor Commission Hearings (2007) Monika Kin Gagnon and Yasmin Jiwani The Time Has Come: Self and Community Articulations in Colour. An Issue and Awakening Thunder Larissa Lai Archivable Concepts: Talonbooks and Literary Translation Kathy Mezei Is CanLit Lost in Japanese Translation? Yoko Fujimoto The Cunning of Reconciliation: Reinventing White Civility in the ""Age of Apology"" Pauline Wakeham The Long March to ""Recognition"": Sákéj Henderson, First Nations Jurisprudence, and Sui Generis Solidarity Len Findlay bush/writing: embodied deconstruction, traces of community, and writing against the state in indigenous acts of inscription peter kulchyski Notes Works Cited Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisTo broaden the interpretive scope of critical theory and increase its usefulness, this text draws tradition-based views of language and anti-humanistic theories from their abstract frameworks into the field of cultural studies. It examines major thinkers and contemporary writers.

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Book SynopsisWidely known as the winner of the 1966 National Book Award and author of the best-selling novel ""Deliverance"", James Dickey devoted himself as much to the critique of the modern literary tradition as to his participation in it. A writer enthralled by teaching, he lectured at several major universities before settling at the University of South Carolina for nearly three decades as poet-in-residence. After his death in 1997, a transcript of his lectures was found among his papers. Collected here and published for the first time, these lectures reveal judgments and appraisals Dickey would use to great effect in his teaching. They also contribute to the unraveling of Dickey's art from the larger-than-life myth that surrounded him. In a comprehensive introduction to Dickey's remarks, Donald J. Greiner evaluates the relevance of the writer's often sharply worded opinions. The volume brings to life class sessions planned and delivered soon after Dickey took up full-time residence at the University of South Carolina, in the triumphal years following his rapid succession of honours. Full of asides, witticisms and afterthoughts, the sessions suggest not the pontification of a scholar at an academic conference but the confident learning of a practicing poet who happens to enjoy being in the classroom. Clearly setting forth his sense of literary criticism, Dickey repeatedly emphasizes the preeminence of the poet over the critic, the original use of language as a primary criterion for effective poetry, and the centrality of personal reaction to poetry as a measure of its value. Dickey's comments are valuable for their insight into both his own thought processes and those of the poets he reviewed, among them William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, Dylan Thomas, A.E. Housman, Gerald Manley Hopkins, Robert Frost, Walter de la Mare and Robert Bridges.

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Book SynopsisExplores the central theme of Romantic poetry in the works of the most important German Romantic poet of all. Goethe, in association with his younger Romantic compatriots the Schlegels, Novalis, Fichte, and Schelling, struggled with the subject-object dichotomy, and tried to bridge the gap between self and other, consciousness and nature.His theory and practice prefigured the Romantics' determination to display and interrogate the linguistic and cultural structures informing their own thinking and modes of representation--what Goethe calls one's "Vorstellungsart." His work exploits, subverts, and supplants inherited conventions and signs, demonstrating with virtuosic irony that literature is a system of texts, pre-texts, and pre-established but dynamic conceptual models. Love and Deathin Goethe:"One and Double" explores Goethe's use, in a wide range of his poetry and prose, of the theme of Liebestod (love and death) and related embodiments of the paradox of unity in duality. Ellis Dye also examinesGoethe's use of other themes related to love and death--the femme fatale, the vagina dentata, Frau Welt, the Lorelei, venereal disease, the Lustmord--and considers issues of selfhood and individuation as wellas the possibility that the love-death theme contains an implicit gender bias toward the existential fact of personal separateness. Poems, plays, and novels are dealt with, nevertheless, as works of art, not only as illustrationsof an idea or as points of intersection in a system of rhetorical conventions, and are examined for intellectual cohesiveness, elegance, and integrity of design as well as special meanings and effects. Love and Death in Goethe:"One and Double" explores the meaning of the central theme of Romantic poetry in the works of the most important Romantic poet of all. Students of literary culture, both the lay reader and the Goethe specialist, will be enlightened by its approach and find pleasure and instruction in its revelations. Robert Ellis Dye is Professor of German at Macalester College.Trade ReviewIn this impressive study one encounters a densely woven tapestry of argument from a scholar of literature and philosophy...Dye offers valuable commentary on the perspectives of major Goethe scholars and makes lively reference to contemporaneous popular culture. Essential. * CHOICE *Solid scholarship and well-made books, not short-lived provocation is what we have come to expect from the series 'Studies in German literature, linguistics, and culture' by Camden House. This volume is an important contribution to the study of Goethe as an essential part of and even pioneer of European Romanticism. * GERMAN QUARTERLY *By showing the parallels between Goethe's worldview and Romantic irony, [Dye] is able to firmly connect the dots between Goethe and his younger Romantic contemporaries. Scholars will find this innovative approach to Goethe both refreshing and insightful. * GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW *Ellis Dye has ... made an extremely important contribution to contemporary Goethe studies, drawing upon a vast array of Goethe's works, and offering interpretations that are often bold and compelling. * SPRACHKUNST *Table of ContentsIntroduction Issues: Some Implications of the Link between Love and Death Incorporating Tradition Frau Welt. Veneral Disease. Femmes Fatales Die Leiden des jungen Werthers Stella: Eine Schauspiel für Liebende Intrusions of the Supernatural Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre: Identity and Difference Poetic Ambiguity: "Selige Sehnsucht" Die Wahlverwandtschaften: Romantic Metafiction Love and Death in Faust Truth, Paradox, Irony Virtuosity Works Cited Index

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Book SynopsisA genuinely accessible introduction to Freud's theory and its application to literary and cultural studies. Few figures have had as much influence on Western thought as Sigmund Freud. His ideas permeate our culture to such a degree that an understanding of them is indispensable. Yet many otherwise well-informed students in the humanities labor under misconceptions about Freudian theory. There are countless introductions to Freudian psychoanalysis but, surprisingly, none that combine a genuinely accessible account of Freud's ideas with an introduction to their use in literary and cultural studies, as this book does. Written specifically for use by advanced undergraduate and graduate students in courses dealing with literary and cultural criticism, it is also of interest to the general reader. The first part of the book explains Freud's key ideas and refutes many popular misconceptions, using examples throughout. The assumption underlying this account is that Freud offers not simply a model of the mind, but an analysis of the relation between the individual and society. The second part addresses the implications of Freudian psychoanalysis for the study of literature and culture, again using plentiful examples. Existing books focus either onFreudian psychoanalysis in general or on psychoanalytic literary or cultural criticism; the latter tend to be abstract and theoretical in nature. None of them are suitable for readers who are interested in psychoanalysis as a tool for literary and cultural criticism but have no firm knowledge of Freud's ideas. Freud's Theory and Its Use in Literary and Cultural Studies fills this gap. Henk de Berg is Professor of German at the Universityof Sheffield, UK.Trade ReviewThis is as good an introductory text as one can possibly hope for. - -- Peter Gay[Henk de Berg] pairs a brief, clear introduction to Freud and a demonstration of how thinking about Freud can enrich literary and cultural studies. His Freud is one of the most convincing assessments of that oft-maligned thinker in years... The book reconstructs a Freud of deep human sympathies, wide reading, and wide-ranging importance... Well researched and including a brief bibliography.... Highly recommended. * CHOICE *[The book] is clearly and forcefully written, keeps technical language to a minimum, brings in numerous real-life examples ... and firmly opposes many of the current cliches about Freud and psychoanalysis. * AMERICAN IMAGO *[de Berg's] narrative map for psychoanalysis has just the right navigational markers. * GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW *...clear, lively, unpedantic... It serves its purpose well. * GERMAN QUARTERLY *[A] new standard work that provides an introduction to the bases of Freudian literary interpretation.... * GERMANISTIK *[A]n incisive, clearly structured yet never simplified introduction to Freud....Throughout, this is a critical guide in the very best sense and an invaluable text for teachers of cultural studies to recommend to students new to Freud or sceptical of his theories. * FORUM OF MODERN LANGUAGE STUDIES *[T]his introduction to Freud succeeds brilliantly in presenting complex ideas lucidly. * MODERN AUSTRIAN LITERATURE *

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Book SynopsisNew, carefully focused essays providing a thorough examination of Hemingway's groundbreaking non-fictional work. Published in 1932, Death in the Afternoon reveals its author at the height of his intellectual and stylistic powers. By that time, Hemingway had already won critical and popular acclaim for his short stories and novels of the late twenties. A mature and self-confident artist, he now risked his career by switching from fiction to nonfiction, from American characters to Spanish bullfighters, from exotic and romantic settings to the tough world of theSpanish bullring, a world that might seem frightening and even repellant to those who do not understand it. Hemingway's nonfiction has been denied the attention that his novels and short stories have enjoyed, a state of affairs this Companion seeks to remedy, breaking new ground by applying theoretical and critical approaches to a work of nonfiction. It does so in original essays that offer a thorough, balanced examination of a complex, boundary-breaking, and hitherto neglected text. The volume is broken into sections dealing with: the composition, reception, and sources of Death in the Afternoon; cultural translation, cultural criticism, semiotics, and paratextual matters; and the issues of art, authorship, audience, and the literary legacy of Death in the Afternoon. The contributors to the volume, four men and seven women, lay to rest the stereotype of Hemingway as a macho writer whom women do not read; and their nationalities (British, Spanish, American, and Israeli) indicate that Death in the Afternoon, even as it focuses on a particular national art, discusses matters of universal concern. Contributors: Miriam B. Mandel, Robert W. Trogdon, Lisa Tyler, Linda Wagner-Martin, Peter Messent, Beatriz Penas Ibáñez, Anthony Brand, Nancy Bredendick, Hilary Justice, Amy Vondrak, and Keneth Kinnamon. MiriamB. Mandel teaches in the English Department of Tel Aviv University.Trade ReviewMandel and her scholarly companions traverse a vast territory in this, the most extensive exploration to date of Hemingway's longest and most complex work of non-fiction. * THE HEMINGWAY REVIEW *

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Book SynopsisFocuses on the cultural, philosophical, political, and scholarly uses of "orientalism" in the German-speaking and Central and Eastern European worlds from the late eighteenth century to the present day. The concept and study of orientalism in Western culture gained a changed understanding from Edward Said's now iconic 1978 book Orientalism. However, recent debate has moved beyond Said's definition of the phenomenon, highlighting the multiple forms of orientalism within the "West," the manifold presence of the "East" in the Western world, indeed the epistemological fragility of the ideas of "Occident" and "Orient" as such. This volume focuses on the deployment -- here the cultural, philosophical, political, and scholarly uses -- of "orientalism" in the German-speaking and Central and Eastern European worlds from the late eighteenth century to the present day. Its interdisciplinary approach combines distinguished contributions by Indian scholars, who approach the topic of orientalism through the prism of German studies as practiced in Asia, with representative chapters by senior German, Austrian,and English-speaking scholars working at the intersection of German and oriental studies. Contributors: Anil Bhatti, Michael Dusche, Johannes Feichtinger, Johann Heiss, James Hodkinson, Kerstin Jobst, Jon Keune, Todd Kontje, Margit Köves, Sarah Lemmen, Shaswati Mazumdar, Jyoti Sabarwal, Ulrike Stamm, John Walker. James Hodkinson is Associate Professor in German Studies at Warwick University. John Walker is Senior Lecturer in EuropeanCultures and Languages at Birkbeck College, University of London. Shaswati Mazumdar is Professor in German at the University of Delhi. Johannes Feichtinger is a Researcher at the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften.Trade ReviewThis book expands and deepens our understanding of European orientalist discourses by not only examining the relatively neglected field of Germanophone orientalism, but also by looking further East to encompass the utterly overlooked orientalisms of Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Russia. This collection is required reading for anyone interested in orientalism, travel writing, and the cultural history of Central and Eastern Europe. -Robert Lemon, University of Oklahoma, author of Imperial Messages: Orientalism as Self-Critique in the Habsburg Fin-de-Siècle -- Robert Lemon, University of Oklahoma, author of Imperial Messages: Orientalism as Self-Critique in the Habsburg Fin-de-SiècleTable of ContentsPreface Introduction (Re)translating the West: Humboldt, Habermas, and Intercultural Dialogue Friedrich Schlegel's Writings on India: Reimagining Germany as Europe's True Oriental Self Germany's Local Orientalisms Tales from the Oriental Borderlands: On the Making and Uses of Colonial Algiers in Germanophone Travel Writing from the Maghreb around 1840 The Jew, the Turk, and the Indian: Figurations of the Oriental in the German-Speaking World M. C. Sprengel's Writings on India: A Disenchanted and Forgotten Orientalism of the Late Eighteenth Century Occident and Orient in Narratives of Exile: The Case of Willy Haas's Indian Exile Writings Distant Neighbors: Uses of Orientalism in the Late Nineteenth-Century Austro-Hungarian Empire Modes of Orientalism in Hungarian Letters and Learning of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Where the Orient Ends? Orientalism and Its Function for Imperial Rule in the Russian Empire Noncolonial Orientalism? Czech Travel Writing on Africa and Asia around 1918 Oriental Sexuality and Its Uses in Nineteenth-Century Travelogues Notes on the Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisLearning how to behave and engage professionally can be one of the most challenging parts of embarking on a career in the medical field. But using the 'power of stories' can teach, heal, and enlighten, encourage the development of empathy, and help healthcare providers appreciate who their patients are, not just what disease they have. The humanities offer knowledge and skills that may move students toward becoming better physicians. The incorporation of the humanities into the traditional medical education curriculum can truly make a difference.In this expansive anthology, Susan Stagno and Michael Blackie assemble an insightful group of contributors to discuss the ways in which medical professionals can powerfully engage with their students through a variety of literary texts. Examples as diverse as Charles Bukowski, Leo Tolstoy, William Carlos Williams, Sherwood Anderson, Mary Shelley, Stephen King, the comic strip Pearls Before Swine, and the sayings of Buddha will provide both teachers and students a rich cache of stories for discussion and inspiration.

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Book SynopsisA noncommissioned officer of the Nicaraguan National Guard travels to New York to meet the famous bodybuilder, Charles Atlas. When he approaches his hero, he finds a body pierced with syringes and tubes, a cyborg of fragile artificial life. In the garden of a Central American dictator's mansion, a prisoner is locked in a cage next to a lion's. Nature and animal instinct will take their course. In post-Sandinista Nicaragua, an amputee policeman must face—alone and wounded—a drug gang commanded by his former guerrilla leader. Despite the gravity and violence present in many of Sergio Ramírez Mercado's short stories and novels, his writing is governed by irony and parody. Fábula del Poder proposes a novel critical assessment of the narrative work of Ramírez, who won the Cervantes Prize in 2017, emphasizing the mechanisms of representation and criticism of power in contemporary Latin American literature. In an entertaining and dynamic way, the book applies an interdisciplinary, theoretical approach, borrowing concepts from political theory, literary criticism, video games, visual culture, and sports, and reviews the contemporary historiography of Nicaragua and Latin America.Un suboficial de la Guardia Nacional de Nicaragua viaja a Nueva York para conocer al célebre fisicoculturista Charles Atlas. Cuando logra acercarse al héroe, encuentra un cuerpo traspasado de jeringas y mangueras, un cíborg de frágil vida artificial. En el jardín de la mansión de un dictador centroamericano, un prisionero es encerrado en la jaula contigua a la de un león. La naturaleza y el instinto animal seguirán su curso. En la Nicaragua post-sandinista, un policía amputado de una pierna debe enfrentar—solo y herido—a una banda de narcotraficantes comandada por su antiguo jefe guerrillero. A pesar de la gravedad y violencia de las historias contadas en muchos de los cuentos y las novelas de Sergio Ramírez Mercado, su obra está regida por la ironía y la parodia. Fábula del Poder propone una novedosa valoración crítica de la obra narrativa de Ramírez, quien recibió el Premio Cervantes en 2017, haciendo énfasis en los mecanismos de representación y crítica del poder en la literatura contemporánea de América Latina. De manera amena y dinámica el libro utiliza un marco teórico interdisciplinario y aplica conceptos de teoría política, crítica literaria, videojuegos, cultura visual y deportiva, y repasa la historiografía contemporánea de Nicaragua y América Latina.

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Book SynopsisThe book examines the links between literature and film in Latin America by using queer theory and a series of recent cultural productions whose arguments destabilize traditional gender roles and heteronormative masculinity. For many years, the connections between a literary text and its film adaptation have been considered only from the point of view of the latter’s fidelity to the written work, which many scholars imagined to be the original that filmmakers needed to respect. Within the last two decades, however, the idea of adaptation fidelity has been challenged by a number of critics who refute the existence of an original text and promote the notion of an ambiguous and complex relationship between a literary work and its film adaptation. Based on such developments and with the help of queer theory, this book questions and revises several crucial theoretical approximations that analyze the relations between the two art forms in an attempt to overcome the limitations of fidelity discourse. This is the first book-length study that seeks to examine, with the appropriate detail, the connections between film and literature in Latin America through the lenses of queer theory and by focusing on the representations of numerous practices that do not fit within the general framework of heteronormative sexuality.In Spanish.

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Book SynopsisThe book examines the links between literature and film in Latin America by using queer theory and a series of recent cultural productions whose arguments destabilize traditional gender roles and heteronormative masculinity. For many years, the connections between a literary text and its film adaptation have been considered only from the point of view of the latter’s fidelity to the written work, which many scholars imagined to be the original that filmmakers needed to respect. Within the last two decades, however, the idea of adaptation fidelity has been challenged by a number of critics who refute the existence of an original text and promote the notion of an ambiguous and complex relationship between a literary work and its film adaptation. Based on such developments and with the help of queer theory, this book questions and revises several crucial theoretical approximations that analyze the relations between the two art forms in an attempt to overcome the limitations of fidelity discourse. This is the first book-length study that seeks to examine, with the appropriate detail, the connections between film and literature in Latin America through the lenses of queer theory and by focusing on the representations of numerous practices that do not fit within the general framework of heteronormative sexuality.In Spanish.

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Book SynopsisThis critical volume of essays explores how texts and literary theories interrelate and interconnect different principles of critical evaluation. Reading for pleasure is different from reading for aesthetic sensibility. To read literature is to seek experience but interpreting the text is to add perspective. A skilled reader will apply multiple lenses to the same text to explore how different texts and theories interact with each other. The Mirror and the Reflections collects various approaches to literary theory from a postcolonial perspective. It offers an invaluable resource for those who wish to familiarize themselves with multifaceted approaches to literature.

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Book SynopsisThe Western, with its stoic cowboys and quickhanded gunslingers, is an instantly recognizable American genre that has achieved worldwide success. Cultures around the world have embraced but also adapted and critiqued the Western as part of their own national literatures, reinterpreting and expanding the genre in curious ways. Canadian Westerns are almost always in conversation with their American cousins, influenced by their tropes and traditions, responding to their politics, and repurposing their structures to create a national literary tradition. The American Western in Canadian Literature examines over a century of the development of the Canadian Western as it responds to the American Western, to evolving literary trends, and to regional, national, and international change. Beginning with Indigenous perspectives on the genre, it moves from early manifestations of the Western in Christian narratives of personal and national growth, and its controversial pulp-fictional popularity in the 1940s, to its postmodern and contemporary critiques, pushing the boundary of the Western to include Northerns, Northwesterns, and post-Westerns in literature, film, and wider cultural imagery. The American Western in Canadian Literature is more than a simple history. It uses genre theory to comment on historical perspectives on nation and region. It includes overviews of Indigenous and settler-colonial critiques of the Western, challenging persistent attitudes to Indigenous people and their traditional territories that are endemic to the genre. It illuminates the way that the Canadian Western enshrines, hagiographies, and ultimately desacralizes aspects of Canadian life, from car culture to extractive industries to assumptions about a Canadian moral high ground. This is a comprehensive, highly readable, and fascinating study of an underexamined genre.Table of Contents Acknowledgements Introduction: Signposts and Scales Chapter 1 Scaling and Spacing the Genre: Transnationalism, Nationalism, and Regionalism Chapter 2 Tom King's John Wayne: Indigenous Perspectives on the Western Chapter 3 The Northwestern Cross: Christianity and Transnationalism in Early Canadian Westerns Chapter 4 From Law to Outlaw: The Second World War, Westerns, and the '40s Pulps Chapter 5 CanLit's Postmodern Westerns: Ghosts and the Cowgirl Riding Off into the Sunrise Chapter 6 Degeneration Through Violence: Contemporary Historical Westerns and Posthuman Horsemen Conclusion: Mining the Western in the 21st Century Bibliography

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Book SynopsisPart literary history, part feminist historiography And Wrote My Story Anyway: Novels by Black South African Women critically examines influential novels in English by eminent black female writers. Studying these writers' key engagements with nationalism, race and gender during apartheid and the transition to democracy, Barbara Boswell traces the ways in which black women's fiction critically interrogates narrow ideas of nationalism. She examines who is included and excluded, while producing alternative visions for a more just South African society. This is an erudite analysis of ten well-known South African writers, spanning the apartheid and post-apartheid era: Miriam Tlali, Lauretta Ngcobo, Farida Karodia, Agnes Sam, Sindiwe Magona, Zoë Wicomb, Rayda Jacobs, Yvette Christiansë, Kagiso Lesego Molope and Zukiswa Wanner. Boswell argues that black women's fiction could and should be read as a subversive site of knowledge production in a setting, which, for centuries, denied black women's voices and intellects. Reading their fiction as theory, for the first time these writers' works are placed in sustained conversation with each other, producing an arc of feminist criticism that speaks forcefully back to the abuse of a racist, white-dominated, patriarchal power.Table of Contents Acknowledgements Author's Preface Acronyms Introduction ‘… And Wrote My Story Anyway': Black South African Women's Fiction and the Nation Chapter 1 Writing as Activism: A History of Black South African Women's Writing Chapter 2 Rewriting the Apartheid Nation: Miriam Tlali and Lauretta Ngcobo Chapter 3 Dissenting Daughters: Girlhood and Nation in the Fiction of Farida Karodia and Agnes Sam Chapter 4 Interrogating 'Truth' in the Post-Apartheid Nation: Zoë Wicomb and Sindiwe Magona Chapter 5 Making Personhood; Remaking History in Yvette Christiansë and Rayda Jacobs's Neo-Slave Narratives Chapter 6 Black Women Writing 'New' South African Masculinities: Kagiso Lesego Molopes and Zukiswa Wanner Conclusion Literature as Theory: Towards a Black South African Feminist Criticism Select References Index

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Book SynopsisFrancophone intellectuals writing in the lead-up to the decolonisation were faced with an impossible dilemma. How could they redefine their culture, and the ‘humanity’ they felt had been denied by the colonial project, in terms that did not replicate the French thinking by which they were formed? Figures such as Senghor, Césaire, Fanon, Amrouche, Feraoun and Kateb were all educated, indeed immersed, in French culture and language, yet they intervened forcefully in political debates surrounding decolonisation and sought to contribute to the reinvention of local cultures in a gesture of resistance to the ongoing French presence. Despite their pivotal role during this period of upheaval, then, their project was fraught with tensions that form the focus of this study. In particular, these writers reflected on the relation between universality and particularity in intellectual work, and struggled to avoid the traps associated with an over-investment in either domain. They also all learned from metropolitan French humanist thought but strove continually to reinvent that humanism so as to account for colonised experience and culture. Their work also readdresses the ongoing question of the relation between literature or culture and politics, and testifies to a moment of intense dialogue, and potential conflict, between contrasting but complementary spheres of activity.Trade ReviewReviews'An extremely erudite study of the vexed questions facing Francophone intellectuals in their response to colonial politics, ideas and culture and received ideas of the human. It is intellectually strong and very well written.' Max Silverman, University of Leeds'Each of the chapters makes incisive contributions to the subfields of Negritude and Maghrebi studies, and would thus serve well in specialized graduate seminars. Taught as a book, it is suitable for both graduate courses on postcolonial theory and undergraduate francophone literature classes.'Olivia Harrison, French Studies JournalTable of Contents Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Léopold Sédar Senghor: Politician and Poet between Hybridity and Solitude 2. Aimé Césaire: From Poetic Insurrection to Humanist Ethics 3. Frantz Fanon: Experiments in Collective Identity 4. Jean El-Mouhoub Amrouche: The Universal Intellectual? 5. Mouloud Feraoun: Postcolonial Realism, or, the Intellectual as Witness 6. Kateb Yacine: Poetry and Revolution Conclusion Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisWhat does Afro-Europe signify? This volume explores the concept and possibility of a black European community by analysing the ways in which contemporary Francophone African writers articulate and interrogate their complex relationships with European society, culture and history. Through the different contributions in this volume, readers will discover the symbiotic ways in which Africa has transformed/been transformed (in/by) Europe and in turn how Africanness has (re)defined Europeanness. To this end, the volume places scholarly articles addressing the relationship between the francophone and Afro-European context alongside new, specially commissioned short stories and essays by some of the most critically-acclaimed and influential producers of Afropean writing today: Fatou Diome, Alain Mabanckou, Léonora Miano, Wilfried N’Sondé, Sami Tchak and Abdourahman Waberi. Works by these authors are discussed in and across the scholarly interventions, generating dialogue around what it means to be ‘Francophone’ and ‘Afropean’ in the twenty-first century. At a time when it is no longer easy to define what Europe really is, this book considers to what extent the category ‘Afropean’ may prove helpful in improving our understanding of the complex ways in which minority communities conceive of identity in Europe today and address the range of issues impacting them. The notion of ‘Afropeanism’ is of course relatively new, and this book does not claim to offer an exhaustive analysis of the term’s usage and/or potential pertinence. Rather, the cultural, political, and social circumstances of Europe today are reflected in discussions surrounding the term and perhaps not surprisingly, in the diverse and diverging perspectives adopted by the scholars and creative writers in this volume.Trade Review'With the publishing of this authoritative ground-breaking volume on Afropean literatures of French expression, it is hoped that the mainstreaming of the term into lexicography will soon become a reality.' Augustine H. Asaah, Cahiers d'Études AfricainesTable of Contents Introduction: Francophone Afropeans - Nicki Hitchcott and Dominic Thomas 1. Afropeanism and Francophone Sub-Saharan African Writing - Dominic Thomas 2. The Transatlantic Poetics of Fatou Diome - Kathryn M. Lachman 3. Corps sans titre: ‘fleshiness’ and Afropean identity in Bessora’s 53 cm - John Nimis 4. Already Here: Sami Tchak’s Afropean Generation - Allison Van Deventer 5. Paris Polar: Afropean Noir in the City of Lights - Dawn Fulton 6. Mapping Afropea: The Translation of Black Paris in the Fiction of Alain Mabanckou - John Patrick Walsh 7. Relighting Stars and Bazars of Voices: Exchange and Dialogue in Léonora Miano’s Tels des Astres Éteints and Alain Mabanckou’s Black Bazar - Kathryn Kleppinger 8. Sex and the Afropean City: Léonora Miano’s Blues pour Elise - Nicki Hitchcott 9. Toward an Afropean Cosmopolitanism: Hospitality, Friendship and the African Immigrant - Srilata Ravi 10. Afropean Masculinities as Bricolage - Ayo A. Coly SHORT STORIES: Fatou Diome - ‘The Old Man and the Boat’ Léonora Miano - ‘The Rain-maker Affair’ Abdourahman A. Waberi - ‘The Squirrels of Wannsee’ Wilfried N’Sondé - ‘Francasterix’ Sami Tchak - ‘At the Borders of my Skin’ Alain Mabanckou - ‘Confessions of a sapeur’ Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisThis book analyses French Caribbean writing from the point of view of its language and literary form - questions which until recently were somewhat neglected in postcolonial studies but are now becoming an important area of research. Britton supplements postcolonial theory with structuralism and poststructuralism to show how analysis of the textual illuminates the political and ideological positions of the writers. Topics including genre, intertextuality, narrative voice, discursive agency, orality, the ‘creolization’ of languages and the renewal of realism are discussed in relation to Glissant, Césaire, Ménil, Chamoiseau, Confiant, Depestre, Condé, Schwarz-Bart, Pineau and Maximin.Trade Review'Britton makes an unanswerable case for a rebalancing of textually-based and world-based reading, a rebalancing of critical attention to language and form on the one hand, representation and political positioning on the other.' Mary GallagherThis publication, though consisting of previously published material, in its cumulative effect and sustained attention across the field as a whole, demonstrates the incisive originality and intelligence of this outstanding reader of French Caribbean literature.French Studies'This remarkable book unravels the links between theoretical and philosophical discourses (Benveniste, Lacan, Barthes, Kristeva, Bakhtin, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, feminist philosophy) and French Caribbean writers from Martinique and Guadeloupe (Me´nil, Chamoiseau, Confiant, Schwartz-Bart, Conde´, Maximin, Glissant).'Richard Langer, Oxford Journals'Britton is persuasive in arguing for the need to reevaluate the study of the formal aspects of literary texts produced in the French Caribbean. As she makes clear, eventually neither (post)structuralist nor postcolonial theory fully does justice to all French Caribbean texts. In concise chapters, the broad corpus she brings together establishes the way in which formal and textual analysis also uncovers the implications of the political.'Jacqueline Couti, New West Indian GuideTable of Contents Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction Part I: Genre, Intertextuality, Discourse 1. How to be primitive: Tropiques, surrealism and ethnography 2. Problems of Cultural Self-Representation: René Ménil, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant 3. Eating their words: the consumption of French Caribbean literature 4. Intertextual Connections: The Jewish Holocaust in French Caribbean Novels 5. Breaking the Rules: Irrelevance/Irreverence in Maryse Condé’s Traversée de la mangrove 6. Discursive Agency and the (De)Construction of Subjectivity in Daniel Maximin’s L’Ile et une nuit Part II: On Edouard Glissant 7. Discours and histoire, magical and political discourse in Le Quatrième Siècle 8. Collective narrative voice in Malemort, La Case du commandeur and Mahagony 9. Fictions of identity and the identities of fiction in Tout-monde 10. Mixing up Languages in the Tout-monde 11. ‘La parole du paysage’: Art and the Real in Une Nouvelle Région du monde Appendix Writing in the Present: Interview with Maryse Condé Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisHybridity theory, the creative dissemination and restless to-and-fro of Homi Bhabha’s Third Space or of Stuart Hall’s politics of difference, for example, has opened up understandings of what may be produced in the spaces of cultural contact. This book argues that the particularity of the forms of mixing in the literatures of the French Pacific country of New Caledonia contest and complexify the characterisations of hybrid cultural exchange. From the accounts of European discovery by the first explorers and translations of the stories of oral tradition, to the writings of settler, déporté, convict, indentured labourer and their descendants, and contemporary indigenous (Kanak) literatures, these texts inscribe Oceanian or Pacific difference within and against colonial contexts. In a context of present strategic positioning around a unique postcolonial proposal of common destiny, however, mutual cultural transformation is not unbounded. The local cannot escape coexistence with the global, yet Oceanian literatures maintain and foreground a powerful sense of ancestral origins, of an original engendering. The spiral going forward continually remembers and cycles back distinctively to an enduring core. In their turn, the Pacific stories of unjust deportation or heroic settlement are founded on exile and loss. On the other hand, both the desire for, and fears of, cultural return reflected in such hybrid literary figures as Déwé Gorodé’s graveyard of ancestral canoes and Pierre Gope’s chefferie internally corrupted in response to the solicitations of Western commodity culture, or Claudine Jacques’ lizard of irrational violence, will need to be addressed in any working out of a common destiny for Kanaky-New Caledonia.Trade Review'An excellent and much needed analysis / overview of New Caledonian literatures. It is extremely well-documented and extensive in its coverage of literature from the precursors to more contemporary authors. It covers multiple facets of hybridity through incorporating not only Kanak and Caldoche writing but also representations of other identities such as Metro, Vietnamese, Chinese or Wallisian.' Pascale De SouzaTable of Contents Introduction and overview of chapter contents 1. Behind the accounts of first encounter and the tales of oral tradition: reading Kanak-New Caledonian texts as palimpsest Part 1: Behind the accounts of first encounter Appendix: Extracts from the texts of the early European explorers Part 2: Reading the role of gender through the texts of oral tradition 2. Writing (in) the languages of the other: translation as third space 3. Histories of exile and home: strategic hybridity 4. Locating the first man in the (hi)stories of Kanaky: indigenous hybridities 5. The paradoxical pathways of the first Kanak woman writer: Déwé Gorodé’s parti pris of indigeneity 6. The hybrid within: the first Kanak novel, 'L’épave' [the wreck] and the cannibal ogre 7. Cross-cultural readings of 'Le maitre de koné’ [the chief and the lizard]: intertextuality as hybridity 8. Writing métissage in non-Kanak literatures : from colonial to postcolonial hybridities 9. A multicultural future (destin commun) for New Caledonia ? From métissage to hybridities Conclusion: Modifying the hybridity debates Works cited Index

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Book SynopsisThis book considers the differing emotional investments in Israel of, on the one hand, Jews physically domiciled in Israel and, on the other hand, diasporic Jews living outside Israel for whom the country nonetheless forms a central point of affect. The book’s purpose is to trace how these two types of investment are represented by francophone Jewish writers. Israel is at once a problematic geopolitical reality in international politics and a salient topos within Jewish cultural imaginaries that transcend national boundaries. However, it has often been claimed that Israel has a “special” relationship with France, which until 1967 was its greatest ally. Israel has a large francophone community (some 800,000), while France has the largest Jewish community in Europe (some 600,000). But Franco-Israeli relations have undergone radical, largely negative transformations under the Fifth Republic (1958- ). The scope of the book is wide, addressing the following questions. How do francophone Jewish writers represent Israel in their literary works? What responses to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict do they express both in these works and in non-literary discourse (interviews and journalistic articles)? What is the role in those responses of emotion, affect, cognition, and ethics? To answer these questions, the book examines 44 different autobiographies, memoirs and novels published between 1965 and 2012 by 27 different authors, both male and female, covering the full cultural spectrum of Jews: Ashkenazic, Sephardic, and Mizrahi. The approach of the book is interdisciplinary, combining literary analysis with insights from the domains of history, journalism, philosophy, politics, psychoanalysis, and sociology.Trade ReviewReviews 'Cairns has made a powerful case for thinking of Israel, in all its complexity, as an integral part of Francophone literature.' Robert J. Watson, L'Esprit Créateur'This closely engaged and forensically pursued investigation into the complex of emotional relationships with Israel as a modern state maintained both by Jews living there and diasporic Jews has the fascinating focus of the Francophone dimension of such a double investment [...] The book works through highly attentive readings of no fewer than 44 autobiographies, memoirs or novels by 27 different authors published over a 50-year period from 1965. [...] There is a powerful moment early on where the author convincingly defends the truth-value of affect in reading scenarios of complex and even anguished adherence [...] The successive readings indeed draw on an impressively wide range of theories and insights, encompassing historical overview, philosophical reasoning, political and journalistic urgency, and psychoanalytic or sociological frameworks.' Sean Hand, Modern and Contemporary France'[This] book is a timely and thoroughly detailed discussion of Francophone Jewish mediations of Israel, offering access and insights into a heretofore overlooked corpus of literature.' Robert Isaacson, H-Judaic'Cairns' work will be of significant interest to scholars and students in French/Francophone studies, Israeli and Jewish studies, colonial and postcolonial studies, political science, history, and conflict studies.' Erika Hess, French Review'Cairns is to be commended for not taking a side: that is, she presents the reader with an engaging, but scientifically motivated study.'Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken, Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature'Cairns takes literary fiction as unmediated testimony of individualsfeelings and attitudes. This is not the only way to read literature, of course, but in the case of the corpus studied here, it may not be the least pertinent.'David Bellos, French StudiesTable of ContentsAcknowledgementsIntroduction1 Historical Foundations of Israeli Nationhood2 Modern Israeli Paradigms of Identity3 Intra-Israeli Conflict4 Arab–Israeli Conflict5 Arab–Israeli Conflict Turned Franco–Israeli Conflict6 The Metaphysics and Poesis of Israel7 SupplementBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisBeing Contemporary is a volume of original essays by 23 preeminent scholars of French and Comparative literature, hailing from both sides of the Atlantic, in response to the editors’ invitation to “think through the contemporary.” The volume offers a sustained critical reflection on the contemporary as a concept, a category, a condition, and a set of relationships to others and to one’s own time. Being Contemporary emerges from a sense of a critical urgency to probe the notion of “the contemporary,” and the place of the contemporary critic, in French literary and cultural studies today. Its point of departure is Susan Suleiman’s book Risking Who One Is (Harvard, 1994), which proposed two decades ago that “being contemporary” offers a heuristic category for assessing the role of the scholar and critic, for studying the current moment in literature, art, and culture, and for engaging with historical and philosophical questions in a way that resonates with readers in the present day. Returning to these ideas with renewed vigor, the thought-provoking essays that comprise this volume center on 20th- and 21st-century French literature, politics, memory, and history, and problematize the contemporary as a critical position with respect to the current moment.Trade Review'Lia Brozgal and Sara Kippur’s edited volume is impressive in its scope and in the intellectual level of its essays...providing useful theoretical concepts and models of thought that other scholars can productively apply to their own areas and objects of study.' David Petterson, H-France Review'This volume is, therefore, a foundational consideration of the academic’s position in time as well as a fitting tribute to Susan Suleiman, one of our field’s most influential, humane, and engaged scholars.' Kathryn Kleppinger, Bulletin of Francophone Postcolonial Studies'As a book exploring how Susan Rubin Suleiman’s thought continues to orient and inspire research in a number of disciplines, Being Contemporary is nothing short of excellent.' Lucas Hollister, French ReviewTable of ContentsIntroduction: Being Contemporary, Then and Now Lia Brozgal and Sara Kippur I. Conceptualizing the Contemporary 1. Henry Rousso, “Coping with Contemporariness” 2. Emily Apter, “Rethinking Periodization for the Now Time” 3. Carrie Noland, “(After) Conceptualism: Contemporaneity and Choreography” II. Contemporary Politics and French Thought 4. Régine Robin, “Identities in Flux” 5. Lawrence D. Kritzman, “The Paradoxes of Being Contemporary: Derrida and the Political” 6. Jeffrey Mehlman, “Of Sade, Blanchot, and the French Twentieth Century: Thoughts at Columbia” 7. Maurice Samuels, “Alain Badiou and Antisemitism” III. World War II and Vichy: Present Perspectives 8. Richard J. Golsan, “What Does ‘Vichy’ Mean Now?” 9. Gisèle Sapiro, “Forces of Solidarity and Logics of Exclusion: The Role of Literary Institutions in Times of Crisis” 10. Jakob Lothe, “Narrative, Testimony, Fiction: The Challenge of Not Forgetting the Holocaust” 11. Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, “‘Moral Witnessing?’” An Israeli Perspective on Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes” 12. Irene Kacandes, “From ‘Never Forgetting’ to ‘Post-Remembering’ and ‘Co-Witnessing’: Memory Work for the Twenty-First Century” IV. Writing the Contemporary Self 13. Annette Wieviorka, “‘I’ in the Plural: A New Writing of History” 14. Tom Conley, “Selves at Risk: Reading Susan Suleiman with Marc Augé, La Vie en double” 15. Alice Jardine, “Risking Who One Is, At The Risk of Thinking: On Writing an Intellectual Biography of Julia Kristeva” 16. Michael Sheringham, “‘La Connaissance par corps’: Writing and Self-Exposure in Annie Ernaux” V. Novel Rereadings 17. Mieke Bal, “Long Live Anachronism” 18. Janet Beizer, “Colette’s Côtelettes, or the Word Made Flesh” 19. Christie McDonald, “Choices: Beckett’s Way” 20. Alice Kaplan, “Making L'Etranger Contemporary: Kamel Daoud’s Meursault, contre-enquête” VI. Memory: Past and Future 21. Emmanuel Bouju, “A Nest in the Air: Phantom Pain and Contemporary Narrative” 22. Deborah Jenson, “Adrien and Marcel Proust: The Memory Patient” 23. Marianne Hirsch, “Vulnerable Times”

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Book SynopsisFor at least fifteen years, any keen observer of European society has been aware that antisemitism is no longer a matter of racial theory, nationalism, or exclusion of the 'other.' While in the past antisemites saw Jews as all too modern 'rootless cosmopolitans' (to use Stalin's expression), today's European antisemitism construes them as obsolete precisely because they are attached to their roots, their land, their community, their origin. The Jews are now perceived as a reactionary force that hinders the progress of humankind toward multiculturalism, understood as the peaceful, infinitely enriching coexistence of ethnicities, races, religions, and cultures within the same territory. The antisemite of yore viewed the Jews as an inferior race; today he views them as racist. By looking back to the emergence of a postwar theoretical discourse on trauma, memory, victims, suffering, the Holocaust and the Jews, Is Theory Good for the Jews? explores how 'French thought' is implicated in intellectual, literary and ideological components of the global and local upsurge of antisemitism. The author probes the legacy of Heidegger in France and exposes the shortcomings of radical social critique and postcolonial theory confronted to the challenge of Islamic terrorism and Jew hatred. This book is the first effort to analyze French responses that have regrettably played their part in generating the new antisemitism.Trade ReviewReviews 'The reader will be fascinated by the deftness with which Chaouat triangulates such opppositions as Sephardic/Ashkenazi, Israélite/Juif, Jew of the flesh/Jew of the spirit, infinitely expanding Europe/infinitely expanding Jihad. This is a remarkable book. ' Professor Jeffrey Mehlman, Boston University'In this startlingly lucid book, Bruno Chaouat asks why so many of the important theorists of our time, from Alain Badiou to Judith Butler, have failed to confront the problem of the 'new antisemitism.' A must-read for anyone interested in the intersection of contemporary politics and critical theory.' Maurice Samuels, Yale University'It is a final, telling indictment of Theory that Chaouat’s critique of it derives more political and moral insight from his detours into novels by Philip Roth, Boualem Sansal, and Michel Houellebecq than from any theoretical text he cites. One might have wished that Theory were today solely a matter of 1980s trivia, at most an exercise in period nostalgia like the television show Stranger Things, albeit scarier and less entertaining. Alas, as Chaouat’s book shows, it is still very much with us.'Michael Weingrad, Jewish Review of Books'Bruno Chaouat’s Is Theory Good for the Jews? is well-written, well-researched, and deeply felt. Chaouat is an established scholar and Professor at the University of Minnesota whose work is at the intersection of French literature and thought and Holocaust and Jewish Studies.' Brett Ashley Kaplan, University of Illinois, H-France Review‘Chaouat connects the history of postwar philosemitic theory to the history of postcolonial theory with fiery results. Among the book’s merits is to have anticipated one way in which, on the fiftieth anniversary of the student uprising and general strike that roiled France in May 1968, the French are taking stock of present tumult against the backdrop of past upheaval.’Dorian Bell, Antisemitism StudiesTable of ContentsFiguresAcknowledgementsPrologue: A Farewell to TheoryIntroduction: Is Theory Good for the Jews?1 Specters of Heidegger2 The Moralistic Turn: Radical Social Critique, Literary Terror, and Antisemitism after Toulouse3 Dangerous Parallels: The Holocaust, the Colonial Turn, and the New Antisemitism4 Theory’s Operation Shylock  Divertimento  Part I: Antisemitism Denial  Intermezzo: Have French Jews Veered to the Right?  Part II: Jew-Splitting in Judith Butler’s Parting WaysPostscript: Theorizing Antisemitic LaughterEnvoy: Adieu to France?Index Nominum

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Book SynopsisCaribbean Critique seeks to define and analyze the distinctive contribution of francophone Caribbean thinkers to perimetric Critical Theory. The book argues that their singular project has been to forge a brand of critique that, while borrowing from North Atlantic predecessors such as Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, and Sartre, was from the start indelibly marked by the Middle Passage, slavery, and colonialism. Chapters and sections address figures such as Toussaint Louverture, Baron de Vastey, Victor Schoelcher, Aimé Césaire, René Ménil, Frantz Fanon, Maryse Condé, and Edouard Glissant, while an extensive theoretical introduction defines the essential parameters of 'Caribbean Critique.'Trade Review'This is a very important and exciting book. Extending to the whole of the French Caribbean his previous work on the philosophical bases of the Haitian Revolution, Nesbitt has produced the first ever account of the region’s writing from a consistently philosophical, as distinct from literary or historical, standpoint.' Celia Britton'… the book fills an important gap in francophone Caribbean studies, which has always had a strong theoretical component but, arguably, has not previously been subject to such a rigorously philosophical critical treatment. … latest study will prove to be a landmark, indeed seminal, work in Caribbean Critique.' French Studies'Nesbitt’s book may be read as a survey, it also offers extremely succinct, complex, and compelling new perspectives on polemical issues that inhabit our work as professors, pedagogues, and intellectuals today…' Contemporary French Civilization'Nesbitt has made an important and highly original contribution to such debates.'New West Indian Guide Reviews 'A prodigiously researched and compelling conceptualisation of francophone Caribbean critical thought.' Gabriella Rodriguez, SX SalonTable of Contents Acknowledgements Preface Introduction: The Caribbean Critical Imperative I. Tropical Equality: The Politics of Principle . 1 Foundations of Caribbean Critique: From Jacobinism to Black Jacobinism . 2 Victor Schoelcher, Tocqueville, and the Abolition of Slavery . 3 Aimé Césaire and the Logic of Decolonization . 4 ‘Stepping Outside the Magic Circle’: The Critical Thought of Maryse Condé . 5 Édouard Glissant: From the Destitution of the Political to Antillean Ultra-leftism II. Critique of Caribbean Violence . 6 Jacobinism, Black Jacobinism, and the Foundations of Political Violence . 7 The Baron de Vastey and the Contradictions of Scribal Critique . 8 Revolutionary Inhumanism: Fanon’s On Violence . 9 Aristide and the Politics of Democratization III. Critique of Caribbean Relation . 10 Édouard Glissant: From the Poétique de la relation to the Transcendental Analytic of Relation . 11 Césaire and Sartre: Totalization, Relation, Responsibility . 12 Militant Universality: Absolutely Postcolonial . Conclusion: Aimé Césaire: The Incandescent I, Destroyer of Worlds Appendix: Letter of Jean-François, Belair, and Biassou/ Toussaint, July 1792 Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisAn Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and through Knowledge Unlatched.Disabled Bodies in Early Modern Spanish Literature: Prostitutes, Aging Women and Saints examines the concepts and role of women in selected Spanish discourses and literary texts from the late fifteenth to seventeenth centuries from the perspective of feminist disability theories. This study explores a wide range of Spanish medical, regulatory and moral discourses, illustrating how such texts inherit, reproduce and propagate an amalgam of Western traditional concepts of female embodiment. It goes on to examine concrete representations of deviant female characters, focusing on the figures of syphilitic prostitutes and physically decayed aged women in literary texts such as Celestina, Lozana andaluza and selected works by Cervantes and Quevedo. Finally, an analysis of the personal testimony of Teresa de Avila, a nun suffering neurological disorders, complements the discussion of early modern women’s disability. By expanding the meanings of contemporary theories of materiality and the social construction of disability, the book concludes that paradoxically, femininity, bodily afflictions, and mental instability characterized the new literary heroes at the very time Spain was at the apex of its imperial power. Ultimately, as this study shows, the broken female bodies of pre-industrial Spanish literature reveal the cracks in the foundational principles of power and established truths.Trade Review'Disabled Bodies in Early Modern Spanish Literature: Prostitutes, Aging Women and Saints provides a politically urgent critical approach to disability and female corporeality in early modern Spanish literary and social discourse. Rigorous in its historical contextualization and offering innovative, compelling readings of classic works, this book challenges familiar interpretations of women’s bodies in texts of this period, transforming prior disciplinary boundaries and categories of analysis.'Professor Susan Antebi, University of Toronto'Blending historical context and literary text with disability studies method, Encarnación Juárez-Almendros sets out to challenge the foundations of early modern scholarship through a long-awaited critical feminist examination of disability as both a social construction and an embodied material experience.' Benjamin Fraser, Professor and Chair, Thomas Harriot College of Arts & Sciences, East Carolina University‘Juárez-Almendros’s work demonstrates the usefulness of the lens of feminist disability theory as a new way to examine the premodern perception of women. She calls upon an excellent range of historical, sociological, and literary sources to frame and bolster her argument…this work is a welcome addition to studies on early modern Spanish culture.’ Kristy Wilson Bowers, H-Disability‘Throughout this book, Juárez-Almendros controls an impressive amount of medical knowledge from the period. This is evident not just in the chapters themselves but in the numerous discursive endnotes, which often add textual material to support points she is making and carry the discussion forward. All of the literary texts she discusses are canonical and so have been written about extensively and from different critical viewpoints, which is something her bibliography reflects. Finally, the introduction contains a brief and accessible discussion of disability studies as a discipline with references to some of the most important scholars and works in the field.’ Madeline Sutherland-Meier, Bulletin of the ComediantesReviews ‘The book is an excellent example of how to apply concepts created for the study of the present to the past. It is a well-documented and written in a concise style that uses only the necessary words to express complex ideas.’ Enrique Fernandez, Romance Quarterly‘It constitutes a substantial contribution to the field of disability and ageism studies, as well as a key text for scholars of Spanish early modern literature.' Victoria Rivera-Cordero, Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary JournalTable of ContentsIntroduction1. The Creation of Female Disability: Medical, Prescriptive and Moral Discourses2. The Artifice of Syphilitic and Damaged Female Bodies in Literature3. The Disabling of Aging Female Bodies: Midwives, Procuresses, Witches and the Monstrous Mother4. Historical Testimony of Female Disability: The Neurological Impairment of Teresa de Avila ConclusionsWorks CitedIndex

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Book SynopsisAn Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and through Knowledge Unlatched.Anti-Empire explores how different writers across Lusophone spaces have engaged with imperial and colonial power at its various levels of domination, while imagining alternatives to dominant discourses pertaining to race, ethnicity, culture, gender, sexuality, and class. Guided by a theoretically eclectic approach ranging from Psychoanalysis, Deconstruction, Postcolonial Theory, Queer Theory, and Critical Race Studies, Empire is explored as a spectrum of contemporary global power inaugurated by European expansion and propagated in the postcolonial present through economic, cultural, and political forces. Through the texts analysed, Anti-Empire offers in-depth interrogations of contemporary power in terms of racial politics, gender performance, socio-economic divisions, political structures, and the intersections of these facets of domination and hegemony. By way of grappling with Empire’s discursive field and charting new modes of producing meaning in opposition to that of Empire, the texts read from Brazil, Cabo Verde, East Timor, Portugal, and São Tomé and Príncipe open new inquiries for Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies while contributing theoretical debates to the study of Lusophone cultures.Trade ReviewReviews 'Prof. Silva’s manuscript will fill an important gap in Lusophone and postcolonial studies. It is an original study that groups together an important group of texts and discusses them in relation to their critical positionality regarding colonialism and coloniality.'Antonio Luciano de Andrade Tosta, The University of Kansas‘This study is extremely relevant and of interest for anyone who researches about Lusophone countries literature and their political and historical contexts, as well as decolonial forms of knowledge. The book is enlightening, easy to understand and presented in a logical manner. In addition, it certainly provides an important contribution to the field of Lusophone studies and their post-colonial historical, cultural and economic issues.' Débora Zamorano, HispaniaTable of ContentsAcknowledgementsIntroduction1. Decolonizing Consumption and Postcoloniality: a Theory of Allegory in Oswald de Andrade’s Antropofagia2. Mário de Andrade’s Antropofagia and Macunaíma as Anti-Imperial Scene of Writing3. Toward a Multicultural Ethics and Decolonial Meta-Identity in the Work of Fernando Sylvan4. Untranslatable Subalternity and Historicizing Empire’s Enjoyment in Luís Cardoso’s Requiem para o Navegador Solitário5. Imperial Cryptonomy: Colonial Specters and Portuguese Exceptionalism in Isabela Figueiredo’s Caderno de Memórias Coloniais6. Spectrality as Decolonial Narrative Device for Colonial Experience in António Lobo Antunes’s O Esplendor de Portugal7. Decolonizing Hybridity through Intersectionality and Diaspora in the Poetry of Olinda Beja8. Transgendering Jesus: Mário Lúcio’s O Novíssimo Testamento and the Dismantling of Imperial CategoriesConclusionBibliography

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Book SynopsisThis book explores the work of the late-medieval English writer Thomas Hoccleve. It highlights Hoccleve’s role, throughout his works, as a religious writer: an individual who engages seriously with the dynamics of heresy and ecclesiastical reform, who contributes to traditions of vernacular devotional writing, and who raises the question of how Christianity manifests on personal as well as political levels. It suggests a role for Hoccleve as a poetic mediator, capable of mediating between the increasingly militant English church and an incipient English literary tradition, and it highlights Hoccleve’s role in transforming the figure of Chaucer in the first decades of the fifteenth century. It argues that the version of Chaucer presented in Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes – august, devout, and conspicuously religious – is not a pre-formed artifact, but rather a Hocclevian invention; and it indicates the ecclesiastical, political, and literary contexts that make this version of Chaucer both possible and necessary. This study also situates Hoccleve’s accomplishments in a transnational poetic context – offering French and Italian precedents for Hoccleve’s moralization of Chaucer, while examining the influence of contemporary French poetry on Hoccleve’s work. It positions us to reconsider Hoccleve’s role within English literary tradition, and to better understand the way heresy and religious reform surface in late medieval poetry; and it affords us a more nuanced context for Chaucer’s positioning as a literary 'father' figure in this period.Trade Review‘For nearly 40 years Thomas Hoccleve toiled at the Privy Seal, a professional scribe stooping and staring ‘upon the sheepes skyn’ […] Langdell convincingly moves his rehabilitation forward with this thoughtful, wide-ranging and learned reassessment.' Jane Roberts, The Review of English Studies‘The emphasis on Hoccleve’s influence in the conclusion, while quickly spelled out here, is of great importance and will hopefully serve to inspire other scholars; in particular, using Hoccleve’s religious identity to connect him with Lydgate—specifically to the Life of Our Lady—is a promising avenue of research that many others may want to pursue, and thank Langdell as they do.’R. D. Perry, Speculum 'Langdell’s book is rich in textual comparison and includes a productive analytical range with close readings based on surviving paleographical evidence and imagery, as well as more traditional forms of textual analysis.' J. A. T. Smith, The New Chaucer SocietyTable of ContentsList of AbbreviationsIntroduction1. “What world is this? How vndirstande am I?”: Reading and Moralization in the Series 2. Vice, Virtue, and Poetic Mediation in the Epistle of Cupid 3. “What shal I calle thee? What is thy name?”: Hoccleve, Chaucer, and the Architectonics of Fame4. Reforming Thought: The Making of “Thomas Hoccleve”5. Hoccleve’s EucharistConclusion: The Matter of Hocclevian Influence BibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisThis book considers William Wordsworth’s use of iconography in his long poem The Excursion. Through the iconographical approach, the author steers a middle course between The Excursion’s two very different interpretive traditions, one focusing upon the poem’s philosophical abstraction, the other upon its touristic realism. Fresh readings are also offered of Wordsworth’s other major works, including The Prelude.Yen explores Wordsworth’s iconography in The Excursion by tracing allusions and correspondences in an abundance of post-1789 and earlier verbal and pictorial sources, as well as in Wordsworth’s prose and poetry. He analyses how the iconographical images in The Excursion contribute to, and impose limitations on, the overarching preoccupations of Wordsworth’s writings, particularly the themes of paradise lost and paradise regained in the post-revolutionary context. Shedding light on a vital aspect of Wordsworth’s poetic method, this study reveals the visual etymologies – together with the nuances and rhetorical capacities – of five categories of apparently ‘collateral’ images: envisioning, rooting, dwelling, flowing, and reflecting.Trade Review'Yen’s rich and fascinating study of The Excursion builds on Fiona Stafford’s recent revaluing of the local to focus on “the quiet functioning of local detail” at a linguistic and metaphorical level through mediated images of rural landscape. Yen works sensitively within the form of the long poem, with its extended passages of argument and reflection, to tease out “intratextual and intertextual recurrences” that resonate across the whole. Across five categories of “envisioning”; “rooting”, “dwelling”, “flowing”, and “reflecting” Yen pulls out the threads of allusion that link the language of the text into larger political events of the time, arguing for an iconographic power held in the figurative language of landscape. Methodologically sophisticated, the work both draws on and challenges the tenets of New Historicism so that, rather than displacing history, it seeks to awaken the history inherent within the allusive force of landscape imagery through a process of iconological interpretation. The writing is characterised by a remarkable attention to nuances of meaning, whilst the interpretation of political cartoons and symbols of the French Revolution grounds the argument in visual evidence. Brandon Yen’s study treats The Excursion with the respect it deserves as a major work of the late Revolutionary period.'Sally Bushell, Professor of Romantic and Victorian Literature, Lancaster University.‘It is a crucial book for students of The Excursion, but its positioning of that poem will also revitalize study of Wordsworth more generally… Yen’s impressively researched book should prompt critics to return to The Excursion with fresh eyes.’ David Stewart, European Romantic Review‘An outstanding and persistent feature of the book is Yen’s seamless integration of the poetry into his prose. This creates a hybrid voice, at once presenting the poetry for reconsideration and providing an enlightening interpretation of it. Ultimately, through this hybrid voice, Yen emerges as an advocate for renewed and increased scholarly attention to The Excursion.’ Brandon Wernette, The BARS Review'The most ambitious, learned, wide-ranging, and important book on The Excursion to date, one that firmly establishes the poem as the central text in Wordsworth’s re-imagining of British iconographic tradition and his reconfiguring of the post-revolutionary landscape.' Alison Hickey, The Review of English Studies‘Yen matches the number and complexity of Wordsworth’s local details with his own. I found the iconographical lens most productive in chapter 4, where Yen explicates a political tension within the iconography of rural cottages.’ Lawrence Evalyn, Eighteenth-Century Fiction'Yen takes a risk in downplaying the literal in Wordsworth and in locating a “new direction” not in new materials but in new modes of reading.' Lawrence Evalyn, Northeastern UniversityTable of ContentsAcknowledgementsList of IllustrationsList of AbbreviationsIntroductionPart 1: Themes and IconographyThe Excursion, Paradise Lost, and Paradise RegainedWordsworth's IconographyPart 2: EnvisioningIntroductionCastles in the AirLight and Ascent‘Speculative Height’The Wanderer's RevisitingPart 3: RootingIntroductionOak, Mountain Ash, the Liberty TreeTwo Ironic ImagesA Cosmopolitan VisionPart 4: DwellingIntroductionThe Devon Cottage and the Lakeland CottageThe Cottage of the ‘Wedded Pair’The Widower’s CottageThe ‘Cabinet for Sages Built’Part 5: Flowing and ReflectingIntroductionFlowingReflectingBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisIn the final decade of the eighteenth century, theatre was amongst the most important sites for redefining France's national identity. In this study, Annelle Curulla uses a range of archival material to show that, more than any other subject matter which was once forbidden from the French stage, Roman Catholic religious life provided a crucial trope for expressing theatre's patriotic mission after 1789.Even as old rules and customs fell with the walls of the Bastille, dramatic works by Gouges, Chénier, La Harpe, and others depicted the cloister as a space for reimagining forms of familial, individual, and civic belonging and exclusion.By relating the dramatic trope of religious life to shifting concepts of gender, family, religiosity, and nation, Curulla sheds light on how the process of secularization played out in the cultural space of French theatre.Trade Review'As well-written as it is meticulously researched, Annelle Curulla’s excellent first book not only illustrates the scholarly significance of Revolutionary theater, it also broadens our understanding of it.' Yann Robert, H-France ReviewTable of ContentsIntroduction: the cloister and the stageHistorical contextApproaches and sources1. Theatrical vocations: La Harpe’s Mélanie, ou la Religieuse (1770-1802)Mélanie’s instability: revisions to the text (1770-1802)Mélanie in the salonsFrom salon to stage: Mélanie in the Revolution (1790-1792)Reviving Mélanie (1796-1802)Conclusion2. Changing habits: the monastic trope as secularisation, 1790 and 1791Prisoners of the cloth: impossible love in monastic dramaTaking it off: secularisation as comedyOver the line? Plays that failedConclusion3. Dramaturgies of the cloister in Les Victimes cloîtréesPlaces of the forgotten: legends of monastic prisonsThe origins of the double sceneReading the double sceneConclusion4. Mother–daughter plots in monastic dramaThe pregnant nun in D’Alembert’s Eloge de Fléchier (1778)From sentimental to Gothic motherhood: Pougens’s Julie, ou la Religieuse de NîmesMaternal heroism in Olympe de GougesRepublican family values: Chénier’s Fénelon, ou les Religieuses de CambraiConclusion5. Brotherly orders: soldiers, monks and libertines in monastic comedyPersistent libertines: Les VisitandinesBrotherhood or else: La Partie carréePigault-Lebrun: fraternity between the sexesConclusionConclusion: lessons of the cloisterAppendix 1: examples of the monastic trope in Revolutionary dramaAppendix 2: bibliography of printed examples of the monastic tropeBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisThe characteristic alliterative poem of the 14th and 15th centuries tells a story of incident and adventure: it is pre-eminently the poetry of narrative. Yet it is also, more than any other kind of medieval verse, remarkable for passages of vivid description, taking advantage of the extraordinary rich verbal resources of the alliterative poets and the characteristic strengths of the alliterative line. Memorable examples are the green chapel in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the storm at sea in Patience, the dream-landscape in Pearl, and the mysterious tomb in St Erkenwald; there are violent battle-scenes, descriptions of hunting and hawking, beautiful meadows and terrifying mountains, purling streams and wild rivers. Here is a seeming contradiction, or at least a tension that needs to be explored. The descriptive passages are digressions that interrupt the narrative; the story must pause to take in a visual effect. In Description and Narrative in Middle English Alliterative Poetry, Thorlac Turville-Petre explores this relationship between description and narrative, and the contribution of description to the narrative. Passages from all the major alliterative poems are analysed, and translated as necessary, so that the book may meet the needs of students as well as scholars familiar with the language and the topics discussed.Trade ReviewReviews 'These essays cap Thorlac Turville-Petre's nearly half-century career devoted to the alliterative poetic tradition. They ably explore a variety of paradoxes, most notably the tensions between narrative progress and descriptive stasis, and between the perceived 'otherness' of alliterative language and style and various forms of familiarisation (appeals to lived experience, manifold connections with other Middle English writing, as well as with previously unnoted inspirations outwith English). Above all, the essays testify to the power of skills almost forgotten in today's academy, for Turville-Petre's careful unpacking of the poets' capacity to visualise rests always upon an impressive readerly attentiveness.'Ralph Hanna, Professor of Palaeography (Emeritus) and Emeritus Fellow at Keble College, Oxford.‘This book can be approached as a treasury of close readings of the Gawain group and related Middle English alliterative romances, with attention to sources, representation, and locality. On that basis, the book deserves praise, indeed gratitude, for its interpretive precision.’Eric Weiskott, Modern Philology‘[Offers] an informative summary of Turville-Petre’s body of work and provides a critical anthology of vivid passages of alliterative description […] Elegantly written and intellectually engaging.’Alex Mueller, The Review of English Studies'Thorlac Turville-Petre has produced a vade mecum for readers of Middle English alliterative poetry. The most important poems all receive attention. Two preliminary chapters define the corpus and introduce readers to its language and form. The bibliography lists preferred editions. Yet this is not a companion in the sense popularized by Cambridge University Press and Boydell & Brewer. A new “companion to Middle English alliterative poetry” would be welcome, but Turville-Petre offers something more interesting: he reads the poems. His subject is poetic technique, especially descriptive technique and the way that descriptions sit within the flow of narrative.' Ian Cornelius, Anglia'The book as a whole is the work of a scholar immersed in the corpus of late-medieval alliterative verse. Turville-Petre's command of the material is impressive and the texts are lovingly described in clear and crisp prose. That alliterative poets excel at descriptio is a commonplace of criticism, and this study will provoke further analysis of their context and rhetoric.' Richard J. Moll, The Medieval ReviewTable of ContentsAbbreviations1. Introduction2. The Vocabulary of Description3. Narrative and Description in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight4. Morte Arthure: A Hero for our Time5. Alexander’s Entry into Jerusalem in the Wars of Alexander6. Authenticity and Interpretation in St Erkenwald7. Landscapes and Gardens8. Siege Warfare9. Storms10. ConclusionBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisIn the aftermath of the efflorescence of experimental literature and theory that characterized the Trente Glorieuses (1945-75), ‘contemporary’ French literature is often said to embrace more traditional or readable novelistic forms. This rejection of the radical aesthetics of mid-century French literature, this rehabilitation of fictional forms that have been called sub-literary, regressive, or outdated, has been given a name: the ‘return to the story.’ In Beyond Return, Lucas Hollister proposes new perspectives on the cultural politics of such fictions. Examining adventure novels, radical noir, postmodernist mysteries, war novels, and dystopian fictions, Hollister shows how authors like Jean Echenoz, Jean-Patrick Manchette, Jean Rouaud, and Antoine Volodine develop radically dissimilar notions of the aesthetics of ‘return,’ and thus redraw in different manners the boundaries of the contemporary, the French, and the literary. In the process, Hollister argues for the need to move beyond the nostalgic, anti-modernist rhetoric of the ‘return to the story’ in order to appreciate the potentialities of innovative contemporary genre fictions.Trade Review'Beyond Return is a rich, intellectually vigorous, and persuasive study of contemporary French fiction and its presumed return to subject, story, and world. Entertainingly written and well-documented, it focuses on four major writers of the past forty or fifty years, each representing a different take on how such returns can be situated in terms of modernist and postmodernist stances or beyond them, on what they can consist of, and on what they can mean.'Gerald J. Prince, University of Pennsylvania'This book will be an original contribution to scholarship on contemporary French fiction. Hollister’s significant achievement here is to demonstrate how innovative French takes on genre fiction may provide important insights on literary history and cultural politics.'Ruth Cruickshank, Royal Holloway, University of LondonTable of ContentsIntroduction: Contemporary, French, Literature1. The Story and the World (Jean Rouaud)Anti-modern Adventure (The Imitation of Happiness)Littérature-monde2. A Circle of Circles (Jean-Patrick Manchette)Noir Form!Getting out of Circles (West Coast Blues)Endless Circles? (The Prone Gunman)3. Ghosts (Jean Echenoz)The Manchette ConnectionDisplacing Violence (One Year)The Phantom Limb (1914)4. Apocalypse and Posthistory (Antoine Volodine)The Volodinian Dystopia (View of the Boneyard)Post-ExoticismConclusion: Beyond Return

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Book Synopsis‘I want to know what I am, what I want, what I can do, what is real, what is lovely.’ The post-war British artist Keith Vaughan (1912–77) was not only a supremely accomplished painter; he was an impassioned, eloquent writer. Image of a Man is the first book to provide a comprehensive critical reading of Vaughan’s extraordinary journal, which spans thirty-eight years and sixty-one volumes to form a major literary work and a fascinating document of changing times. From close textual analysis of the original manuscripts, this book uncovers the attitudes and arguments that shaped and reshaped Vaughan’s identity as a man and as an artist. It reveals a continual process of self-construction through journal-writing, undertaken to navigate the difficulties of conscientious objection, the complications of desire as a gay man, and the challenges of making meaningful art. By focussing on Vaughan’s journal-writing in the context of its many influences and its centrality to his art practice, Image of a Man offers not only a compelling new critical biography of a significant yet underappreciated artist, but also a sustained argument on the constructed nature of the ‘artist’ persona in early and mid-twentieth-century culture – and the opportunities afforded by journal and diary forms to make such constructions possible.Trade Review'Belsey writes well about Vaughan’s attitude to warfare as a conscientious objector, and how, reduced to a mere cog in the Non-Combatant Corps, he used the early part of the journal to construct an identity for himself. We are also shown Vaughan’s determination to improve and evolve as a writer. In this he succeeded, and his journal is not only an invaluable social document but, at its best, a considerable work of literature.' Peter Parker, Times Literary SupplementTable of ContentsAcknowledgementsImage of a Man: IntroductionOutsider1. War and the Objector2. Society and the ObserverCreator3. Autobiography and the Intellectual4. Art and the ArtistCurator5. Self-Editorship and 'Keith Vaughan'The Diaristic Impulse and Self-Construction: An AfterwordBibliography

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Book SynopsisThis book pursues the specific case of Italian travel narratives in the Far East, through a focus on the experience of Japan in works by writers who visited the Land of the Rising Sun beginning in the Meiji period (1868-1912) and during the concomitant opening of Japan’s relations with the West. Drawing from the fields of Postcolonial and Transnational Studies, analysis of these texts explores one central question: what does it mean to imagine Japanese culture as contributing to Italian culture? Each author shares in common an attempt to disrupt ideas about dichotomies and unbalanced power relationships between East and West. Proposing the notion of ‘relational Orientalism,’ this book suggests that Italian travelogues to Japan, in many cases, pursued the goal of building imaginary transnational communities, predicated on commonalities and integration, by claiming what they perceived as ‘Oriental’ as their own. In contrast with a long history of Western representations of Japan as inferior and irrational, Searching for Japan identifies a positive overarching attitude toward the Far East country in modern Italian culture. Expanding the horizon of Italian transnational networks, normally situated within the Southern European region, this book reinstates the existence of an alternative Euro-Asian axis, operating across Italian history.Trade Review"Through a sophisticated close reading of a variety of yet untapped Italian literary sources, this thought-provoking volume sheds light on a fascinating and understudied aspect of Italian foreign relations and cultural diplomacy. An exciting read for anyone interested in Japan-Italy relations, Orientalism, and East-West relations."Rebecca Suter, Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Japanese Studies, The University of SydneyTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Searching for Japan1. Cosmopolitan Possibilities in Translation. Views from the Russo-Japanese War2. Mussolini in Japan: Japanese Representations in the Age of Fascism3. Little Italy, Big Japan: Patterns of Continuity and Displacement among Italian Writers in Japan4. Madama Butterfly RevisedPostscript

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Book SynopsisHenry Crabb Robinson (1775–1867) earned his place in literary history as a perceptive diarist from 1811 onwards. Drawing substantially on hitherto unpublished manuscript sources, this book discusses his formal and informal engagement with a wide variety of English and European literature prior to this point. Robinson emerges as a pioneering literary critic whose unique philosophical erudition underpinned his activity as a cross-cultural disseminator of literature during the early Romantic period. A Dissenter barred from the English universities, Robinson educated himself thoroughly during his teenage years and began to publish in radical journals. Godwin’s philosophy subsequently inspired his first theory of literature. When in Germany from 1800 to 1805, he became the leading British scholar of Kant, whose philosophy informed his discussions of Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, and August Wilhelm Schlegel. After his return to London, Robinson aided Hazlitt’s understanding of Kant and, thus, Hazlitt’s early career as a writer. His distinctive comparative criticism further enabled him to draw compelling parallels between Wordsworth, Blake, and Herder, and to discern ‘moral excellence’ in Christian Leberecht Heyne’s Amathonte. This also prompted Robinson’s transmission of Friedrich Schlegel and Jean Paul in 1811, as well as a profound exchange of ideas with Coleridge. In this new study, Philipp Hunnekuhl finds that Robinson’s ingenious adaptation of Kantian aesthetic autonomy into a revolutionary theory of literature’s moral relevance anticipated the current ‘ethical turn’ in literary studies.Trade Review'The study of Romantic criticism has gained new dimension with Philipp Hunnekuhl’s stunning exposition of Henry Crabb Robinson’s early reviews, essays, and translations. Robinson wrote with profound insight into Kantian transcendentalism, attended Schelling’s lectures, and even met with Goethe. Hunnekuhl demonstrates how Robinson established himself as the first true comparatist among the Romantic critics.'Frederick Burwick, Emeritus Professor at the University of California Los Angeles'The genre of Hunnekuhl's superbly researched monograph is hard to pin down: it is a historical as well as a biographical work that is simultaneously a study of the development of Romantic philosophy and the study of a genuinely Romantic theory of literature that combines German aesthetic autonomy and English political ethics. What is more, Hunnekuhl unearths archival material – manuscripts such as letters and diaries – and makes it available in an appendix. Thus, this important study provides material for future investigations of early 19th-century literature at the same time that it paints a complex picture of the way that key cultural concepts are generated and disseminated in the period of European Romanticism.'Ralf Haekel, Anglistik'This monograph uses Robinson’s extensive published works to unpick the influence he had on his contemporaries and further into the nineteenth century. Through the study of an author whose interests bridged languages, this is an exceptional case study of comparative literature. This monograph leaves us excitedly awaiting future opportunities to continue exploring the complexities of not just Robinson’s critical role as literary intermediary and disseminator in the Romantic period, but also comparative literature studies.'Charlotte May, The Charles Lamb Bulletin'Henry Crabb Robinson’s diary, 1811–67, is familiar terrain for British and German Romantic scholars. Philipp Hunnekuhl’s goal in Henry Crabb Robinson, Romantic Comparatist is instead to review Robinson’s life and work in the years 1790 to 1811, thereby retracing Robinson’s emergence as a comparatist and his formative impact on British and German Romantic authors. This task covers Robinson’s publications and manuscripts as well as his social interactions.'John Claiborne Isbell, European Romantic ReviewTable of ContentsIntroduction. Henry Crabb Robinson: Romantic Comparatist, 1790–1811 1. Radical Self-Education and First Authorship 2. The Godwinian Critic 3. Kant, Aesthetic Autonomy, and Literary Ethics 4. Moral Discourse in A.W. Schlegel, Schiller, Goethe, and Lessing 5. Hazlitt, Napoleon, and Literary Disinterestedness 6. ‘Matters of Religion & Morality’: Herder, Wordsworth, and Blake 7. Friedrich Schlegel, Coleridge, and the Ethics of Amathonte Conclusion: Or, a New Outlook for Nineteenth-Century Comparatism

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Book SynopsisThis book explores the work of the late-medieval English writer Thomas Hoccleve. It highlights Hoccleve’s role, throughout his works, as a religious writer: an individual who engages seriously with the dynamics of heresy and ecclesiastical reform, who contributes to traditions of vernacular devotional writing, and who raises the question of how Christianity manifests on personal as well as political levels. It suggests a role for Hoccleve as a poetic mediator, capable of mediating between the increasingly militant English church and an incipient English literary tradition, and it highlights Hoccleve’s role in transforming the figure of Chaucer in the first decades of the fifteenth century. It argues that the version of Chaucer presented in Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes – august, devout, and conspicuously religious – is not a pre-formed artifact, but rather a Hocclevian invention; and it indicates the ecclesiastical, political, and literary contexts that make this version of Chaucer both possible and necessary. This study also situates Hoccleve’s accomplishments in a transnational poetic context – offering French and Italian precedents for Hoccleve’s moralization of Chaucer, while examining the influence of contemporary French poetry on Hoccleve’s work. It positions us to reconsider Hoccleve’s role within English literary tradition, and to better understand the way heresy and religious reform surface in late medieval poetry; and it affords us a more nuanced context for Chaucer’s positioning as a literary 'father' figure in this period.Trade Review‘For nearly 40 years Thomas Hoccleve toiled at the Privy Seal, a professional scribe stooping and staring ‘upon the sheepes skyn’ […] Langdell convincingly moves his rehabilitation forward with this thoughtful, wide-ranging and learned reassessment.' Jane Roberts, The Review of English Studies‘The emphasis on Hoccleve’s influence in the conclusion, while quickly spelled out here, is of great importance and will hopefully serve to inspire other scholars; in particular, using Hoccleve’s religious identity to connect him with Lydgate—specifically to the Life of Our Lady—is a promising avenue of research that many others may want to pursue, and thank Langdell as they do.’R. D. Perry, Speculum 'Langdell’s book is rich in textual comparison and includes a productive analytical range with close readings based on surviving paleographical evidence and imagery, as well as more traditional forms of textual analysis.' J. A. T. Smith, The New Chaucer SocietyTable of ContentsList of AbbreviationsIntroduction1. “What world is this? How vndirstande am I?”: Reading and Moralization in the Series 2. Vice, Virtue, and Poetic Mediation in the Epistle of Cupid 3. “What shal I calle thee? What is thy name?”: Hoccleve, Chaucer, and the Architectonics of Fame4. Reforming Thought: The Making of “Thomas Hoccleve”5. Hoccleve’s EucharistConclusion: The Matter of Hocclevian Influence BibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisSome of H.D.s most oft-quoted lines have to do with the meaning and value of words; they are conditioned to hatch butterflies. Yet rather than seeking merely to understand how H.D. represented the meaning and value of words, this volume uses the butterfly hatch as a metaphor for thinking more broadly about the capacity of literary experience to hatch transformed persons butterflies in quest of wisdom in university English studies. Dislodging H.D. from her usual modernist context, this book positions her as a thinker and reads her autobiographical prose and recently published work of the 1940s for its ability to offer new insights into such pertinent and interconnected areas as literary contexts, imagination, and personal and social transformation. H.D. has, in her own words, always been uncanonically seated, resistant to rigid classification; the texture of her work celebrates internal, existential resonances that evidence the emergence of personality. The author capitalizes on this facet of H.D.s work and uncanonically seats her in conversation with the neglected literary theorist, Louise Rosenblatt (19042005), whose transactional contribution uniquely fuses critical theory, politics, philosophy, and educational vision. This book synthesizes the work of H.D. and Rosenblatt to create an emergent personalist theory of literary experience in the quest for wisdom, crystallizing links between philosophical anthropology, aesthetics, pedagogy, and the politics of human relations. Benefiting from access to unpublished material housed at Columbia, New York, and Yale universities, Vytniorgu combines analysis and theorizing to offer a significant, pedagogically-inflected intervention in literary studies, arguing that university English studies must incorporate critical and pedagogical vantages which open a window on wisdom as well as knowledge.

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Book SynopsisThe characteristic alliterative poem of the 14th and 15th centuries tells a story of incident and adventure: it is pre-eminently the poetry of narrative. Yet it is also, more than any other kind of medieval verse, remarkable for passages of vivid description, taking advantage of the extraordinary rich verbal resources of the alliterative poets and the characteristic strengths of the alliterative line. Memorable examples are the green chapel in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the storm at sea in Patience, the dream-landscape in Pearl, and the mysterious tomb in St Erkenwald; there are violent battle-scenes, descriptions of hunting and hawking, beautiful meadows and terrifying mountains, purling streams and wild rivers. Here is a seeming contradiction, or at least a tension that needs to be explored. The descriptive passages are digressions that interrupt the narrative; the story must pause to take in a visual effect. In Description and Narrative in Middle English Alliterative Poetry, Thorlac Turville-Petre explores this relationship between description and narrative, and the contribution of description to the narrative. Passages from all the major alliterative poems are analysed, and translated as necessary, so that the book may meet the needs of students as well as scholars familiar with the language and the topics discussed.Trade ReviewReviews 'These essays cap Thorlac Turville-Petre's nearly half-century career devoted to the alliterative poetic tradition. They ably explore a variety of paradoxes, most notably the tensions between narrative progress and descriptive stasis, and between the perceived 'otherness' of alliterative language and style and various forms of familiarisation (appeals to lived experience, manifold connections with other Middle English writing, as well as with previously unnoted inspirations outwith English). Above all, the essays testify to the power of skills almost forgotten in today's academy, for Turville-Petre's careful unpacking of the poets' capacity to visualise rests always upon an impressive readerly attentiveness.'Ralph Hanna, Professor of Palaeography (Emeritus) and Emeritus Fellow at Keble College, Oxford.‘This book can be approached as a treasury of close readings of the Gawain group and related Middle English alliterative romances, with attention to sources, representation, and locality. On that basis, the book deserves praise, indeed gratitude, for its interpretive precision.’Eric Weiskott, Modern Philology‘[Offers] an informative summary of Turville-Petre’s body of work and provides a critical anthology of vivid passages of alliterative description […] Elegantly written and intellectually engaging.’Alex Mueller, The Review of English Studies'Thorlac Turville-Petre has produced a vade mecum for readers of Middle English alliterative poetry. The most important poems all receive attention. Two preliminary chapters define the corpus and introduce readers to its language and form. The bibliography lists preferred editions. Yet this is not a companion in the sense popularized by Cambridge University Press and Boydell & Brewer. A new “companion to Middle English alliterative poetry” would be welcome, but Turville-Petre offers something more interesting: he reads the poems. His subject is poetic technique, especially descriptive technique and the way that descriptions sit within the flow of narrative.' Ian Cornelius, Anglia'The book as a whole is the work of a scholar immersed in the corpus of late-medieval alliterative verse. Turville-Petre's command of the material is impressive and the texts are lovingly described in clear and crisp prose. That alliterative poets excel at descriptio is a commonplace of criticism, and this study will provoke further analysis of their context and rhetoric.' Richard J. Moll, The Medieval ReviewTable of ContentsAbbreviations1. Introduction2. The Vocabulary of Description3. Narrative and Description in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight4. Morte Arthure: A Hero for our Time5. Alexander’s Entry into Jerusalem in the Wars of Alexander6. Authenticity and Interpretation in St Erkenwald7. Landscapes and Gardens8. Siege Warfare9. Storms10. ConclusionBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisWhat are the effects of a catastrophic earthquake on a society, its culture and politics? Which of these effects are temporary, and which endure? Are the various effects immediately discernible, or do they manifest themselves over time? What roles do artists, and writers in particular have in witnessing, bearing testimony to, and gauging the effects of natural disasters? What is the worth of literature in a time of disaster? These are the fundamental questions addressed in this book, which examines the case of the Haitian earthquake of 12 January 2010, a uniquely destructive event in the recent history of cataclysmic disasters, in Haiti and the broader world. The book argues that Haitian literature since 2010 has played a primary role in recording, bearing testimony to, and engaging with the social and psychological effects of the disaster. It further shows that daring literary invention—what Edwidge Danticat calls “dangerous creation”—constitutes one of the most striking and important means of communicating the effects of such a disaster, and that close engagement with the creative imagination is one of the most privileged ways for the outsider in particular to begin to comprehend the experience of living in and through a time of catastrophe.Trade ReviewReviews 'In the wake of Haiti's tragic 2010 earthquake, Dany Laferriere called for an imaginative rethinking of a new Haiti reborn from the disaster. In his thorough and perceptive survey of Haitian post-earthquake literature, Martin Munro examines the literary legacy of catastrophe. More than literary therapy, this new phase of Haitian writing emphasizes reconstruction as a subjective, human endeavor and engages with a changed view of Haitian space, collective values, tolerance and hospitality which are the key to Haiti’s recovery from this disaster. Writing on the Fault line is as timely as it is welcome.' J. Michael Dash'Writing on the Fault Line is a tour de force; the definitive statement on the effects of a devastating earthquake on Haiti’s literary production.' Rachel Douglas, University of Glasgow'Over many years, Martin Munro’s work has been mapping the cultural imprint of Haitian history. Along with several other groundbreaking critics, whose thinking he draws upon,he has made Haiti more approachable (especially for the Anglophone world).'Mary Gallagher, L'Esprit Créateur'This book also speaks broadly to the cultural, political, aesthetic, and historical importance of literature as a valid means of creating knowledge. It offers inspired, articulate reasons as to why Haitian literature, and fiction as a genre, provides invaluable testimony for better understanding countries and their people in difficult times.'Jason Herbeck, French ReviewTable of Contents Introduction: Reading the Ruins 1. Going Public: The Post-earthquake Essay 2. Broken Bodies: Makenzy Orcel, Marvin Victor, and the New Haitian Novel 3. Broken Lands: Gary Victor, Kettly Mars, and Post-earthquake Fiction 4. Not Writing Disaster: The Earthquake as Non-event in the Haitian Novel 2010-2014 5. Writing the “Haitian Soul”: Post-earthquake Poetry Conclusion: New Lands Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisFrancophone intellectuals writing in the lead-up to the decolonisation were faced with an impossible dilemma. How could they redefine their culture, and the ‘humanity’ they felt had been denied by the colonial project, in terms that did not replicate the French thinking by which they were formed? Figures such as Senghor, Césaire, Fanon, Amrouche, Feraoun and Kateb were all educated, indeed immersed, in French culture and language, yet they intervened forcefully in political debates surrounding decolonisation and sought to contribute to the reinvention of local cultures in a gesture of resistance to the ongoing French presence. Despite their pivotal role during this period of upheaval, then, their project was fraught with tensions that form the focus of this study. In particular, these writers reflected on the relation between universality and particularity in intellectual work, and struggled to avoid the traps associated with an over-investment in either domain. They also all learned from metropolitan French humanist thought but strove continually to reinvent that humanism so as to account for colonised experience and culture. Their work also readdresses the ongoing question of the relation between literature or culture and politics, and testifies to a moment of intense dialogue, and potential conflict, between contrasting but complementary spheres of activity.Trade ReviewReviews'An extremely erudite study of the vexed questions facing Francophone intellectuals in their response to colonial politics, ideas and culture and received ideas of the human. It is intellectually strong and very well written.' Max Silverman, University of Leeds'Each of the chapters makes incisive contributions to the subfields of Negritude and Maghrebi studies, and would thus serve well in specialized graduate seminars. Taught as a book, it is suitable for both graduate courses on postcolonial theory and undergraduate francophone literature classes.'Olivia Harrison, French Studies JournalTable of Contents Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Léopold Sédar Senghor: Politician and Poet between Hybridity and Solitude 2. Aimé Césaire: From Poetic Insurrection to Humanist Ethics 3. Frantz Fanon: Experiments in Collective Identity 4. Jean El-Mouhoub Amrouche: The Universal Intellectual? 5. Mouloud Feraoun: Postcolonial Realism, or, the Intellectual as Witness 6. Kateb Yacine: Poetry and Revolution Conclusion Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisCaribbean Globalizations explores the relations between globalization and the Caribbean since 1492, when Columbus first arrived in the region, to the present day. It aims to help change prevalent ways of thinking, not only about the Caribbean archipelago as a complex field of historical enquiry and cultural production, but also about the nature of globalization. It argues that the region has long been – and remains – a theatre of conflict between, as well as a site of emergence for, different forms of globalization. It thereby offers the opportunity to focus research and debate across the interdisciplinary spectrum by reflecting upon and re-imagining the idea of globalization in a specifically Caribbean context. It does so at a time when the Caribbean is urgently rethinking its own identity and place in a world where the Western economic model of globalization is more in question than ever. With contributors including Patrick Chamoiseau, Christopher Miller, Mimi Sheller and Charles Forsdick, this book will be required reading for all scholars working in Caribbean Studies.Trade ReviewReviews 'Caribbean Globalizations offers rich, innovative and cutting edge contributions to ongoing debates about the necessity to reexamine the Caribbean’s complex authenticities, entangled histories, imagined discourses, multifaceted cultures, and postplantation economic and political systems as they relate to the globalized world... it will be valuable to scholars and students in Globalization Studies, Comparative Caribbean Cultural Studies, Francophone Studies, Diaspora and Atlantic Studies, and New World Studies.' Anny Dominique Curtius, University of Iowa'The volume is commendable for offering a dialogized, balanced view of Western and Caribbean perspectives on the Caribbean, of vital importance to globalization and postcolonial studies.'Foara Adhikari, Bulletin of Francophone Postcolonial Studies'Fumagalli succeeds in bringing the multilayered cultural-political history of the Haitian–Dominican border to the fore while refusing to comply “with the idea that an acceptable future is unattainable” (p. 391).'Philip Kaisary, New West Indian ReviewTable of ContentsPrologue: Globalization, Globality, Globe-Stone - Patrick Chamoiseau Introduction - Eva Sansavior and Richard Scholar PART I. The Makings of Modernity 1. How Globalization invented Indians in the Caribbean - Patricia Seed 2. The Archipelago Goes Global: Late Glissant and the Early Modern Isolario - Richard Scholar 3. Precocious Modernity: Environmental Change in the Early Caribbean - Philip D. Morgan 4. ‘Slaves’ in My Family: French Modes of Servitude in the New World - Christopher L. Miller 5. Tobacco: The Commodification of the Caribbean and the Origins of Globalization - Guillaume Pigeard de Gurbert PART II. The Complex Present 6. The Amaranth Paradigm: Amerindian Indigenous Glocality in the Caribbean - Judith Misrahi-Barak 7. Paradoxical Encounters: The Essay as a Space of Globalization in Montaigne’s ‘On the Cannibals’ and Maryse Condé’s ‘O Brave New World’ - Eva Sansavior 8. Race and Modernity in Hispaniola: Tropical Matters and Development Perspectives - David Howard 9. Aluminium: Globalizing Caribbean Mobilities, Caribbeanizing Global Mobilities - Mimi Sheller 10. Local, National, Regional, Global: Glissant and the Postcolonial Manifesto - Charles Forsdick 11. Tropical Apocalypse: Globalization and the Caribbean End Times - Martin Munro Acknowledgements Note on Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisThis book considers the differing emotional investments in Israel of, on the one hand, Jews physically domiciled in Israel and, on the other hand, diasporic Jews living outside Israel for whom the country nonetheless forms a central point of affect. The book’s purpose is to trace how these two types of investment are represented by francophone Jewish writers. Israel is at once a problematic geopolitical reality in international politics and a salient topos within Jewish cultural imaginaries that transcend national boundaries. However, it has often been claimed that Israel has a “special” relationship with France, which until 1967 was its greatest ally. Israel has a large francophone community (some 800,000), while France has the largest Jewish community in Europe (some 600,000). But Franco-Israeli relations have undergone radical, largely negative transformations under the Fifth Republic (1958- ). The scope of the book is wide, addressing the following questions. How do francophone Jewish writers represent Israel in their literary works? What responses to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict do they express both in these works and in non-literary discourse (interviews and journalistic articles)? What is the role in those responses of emotion, affect, cognition, and ethics? To answer these questions, the book examines 44 different autobiographies, memoirs and novels published between 1965 and 2012 by 27 different authors, both male and female, covering the full cultural spectrum of Jews: Ashkenazic, Sephardic, and Mizrahi. The approach of the book is interdisciplinary, combining literary analysis with insights from the domains of history, journalism, philosophy, politics, psychoanalysis, and sociology.Trade ReviewReviews 'Cairns has made a powerful case for thinking of Israel, in all its complexity, as an integral part of Francophone literature.' Robert J. Watson, L'Esprit Créateur'This closely engaged and forensically pursued investigation into the complex of emotional relationships with Israel as a modern state maintained both by Jews living there and diasporic Jews has the fascinating focus of the Francophone dimension of such a double investment [...] The book works through highly attentive readings of no fewer than 44 autobiographies, memoirs or novels by 27 different authors published over a 50-year period from 1965. [...] There is a powerful moment early on where the author convincingly defends the truth-value of affect in reading scenarios of complex and even anguished adherence [...] The successive readings indeed draw on an impressively wide range of theories and insights, encompassing historical overview, philosophical reasoning, political and journalistic urgency, and psychoanalytic or sociological frameworks.' Sean Hand, Modern and Contemporary France'[This] book is a timely and thoroughly detailed discussion of Francophone Jewish mediations of Israel, offering access and insights into a heretofore overlooked corpus of literature.' Robert Isaacson, H-Judaic'Cairns' work will be of significant interest to scholars and students in French/Francophone studies, Israeli and Jewish studies, colonial and postcolonial studies, political science, history, and conflict studies.' Erika Hess, French Review'Cairns is to be commended for not taking a side: that is, she presents the reader with an engaging, but scientifically motivated study.'Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken, Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature'Cairns takes literary fiction as unmediated testimony of individualsfeelings and attitudes. This is not the only way to read literature, of course, but in the case of the corpus studied here, it may not be the least pertinent.'David Bellos, French StudiesTable of ContentsAcknowledgementsIntroduction1 Historical Foundations of Israeli Nationhood2 Modern Israeli Paradigms of Identity3 Intra-Israeli Conflict4 Arab–Israeli Conflict5 Arab–Israeli Conflict Turned Franco–Israeli Conflict6 The Metaphysics and Poesis of Israel7 SupplementBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisBeing Contemporary is a volume of original essays by 23 preeminent scholars of French and Comparative literature, hailing from both sides of the Atlantic, in response to the editors’ invitation to “think through the contemporary.” The volume offers a sustained critical reflection on the contemporary as a concept, a category, a condition, and a set of relationships to others and to one’s own time. Being Contemporary emerges from a sense of a critical urgency to probe the notion of “the contemporary,” and the place of the contemporary critic, in French literary and cultural studies today. Its point of departure is Susan Suleiman’s book Risking Who One Is (Harvard, 1994), which proposed two decades ago that “being contemporary” offers a heuristic category for assessing the role of the scholar and critic, for studying the current moment in literature, art, and culture, and for engaging with historical and philosophical questions in a way that resonates with readers in the present day. Returning to these ideas with renewed vigor, the thought-provoking essays that comprise this volume center on 20th- and 21st-century French literature, politics, memory, and history, and problematize the contemporary as a critical position with respect to the current moment.Trade Review'Lia Brozgal and Sara Kippur’s edited volume is impressive in its scope and in the intellectual level of its essays...providing useful theoretical concepts and models of thought that other scholars can productively apply to their own areas and objects of study.' David Petterson, H-France Review'This volume is, therefore, a foundational consideration of the academic’s position in time as well as a fitting tribute to Susan Suleiman, one of our field’s most influential, humane, and engaged scholars.' Kathryn Kleppinger, Bulletin of Francophone Postcolonial Studies'As a book exploring how Susan Rubin Suleiman’s thought continues to orient and inspire research in a number of disciplines, Being Contemporary is nothing short of excellent.' Lucas Hollister, French ReviewTable of ContentsIntroduction: Being Contemporary, Then and Now Lia Brozgal and Sara Kippur I. Conceptualizing the Contemporary 1. Henry Rousso, “Coping with Contemporariness” 2. Emily Apter, “Rethinking Periodization for the Now Time” 3. Carrie Noland, “(After) Conceptualism: Contemporaneity and Choreography” II. Contemporary Politics and French Thought 4. Régine Robin, “Identities in Flux” 5. Lawrence D. Kritzman, “The Paradoxes of Being Contemporary: Derrida and the Political” 6. Jeffrey Mehlman, “Of Sade, Blanchot, and the French Twentieth Century: Thoughts at Columbia” 7. Maurice Samuels, “Alain Badiou and Antisemitism” III. World War II and Vichy: Present Perspectives 8. Richard J. Golsan, “What Does ‘Vichy’ Mean Now?” 9. Gisèle Sapiro, “Forces of Solidarity and Logics of Exclusion: The Role of Literary Institutions in Times of Crisis” 10. Jakob Lothe, “Narrative, Testimony, Fiction: The Challenge of Not Forgetting the Holocaust” 11. Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, “‘Moral Witnessing?’” An Israeli Perspective on Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes” 12. Irene Kacandes, “From ‘Never Forgetting’ to ‘Post-Remembering’ and ‘Co-Witnessing’: Memory Work for the Twenty-First Century” IV. Writing the Contemporary Self 13. Annette Wieviorka, “‘I’ in the Plural: A New Writing of History” 14. Tom Conley, “Selves at Risk: Reading Susan Suleiman with Marc Augé, La Vie en double” 15. Alice Jardine, “Risking Who One Is, At The Risk of Thinking: On Writing an Intellectual Biography of Julia Kristeva” 16. Michael Sheringham, “‘La Connaissance par corps’: Writing and Self-Exposure in Annie Ernaux” V. Novel Rereadings 17. Mieke Bal, “Long Live Anachronism” 18. Janet Beizer, “Colette’s Côtelettes, or the Word Made Flesh” 19. Christie McDonald, “Choices: Beckett’s Way” 20. Alice Kaplan, “Making L'Etranger Contemporary: Kamel Daoud’s Meursault, contre-enquête” VI. Memory: Past and Future 21. Emmanuel Bouju, “A Nest in the Air: Phantom Pain and Contemporary Narrative” 22. Deborah Jenson, “Adrien and Marcel Proust: The Memory Patient” 23. Marianne Hirsch, “Vulnerable Times”

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Book SynopsisAn Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and through Knowledge Unlatched.Anti-Empire explores how different writers across Lusophone spaces have engaged with imperial and colonial power at its various levels of domination, while imagining alternatives to dominant discourses pertaining to race, ethnicity, culture, gender, sexuality, and class. Guided by a theoretically eclectic approach ranging from Psychoanalysis, Deconstruction, Postcolonial Theory, Queer Theory, and Critical Race Studies, Empire is explored as a spectrum of contemporary global power inaugurated by European expansion and propagated in the postcolonial present through economic, cultural, and political forces. Through the texts analysed, Anti-Empire offers in-depth interrogations of contemporary power in terms of racial politics, gender performance, socio-economic divisions, political structures, and the intersections of these facets of domination and hegemony. By way of grappling with Empire’s discursive field and charting new modes of producing meaning in opposition to that of Empire, the texts read from Brazil, Cabo Verde, East Timor, Portugal, and São Tomé and Príncipe open new inquiries for Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies while contributing theoretical debates to the study of Lusophone cultures.Trade ReviewReviews 'Prof. Silva’s manuscript will fill an important gap in Lusophone and postcolonial studies. It is an original study that groups together an important group of texts and discusses them in relation to their critical positionality regarding colonialism and coloniality.'Antonio Luciano de Andrade Tosta, The University of Kansas‘This study is extremely relevant and of interest for anyone who researches about Lusophone countries literature and their political and historical contexts, as well as decolonial forms of knowledge. The book is enlightening, easy to understand and presented in a logical manner. In addition, it certainly provides an important contribution to the field of Lusophone studies and their post-colonial historical, cultural and economic issues.' Débora Zamorano, HispaniaTable of ContentsAcknowledgementsIntroduction1. Decolonizing Consumption and Postcoloniality: a Theory of Allegory in Oswald de Andrade’s Antropofagia2. Mário de Andrade’s Antropofagia and Macunaíma as Anti-Imperial Scene of Writing3. Toward a Multicultural Ethics and Decolonial Meta-Identity in the Work of Fernando Sylvan4. Untranslatable Subalternity and Historicizing Empire’s Enjoyment in Luís Cardoso’s Requiem para o Navegador Solitário5. Imperial Cryptonomy: Colonial Specters and Portuguese Exceptionalism in Isabela Figueiredo’s Caderno de Memórias Coloniais6. Spectrality as Decolonial Narrative Device for Colonial Experience in António Lobo Antunes’s O Esplendor de Portugal7. Decolonizing Hybridity through Intersectionality and Diaspora in the Poetry of Olinda Beja8. Transgendering Jesus: Mário Lúcio’s O Novíssimo Testamento and the Dismantling of Imperial CategoriesConclusionBibliography

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Book SynopsisThis book considers William Wordsworth’s use of iconography in his long poem The Excursion. Through the iconographical approach, the author steers a middle course between The Excursion’s two very different interpretive traditions, one focusing upon the poem’s philosophical abstraction, the other upon its touristic realism. Fresh readings are also offered of Wordsworth’s other major works, including The Prelude.Yen explores Wordsworth’s iconography in The Excursion by tracing allusions and correspondences in an abundance of post-1789 and earlier verbal and pictorial sources, as well as in Wordsworth’s prose and poetry. He analyses how the iconographical images in The Excursion contribute to, and impose limitations on, the overarching preoccupations of Wordsworth’s writings, particularly the themes of paradise lost and paradise regained in the post-revolutionary context. Shedding light on a vital aspect of Wordsworth’s poetic method, this study reveals the visual etymologies – together with the nuances and rhetorical capacities – of five categories of apparently ‘collateral’ images: envisioning, rooting, dwelling, flowing, and reflecting.Trade Review'Yen’s rich and fascinating study of The Excursion builds on Fiona Stafford’s recent revaluing of the local to focus on “the quiet functioning of local detail” at a linguistic and metaphorical level through mediated images of rural landscape. Yen works sensitively within the form of the long poem, with its extended passages of argument and reflection, to tease out “intratextual and intertextual recurrences” that resonate across the whole. Across five categories of “envisioning”; “rooting”, “dwelling”, “flowing”, and “reflecting” Yen pulls out the threads of allusion that link the language of the text into larger political events of the time, arguing for an iconographic power held in the figurative language of landscape. Methodologically sophisticated, the work both draws on and challenges the tenets of New Historicism so that, rather than displacing history, it seeks to awaken the history inherent within the allusive force of landscape imagery through a process of iconological interpretation. The writing is characterised by a remarkable attention to nuances of meaning, whilst the interpretation of political cartoons and symbols of the French Revolution grounds the argument in visual evidence. Brandon Yen’s study treats The Excursion with the respect it deserves as a major work of the late Revolutionary period.'Sally Bushell, Professor of Romantic and Victorian Literature, Lancaster University.‘It is a crucial book for students of The Excursion, but its positioning of that poem will also revitalize study of Wordsworth more generally… Yen’s impressively researched book should prompt critics to return to The Excursion with fresh eyes.’ David Stewart, European Romantic Review‘An outstanding and persistent feature of the book is Yen’s seamless integration of the poetry into his prose. This creates a hybrid voice, at once presenting the poetry for reconsideration and providing an enlightening interpretation of it. Ultimately, through this hybrid voice, Yen emerges as an advocate for renewed and increased scholarly attention to The Excursion.’ Brandon Wernette, The BARS Review'The most ambitious, learned, wide-ranging, and important book on The Excursion to date, one that firmly establishes the poem as the central text in Wordsworth’s re-imagining of British iconographic tradition and his reconfiguring of the post-revolutionary landscape.' Alison Hickey, The Review of English Studies‘Yen matches the number and complexity of Wordsworth’s local details with his own. I found the iconographical lens most productive in chapter 4, where Yen explicates a political tension within the iconography of rural cottages.’ Lawrence Evalyn, Eighteenth-Century Fiction'Yen takes a risk in downplaying the literal in Wordsworth and in locating a “new direction” not in new materials but in new modes of reading.' Lawrence Evalyn, Northeastern UniversityTable of ContentsAcknowledgementsList of IllustrationsList of AbbreviationsIntroductionPart 1: Themes and IconographyThe Excursion, Paradise Lost, and Paradise RegainedWordsworth's IconographyPart 2: EnvisioningIntroductionCastles in the AirLight and Ascent‘Speculative Height’The Wanderer's RevisitingPart 3: RootingIntroductionOak, Mountain Ash, the Liberty TreeTwo Ironic ImagesA Cosmopolitan VisionPart 4: DwellingIntroductionThe Devon Cottage and the Lakeland CottageThe Cottage of the ‘Wedded Pair’The Widower’s CottageThe ‘Cabinet for Sages Built’Part 5: Flowing and ReflectingIntroductionFlowingReflectingBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisWhat kinds of pleasure do we take from writing and reading? What authority has the writer over a text? What are the limits of language’s ability to communicate ideas and emotions? Moreover, what are the political limitations of these questions? The work of the French cultural critic and theorist Roland Barthes (1915–80) poses these questions, and has become influential in doing so, but the precise nature of that influence is often taken for granted. This is nowhere more true than in poetry, where Barthes’ concerns about pleasure and origin are assumed to be relevant, but this has seldom been closely examined. This innovative study traces the engagement with Barthes by poets writing in English, beginning in the early 1970s with one of Barthes’ earliest Anglophone poet readers, Scottish poet-theorist Veronica Forrest-Thomson (1947–75). It goes on to examine the American poets who published in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and other small but influential journals of the period, and other writers who engaged with Barthes later, considering his writings’ relevance to love and grief and their treatment in poetry. Finally, it surveys those writers who rejected Barthes’ theory, and explores why this was. The first study to bring Barthes and poetry into such close contact, this important book illuminates both subjects with a deep contemplation of Barthes’ work and a range of experimental poetries.Trade ReviewReviews 'Roland Barthes had little interest in poetry, but, surprisingly, his occasional remarks on the subject and thoughts about literature in general played a provocative role, Callie Gardner shows, for poets in the UK and especially the US and contributed especially to arguments about L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing. Gardner’s lucid and wide-ranging discussion shrewdly illuminates the odd fortunes of literary ideas.' Professor Jonathan Culler, Cornell University'Callie Gardner's subtle and shifting account of how the work of Roland Barthes has been read and re-used by English-speaking poets since the 1970s is a tour de force that will long resonate with poetry specialists and literary theorists alike.' Dr Andy Stafford, Leeds UniversityTable of ContentsAcknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction: A Great Indelicacy • ‘Insular and Pragmatical Minds’: Barthes’ First Readers in English • Barthes and the Poets 1. Barthes and Forrest-Thomson • ‘S/Z’ • ‘Drinks with a Mythologue’ • ‘L’effet du réel’ • Poems with Footnotes • ‘After Intelligibility’ • Poetic Artifice • Conclusion2. Barthes in America • Robert Duncan’s ‘Kopóltuš’ • Ron Silliman’s Nine Poets • Bernadette Mayer’s Experiments • Lyn Hejinian’s Erotics of Materials • Conclusion3. Barthes in Journals • Approaching Poetry Journal Culture • Poetics and Art Journalism: New York and Paris • Barthes in the ‘Language-Centred’ Poetics Journals • Wch Way • Michael Palmer’s Barthes • L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E’s Barthes • ‘Code Words’ • Open Letter • Barthes in Poetics Journal • UK Poetics • Barthes and Oulipo • Conclusion 4. Barthes and Love • Reading A Lover’s Discourse • ‘Lonely Girl Phenomenology’ • Anne Carson: Nuance and Eros • Deborah Levy: The Suburbs of Hell • Kristjana Gunnars: Roland Barthes in Winnipeg • Gunnars’ Transition: Longing to Zero • Conclusion5. Rejections of Barthes • Rejection and/as Influence • The Signifier as Fetish • Barthes and Race • John Yau and ‘The Death of the Author’ • Queer Barthes • New Narrative Writing and Queer Subjecthood • Acker, Barthes, Bataille • Conclusion Conclusion: Nothing Better Than A Theory BibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisT. S. Eliot and Organicism provides the first comprehensive account of Eliot’s preoccupation with agrarianism, organicism and the environment. Jeremy Diaper elucidates and contextualizes several facets of Eliot’s organic thinking, ranging from composting and soil fertility, to regionalism, nutrition and culinary skills. Through detailed examination of Eliot’s engagement with organic issues, this book offers environmental readings of Eliot’s poetry and plays and demonstrates that agrarian concerns emerge as a notable theme in his literary output – from his earliest notebook of poems known as Inventions of the March Hare to Murder in the Cathedral. This book also analyzes Eliot’s prose to illuminate his engagement with the key environmental debates which were taking place during the 1930s-50s. Diaper offers a thorough analysis of Eliot’s social criticism and explores his perturbation regarding the decline of agriculture in After Strange Gods, The Idea of a Christian Society and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. T. S. Eliot and Organicism breaks new ground by demonstrating that a thorough understanding of Eliot’s engagement with environmentalism is vital to our interpretation of both his poetry and prose. It establishes that one of the twentieth century’s most eminent literary figures should be remembered for his important role in the emergence of the organic husbandry movement and for his wide-ranging comments on a variety of environmental and organic issues. Trade Review‘The most valuable part of T. S. Eliot and Organicism is its thorough trawling through the files of the New English Weekly and the Christian News-Letter, two publications which Eliot supported and contributed to, especially once the Criterion had closed. This yields ample evidence of parallels between that of Eliot's work and a number of prominent writers on agriculture and its place in a good society.’ Stefan Collini, The Times Literary Supplement‘Jeremy Diaper's lucid and detailed study locates Eliot at the heart of the early organic movement ... this book will prove essential reading not only for students of organicism, but for all those with a general interest in the culture of mid-twentieth-century England as reflected in the work of its greatest modernist poet.’ Richard Moore-Colyer, Rural History‘Jeremy Diaper’s argument in T. S. Eliot and Organicism goes way beyond such circumstantial considerations, though, presenting a wealth of evidence to show that Eliot attached great importance to farming and to a thriving rural culture and economy… Diaper’s monograph offers a convincing case for T. S. Eliot’s major role in propagating the organicist philosophy.’ Philip Conford, Agricultural History Review‘T. S. Eliot and Organicism’s profound reconsideration of Eliot’s organic thinking will undoubtedly inspire future approaches to ecocriticism and Eliot Studies.’ Clint Wilson, Time Present'Jeremy Diaper has drawn a meticulous portrait of Eliot as ecocritic avant la lettre... His work establishes a solid historical basis for future environmental readings of Eliot – the poet of soil, air, and water.'Frances Dickey, Essays in Criticism'Certain readers may be unfamiliar with the relevant contexts that shaped Eliot's 'agricultural sensibility' and in this respect one of the delights of the book, as well as the lucidity of Diaper's prose, is the meticulous positioning of the author in relation to various agrarian, agricultural and environmental concerns... Overall, Diaper's book is written with sharp clarity, is logically structured and meticulously historicised, and, even though some of the close readings may induce further questions and critical responses, the implications are far reaching'.Scott Freer, The Journal of The T. S. Eliot Society (UK)'Diaper’s meticulously researched exploration of Eliot’s engagements with the organicist movement of the 1930s invites us to reconsider the author many still associate with modernism at its most anthropocentric. We find instead a poet invested in the practicalities of food, dirt, sustainable human habitation, and the webs of politics and economics in which it is all entangled. Diaper compellingly argues that it is impossible to understand Eliot’s social criticism and poetics, and even his faith, aside from his concern for the fate of actual, living loam... This touchstone work will be referenced in any future ecocritical study of Eliot. Beyond this, the book is an important contribution to the ongoing greening of modernist studies. The last decade produced several works on the more-than-human investments of modernism, each of which has had to argue vigorously for the validity of combining modernism and ecocriticism. One hopes that we’re finally now in a moment when we can do away with the anxious justifications tucked into our prologues and intros. Indeed, Diaper’s book perhaps signals that such a moment is here'.Julia E. Daniel, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment'T.S Eliot and Organicism is a valuable contribution, not simply because of its original take on Eliot's legacy, but also due to its highlighting an early-twentieth-century movement that is rarely considered at length"Karina Jakubowicz, Journal of Modern LiteratureTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. The Formation of Eliot’s Agricultural Sensibility 2. The Criterion: A Platform for Agricultural Perspectives 3. The Material and Spiritual Soil of the New English Weekly 4. A Christian Community: T. S. Eliot and the Christian News-Letter 5. The Cultivation of Culture Conclusion: Organic Eliot Notes Index

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Book SynopsisIn the aftermath of the efflorescence of experimental literature and theory that characterized the Trente Glorieuses (1945-75), ‘contemporary’ French literature is often said to embrace more traditional or readable novelistic forms. This rejection of the radical aesthetics of mid-century French literature, this rehabilitation of fictional forms that have been called sub-literary, regressive, or outdated, has been given a name: the ‘return to the story.’ In Beyond Return, Lucas Hollister proposes new perspectives on the cultural politics of such fictions. Examining adventure novels, radical noir, postmodernist mysteries, war novels, and dystopian fictions, Hollister shows how authors like Jean Echenoz, Jean-Patrick Manchette, Jean Rouaud, and Antoine Volodine develop radically dissimilar notions of the aesthetics of ‘return,’ and thus redraw in different manners the boundaries of the contemporary, the French, and the literary. In the process, Hollister argues for the need to move beyond the nostalgic, anti-modernist rhetoric of the ‘return to the story’ in order to appreciate the potentialities of innovative contemporary genre fictions.Trade Review'Beyond Return is a rich, intellectually vigorous, and persuasive study of contemporary French fiction and its presumed return to subject, story, and world. Entertainingly written and well-documented, it focuses on four major writers of the past forty or fifty years, each representing a different take on how such returns can be situated in terms of modernist and postmodernist stances or beyond them, on what they can consist of, and on what they can mean.'Gerald J. Prince, University of Pennsylvania'This book will be an original contribution to scholarship on contemporary French fiction. Hollister’s significant achievement here is to demonstrate how innovative French takes on genre fiction may provide important insights on literary history and cultural politics.'Ruth Cruickshank, Royal Holloway, University of LondonTable of ContentsIntroduction: Contemporary, French, Literature1. The Story and the World (Jean Rouaud)Anti-modern Adventure (The Imitation of Happiness)Littérature-monde2. A Circle of Circles (Jean-Patrick Manchette)Noir Form!Getting out of Circles (West Coast Blues)Endless Circles? (The Prone Gunman)3. Ghosts (Jean Echenoz)The Manchette ConnectionDisplacing Violence (One Year)The Phantom Limb (1914)4. Apocalypse and Posthistory (Antoine Volodine)The Volodinian Dystopia (View of the Boneyard)Post-ExoticismConclusion: Beyond Return

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Book SynopsisInto our Labours explores the literary representation of work across the globe since 1850, setting out to show that the literature of modernity is best understood in the light of the worlding of capitalism. The book proposes that a determinative relation exists between changing modes of work and changes in the forms, genres, and aesthetic strategies of the writing that bears witness to them. Two aspects of the ‘worlding’ of modernity, especially, are emphasised. First, an ‘inaugural’ experience of capitalist social relations, whose literary registration sometimes makes itself known through a crisis of representation, as the forms of space- and time-consciousness demanded by life in contexts in which market-oriented commodity production has become the dominant form of social labour are counterposed with inherited ways of seeing and knowing, now under acute pressure if not already obsolete. Second, a moment corresponding to the consolidation, regularisation and global dispersal of capitalist development. Into Our Labours focuses on the naturalisation of capitalist social relations: forms of sociality and solidarity, ideologies of familialism, individualism and work, relations between the sexes and the generations. Arguing that the only plausible term for the vast body of literary work engendered by the worlding of capitalist social relations is ‘modernist’, the book proposes that it is then important to challenge the still-entrenched Eurocentric understandings of modernism. Modernism is neither originally nor paradigmatically ‘Western’ in provenance; and its temporal parameters are much broader than are usually assumed in modernist studies, extending both backward and forward in time.Trade Review“In the context of “English” and postcolonial literary studies, it has been one of Lazarus’s signal contributions to widen the corpus far beyond the usual suspects. Into Our Labours continues in that vein and issues, in effect, a challenge to scholars within the discipline of English to work and think comparatively. Among comparatists proper, the scope of Lazarus’s selections is perhaps less unusual, but here it is the theoretical claims that will inspire continued debate.”Stefan Helgesson, Stockholm University'“What exactly would a literary scholarship that plausibly conjoined historical and formal analysis look like?” Neil Lazarus poses this question early in his luminous new book, and then answers it over the next two hundred or so pages in a virtuoso critical performance. Lazarus wears his learning lightly, but never without the seriousness and precision that it demands. At one moment, he is taking apart a single word – ‘abstract’, used by Roberto Schwarz in his foundational writing on Brazilian culture – and examining its manifold meanings and implications over three gripping pages; At another, he is providing the most lucid and compelling reading imaginable of the Korean writer Yi Mun-yol’s novel, The Poet. Everything from Old English elegies to Urdu shayaris, and everyone from the Chinese Lao She to the Algerian Assia Djebar, attracts Lazarus’s exact and exacting attention. This book will change the terms of debate about ‘world-literature’. More importantly, if you think literature matters, you cannot afford to miss what Lazarus has to say here.'Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, University of WarwickTable of ContentsChapter OneThe Ground Beneath Our Feet: Positions and Position-Takings in World-Literary StudiesChapter TwoWork, Form and the Ideology of CultureChapter ThreeStone upon Stone: Land, Labour and ConsciousnessWorks cited

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