Literary theory Books

Book SynopsisThis treatise argues that literary criticism must re-establish connections to a wide range of social activities. It sets out a new type of criticism, called ecological literary criticism, which aims to make humanistic studies more socially responsible.

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.It's happening all the time, all around us. We cover it up. We ignore it. Rust takes on the many meanings of this oxidized substance, showing how technology bleeds into biology and ecology. Jean-Michel Rabate combines art, science, and autobiography to share his fascination with peeling paints and rusty metal sheets. Rust, he concludes, is a place where things living, built, and remembered commingle.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewRabate counters our instinctively negative view of rust with a surprisingly wide variety of examples drawn from philosophy as well as the arts and sciences for a strikingly and broadly convincing argument as to the merits of rust … Rabate presents rust as an imperfection with unlimited possibilities. He clarifies its role in our lives and complicates how we value its role. He brings readers his family rouille recipe and the news that someday soon, science may give us a green rust capable of cleaning our water and soil … He provides plenty of food for thought as we run into these references across daily life. * PopMatters *This is a witty, delightfully eclectic fantasy and fugue on the theme of rust, which, it turns out, is a perfect metaphor for an aesthetics of metamorphosis in and after modernism. Rust has the ruddy glow of active thinking in the process of self-transformation. Rust not only doesn’t sleep, it never stops giving off sparks. * Charles Bernstein, Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania, USA *Through his elegant alchemical associations, Rabaté spins Rust to gold. * Vanessa Place, artist and criminal defense attorney *Rust has its fascinating moments, those deeply poetic instants where metaphor becomes real and you get a tiny glimpse of the wonder that can reside inside seemingly ordinary items. * San Francisco Book Review *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. How to Live with Global Rust 2. Hegel and Ruskin, from the Inorganic to the Organic 3. Interlude: Blood-work 4. Rats and Jackals, Kafka after von Hofmannsthal 5. Aesthetics of Rust Conclusion: Fougères to Marseilles: Green Rust or Edible Rouille? Acknowledgments Notes Index

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Book SynopsisIrwin mirrors the aesthetic impact of the genre by creating in his study the dynamics of a detective story-the uncovering of mysteries, the accumulation of evidence, the tracing of clues, and the final solution that ties it all together.Trade ReviewThis is a fine book... Irwin has travelled far and profitably, indeed, into the history of chess, into geometry and algebra, into mythology, into alchemy, into the culture of labyrinths, and more besides. -- John Sturrock Times Literary Supplement [Irwin] has probed the labyrinthine depths principally of Poe and Borges, using the analytic tools of Jung, Lacan, and Derrida, and a score of other psychological interpreters of fiction... The result is dazzling. America [A] learned, capacious, and ultimately amazing book. Virginia Quarterly Review

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Book SynopsisThis combined edition provides a sophisticated yet accessible discussion-across generations-of "the fundamental discourse of poetic structure."Trade ReviewIn the ideal writing program where criticism and creative writing imply, sustain, and nourish one another, Allen Grossman's ' Summa Lyrica' would be required reading. Alan Shapiro

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Book Synopsis* This is a unique testimony to one of the most important literary friendships of our time. Robbe-Grillet, the master of the nouveau roman, considered Barthes, France s greatest postwar literary theorist and critic, as one of his very few true friends.Trade Review"The warmth of friendship between the two is palpable, with some comic teasing: 'Roland speaks quietly,' Robbe-Grillet says. 'I don't speak quietly,' Barthes objects. 'You don't speak quietly,' his friend ripostes, 'but you take the precaution of always having a cigarette between your lips, which, as you know [...] doesn't allow you to shout things out.' The modern literary event-goer wonders melancholically: où sont les Gitanes d'antan?" Steven Poole, The Guardian "The book's arrival in English should be embraced as a challenge to the many reductions of 'French theory' to a mausoleum of movements, -isms, and masterable ideas. A disapporving critic once called Barthes the Pierre Laval to Robbe-Grillet's Marshal Pétain, but this volume shows them to be eels - not quite a pair, not easy to catch, but always electric." Times Literary Supplement "The image of Robbe-Grillet lying in the bath reciting texts by Barthes that he has learned by heart is only one of many unexpected delights of this extremely engaging little book. The dialogue between Barthes and Robbe-Grillet at Cerisy - friendly fencing - teaches much about each of them." Jonathan Culler, Cornell University "Robbe-Grillet describes his friendship with Barthes as a literary love affair without intimacy: 'un certain type de rapport amoureux'. This paradox is traced in its complexity and mystery through the four brief texts of this collection in which the novelist explores the different phases of his relationship with his most eminent critic, laying bare their shared vulnerability and fragility in a way which compels the reader's attention." Christina Howells, University of OxfordTable of ContentsForeword by Olivier Corpet viiWhy I love Barthes, 1978 1Roland Barthes's choice, 1981 51Yet another Roland Barthes, 1995 61I like, I don't like, 1980 77Translator's Notes 81

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Book SynopsisMoses and Monotheism brings together fundamental new contributions to discourses on Freud and Moses, as well as new research on the intersections of theology, political theory, and history in Freud’s psychoanalytic work.Table of ContentsIntroduction Karen Feldman and Gilad Sharvit “Why [the Jews] have Attracted this Undying Hatred” Richard Bernstein “Geistigkeit”: A Problematic Concept Joel Whitebook Heine and Freud: Deferred Action and the Concept of History Willi Goetschel Freud’s Moses: Murder, Exile, and the Question of Belonging Gabriele Schwab A Leap of Faith into Moses: Freud’s Invitation to Evenly Suspended Attention Yael Segalovitz Freud, Sellin, and the Murder of Moses Jan Assmann Creating the Jews: Mosaic Discourse in Freud and Hosea Ronald Hendel Is Psychic Phylogenesis only a Phantasy? New Biological Developments in Trauma Inheritance Catherine Malabou Moses and the Burning Bush: Leadership and Potentiality in the Bible Gilad Sharvit Notes List of Contributors Index

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Book Synopsis"Paradigms for a Metaphorology may be read as a kind of beginner''s guide to Blumenberg, a programmatic introduction to his vast and multifaceted oeuvre. Its brevity makes it an ideal point of entry for readers daunted by the sheer bulk of Blumenberg''s later writings, or distracted by their profusion of historical detail. Paradigms expresses many of Blumenberg''s key ideas with a directness, concision, and clarity he would rarely match elsewhere. What is more, because it served as a beginner's guide for its author as well, allowing him to undertake an initial survey of problems that would preoccupy him for the remainder of his life, it has the additional advantage that it can offer us a glimpse into what might be called the ''genesis of the Blumenbergian world.'"from the Afterword by Robert SavageWhat role do metaphors play in philosophical language? Are they impediments to clear thinking and clear expression, rhetorical flourishes that may well help to make philosophy more accessible to a lay audience, but that ought ideally to be eradicated in the interests of terminological exactness? Or can the images used by philosophers tell us more about the hopes and cares, attitudes and indifferences that regulate an epoch than their carefully elaborated systems of thought?In Paradigms for a Metaphorology, originally published in 1960 and here made available for the first time in English translation, Hans Blumenberg (19201996) approaches these questions by examining the relationship between metaphors and concepts. Blumenberg argues for the existence of "absolute metaphors" that cannot be translated back into conceptual language. These metaphors answer the supposedly naïve, theoretically unanswerable questions whose relevance lies quite simply in the fact that they cannot be brushed aside, since we do not pose them ourselves but find them already posed in the ground of our existence. They leap into a void that concepts are unable to fill.An afterword by the translator, Robert Savage, positions the book in the intellectual context of its time and explains its continuing importance for work in the history of ideas.Trade ReviewParadigms for a Metaphorology is a model of scholarly translation. Savage's handling of citations and sources is scrupulous and thorough.... And he provides judicious explanatory notes that work in conjunction with the afterword and Blumenberg's own notes to guide readers through Blumenberg's own reading and career. Finally, and most importantly, his English rendering is consistently accurate while also being, in the context of translations of German philosophy, remarkably readable.... In short, readers approaching Blumenberg's reflections on metaphor through the English language could not ask for a more reliable and helpful guide than this volume. -- David Adams * Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews *Table of ContentsHans Blumenberg: An Introduction Part I: History, Secularization, and Reality 1. The Linguistic Reality of Philosophy (1946/1947) 2. World Pictures and World Models (1961) 3. "Secularization": Critique of a Category of Hisotrical Illegitimacy (1964) 4. The Concept of Reality and the Theory of the State (1968/1969) 5. Preliminary Remarks on the Concept of Reality (1974) Part II: Metaphors, Rhetoric, and Nonconceptuality 6. Light as a Metaphor for Truth: At the Preliminary Stage of Philosophical Concept Formation (1957) 7. Introduction to Paradigms for a Metaphorology (1960) 8. An Anthropological Approach to the Contemporary Significance of Rhetoric (1971) 9. Observations Drawn from Metaphors (1971) 10. Prospect for a Theory of Nonconceptuality (1979) 11. Theory of Nonconceptuality (circa 1975, excerpt) Part III: Nature, Technology, and Asthetics 12. The Relationship between Nature and Technology as a Philosophical Problem (1951) 13. "Imitation of Nature": Toward a Prehistory of the Idea of the Creative Being (1957) 14. Phenomenological Aspects on Life-World and Technization (1963) 15. Socrates and the objet ambigu: Paul Valery's Discussion of the Ontology of the Aesthetic Object and Its Tradition (1964) 16. The Essential Ambiguity of the Aesthetic Object (1966) 17. Speech Situation and Immanent Poetics (1966) Part IV: Fables, Anecdotes, and the Novel 18. The Absolute Father (1952/1953) 19. The Mythos and Ethos of America in the Work of William Faulkner (1958) 20. The Concept of Reality and the Possibility of the Novel (1964) 21. Pensiveness (1980) 22. Moments of Goethe (1982) 23. Beyond the Edge of Reality: Three Short Essays (1983) 24. Of Nonunderstanding: Glosses on Three Fables (1984) 25. Unknown Aesopica: From Newly Found Fables (1985) 26. Advancing into Eternal Silence: A Century after the Sailing of the Fram (1993)

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Book SynopsisA comprehensive account of all major trends in Russian interwar literary theory and its wider impact in our post-deconstruction and world literature era, this book attempts to answer two fundamental questions: What does it mean to think about literature theoretically, and what happens to literary theory when it is no longer available as an option?Trade Review"Eloquent and erudite, Galin Tihanov offers us a magisterial account of twentieth-century Russian literary theory. His book is not a survey but a careful analysis of diverse movements and theorists whose unexpected juxtapositions put familiar concepts and people in an entirely new light. This is intellectual history at its best." -- Michael Wachtel * Princeton University *"Committed both to rigorous historical contextualization and to the clear analysis of ideas, Tihanov's highly original book addresses a topic of major concern to the humanities, the rise of literary theory, showing the central contribution of Russian thinkers to it. This is the first book one should read on its subject." -- William Mills Todd III * Harvard University *"The foundational status of literary theory in twentieth-century Russia has never been described with greater attention to detail than in Galin Tihanov's new book. And this extraordinary historical groundwork results in the ultimate challenge for literary criticism today: can and should the discipline survive under epistemological conditions that are now so radically different?" -- Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht * Stanford University *"Up to now, no one has woven together the many threads of Russian literary thought—Formalism, Socialist Realism, Marxism, the Bakhtin Circle, and the many groups, domestic and émigré, that shaped modern theory. With a large cast of characters and a sharp, cumulative argument, Tihanov renders obsolete numerous received judgments about theory's origins and impact." -- Haun Saussy * University of Chicago *"Tihanov has written an excellent book that provides a plethora of substance for reflection, and most importantly reminds us of the time when literature and the study of literature was taken seriously to an extent that to most readers today seems like an act of defamiliarization in itself." -- Eli Park Sorensen * Hong Kong Review of Books *"[One] senses that Tihanov, whose own intellectual range is staggering, could have chosen any number of examples to demonstrate his thesis....[A] rich and generous book." -- Caryl Emerson * The Russian Review *"There are few literary critics and theorists that delve into the afterlives of past theories and theoretical trends as dazzlingly and lucidly as Galin Tihanov does." -- Daiana Gârdan * Metacritic *"Tihanov's journey across past intellectual landscapes is engaging and helpful: it allows us to understand a great deal about the past, the present, and ourselves in that present." -- Galina Babak * New Literary Observer *"If literary theory is your thing, and you're feeling uninspired by what the Anglo-American academy has to offer, The Birth and Death is a fine showcase for what is, in effect, another world of literary theory, largely untapped. That Tihanov writes about...quite different approaches to literature—as well as about canon wars within the Russian émigré community—with such authority and erudition is, frankly, remarkable in itself." -- Ken Hirschkop * Textual Practice *"This detailed, authoritative study of the European twentieth century in terms of literary and cultural theory, its only fault being its understatement, ranges through several countries and languages, bringing familiar names into interesting juxtapositions." -- Jeremy Tambling * The Modern Language Review *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsPrologue: What This Book Is and Is Not About chapter abstractThe Prologue introduces the reader to the goals of the book and its methodology. The death of literary theory is discussed, in Derridean sense, as opening up the much more important question of its multiple legacies. The precise meaning of "literary theory" is also clarified, in comparison with recent meta-discourses that draw on "theory" understood, more broadly and less specifically, as Continental philosophy. Introduction: The Radical Historicity of Literary Theory chapter abstractThe chapter explores the birth of literary theory in the years around World War I through a chronotopic prism: this birth took place at a precise moment in time and in a precise location – and for good reasons. The multiple (and overlapping) scenarios that best describe the emergence of literary theory point to the disintegration and modification of mainstream philosophical discourses (phenomenology; Marxism); the need to respond to new experimental developments in literature; exile, polyglossia, and the productive estrangement from a single (one's own national) language in which literature is thought. Asserting its radical historicity, one can observe that literary theory emerged in Eastern and Central Europe in the interwar decades as one of the conceptual by-products of the transition from a regime of relevance that recognizes literature for its role in social and political practice to a regime that values literature primarily for its qualities as art. 1Russian Formalism: Entanglements at Birth and Later Reverberations chapter abstractThis chapter is an exploration of the complex relationship between Formalism and Marxism, and between the different regimes of relevance and valorization of literature—and their respective argumentative logics—at work in Formalism and Marxism. To detail this, the chapter offers three case studies framed by the question of Formalism's impact and its encounters with intellectual formations that had their own (larger) stake in the political debates of the time: the 1927 public dispute between Formalism and Marxism; Viktor Shklovsky's theory of estrangement and its multiple echoes; and the mediated presence of Formalism in Eurasianism, a Russian exilic movement that sought to reconcile Formalism and Marxism, as well as the distinct regimes of relevance within which they operated. 2A Skeptic at the Cradle of Theory: Gustav Shpet's Reflections on Literature chapter abstractThis chapter takes the discussion of the different regimes of relevance and valorization of literature into new territory: it reveals how the more traditional regime of relevance that insisted on literature's wider social commitment and significance operated in a milder and more diffuse fashion in the 1920s as an invitation to interpret literature, not through the prism of literary theory—which would have entailed an insistence on the uniqueness of literature grounded in the specific way it uses language—but rather through the less radical screen of aesthetics and philosophy of art. Gustav Shpet is very much a thinker who participates in this process, but his place in it is contradictory and inconclusive: although foreshadowing some important tenets of Structuralism, he remained in the end poised between innovation and regression, and his ultimate loyalty tended to be with a philosophical and aesthetic approach to literature and the arts. 3Toward a Philosophy of Culture: Bakhtin beyond Literary Theory chapter abstractDuring the 1930s, Mikhail Bakhtin arrived at a new way of capturing the relevance of literature, different from the regimes of relevance that sustained the work of either the Russian Formalists or Gustav Shpet. Bakhtin's transition in the 1930s from ethics and aesthetics to philosophy of culture, analyzed in the first section of this chapter, is crucial for understanding this new regime. The chapter then proceeds to offer a case study of Bakhtin's positioning in relation to the 1930s Soviet debates on the classical and the canon; this prepares the ground for returning to the question of Bakhtin's impact and later appropriations of his work, especially through the lens of postmodernism and post-Structuralism. Ultimately, this chapter seeks to grasp the specific regime of relevance that sustained the significance of literature in Bakhtin's writings of the 1930s, still centered around the importance of language, but not around "literariness." 4The Boundaries of Modernity: Semantic Paleontology and Its Subterranean Impact chapter abstractThe presence of semantic paleontology in literary studies and its importance for the methodological debates of the 1930s have never before been examined systematically. The chapter thus begins by outlining the foundations of semantic paleontology and its interventions in the study of literature during the 1930s; the analysis then focuses on the principal methodological distinctions that semantic paleontology sought to draw in order to assert its own identity vis-à-vis other trends, especially Russian Formalism. Attention then turns to the central question: what was the place of semantic paleontology in the 1930s polemics on how and where one should draw the boundaries of modernity, and how did this shape the way its practitioners assigned significance to literature. The final section explores the impact of semantic paleontology on cultural and literary theory; this impact persisted into the early 1980s, at times paradoxically reinforced by the critique semantic paleontology triggered. 5Interwar Exiles: Regimes of Relevance in Émigré Criticism and Theory chapter abstractThis chapter returns to the importance of exile and discusses literary theory not per se, but in its interactions with another distinct discourse, that of literary criticism, which had its own dynamic and its own conventions. The symbiosis of literary theory and criticism was a palpable feature of literary life in the diaspora, where the social and professional makeup of the new intelligentsia encouraged this conversion to a greater degree. The chapter is thus an examination of the ways in which émigré literary criticism between the world wars sought to extend an inherited regime of relevance that would conceive of literature as speaking directly to the traditional collective concerns of its creators and readers—in contrast to a radically different perspective that sought to endorse a regime of relevance in which literature would be denationalized so as to address the private concerns of the exile. Epilogue: A Fast-Forward to "World Literature" chapter abstractToday the legacy of modern literary theory is not available in a pure and concentrated fashion; instead, it is dispersed, dissipated, often fittingly elusive. This inheritance is now performing its work in a climate already dominated by a different regime of relevance, which it faces directly and must negotiate. The patrimony of literary theory is currently active within a regime of relevance that thinks literature through its market and entertainment value, with only residual recall of its previously highly treasured autonomy. This regime of relevance has engendered the interpretative framework of "world literature" that has recently grown and gained popularity. Looking at Russian literary theory during the interwar decades, we are struck by the fact that many of its major trends were, obliquely or more directly, relevant to this new framework of understanding and valorizing literature in the regime of its global production and consumption.

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Book SynopsisTo our modern ears the word “creature” has wild, musky, even monstrous, connotations. And yet the terms “creaturely” and “love,” taken together, have traditionally been associated with theological debates around the enigmatic affection between God and His key creation, Man. In Creaturely Love, Dominic Pettman explores the ways in which desire makes us both more, and less, human. In an eminently approachable work of wide cultural reach and meticulous scholarship, Pettman undertakes an unprecedented examination of how animals shape the understanding and expression of love between people. Focusing on key figures in modern philosophy, art, and literature (Nietzsche, Salomé, Rilke, Balthus, Musil, Proust), premodern texts and fairy tales (Fourier, Fournival, Ovid), and contemporary films and online phenomena (Wendy and Lucy, Her, memes), Pettman demonstrates that from pet names to spirit animals, and allegories to analogies, animals have constantly appeared in our writings and thoughts about passionate desire.By following certain charismatic animals during their passage through the love letters of philosophers, the romances of novelists, the conceits of fables, the epiphanies of poets, the paradoxes of contemporary films, and the digital menageries of the Internet, Creaturely Love ultimately argues that in our utilization of the animal in our amorous expression, we are acknowledging that what we adore in our beloveds is not (only) their humanity, but their creatureliness.Trade Review"Pettman has written yet another absorbing, witty, moving, and smart book about the question of human exceptionalism, this time in relation to desire and love, attending especially to literary and artistic works. The book makes a significant contribution particularly to a revisionist reading of modernist literary/artistic history with relation to the presence of the nonhuman animal, or the creaturely."—Carla Freccero, University of California, Santa Cruz"Dominic Pettman writes thoughtful, light-fingered books on significant questions that are simultaneously timely and timeless. In Creaturely Love, he takes up the perennial awkwardness that haunts every effort to etherealize romance: the proximity of our loving bodies to the critter-creatures that rut and tread and mount and cover each other just outside our windows. Drawing on the newest (and some of the oldest) thinking about humans and animals, Pettman here recalls us to ourselves—by ruminating on just how hard it is to say what exactly that might mean."—D. Graham Burnett, Princeton University"Bettman’s ideas and readings will doubtless find application in future scholarship; his text makes readers eager to see all genres of cultural production in the new framework this exciting work provides."—The Goose"The book offers an interesting engagement with the complexity of expressions of affection."—CHOICE connectTable of ContentsContentsPrefaceIntroduction: On the Stupidity of Oysters1. Divining Creaturely Love2. Horsing Around: The Marriage Blanc of Nietzsche, Andreas-Salomé, and Rée3. Groping for an Opening: Rilke between Animal and Angel4. Electric Caresses: Rilke, Balthus, and Mitsou5. Between Perfection and Temptation: Musil, Claudine, and Veronica6. The Biological Travesty7. “The Creature Whom We Love”: Proust and Jealousy8. The Love Tone: Capture and Captivation9. “The Soft Word That Comes Deceiving”: Fournival’s Bestiary of Love10. The Cuckold and the Cockatrice: Fourier and Hazlitt11. The Animal Bride and Horny Toads12. Unsettled Being: Ovid’s Metamorphoses13. Fickle Metaphysics14. Nymphomania and Faunication15. Senseless Arabesques: Wendy and Lucy16. The Goat in the Machine (A Reprise)Conclusion: On Cetaceous MaidensEpilogue: Animal Magnetism and Alternative Currents (or Tesla and the White Dove)AcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Book SynopsisThe Field of Cultural Production brings together Bourdieua s most important writings on art, literature and aesthetics.Trade Review'As we have come to expect of him, Pierre Bourdieu's lucid analysis of the field of cultural production once again provides us with key terms for understanding the issues at the forefront of current critical debate. His accounts of the economy of symbolic capital, and of cultural power relations will undoubtedly become classic formulations, shaping future work on the sociology of culture.' Professor Lisa Jardine, University of London Table of ContentsPreface. Editor's Introduction: Pierre Bourdieu on Art, Literature and Culture. Part I: The Field of Cultural Production. 1. The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed. 2. The Production of Belief: Contribution to an Economy of Symbolic Goods. 3. The Market of Symbolic Goods. Part II: Flaubert and the French Literary Field. 4. Is the Structure of Sentimental Education an Instance of Social Self-analysis?. 5. Field of Power, Literary Field and Habitus. 6. Principles for a Sociology of Cultural Works. 7. Flaubert's Point of View. Part III: The Pure Gaze: Essays on Art. 8. Outline of a Sociological Theory of Art Perception. 9. Manet and the Instutitionalization of Anomie. 10. The Historical Genesis of a Pure Aesthetic. Notes. Selected Bibliography. Index.

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Book Synopsis

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

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Book SynopsisThe Poetics of Insecurity turns the emerging field of literary security studies upside down. Rather than tying the prevalence of security to a culture of fear, Johannes Voelz shows how American literary writers of the past two hundred years have mobilized insecurity to open unforeseen and uncharted horizons of possibility for individuals and collectives. In a series of close readings of works by Charles Brockden Brown, Harriet Jacobs, Willa Cather, Flannery O''Connor, and Don DeLillo, Voelz brings to light a cultural imaginary in which conventional meanings of security and insecurity are frequently reversed, so that security begins to appear as deadening and insecurity as enlivening. Timely, broad-ranging, and incisive, Johannes Voelz''s study intervenes in debates on American literature as well as in the interdisciplinary field of security studies. It fundamentally challenges our existing explanations for the pervasiveness of security in American cultural and political life.Trade Review'The Poetics of Insecurity is an impressive and accomplished work that analyzes a range of American narratives from the early Republic to our present moment to show how an interest in and exploration of 'security' has been central to American literature and culture. Voelz makes contributions to multiple fields, including not only American literature broadly construed, but also narrative theory; it also joins a growing body of work exploring the intersections of the literary with non-literary conceptions of security, and contributes to recent work focused on chance and/or accident in American literary history.' Steven Belletto, Lafayette College, Pennsylvania'The strength of Voelz's readings lies in their attentiveness to the ambivalent affective dimensions of insecurity, the intermingling of fear and desire that accompanies the contemplation of an uncertain future.' Deborah Thurman, The Review of English StudiesTable of Contents1. Introduction: security and the uncertain worlds of fiction; 2. The virtue of uncertainty: securing the republic in Arthur Mervyn; 3. Harriet Jacobs's imagined community of insecurity; 4. Willa Cather and the security of radical contingency; 5. Cold War liberalism and Flannery O'Connor's 'The Displaced Person'; 6. In the future, toward death: finance capitalism and security in DeLillo's cosmopolis; Epilogue.

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Book SynopsisThe twentieth century with its unprecedented advances in technology and scientific understanding saw the birth of a distinctively new and modern' age. Henri Bergson stood as one of the most important philosophical voices of that tumultuous time. An intellectual celebrity in his own life time, his work was widely discussed by such thinkers as William James, Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, as well as having a profound influence on modernist writers such as Wallace Stevens, Willa Cather and Wyndham Lewis and later thinkers, most notably Gilles Deleuze.Key Writings brings together Bergson's most essential writings in a single volume, including crucial passages from such major work as Time and Free Will, Matter and Memory, Creative Evolution, Mind-Energy, The Creative Mind, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion and Laughter. The book also includes Bergson's correspondences with William James and a chronology of his liTrade Review"Henri Bergson: Key Writings will change the way we will think about Twentieth Century philosophy. It includes selections from all of Bergson's important published texts and English translations of other never before translated texts. Ansell-Pearson and Mullarkey have done a great job; their Preface to the volume is one of the best introductions to (and expansions of) Bergson's philosophy available in any language."--Leonard Lawlor, University of MemphisTable of Contents1. Time and Free Will: The Idea of Duration 2. Matter and Memory 3. Mind-Energy 4. Creative Evolution 5. Duration and Simultaneity: The Nature of Time 6. The Creative Mind 7. Bergson and Kant: Beyond the Noumenal 8. The Two Sources of Morality and Religion 9. Melanges

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Book Synopsis'Dizzyingly flexible, deeply human, often funny, it blasts aside our preconceptions and urges us to see the world as it is' iFeminist philosophy meets family memoir in Siri Hustvedt's most personal essay collection yet, a scintillating and profound exploration of motherhood, the maternal and misogyny. Ranging across artistic mothers such as Jane Austen and Louise Bourgeois, psychoanalysis, science, literature and ethnography, this is a polymath's journey into urgent questions about familial love and hate, human prejudice and cruelty, and the transformative power of art. Fierce, moving and witty, it warns against drawing hard and fast borders where none exist.'The voice is consistent, combining assured erudition with more playful questioning, always thoughtful and capable of surprising shifts of register and even genre' Lara Feigel, GuardianPRAISE FOR SIRI HUSTVEDT:'Hustvedt is that rare artist, a writer of high intelligence, profound sensuality and a less easily definable capacity for which the only word I can find is wisdom' Salman Rushdie'It is Hustvedt's gift to write with exemplary clarity of what is by necessity unclear' Hilary Mantel'Her novels have received a deserved acclaim. But to my mind, she is even more to be admired as an essayist . . . in this regard I feel that she resembles Virginia Woolf ' Observer'Few contemporary writers are as satisfying and stimulating to read as Siri Hustvedt' Washington PostTrade ReviewMemoir, psychoanalysis, feminist theory and literary criticism combine in a thoughtful essay collection . . . Now, as issues of surrogacy and trans motherhood pose fresh challenges, feminism's confrontation with the issue feels newly urgent. Siri Hustvedt joins the fray with a mixture of directness and obliqueness. She takes on motherhood from every direction, combining memoir with ethnography, the history of science and psychoanalysis, literary and art criticism. -- Lara Feigel * Guardian *American novelist and feminist philosopher Siri Hustvedt is a wonderful essayist, equally at ease discussing the thoughts of Plato or the lyrics of Tom Waits. Her new collection is replete with personal history and recollection, and sparkles with small descriptive gems. -- Martin Chilton * Independent *Dizzyingly flexible, deeply human, often funny, Mothers, Fathers, and Others blasts aside our preconceptions and urges us to see the world as it is. -- Emily Watkins * i *In precise yet luxuriant prose Hustvedt uses her family history to explore questions of memory and identity. -- Sophie McBain * New Statesman *Ranging from portraits of her family, through female artists and authors, to the sometimes disturbing eruptions of the male psyche, this is an extremely well-written exploration of the hinterland of a modern feminist. More than once, I found myself comparing her analyses to Socratic dialogues, and there can be no higher praise than that. -- Chris Nancollas * Tablet *Mothers, Fathers, and Others, showcases a wonderfully relaxed erudition. Blending family memoir and feminist philosophy, its subjects include misogyny, motherhood and what we inherit from our parents -- Alex Peake-Tomkinson * The i *Siri Hustvedt takes feminist discourse to a new level . . . a powerful collection with an impressive variety of disciplines through whose prism the themes of art, motherhood, neuroscience, misogyny and sex are revealed. It is an engaging and educational read that makes a valuable contribution to contemporary feminist discourse. -- Elizaveta Kolesova * The Upcoming *Another outstanding compilation of essays from Hustvedt. As in her previous standout collections, the author shares personal, familial stories as well as incisive ruminations on a breadth of literary, political, arcane, and germane subjects . . . Although each essay is a stand-alone piece, their cumulative effect is staggering. Themes related to sexual hierarchies abound . . . The author, one of our most appealing literary polymaths, quotes innumerable resources, and she maintains a pleasingly nuanced balance between striking originality and intellectual synthesis . . . Brilliant and utterly transfixing. * Kirkus Reviews *

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Book SynopsisExploring the ever-changing philosophy of city life with Jean-Luc NancyIn The City in the Distance, Jean-Luc Nancy embarks on nothing less than a philosophy of the city. Drawing on his widely discussed accounts of sense and of the fraught question of community, Nancy views the city as the site of a disposition that is constantly undergoing metamorphoses.Far from an abstract account, Nancy attends in the most concrete way possible to the workings of a city not typically taken as paradigmatic, Los Angeles. As Jean-Christophe Bailly suggests in his foreword, Nancy joins Walter Benjamin in thinking the city not from an external vantage point, but on its own terms.

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Book SynopsisWhat is the best way to tell a story? In first-person peripheral, or third-person focalised? Unfolding in the present, or as events in the past? Where is the camera? What is the lens? Where is the action? In this concise little book, educator Amy Jones describes the different ways that novelists and scriptwriters tell their stories. Packed with examples and insights, this is an essential reference guide for writers of all ages and disciplines. It's not the story, it's how you tell it!Trade ReviewWooden Books are: "Fascinating" FINANCIAL TIMES. "Beautiful" LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS. "Rich and Artful" THE LANCET. "Genuinely mind-expanding" FORTEAN TIMES. "Excellent" NEW SCIENTIST. "Stunning" NEW YORK TIMES. Small books, big ideas.

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Book SynopsisExtreme States traces the evolution of American transgressive fiction from the 1960s to 2000, exploring how transgressive fiction reflects, exaggerates and critically interrogates how central American ideologies are perpetually (re)constructed in its extra-textual context.Trade ReviewIs transgression only about breaking the rules, or is it also creative and reconstitutive, part of a perpetual reconfiguration of American culture? Is it about style, or is it about ideas? Coco d’Hont, in her study of American fiction since the 1960s, helps us see transgression as violation, creation, and ideology.—Christopher Phelps, University of Nottingham"Transgression as a concept involves so much more than the cliché of that which is outré or titillating, usually understood in sexual or aesthetic terms. At last, with Extreme States, we have a monograph that explores the ways in which the crossing of borders, boundaries, and categories is both central to much recent American fiction, and key to understanding the contemporary American ideological imaginary." —Lisa Downing, University of BirminghamTable of ContentsPreface1 Dead in the Water? Reading Transgression as a Central Social Mechanism Moving Beyond Marginality: (Re)defining TransgressionA Perverse Society? Transgression and American CultureThe Body of Work: What Is Transgressive Fiction? A History of Transgression: Case Studies2 Too Much Filth to Handle: Pornography and Capitalism in Hogg Dirt, Sex and Violence: Breaking Through the SurfaceWandering Around the Wasteland: An Alternative AmericaConstructing Mainstream Marginality: Racism, Homophobia and MisogynyThe (S)innocent Child: The Nuclear Family and Morality3 Saving the West: Environmentalism and Conservatism in The Monkey Wrench GangA Modern-Day Thoreau: An Environmentalist History Maintenance through Destruction: Saving the American WestReinventing the Vigilante: Masculinity as Activist VehicleThe West as a Playing Field: Narrative Distortion and Critical Exploration4 A Painful Past: Rememory, Monstrosity and Intersectionality in BelovedA Ghost From the Past: Uncomfortable HistoriesMonsters and Reconstruction: Learning from the PastHalf-formed Things: Building Gendered and Ethnic IdentitiesUnder Construction: Fluid Freedoms5 The Perfect Neoliberal: The Corporate and the Corporeal in American PsychoConsuming Objects: Commodity Fetishism and the CorporealThe Power of the Corporeal: Corporate InstabilityChasing the Cipher: Bodily Violation as Critical InterrogationReinventing Neoliberalism: Crisis and Regeneration6 Wild Men: Freedom and Masculinity in Fight ClubInfected Masculinity: Reforming Capitalism through the Male BodyInfecting Society: Project Mayhem as Social DiseaseRethinking the Ethics of Physicality: Gender and the Politics of IllnessThe End of Freedom? The Return of the Limit7 "This Is Not an Exit": The (Non) Death of TransgressionFrom Safety Valve to Critical Exploration: Transgressive Fiction as a Fictional LabThe Mind-Body Problem: Connecting Ideology and PhysicalityMoving beyond Boundaries: Transgressive Fiction After the Turn of the CenturyNo Future? The Continued Importance of Transgressive FictionIndex

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Book SynopsisRomantic Writings is an ideal introduction to the cultural phenomenon of Romanticism - one of the most important European literary movements and the cradle of ''Modern'' culture. Here you will find an accessible introduction to the well-known male Romantic writers - Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats. Alongside are chapters dealing with poems by Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, Ann Barbauld, Elizabeth Barrett Browning which challenge the idea that these men are the only Romantic writers. As a further counterpoint the book also includes discussion of two German Romantic short stories by Kleist and Hoffman. Throughout, close-reading of texts is matched by an insistence on reading them in their historical context. Romantic Writings offers invaluable discussions of issues such as the notion of the Romantic artist; colonialism and the exotic; and the particular situation of women writers and readers.Table of ContentsIntroduction, Part One, 1. Romantic poems and contexts - Stephen Bygrave 2. Versions of British Romantic writing - Stephen Bygrave 3. Defences of poetry - Graham Allen 4. Women writers and readers - Susan Matthews 5. Reading The Prelude - Stephen Bygrave 6. Romantic verse narrative - Graham Allen 7. Reading Byron - Stephen Bygrave 8. Women poets 1780-1830 - Amanda Gilroy 9. Romantic allegory - Graham Allen 10. Colonialism and the exotic - Nigel Leask, 11. Reading Kleist and Hoffmann - Richard Allen, Conclusion - Stephen Bygrave Part Two, Romantic poetry: The I altered - Stuart Curran, The oriental renaissance - Raymond Schwab, The Corsair - Lord Byron, The uncanny - Sigmund Freud, The concept of Romanticism in literary history - Rene Wellek,

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Book SynopsisThis book examines the relations among nostalgia, gender, and foundational philosophies through a critique of the lost mother as a ground for thinking about sexual difference. More specifically, the author critiques the nostalgic tendencies of feminist theory, arguing that an emancipatory system of thought must move beyond a maternally oriented structure.Through close readings of works by Maurice Blanchot, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Nicole Brossard, the book elucidates the many dimensions of nostalgic paradigmsliterary, psychoanalytic, epistemological, ontological, and sociopolitical. This critique ultimately confronts postmodernism, and especially the burgeoning field of performative theory, as an intellectual paradigm that claims to subvert systems of meaning. Analyzing the writings of J. L. Austin, Judith Butler, and Irigaray, the author argues that despite its antinostalgic structure, performative theory provides an inadequate model for understanding the connectioTable of ContentsIntroduction: maternal pasts Part I. Nostalgia: The Lost Mother: 1. Blanchot's mother 2. Lips in the mirror: Irigaray's specular mother Part II. Nostalgia and Ethics: Approaching the Other: 3. Imperialsit nostalgia: Kristeva's maternal Chora 4. Luce et veritas: toward an ethics of performance Part III. Toward Another Model: 5. From Lesbos to Montreal: Brossards's urban fictions Afterword: feminist futures Notes Bibliography Index.

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Book SynopsisFrom its ancient incarnation as a song to recent translations in modern languages, Homeric epic remains an abiding source of inspiration for both scholars and artists that transcends temporal and linguistic boundaries. TheCambridge Guide to Homer examines the influence and meaning of Homeric poetry from its earliest form as ancient Greek song to its current status in world literature, presenting the information in a synthetic manner that allows the reader to gain an understanding of the different strands of Homeric studies. The volume is structured around three main themes:Homeric Song and Text; the Homeric World, and Homer in the World. Each section starts with a series of ''macropedia'' essays arranged thematically that are accompanied by shorter complementary ''micropedia'' articles. TheCambridge Guide to Homerthus traces the many routes taken by Homeric epic in the ancient world and its continuing relevance in different periods and cultures.Trade Review'The entries are very well written … Recommended.' H. M. Roisman, ChoiceTable of ContentsPart I. Homeric Song and Text: 1. Introduction; 2. Homeric epic in performance; 3. Homeric poetics; 4. Homer in a world of song; 5. Epic traditions; 6. Mythic background; 7. The language of Homer; 8. From song to text; 9. Achilles; 10. Ancient Near Eastern epic; 11. Batrakhomuomakhia; 12. Catalogues; 13. Dreams; 14. Early editions; 15. Ekphrasis; 16. Epic cycle; 17. Epithets; 18. Formula; 19. Gods and goddesses; 20. Hesiod and Homer; 21. Home; 22. Homer and Indo-European myth; 23. Homer and the alphabet; 24. Homeric body and mind; 25. Homeric dialects; 26. Homeric humor; 27. Homeric hymns; 28. Homeric scholia; 29. Hospitality; 30. Iliad; 31. Immanence; 32. Kleos; 33. Lament; 34. Margites; 35. Meter; 36. Narrative; 37. Odysseus; 38. Odyssey; 39. Panathenaia; 40. Panhellenism; 41. Pisistratus; 42. Rhapsodes and Homeridai; 43. Ring composition; 44. Similes; 45. Speech; 46. Trojan horse; 47. Troy; 48. Type scene; Part II. Homeric World: 49. Introduction; 50. Homeric communities in the Homeric epics and early Archaic Greece; 51. Homeric religion; 52. Homer and history; 53. Homeric geography; 54. Homeric materiality; 55. Afterlife in Homer; 56. Assemblies and councils; 57. Athletic competition; 58. Basileus and Anax in Homer and Mycenaean; 59. Carl Blegen; 60. Boar's tusk helmets; 61. Burial practices; 62. Catalogue of ships and archaeology; 63. Catalogue of ships: literary aspects; 64. Class relations; 65. The literary tradition of destruction of cities; 66. Divine epiphany in Homer; 67. Family and marriage in Homer; 68. Feasting and drinking in Homer; 69. Archaeology of hero cult; 70. Hittite literary evidence; 71. Homeric archaeology; 72. Homeric economy; 73. Household organization; 74. Lefkandi; 75. Mycenae; 76. Nestor's cup; 77. Nostoi; 78. Offerings in Homer; 79. Personification in Homer; 80. Prayers and vows; 81. Pylos; 82. Religious festivals in Homer; 83. Heinrich Schliemann; 84. Shield of Achilles; 85. Slavery in Homer; 86. Supplication in Homer; 87. Troy and its treasures; 88. Warfare in Homer; 89. Warrior graves; 90. Weapons and armor; 91. Women in Homer; Part III. Homer in the World: 92. Introduction; 93. Homer in antiquity; 94. Homer and the Latin West in the Middle Ages; 95. Homer in Greece from the end of Antiquity: 1. The Byzantine reception of Homer and his export to other cultures; 96. Homer in Greece from the end of Antiquity: 2. Homer after Byzantium: from the Early Ottoman Period to the age of nationalisms; 97. Homer in Renaissance Europe (1488–1649); 98. Homer in early modern Europe; 99. The reception of Homer since 1900; 100. Homer: image and cult; 101. Albert Bates Lord; 102. Allegory and allegorical interpretation; 103. Aristotle and Homer; 104. Athens and Homer; 105. Biographies of Homer; 106. Chaucer and Homer; 107. Dante and Homer; 108. Homeric question; 109. Milman Parry; 110. Plato and Homer; 111. Plutarch and Homer; 112. Shakespeare and Homer; 113. Sponde Jean de and Homer; 114. Vergil and Homer; 115. Weil Simone and the Iliad.

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Book SynopsisIn A Global History of Literature and the Environment, an international group of scholars illustrate the immense riches of environmental writing from the earliest literary periods down to the present. It addresses ancient writings about human/animal/plant relations from India, classical Greece, Chinese and Japanese literature, the Maya Popol Vuh, Islamic texts, medieval European works, eighteenth-century and Romantic ecologies, colonial/postcolonial environmental interrelations, responses to industrialization, and the emerging literatures of the world in the present Anthropocene moment. Essays range from Trinidad to New Zealand, Estonia to Brazil. Discussion of these texts indicates a variety of ways environmental criticism can fruitfully engage literary works and cultures from every continent and every historical period. This is a uniquely varied and rich international history of environmental writing from ancient Mesopotamian and Asian works to the present. It provides a compelling account of a topic that is crucial to twenty-first-century global literary studies.Table of ContentsList of figures; List of contributors; Acknowledgments; Chronology; Introduction Louise Westling and John Parham; Part I. Beginnings: 1. The natural world in ancient Mesopotamian literature Stephanie Dalley; 2. Environments of early Chinese and Japanese literatures Karen Thornber; 3. The Garden of Eden in the Hebrew Bible Deborah Green; 4. Ecopoetics and the literature of ancient India Murali Sivaramakrishnan; 5. Ancient Greek literature and the environment: a case study with Pindar's Olympian 7 Chris Eckerman; 6. 'Who shall be a sustainer?': maize and human mediation in the Maya Popol Vuh Allen Christenson; 7. I invoke God, therefore I am: nature's spirituality and its ecological impact in Islamic texts Sarra Tlili; Part II. The Development of Humanism and the Industrial Age: 8. 'Viking' ecologies: Icelandic sagas, local knowledge, and environmental memory Steven Hartman, Reinhard Hennig and Astrid Ogilvie; 9. Human responses to the environment in Medieval literature Gillian Rudd; 10. Remaking eighteenth-century ecologies: arboreal mobility Elizabeth H. Cook; 11. Romantic ecology, Aboriginal culture, and the ideology of improvement in British Atlantic literature Kevin Hutchings; 12. Natural history in the Anthropocene Laura Dassow Walls; 13. Bleak House, Liquid City, Climate to Climax in Dickens Karen Chase and Michael Levenson; 14. Fantastic metabolisms: a materialist approach to modern eco-speculative fiction Tom Sykes; Part III. The Anthropocene: 15. Climate and culture in Australia and New Zealand C. A. Cranston and Charles Dawson; 16. Modern English fiction Kelly Sultzbach; 17. Ecological thought and literature in Europe and Germany Hubert Zapf; 18. From birds and trees to texts: an ecosemiotic look at Estonian nature writing Timo Maran and Kadri Tüür; 19. Contemporary British poetry and the environment Leo Mellor; 20. Rescuing nature from the nation: ecocritical (un)consciousness in modern Chinese culture Hangping Xu; 21. Eating life at a contaminated table: the narrative significance of toxic meals in contemporary Japan Yuki Masami; 22. Commodity frontiers, Caribbean natures, and the aesthetics of ecological revolution in Trinidadian literature Michael Niblett; 23. Petro-violence and the act of bearing witness in contemporary Nigerian literature Byron Caminero-Santangelo; 24. Black ants and bones: Nehruvian science and third-world environment in the fiction of Satyajit Ray Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee; 25. Brazilian women poets on gender, nature, and the body Izabel F. O. Brandão; 26. Can the environmental imagination save the world? Lawrence Buell; Further readings; Index.

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Book SynopsisAugustine in Context assesses the various contexts - historical, literary, cultural, spiritual - in whichAugustine lived and worked. The essays, written by an international team of scholars especially for this volume, provide the background against which Augustine''s treatises should be read and interpreted. They are organized according to a rationale which moves from an introduction to the person (the so-called ''personal context'') to the contexts of Augustine''s works and ideas, starting from the intellectual setting and extending to the socio-political realm. Collectively the essays highlight the embeddedness of Augustine in the world of late antiquity and the interdependence of his discourse with contemporary forms of social life. They shed new light on one of the most important figures of the western canon and facilitate a more enlightened reading of his writings.Trade Review'… the book will be a valuable resource for those seeking knowledge of Augustine's background.' J. P. Blosser, ChoiceTable of Contents1. Chronological chart; 2. 'Augustine in Context and Augustine on context' Tarmo Toom; Part I. Life: 3. Biography in late antiquity Arthur P. Urbano; 4. Augustine on himself Annemareì Kotzeì; 5. Possidius on Augustine Erika T. Hermanowicz; 6. Augustine in Roman North Africa (Thagaste, Carthage) Gareth Sears; 7. Augustine in higher society (Rome and Milan) David Gwynn; 8. Augustine as a Bishop (Hippo) Andrea Sterk; Part II. Literary and intellectual contexts: 9. Language James Clackson; 10. Classical literary culture in North Africa Martin Bloomer; 11. Education, grammar, and rhetoric Yun Lee Too; 12. Scripture and biblical commentaries Stephen A. Cooper; 13. Latin Christian literature I (polemical and theological writings) Josef Lössl; 14. Latin Christian literature II (moral and spiritual writings) David Hunter; 15. Letter-writing and preaching Jaclyn Maxwell; 16. Philosophical trends in Augustine's time Giovanni Catapano; Part III. Religious Contexts: 17. Roman religion Jeffrey Brodd; 18. Manicheism Nicholas Baker-Brian; 19. Ecclesiological controversies Alden Bass; 20. Soteriological controversies Dominic Keech; 21. Trinitarian controversies Mark Weedman; 22. Monasticism/asceticism Marilyn Dunn; Part IV. Political, Social, and Cultural Contexts: 23. Imperial politics and legislation in Roman Africa Dean Hammer; 24. War Alexander Sarantis; 25. Religious violence Despina Iosif; 26. Relationships in Augustine's life Geoffrey Nathan; 27. Popular culture and entertainment Jerry Toner; Part V. Reception: 28. Augustine's reception of himself Johannes Brachtendorf; 29. Reception of Augustine during his lifetime Mathijs Lamberigts; 30. Reception of Augustine in Hadrumetum and Southern Gaul Alexander Y. Hwang.

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