Literary theory Books
Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) The Phoenix of Philosophy Russian Thought of the
Book SynopsisMikhail Epstein is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Cultural Theory and Russian Literature at Emory University, USA, and former Professor of Russian and Cultural Theory at Durham University, UK. He has authored 30 books (in English and Russian), including The Transformative Humanities (Bloomsbury, 2012), and approximately 600 essays and articles, translated into 16 languages. Professor Epstein has won national and international awards, including The Andrei Bely Prize (S.-Petersburg, 1991) and the Liberty Prize, awarded annually for the outstanding contribution to the development of Russian - U.S. cultural relations (New York, 2000).Trade ReviewFew books could be a better, more incisive and captivating guide to the intellectual richness of an important historical period than Mikhail Epstein’s history of Russian thought in the late Soviet period ... a treasure-trove of discovery, opening up a vault of riches that is vast and multi-leveled. * Slavic Review *The Phoenix of Philosophy benefits from its author’s encyclopaedic knowledge of the many philosophical tendencies and the individual philosophers he describes. He is brilliant at summarising their ideas ... Epstein’s work is a great achievement * Marx and Philosophy Review of Books *Both a provocative analytical study and a philosophical dictionary of sorts, the book is absorbing and extremely valuable and should hopefully reach a large—and not just Slavic—audience. * Slavic and East European Journal *[T]his is a very helpful and stimulating work. * Slavonic & East European Review *Bold, comprehensive, and beautifully written, this book retrieves one of the best-forgotten parts of global intellectual history. While the lives of leading Soviet thinkers were tragic, Mikhail Epstein presents their philosophy as liberating: a sublime lesson of hope and resistance for our time. * Alexander Etkind, Professor of History of Russia-Europe Relations, European University at Florence, Italy *An impressive work of synthesis, this book offers a fascinating panorama of Soviet intellectual life in the second half of the 20th century. Epstein writes with clarity and conviction that stem from his knowledge and immediate experience of the times he revisits in these often riveting pages. * Galin Tihanov, George Steiner Professor of Comparative Literature, Queen Mary University of London, UK *This beautifully written book by one of our most eminent scholars of Russian culture confirms that even in the most inhospitable circumstances, such as Soviet ideocracy, Russian thought flourishes and liberates. It is a brilliant testimony to the power of ideas and of the human spirit. * Randall A. Poole, Professor of History, College of St. Scholastica, USA *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction Part 1. Vicissitudes of Soviet Marxism Part 2. Neo-rationalism. Structuralism. General methodology Part 3. The philosophy of personality and of freedom Part 4. Culturology, or, the philosophy of culture Conclusion Works cited Appendix: Original Russian and other foreign-language titles Name index Subject index
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Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Alchemies of Blood and AfroDiasporic Fiction
Book SynopsisAlchemies of Blood and Afro-Diasporic Fiction focuses on the resurgence of biological racism in 21st-century public discourse, the ontological and material turns in the academy that have occurred over the same time period, and how Afro-diasporic fiction has responded to both with alternative visions of bloodlines, kinship, and community. In thinking through conceptions of race, ethnicity, and materiality at work within both humanities research and popular culture, Nicole Simek asks how the figure of alchemy that semi-scientific, semi-mystical search for gold and the elixir of long life can help scholars address the epistemological and affective investments in blood, bloodlines, and genetics marking both academic and mainstream discourses. To answer this question, Simek examines neo-plantation and Afrofuturist narratives, Afropessimist interventions, museums and public memory projects, and direct-to-consumer genetic testing services in the French Caribbean and the United States. This
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Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) Critical Theory Between Klein and Lacan A Dialogue Psychoanalytic Horizons
Book SynopsisAmy Allen is Liberal Arts Professor of Philosophy and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Pennsylvania State University, USA. She is the author of three books, including, most recently, The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (2016). Mari Ruti is Distinguished Professor of Critical Theory and of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Toronto, Canada. She is the author of twelve books, including Between Levinas and Lacan: Self, Other, Ethics (Bloomsbury, 2015) and Distillations: Theory, Ethics, Affect (Bloomsbury Press, 2018).Trade ReviewThis vibrant conversation of two brilliant theorists gives readers a chance to understand why psychoanalytic theory matters for thinking about subjectivity, affect, creativity, and politics. In conversational mode, these interlocutors bring to life difficult and important concepts, exploring the tensions among psychoanalytic positions, and giving an acute sense of life to theoretical concepts. This book makes the case for thinking carefully and well about key dimensions of selfhood, relationality, psychic states, and social relations. It brings one into the living character of thought, the fecundity of dialogue, and provides a model for intellectual friendship for our times. The text speaks to the specialist and to the curious, and helps to illuminate key concepts about psychic and social life that prove to be indispensable for understanding ourselves in the world. * Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley, USA, and author of The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (1997) *I feel like I’ve pulled up a chair to the dining room table, strewn with all the texts that Jacques Lacan and Melanie Klein have ever written, where Mari Ruti and Amy Allen sit immersed in conversation, intent on discovering—and explaining with erudite ease—the common touch points of two of the twentieth century’s most important thinkers. * Noelle McAfee, Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Psychoanalytic Studies Program, Emory University, USA *Everything you wanted to know about Melanie Klein but were legitimately afraid to ask Jacques Lacan! This extended staging of an encounter between Klein and Lacan is long overdue, a god-send and a necessity for our contemporary times. How is it that we have not put on fertile ground the two heavy weights of post-Freudian theory? The intimate exchange between Amy Allen and Mari Ruti guides us through the most difficult terrain, from alienation to paranoia and castration, from depressive anxieties to love and symbiosis. * Jamieson Webster, Psychoanalyst based in New York, USA, and author of Conversion Disorder: Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis (2018) *Allen and Ruti manage not only to bring into conversation two crucial theorists who had previously been regarded as being at odds with one another, they also enact in the structure of their book and the style of their discourse a new mode of engaging in critical theory: non-adversarial but differentiated, generous but rigorous. * Gail M. Newman, Harold J Henry Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Director of the Center for Foreign Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, Williams College, USA *Table of ContentsPreface 1. Subjectivity 2. Fusion 3. Anxiety 4. Affect 5. Love 6. Creativity 7. Politics Notes Index
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Bloomsbury Publishing Plc African Literatures as World Literature
Book SynopsisThe enormous success of writers such as Teju Cole and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie demonstrates that African literatures are now an international phenomenon. But the apparent global legibility of a small number of (mostly Anglophone) writers in the diaspora raises the question of how literary producers from the continent, both past and present, have situated their work in relation to the world and the kinds of material networks to which this corresponds. This collection shows how literatures from across the African continent engage with conceptualizations of ''the world'' in relation to local social and political issues. Focusing on a wide variety of geographic, historical and linguistic contexts, the essays in this volume seek answers to the following questions: What are the topographies of ''the world'' in different literary texts and traditions? What are that world's limits, boundaries and possibilities? How do literary modes and forms such as realism, narrative poetry or the
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Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) The Bloomsbury Handbook to Philip Roth
Book SynopsisAimee Pozorski is Professor of English at Central Connecticut State University, USA, where she also directs the English graduate program and co-directs the program in American Studies. She is the author of AIDS-Trauma and Politics (2019), Falling After 9-11: Art and Literature in Crisis (Bloomsbury, 2014), and Roth and Trauma: The Problem of History in the Later Works (1995-2010) (Bloomsbury/Continuum, 2011). She is Co-executive Editor, with Maren Scheurer, of Philip Roth Studies, and is past President of the Philip Roth Society (2009-2015). Maren Scheurer is a Researcher and Lecturer in the Department for Comparative Literature and in the Department for English and American Studies at Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main, Germany. She is the author of Transferences: The Aesthetics and Poetics of the Therapeutic Relationship (Bloomsbury, 2019). She is Co-executive Editor, with Aimee Pozorski, of Philip Roth Studies.Trade ReviewA rich collection of discursive takes on America's leading novelist of the late twentieth century, a writer no less controversial – and essential – now than he was at the start of his long, fertile and explosive writing life. * Steven J. Zipperstein, Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History, Stanford University, USA *It’s well known that Philip Roth courted disapproval and thrived on giving offense. What’s less well known is that his fiction is an intellectual feast and an incomparable scrutiny of modern life. This wide-ranging collection helps us acknowledge the breadth and scale of Roth’s significance. * Patrick Hayes, Fellow of St John’s College, University of Oxford, UK *The Bloomsbury Handbook to Philip Roth is the authoritative volume on contemporary approaches to Roth’s work. Combining new scholarly voices with established Roth experts, the volume examines Roth’s complex representations of women, race, and sexualities. The volume offers formal approaches to this most literary of American writers, as well as careful examinations of the difficulty of Roth’s reputation. Aimee Pozorski and Maren Scheurer have compiled a rich and fascinating guide through the territory of Roth’s life, research, interests, and writings. This is a wonderful guide for Roth readers old and new! * Catherine Morley, Professor and Head of School of Arts, University of Leicester, UK *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Introduction Aimee Pozorski (Central Connecticut State University, USA) and Maren Scheurer (Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany) Timeline I. Roth Through the Genres 1. Philip Roth's Novels: A Matter of Ventriloquism Pia Masiero (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy) 2. Divided Selves in Roth's Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories Victoria Aarons (Trinity University, St. Antonio, USA) 3. "Begging the Question": Philip Roth's Life Writing Melissa Schuh (University of Kiel, Germany) 4. Liberalism, Autonomy, and the Open Mind in Philip Roth's Drama of the 1960s Joshua Powell (Cardiff University, UK) 5. Philip Roth's Nonfiction: A Personal Unmasking Elèna Mortara (University of Tor Vergata, Rome, Italy) 6. "By Now What You Are Is a Walking Text": Philip Roth's Editorial Contexts, Roles, and Imagination Jack Knowles (University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada) II. Roth Across Disciplines 7. Dream a Little Dream: Music as Counternarrative in Philip Roth's Fiction Matthew Shipe (Washington University of St. Louis, USA) 8. Roth's Existential Lesson in Identity and Irony Valérie Roberge (Université de Laval, Canada) 9. Safe at Home? Philip Roth and Sports Mike Witcombe (Bath Spa University, UK) 10. Philip Roth and Fine Art David Brauner (University of Reading, UK) 11. Roth and Religion: Nemesis, or Roth's Quarrel with God Timothy Parrish (University of California, Davis, USA) 12. "Anagramists and Manure-Spreaders": Philip Roth and the Academy David Gooblar (The University of Iowa, USA) III. History and Politics 13. Roth and Politics: The Representative Writer Masquerading as Bartleby the Citizen Claudia Brühwiler (University of St. Gallen, Switzerland) 14. The Deception of Democracy in Philip Roth's Fiction Dean Franco (Wake Forest University, USA) 15. "Our Fathers' Sons and Our Neighborhood's Creatures": Upwards Mobility and the Welfare State in Roth's Fiction Daniel Dufournaud (York University, Toronto, Canada) 16. "Slipping the Punch": Philip Roth and Racial Passing Aimee Pozorski (Central Connecticut State University, USA) 17. How History Uses Us: Philip Roth, the Holocaust, and American History James Wigren (Central Connecticut State University, USA) 18. The Many Diasporas of Nathan Zuckerman Bryan Cheyette (University of Reading, UK) IV. New Directions in Roth Studies 19. Against the "Terror of Seeing": Old Age and Disability in Philip Roth's Later Novels Maren Scheurer (Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany) 20. Countering Pastoral: Philip Roth and Ecology Eric Leonidas (Central Connecticut State University, New Britain, USA) 21. Suburb, Settlement, Village: Roth on Whiteness and Landscape in the US and Beyond Naomi Taub (University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, USA) 22. Philip Roth's Anatomy Lessons Ira Nadel (University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada) 23. Jews That Matter: Philip Roth and the Body Joshua Lander (University of Glasgow, UK) 24. The Counterlife: On Roth's Queers RL Goldberg (Princeton University, USA) V. Adaptations and Influences 25. Roth’s Legacy and Cancel Culture Miriam Jaffe Foger (Rutgers University, Newark, USA) 26. Counter-Roth's: Nicole Krauss, Lisa Halliday, and Roth's Legacy Michael Kalisch (University of Oxford, UK) 27. Roth Abroad Brett Ashley Kaplan (University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, USA) 28. Roth and Adaptation Debra Shostak (Wooster College, Ohio, USA) 29. Roth Exhibited: An Interview with Bryan Zanisnik Bryan Zanisnik (Hunter College, USA; Practicing Artist in NYC) VI. Shop Talk 30. Philip Roth and a Pedagogy of Compassion Maggie McKinley (Harper College, Chicago, USA) 31. Nemeses: Roth and His Biographers Jesse Tisch (Independent Scholar, USA) 32. Censorship and Translation in Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, The Breast, and The Professor of Desire Gustavo Sánchez Canales (University of Madrid, Spain) 33. The Philip Roth Personal Library in Newark: Genesis, Purpose, and Contents Tim Crist (Newark Library, USA), Nadine Sergejeff (Newark Library, USA), and Rosemary Steinbaum (Newark Library, USA) Appendix: 34. Annotated Bibliography Connor E. Dombal (Central Connecticut University, USA) 35. Uncollected Published Stories: An Annotated Inventory James D. Bloom (Muhlenberg College, Allentown, USA) 36. A Guide to Film and Television Adaptations of Roth's Fiction Deborah Shostak (Wooster College, USA) Index
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Bloomsbury Academic The Bloomsbury Handbook to Philip Roth
Book SynopsisAimee Pozorski is Professor of English at Central Connecticut State University, USA, where she also directs the English graduate program and co-directs the program in American Studies. She is the author of AIDS-Trauma and Politics (2019), Falling After 9-11: Art and Literature in Crisis (Bloomsbury, 2014), and Roth and Trauma: The Problem of History in the Later Works (1995-2010) (Bloomsbury/Continuum, 2011). She is Co-executive Editor, with Maren Scheurer, of Philip Roth Studies, and is past President of the Philip Roth Society (2009-2015). Maren Scheurer is a Researcher and Lecturer in the Department for Comparative Literature and in the Department for English and American Studies at Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main, Germany. She is the author of Transferences: The Aesthetics and Poetics of the Therapeutic Relationship (Bloomsbury, 2019). She is Co-executive Editor, with Aimee Pozorski, of Philip Roth Studies.
£39.99
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Understanding Bakhtin Understanding Modernism
Book SynopsisExplores and illuminates the impact of the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin on our understanding of literary modernism.This volume explores the subject of modernism as seen through the lens of Bakhtinian criticism and in doing so offers a rounded and up-to-date example of the application of Bakhtinian theory to a field of research. The contributors consider the global spread of modernism and the variety of its manifestations as well as modernism's relationship to popular culture and its collective elaboration, which are dominant concerns in Bakhtin's thinking. As with other volumes in the Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism series, the volume is divided into three parts. Part 1 provides readings of Bakhtin's work in the context of literary modernism. Part 2 features case studies of modernist art and artists and their relation to Bakhtinian theory. The final part provides a glossary of key terms in Bakhtin's work.
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Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Redemptive Hybridism in PostPostmodern Writing
Book SynopsisFrom Virginia Woolf to David Foster Wallace and beyond, 'redemptive hybridism' a new way of reading texts full of possibility and genre blending emerges as a key trajectory for post-postmodernity. Tasha Haines investigates what she calls 'redemptive hybridism' a tendency in post-postmodern writing characterized by possibility. She suggests that near the 21st century, postmodern élitisme gives way to a reparative blending of high-low forms and genre collaborations for challenging and extending the relationship between writer, written material, and reader. By combining an innovative literary investigation with creative and auto-theoretical strategies, Haines offers valuable new interpretations for texts of the modernisms continuum'. Her conversational survey moves among the hybridity of Virginia Woolf, the paratextuality of David Foster Wallace, with Nathalie Sarraute, Édouard Levé, Maggie Nelson and more. In reference to Deleuze and Guattari, Hassan, and others, writers are curat
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Bloomsbury Publishing Plc The Political Uses of Literature
Book SynopsisDrawing on a global history of politicized writing, this book explores literature's utility as a mode of activism and aesthetic engagement with the political challenges of the current moment.The question of literature's uses' has recently become a key topic of academic and public debate. Paradoxically, however, these conversations often tend to bypass the rich history of engagements with literature's distinctly political uses that form such a powerful current of 20th- and 21st-century artistic production and critical-theoretical reflection. The Political Uses of Literature reopens discussion of literature's political and activist genealogies along several interrelated lines: As a foundational moment, it draws attention to the important body of interwar politicized literature and to debates about literature's ability to intervene in social reality. It then traces the mobilization of related conversations and artistic practices across several historical conjunctures, most notably the committed literature of the 1960s and our own present. In mapping out these geographically and artistically diverse traditions including case studies from the Americas, Europe, Africa, India and Russia contributors advance critical discussions in the field, making questions pertaining to politicized art newly compelling to a broader and more diverse readership. Most importantly, this volume insists on the need to think about literature's political uses today at a time when it has become increasingly difficult to imagine any kind of political efficacy for art, even as the need to do so is growing more and more acute. Literature may not proffer easy answers to our political problems, but as this collection suggests, the writing of the 20th century holds out aesthetic resources for a renewed engagement with the dilemmas that face us now.
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Bloomsbury Publishing Plc The Political Uses of Literature
Book SynopsisDrawing on a global history of politicized writing, this book explores literature's utility as a mode of activism and aesthetic engagement with the political challenges of the current moment.The question of literature's uses' has recently become a key topic of academic and public debate. Paradoxically, however, these conversations often tend to bypass the rich history of engagements with literature's distinctly political uses that form such a powerful current of 20th- and 21st-century artistic production and critical-theoretical reflection. The Political Uses of Literature reopens discussion of literature's political and activist genealogies along several interrelated lines: As a foundational moment, it draws attention to the important body of interwar politicized literature and to debates about literature's ability to intervene in social reality. It then traces the mobilization of related conversations and artistic practices across several histoTrade ReviewAn absorbing, richly textured, and innovative study that engages a welcome range of voices and geographical sites. The Political Uses of Literature opens new perspectives on literature and activism of the past 100 years, sensitively illuminating the local specificities and shifting historical conjunctures shaping the purposes to which politicized art has been put in transnational movements and theoretical conversations. * Nicole Simek, Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature, Whitman College, USA *This is a timely and necessary book that presents a compelling case for re-establishing political purpose as central to artistic production. The breadth of its focus marks it out as a landmark contribution to the comparative analysis of international political writing. * Nick Hubble, Professor of Modern and Contemporary English, Brunel University London, *Kohlmann and Perica’s edition offers a most welcome resource, in one volume, shoring up the contemporary in relation to prior understandings of the 'political uses' of literature. Portable, and providing expert (suitably targeted) coverage, The Political Uses of Literature leads its emerging field by virtue of effective consolidation. * Stuart Christie, Professor of English Language and Literature, Hong Kong Baptist University, China *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Introduction Ivana Perica (University of Vienna, Austria) and Benjamin Kohlmann (University of Regensburg, Germany) Part I: Revolution, Internationalism and Literary Politics: Interwar Paradigms 1. Marxists Out of Work: Literature and the Useless in Interwar India Benjamin Conisbee Baer (Princeton University, USA) 2. Politics and Literature on the Peruvian Periphery: Realism and Experimentation in the Works of César Vallejo and José Carlos Mariátegui Juan E. De Castro (The New School, USA) 3. Reusing Artaud? On the Contemporaneity of Messages révolutionnaires (1936) Sandra Fluhrer (Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, and University of California-Berkeley, USA) 4. On the German Popular Front and the Novel in Historical and International Context Hunter Bivens (University of California-Santa Cruz, USA) 5. Narrative Struggle: "Good" and "Bad" Uses of Literature in the Committed Novel of the 1930s (Aragon, Dos Passos) Aurore Peyroles (University of Regensburg, Germany) 6. Moscow, 1934 – Yan’an, 1942: The Manifesto as Lived Experience Steven Lee (University of California-Berkeley, USA) Part II: Politicizing Theory and Literary Practice in the Global 1960s: Inflection Points 7. Militant Structures of Feeling: Raymond Williams, Claude Lefort, and Workers' Inquiry Daniel Hartley (Durham University, UK) 8. Solidarity in Black and White J. Daniel Elam (University of Hong Kong) 9. Notes from the Underground, or: Why and How Was Non-Marxist Theory Resisted by Non-Marxists in a Totalitarian Society Galin Tihanov (Queen Mary University of London, UK) 10. Workshops of Abolition: Attica Print Culture and Small Press Poetry Mark Nowak (Manhattanville College, USA) 11. An Autofictional Intervention into Working-Class Literature: Karin Struck’s Klassenliebe and the Werkkreis Literatur der Arbeitswelt Christoph Schaub (University of Vechta, Germany) 12. Feminism and Progressive Writing in Twentieth-Century India Ulka Anjaria (Brandeis University, USA) Section III: The Political Uses of Literature Today: Legacies and Departures 13. Cultural Politics after the Arab Spring: A New Lotus for a New World? Maryam Fatima (University of Massachusetts-Amherst, USA) 14. Segments of a Larger Narrative: Political Formalism and Working-Class Story Cycles Dirk Wiemann (University of Potsdam) 15. Sedimented Reading Habits? The Future Utopia in Contemporary African Science and Speculative Fiction Peter Maurits (University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany) 16. Literary Activism in Contemporary Africa: Praxis, Publics and the Shifting Landscapes of the ‘Literary’ Madhu Krishnan (University of Bristol, UK) Notes of Contributors Index
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Wilfrid Laurier University Press Trans/acting Culture, Writing, and Memory: Essays
Book Synopsis Trans/acting Culture, Writing, and Memory is a collection of essays written in honour of Barbara Godard, one of the most original and wide-ranging literary critics, theorists, teachers, translators, and public intellectuals Canada has ever produced. The contributors, both established and emerging scholars, extend Godard's work through engagements with her published texts in the spirit of creative interchange and intergenerational relay of ideas. Their essays resonate with Godard's innovative scholarship situated at the intersection of such fields as literary studies, cultural studies, translation studies, feminist theory, arts criticism, social activism, institutional analysis, and public memory. In pursuit of unexpected linkages and connections, the essays venture beyond generic and disciplinary borders, zeroing in on Godard's transdisciplinary practice that has been extremely influential in the way that it framed questions and modeled interventions for the study of Canadian, Québécois, and Acadian literatures and cultures. The authors work with the archives ranging from Canadian government policies and documents, to publications concerning white supremacist organizations in Southern Ontario, online materials from a Toronto-based transgender arts festival, a photographic mural installation commemorating the Montreal Massacre, and the works of such writers and artists as Marie Clements, Nicole Brossard, France Daigle, Nancy Huston, Yvette Nolan, Gail Scott, Denise Desautels, Louise Warren, Rebecca Belmore, Vera Frenkel, Robert Lepage, and Janet Cardiff. Table of Contents Trans/acting Culture, Writing, and Memory, edited by Eva C. Karpinski, Jennifer Henderson, Ian Sowton, and Ray Ellenwood Editors' Introduction Eva C. Karpinski and Jennifer Henderson Prolegomenon: Reader at Work: An Appreciation of Barbara Godard Danielle Fuller Part One: Textual/Visual Production: Critical Interventions 1 Incisive Literary Critic, Brilliant Theorist, Engaged Teacher, Inspired Translator, Public Intellectual, and Committed Activist—All in the Feminine: The Early Barbara Godard Louise H. Forsyth 2 Cultural Memory and Tragic Affect in Nancy Huston's The Mark of the Angel Pamela McCallum 3 Language and Interdisciplinarity: (Re-)contextualizing Nicole Brossard's Picture Theory Karl E. Jirgens 4 Writing the Museum: Visual Art and Literature: Denise Desautels and Louise Warren Claudine Potvin Part Two: Culture/Policy/Institutions 5 Negotiating Literatures in Contiguity: France Daigle in/and Québec Lianne Moyes and Catherine Leclerc 6 A Lack of Public Memory, a Public Memory of Lack Phanuel Antwi 7 ""The Toil and Spoil of Translation"": A Godardian Reading of the Study-Guide: Discover Canada/Guide d'étude: Découvrir le Canada (2010) Len M. Findlay 8 Notes toward Thinking Transsexual Institutional Poetics Trish Salah Part Three: Translation/Transculturation 9 Voyage autour de la traduction: The Translator as Writer and Theorist Alessandra Capperdoni 10 Taking Deleuze in the Middle, or Doing Intellectual History by the Letter Jason Demers 11 Gail Scott and Barbara Godard on ""The Main"": Borders, Sutures, Micro-cosmopolitan Interconnectivity, and Translation Studies Gillian Lane-Mercier Part Four: Public Memory and the Archive 12 Linked Histories and Radio-Activity in Marie Clements's Burning Vision Sophie McCall 13 Memory as Fracture: French Mnemotechniques in the Erasure of the Holocaust Michael Dorland 14 Gender in the Shaping of Public Memory: Arms (Monumental) for Montreal Sue Lloyd 15 Contested Memories: Canadian Women Writers in and out of the Archive Barbara Godard Coda: In the Stacks of Barbara Godard, or Do Not Confuse the Complexity of This Moment with Chaos Lisa Sloniowski Contributors Index
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Boydell & Brewer Ltd Heimat: A Critical Theory of the German Idea of Homeland
Book SynopsisA new analysis of one of the most loaded terms in the German language: Heimat, or Homeland. The idea of Heimat (home, homeland, native region) has been as important to German self-perceptions over the last two hundred years as the shifting notion of the German nation. While the idea of Heimat has been long neglected in English studies of German culture--among other reasons because the word Heimat has no exact equivalent in English--this book offers us the first cross-disciplinary and comprehensive analysis, in English or German, of this all-pervasive German idea. Blickle shows how the idea of Heimat interpenetrates German notions of modernity, identity, gender, nature, and innocence. Blickle reminds us of such commonplace expressions of Heimat sentimentality as Biedermeier landscapes of Alpine meadows and castles on the Rhine, but also finds the Heimat preoccupation in Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud. Always aware of the many literary representations of Heimat (for instance in Schiller, Hölderlin, Heine, Kafka, and Thomas Mann), Blickle does not argue for the fundamental innocence of Heimat. Instead he shows again and again how the idealization of a home ground leads to borders of exclusion. Peter Blickle is associate professor of German at Western Michigan University.Trade ReviewThis volume will be a must for scholars working on Heimat and a welcome addition to any library. * MICHIGAN ACADEMICIAN *For anyone interested in German notions of Heimat, Blickle's study, an impressive scholarly accomplishment, is indispensable reading. * GERMAN QUARTERLY *Blickle has rendered an important service in providing a lucid and provocative study on a topic that has elicited profuse commentary in recent years. * MONATSHEFTE *
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Bucknell University Press Ridiculous Critics: Augustan Mockery of Critical Judgment
Book SynopsisRidiculous Critics is an anthology of eighteenth-century writings on the figure of the literary critic, and on the critic’s mixed and complex role. The collection assembles critical texts and satirical images chronologically to suggest a vision of the history of eighteenth-century literary criticism. Including comic, vicious, heartfelt and absurd passages from critics, poets, novelists and literary commentators celebrated and obscure, the writings range through poetry, fiction, drama, and periodical writing. The anthology also includes two original essays discussing and illustrating the irrepressible spirit of critical ridicule in the period, and commending its value and effect. The first offers an evaluation of the merciless and sometimes shockingly venomous satirical attacks on critical habits and personalities of the eighteenth century. The editors argue that such attacks are reflexive, in the sense that criticism becomes increasingly supple and able to observe and examine its own irresponsible ingenuities from within. The volume’s concluding essay supplies an analysis of modern modes of criticism and critical history, and suggests applications across time. We propose that humor’s vital force was once an important part of living criticism. The eighteenth-century mockery of critics casts light on a neglected common thread in the history of criticism and its recent manifestations; it prompts questions about the relative absence of comedy from the stories we presently tell about critics dead or alive. The passages invite laughter, both with the critics and at their expense, and suggest the place that ridicule might have had since the eighteenth century in the making of judgments, and in the pricking of critical pretension. For this reason, they indicate the role that laughter may still have in criticism today and provide an encouraging precedent for its future.Trade Review[The authors] provide a fascinating hybrid collection/anthology on the role of ridicule in criticism produced during the long 18th century. They focus on ridicule of critics/criticism rather than by critics (though sometimes the boundary blurs). In both the critical commentary it offers and the primary texts by the period's 'ridiculous critics' it includes, the volume stands as a history of a body of criticism that has been largely ignored, and which has implications for today's critical practices. In part 1, the editors consider the balance of serious and unserious in English criticism and 'suggest that a corpus of comic and satirical writings with its own genealogy' reveals 'what criticism was, and should be.' In part 2, they provide examples of such writings (and some satirical prints), beginning with Buckingham's Rehearsal and proceeding to satirical jabs by Rochester, Swift, Wycherley, Pope, Parnell, Fielding, Smart, Johnson, Goldsmith, Mackenzie, Sterne, Gibbon, et al. In part 3, the editors suggest that bringing together the 'laughter of critics [and] their own laughable vices . . . offers a way of being serious about things . . . that serious expression renders trivial, obscure, or ineffective.' All who profess themselves literary critics should take a serious look at this book. Summing Up: Essential. All readers. * CHOICE *There are more books on Augustan satire and Augustan criticism than I can count, but no one has ever bothered to bring the two scholarly discourses together. Smallwood and Wild are the first to explore mockery as a serious critical mode, and their innovative approach brings unfamiliar text to light and lets us see familiar ones from new angles. Ridiculous Critics is essential reading for any student of eighteenth-century criticism or satire—which is to say any student of eighteenth-century literature. -- Jack Lynch, Rutgers UniversityTable of ContentsIllustrations Preface Acknowledgments Abbreviations Part I: Laughing with Reason: Seriousness and Un-seriousness in English Critical HistoryClassical Origins and Sources Writing the Laughing History of Criticism Self-Ridicule Overdoing It A Note on Texts and Images Part II: The Language and Appearance of Ridicule: A Selection “Critiques, Do Your Worst”: Buckingham’s Rehearsal Lord Rochester’s Disdain: “An Allusion to Horace” Jonathan Swift and my Good Lords the Critics: A Tale of a Tub Swift’s Goddess Criticism: the Battle of the Books William Wycherley’s Anti-Critical Rampagings Addison and the Art of Critical Tittling and Tattling How Not to Write Literary Criticism: the Cautions of Pope’s Essay Tyrants in Wit and Pretenders to Criticism: The Guardian The Critical Insect of Thomas Parnell: “The Bookworm” A Life in Criticism: Parnell’s Remarks on Zoilus Steele and the Big Beast of Criticism: The Theatre Damning with Faint Praise: Pope’s Epistle to Arbuthnot Pope’s Big Sleep of Criticism: The Dunciad Henry Fielding’s Guesswork: The Champion Sarah Fielding on Critical Cackling and Gobbling: David Simple Henry Fielding’s Critical Reptiles and Slanderers: Tom Jones Thomas Edwards’ “Airy Petulance”: The Canons of Criticism Critical Puffery and Scrapping: Smollett’s Peregrine Pickle Smart’s Practical Critic: The Student Smart’s Semicolonic Ramblings: The Midwife (I) Mrs. Midnight’s Art of Close Reading: The Midwife(II) Smart’s Critical Dogs and Spiders: The Midwife (III) Microscopic and Telescopic Critics: Johnson’s Rambler George Stevens’ Pedasculus: Distress upon Distress Critical Fishiness: Smart, Rolt, and The Universal Visitor Garrick’s Witches’ Brew: “A Recipe for a Modern Critic” Critical Rodents and The Universal Visitor Oliver Goldsmith’s Specious Idlers: Polite Learning in Europe Goldsmith’s Critical Spiders and Blockheads: The Critical Review Johnson’s Critical Minim: The Idler Alexander Mackenzie’s The Hungry Mob of Scriblers and Etchers Sterne’s Bobs and Trinkets of Criticism: Tristram Shandy The Reviewers’ Cave Evan Lloyd and the Critic’s Catacomb of Words: The Powers of the Pen A Connoisseur Admiring a Dark Night Piece An Old Macaroni Critic at a New Play Gibbon’s Critical Overcast: The Decline and Fall Gillray’s Critical Owl Dr. Pomposo The Critics: A Poem The Critic at Home A Connoisseur in Brokers Alley Part III: Legacies of Ridicule: the Close of Critical History Uncertainties Yet More Uncertain Being Serious with Theory Comedy and Contextualization Stasis and Change Dignity, Indignity and the Function of Criticism Laughing When Reason Fails Of Dogs and Monkeys: an Afterword Bibliography Index
£114.42
Bucknell University Press Re-Imagining Nature: Environmental Humanities and
Book SynopsisRe-Imagining Nature: Environmental Humanities and Ecosemiotics explores new horizons in environmental studies, which consider communication and meaning as core definitions of ecological life, essential to deep sustainability. It considers landscape as narrative, and applies theoretical frameworks in eco-phenomenology and ecosemiotics to literary, historical, and philosophical study of the relationship between text and landscape. It considers in particular examples and lessons to be drawn from case studies of medieval and Native American cultures, to illustrate in an applied way the promise of environmental humanities today. In doing so, it highlights an environmental future for the humanities, on the cutting edge of cultural endeavor today.Table of ContentsContents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Chapter 1: Introduction - Song, Tree, and Spring: Environmental Meaning and the Environmental Humanities Part One: Backgrounds Chapter 2: The Ecopoetics of Creation: Genesis LXX 1-3 By Alfred Kentigern Siewers Chapter 3: Place and Sign: Locality as a Foundation for Ecosemiotics By Timo Maran Chapter 4: Learning from Temple Grandin, or, Animal Studies, Disability Studies, and Who Comes after the Subject By Cary Wolfe Part Two: Medieval Natures Chapter 5: “The Secret Folds of Nature”: Eriugena's Expansive Concept of Nature By Dermot Moran Chapter 6: The Nature of Miracles in Early Irish Saints’ Lives By John Carey Chapter 7: Inventing with Animals in the Middle Ages By Jeffrey Jerome Cohen Part Three: Re-Negotiating Native Natures Chapter 8: The Yua as Logoi By Fr Michael Oleksa Chapter 9: Intersubjectivity with “Nature” in Plains Indian Vision-seeking By Kathryn W. Shanley Chapter 10: The Experience of the World as the Experience of the Self: Smooth Rocks in a River Archipelago By Katherine M. Faull Chapter 11: Human Geographies and Landscapes of the Divine in Ibero-American Borderlands By Cynthia Radding Chapter 12: Call and Response: The Human/Non-Human Encounter in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms By Sarah Reese Suggested Reading Bibliography Index About the Contributors
£53.17
De Gruyter Aesthetics and Theurgy in Byzantium
The general scope of the present volume is to present a variety of approaches and topics within the growing field of research on Byzantine aesthetics. Theurgy in Neoplatonic and Christian contexts is represented by the contributions of W.-M. Stock and L. Bergemann; theories of beauty are at the centre of interest of the papers by S. Mariev and M. Marchetto. A. Pizzone approaches Byzantine aesthetics by looking for aesthetic experience in the literary texts, while the remaining contributions explore issues related to the iconoclast controversy: An important moment in the development of Byzantine philosophy on the eve of iconoclasm is the primary interest of A. del Campo Echevarría, who looks at the question of universals in John of Damaskos. The relationship between image and text in Byzantine illustrated manuscripts occupies the attention of B. Crostini. D. Afinogenov explores from a philological perspective the fate of important iconophile terminology in Old Bulgarian, while L. Lukhovitskij reconstructs from historical and philological perspectives the historical memory of the iconoclast controversy during the Late Byzantine Period.
£113.52
De Gruyter Ancient Greek Dialects and Early Authors: Introduction to the Dialect Mixture in Homer, with Notes on Lyric and Herodotus
Epic is dialectally mixed but Ionic at its core. The proper dialect for elegy was Ionic, even when composed by Tyrtaeus in Sparta or Theognis in Megara, both Doric areas. Choral lyric poets represent the major dialect areas: Aeolic (Sappho, Alcaeus), Ionic (Anacreon, Archilochus, Simonides), and Doric (Alcman, Ibycus, Stesichorus, Pindar). Most distinctive are the Aeolic poets. The rest may have a preference for their own dialect (some more than others) but in their Lesbian veneer and mixture of Doric and Ionic forms are to some extent dialectally indistinguishable. All of the ancient authors use a literary language that is artificial from the point of view of any individual dialect. Homer has the most forms that occur in no actual dialect. In this volume, by means of dialectally and chronologically arranged illustrative texts, translated and provided with running commentary, some of the early Greek authors are compared against epigraphic records, where available, from the same period and locality in order to provide an appreciation of: the internal history of the Ancient Greek language and its dialects; the evolution of the multilectal, artificial poetic language that characterizes the main genres of the most ancient Greek literature, especially Homer / epic, with notes on choral lyric and even the literary language of the prose historian Herodotus; the formulaic properties of ancient poetry, especially epic genres; the development of more complex meters, colometric structure, and poetic conventions; and the basis for decisions about text editing and the selection of a manuscript alternant or emendation that was plausibly used by a given author.
£113.52
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Romantic Literature in Light of Bakhtin
Book SynopsisLiterature and literary criticism throughout the twentieth century are famous for their proclamations of the death of the author, the eclipse of character and the "nothingness of personality," as Borges put it. Walter Reed investigates the ideas of personhood developed by one of the most influential literary theorists of the last century: Mikhail Bakhtin. He finds in Bakhtin a personalism based on the idea of an ongoing dialogue between authors and their heroes in imaginative literature. Such a model of inter-personality, Reed argues, allows us to appreciate the rich possibilities of personhood set forth in the earlier nineteenth-century period of Romanticism. Elaborating a new general theory and providing close readings of classic works of Romantic poetry and fiction, Romantic Literature in Light of Bakhtin offers a better understanding of the preoccupation with the individual, creative self that lay at the heart of this revolutionary literature that still speaks to readers today.Trade ReviewThis book is full of deep paradoxes that radically refresh our perception of both Mikhail Bakhtin's theories and Romantic aesthetics in their mutual refractions. Bakhtinian approach to English Romanticism allows us to penetrate more deeply into the latter's personalistic and dialogical tenets. Furthermore, Walter Reed prompts us to see Mikhail Bakhtin himself as a disguised Romantic of the third generation whose critique is addressed primarily to traditional adversaries of Romanticism (such as Rationalists and Neoclassicists), but also to the Romantics of the first (early 19 c.) and second (decadents and symbolists of the turn of the 20 c.) generations. Bakhtin's critique of Romanticism is internal critique: of the less radical otherness from the standpoint of the more radical otherness. This book is a must read for all lovers of Romantic poetry and aesthetics. -- Mikhail Epstein, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Cultural Theory and Russian Literature, Emory University, USA, and Professor of Russian and Cultural Theory, Director of the Center for Humanities Innovation, Durham University, UKReaders will come away from this book with a better grasp of Bakhtin's ideas and a pocketful of new perceptions about well-known Romantic poems. More than that, by putting Bakhtin into fruitful dialogue with it, Walter Reed has lit up the whole terrain of English and German Romanticism, not to mention literary theory. And beyond even that, his welcome departure from the prevailing "hermeneutic of suspicion," his generous and assimilative stance, his "poetics of trust," confirms what many of us still believe: that Romanticism was not just an ideological or "aesthetic" delusion but a worldview full of durable insights. -- Michael K. Ferber, Professor of English, University of New Hampshire, USADistracted by carnival and forever allowed a second chance by dialogue, it is easy to forget that those concepts were preceded by an ethical architectonics. Bakhtin’s cosmos is founded on the notion that dialogic knowledge is dependent on interactive personalism, Creator-creature relations, and the virtues of trust. In his new book, Walter Reed develops these early Bakhtinian ideas into nothing less than an architectonics of Romanticism: muscular, full of particulars, in which Bakhtin’s passion for the fragment is harnessed to a case for Otherness and literary genre becomes the universal binder for creativity. In the early 1920s, while his colleagues in Leningrad were talking Marxism, Bakhtin was holding seminars on his life-long hero, Friedrich Schelling. Reed suggests illuminating reasons why this was so. Both Bakhtin and Romanticism gain in potency and relevance. -- Caryl Emerson, A. Watson Armour III University Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Princeton University, USAThe real treasures of Heffernan's book lie in the extraordinary series of readings and close analyses each of its chapters has to offer... For on the whole, this book stands as a great success, and should go a long way in establishing the importance of hospitality within the field of literary studies. -- Peter Melville * Review 19 *Can one Russian philosopher of communication help us to explain Romantic literature?...Fortunately for this book, Bakhtin is one of the great original thinkers of the past century, and Reed’s ambition to coordinate a theorist and a whole period is matched by his caution. Having taught Romantic writers in a comparative context for four decades, and having produced studies of the novel and of Bakhtin, Reed offers a grand scholarly synthesis in a relatively short study. * Review 19 *In the past half-century Mikhail Bakhtin has been read in many ways, but he has yet to be widely accepted as a Romantic or a Romanticist, or at any rate a critic whom one can use to read Romanticism … Walter L. Reed’s remarkable new book, Romantic Literature in Light of Bakhtin, prompts us to reconsider this view, and in typically Bakhtinian fashion does so from a position of outsidedness … it firmly establishes the relevance of Bakhtin to discussions of Romanticism and perhaps suggests ways of reading Bakhtin himself in the proper critical spirit, Romantic Literature in Light of Bakhtin should be necessary reading for the respectful and suspicious alike. -- Matthew Walker, Stanford University * Slavic and East European Journal *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Foreword:Romanticism in Light of Bakhtin Chapter One: Architectonics: Articulating a Period Imagination Chapter Two: Personalism: Reckoning Voices Chapter Three: Chronotopes: Coordinating Representative Genres Afterword: Bakhtin in Light of Romanticism Appendix: Diagrams Index
£34.99
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Stuff Theory: Everyday Objects, Radical Materialism
Book SynopsisStuff, the hoard of minor objects which have shed their commodity glamor but which we refuse to recycle, flashes up in fiction, films and photographs as alluring, unruly reminder of how people and matter are intertwined. Stuff is modern materiality out of bounds that refuses to be contained by the western semiotic system. It declines its role as the eternal sidekick of the subject, and is thus the ideal basis for a counter-narrative of materiality in flux. Can such a narrative, developed by the new materialism, reinvigorate the classical materialist account of human alienation from commodities under capital? By shifting the discussion of materiality toward the aesthetic and the everyday, the book both embraces and challenges the project of new materialism. It argues that matter has a politics, and that its new plasticity offers a continued possibility of critique. Stuff Theory's five chapters illustrate the intermittent flashes of modern 'minor' materiality in twentieth-century modernity as fashion, memory object, clutter, home décor, and waste in a wide range of texts: Benjamin's essays, Virginia Woolf's and Elfriede Jelinek's fiction, Rem Koolhaas' criticism, 1920s German photography and the cinema of Tati, Bertolucci, and Mendes. To call the commodified, ebullient materiality the book tracks stuff, is to foreground its plastic and transformative power, its fluidity and its capacity to generate events. Stuff Theory interrogates the political value of stuff's instability. It investigates the potential of stuff to revitalize the oppositional power of the object. Stuff Theory traces a genealogy of materiality: flashpoints of one kind of minor matter in a succession of cultural moments. It asserts that in culture, stuff becomes a rallying point for a new critique of capital, which always works to reassign stuff to a subaltern position. Stuff is not merely unruly: it becomes the terrain on which a new relation between people and matter might be built.Trade ReviewBoscagli’s readings of objects are genuinely exciting ... For anyone interested in consumer capitalism, mediation, the cultural transition from modernity to postmodernity, or objects in art, however, Stuff Theory is a necessary read. Boscagli’s writing throughout has verve, and the analyses are sharp, incisive, and often surprising. * U.S. Studies Online *The hinge between [modernist and new materialism] is supplied by the endlessly suggestive writing of Walter Benjamin who acts as the richest example of what can be gleaned when these two worlds are entangled ... Boscagli both follows Benjamin and pushes his work into new arenas ... Stuff Theory’s engagement with ‘new materialism’ is wide ranging. * New Foundations *New materialism meets historical materialism, to the expansion and improvement of both. With enviable nuance and sophistication, imaginative verve and critical acuity, Maurizia Boscagli explores the complex, dynamic life of the stuff of capitalism, producing an innovative and original materialism for the twenty-first century. Essential reading. -- Imre Szeman, Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies, University of Alberta, CanadaAt one point in David Fincher's 1999 cult film Fight Club, Brad Pitt's rascally Tyler Durden mocks a minor character who states vaguely that in college he studied "stuff." Maurizia Boscagli’s dazzling Stuff Theory: Everyday Objects, Radical Materialism shows how Tyler might have taken this utterance seriously: "stuff" is indeed worthy of study. Each page brimming with fresh examples drawn from literature, art, and culture, and carefully informed by intellectual precursors from Marx to the new materialists, Boscagli's theory ultimately illuminates the practice of stuff, and suggests that this practice may be due for revision. -- Christopher Schaberg, Associate Professor of English & Environment at Loyola University New Orleans, USA, and author of The Textual Life of Airports: Reading the Culture of FlightMatter is desire. Whether conceived as an object that can be represented and appropriated or as force whose unpredictability and vitality throws life wide open, matter never leaves us in peace. In this wonderful book Maurizia Boscagli explores how the everyday is shaped by these tantalizing movements of matter. Beyond the capitalocentricism of historical materialism and the detached hype of new materialism Stuff Theory proposes an experimental materialist practice that works with matter to remake the stuff that power and politics are made of. * Dimitris Papadopoulos, Reader in Sociology and Organisation, University of Leicester, UK, author of Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the 21st Century *Boscagli offers an exhilarating genealogy of the commodity in order to open up a questions that neither presuppose the old distinction between subject and object nor revel in the sheer plasticity of things. I especially admire the case that Stuff Theory makes for dialectic as the necessary means of thinking our way through and beyond the 19th-century opposition of materialism (which now includes cyborgian hybrids) to idealism (which has always included aesthetic expression). Bocagli's "radical materialism" shows that only a critique of post-commodity things can tell us how to read them as transformations of "stuff" that expresses the people and selves to which neo-liberalism denies subjectivity. * Nancy Armstrong, Gilbert, Louis, and Edward Lehrman Professor of English, Duke University, USA *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Of Jena Glassware and Potatoes—Matter in the Moment 1. Homeopathic Benjamin: A Flexible Poetics of Matter 2. For the Unnatural Use of Clothes: Fashion as Cultural Assault 3. Paris Circa 1968: Cool Spaces, Decoration, Revolution 4. “You Must Remember this:” Memory Objects in the Age of Erasable Memory 5. Garbage in Theory: Waste Aesthetics Envoi: What Should We Do With Our Stuff? Notes Index
£29.44
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc The Book of Imitation and Desire: Reading Milan Kundera with Rene Girard
Book SynopsisTrevor Cribben Merrill offers a bold reassessment of Milan Kundera’s place in the contemporary canon. Harold Bloom and others have dismissed the Franco-Czech author as a maker of “period pieces” that lost currency once the Berlin Wall fell. Merrill refutes this view, revealing a previously unexplored dimension of Kundera’s fiction. Building on theorist René Girard’s notion of “triangular desire,” he shows that modern classics such as The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting display a counterintuitive—and bitterly funny—understanding of human attraction. Most works of fiction (and most movies, too) depict passionate feelings as deeply authentic and spontaneous. Kundera’s novels and short stories overturn this romantic dogma. A pounding heart and sweaty palms could mean that we have found “the One” at last—or they could attest to the influence of a model whose desires we are unconsciously borrowing: our amorous predilections may owe less to personal taste or physical chemistry than they do to imitative desire. At once a comprehensive survey of Kundera’s novels and a witty introduction to Girard’s mimetic theory, The Book of Imitation and Desire challenges our assumptions about human motive and renews our understanding of a major contemporary author.Trade ReviewThe contribution that Trevor Merrill’s book makes is at least threefold: it sheds new light on the work of one of our era’s strongest novelists; it extends and confirms the literary reach of René Girard’s main hypotheses; and it helps us to better understand our own existence. And it does all of this in a style that’s clear, precise, and elegant. What more could be asked of a major work of literary criticism? -- François Ricard, McGill University, USAIn the same way that according to Galileo "Nature's great book is written in mathematical language", Trevor Merrill argues brilliantly that Milan Kundera’s oeuvre is written in terms of René Girard’s theory of mimetic, triangular desire. What is remarkable is that Kundera himself was unaware of the existence of the theory when he wrote his first novels. Had he been, he would by his own admission have found himself unable to write them. What is even more remarkable is that this structural kinship once revealed does add to the beauty of Kundera’s works in the same way that Newton’s or Einstein’s equations make Nature even more astounding. This is a great book about a great writer and a great theory, in which the three vertices of the triangle enhance one another. -- Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Professor of Philosophy, Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, FranceWith clear and persuasive style Trevor Cribben Merrill’s The Book of Imitation and Desire successfully rescues Milan Kundera from the unjust expulsion he suffered, at the hand of Harold Bloom, from the pantheon of the 20th century canonic authors. By compellingly arguing about the infinite perceptiveness of Kundera’s novels in relation to the Quixotesque adventures of our eternally mediated desires, Merrill offers an illuminating and enriching new perspective on the opus of the Czech writer. The Girardian lens, rather than straitjacketing the psychological complexity of Kundera’s works, as many have argued, opens up new critical perspectives and a new understanding of the author of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Pace Bloom, in the pantheon of the novelistic geniuses set by Girard’s seminal Deceit, Desire and the Novel, Merrill’s excellent book suggests, a place should now be reserved for Milan Kundera. -- Pierpaolo Antonello, University Senior Lecturer, Department of Italian, University of Cambridge, UKTable of ContentsForeword by Andrew McKenna Author’s Preface I. “WOMEN LOOK FOR MEN WHO HAVE HAD BEAUTIFUL WOMEN” II. INTO THE LABYRINTH OF VALUES 1. The Transfiguration of the Object 2. Metamorphoses of Kristyna 3. “An Imitation of Feeling” III. FROM IMITATION TO RIVALRY 1. The Shift from Admiration to Envy 2. Deceit, Desire, and the Plight of the Aging Don Juan 3. Rivalry and the Transfiguration of the Object 4. “The Younger Sister Imitated the Elder” 5. Publish or Perish IV. THE MODEL AS OBSTACLE 1. Strategies of Revelation 2. The Art of Polyphonic Comparison 3. A Little Theory of Resentment 4. Litost in the Underground V. JEALOUSY AND ITS METAPHORS 1. The Game Gone Awry 2. The Metaphors of Jealousy 3. “A Test That Gauged Her Susceptibility To Seduction” VI. THE QUADRILLE OF DESIRE 1. Sex as Theater 2. Acute Rivalry and Homosexual Attraction 3. The Geometry of Sadomasochism VII. AT THE HEART OF THE LABYRINTH 1. “The Thousand-Headed Dragon” 2. “The Cement of their Brotherhood” 3. The Two Temptations 4. “The Absolute Denial of Shit” 5. First Time As Tragedy, Second Time As Farce VIII. REPUDIATING THE MODEL 1. Eduard’s Smile 2. From Hatred to Compassion 3. Karenin’s Smile 4. The Birth of a Novelist 5. Liberating Exiles IX. TOMAS IN COLONUS, OR THE WISDOM OF THE NOVEL Postscript: A Response to Elif Batuman Appendix: A Brief Overview of Kundera’s Life and Works Notes Bibliography Index
£37.99
BLACK EAGLE BOOKS Literature
£16.02
Vernon Press Concepción Gimeno de Flaquer (1850-1919): Her Personal Letters, Short Stories, and Journalism
£65.00
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC The Heroic Shift
Book SynopsisPriscilla Hobbs is Senior Associate Dean at Southern New Hampshire University, USA. Rebekah Lovejoy is an independent scholar and licensed marriage and family therapist specializing in LGBTQ+, women's issues, and neurodivergent affirming care in the United States. She is also a writer, educator, and artist.
£85.50
Academica Press Imposing Fictions: Subversive Literature and the
Book SynopsisImposing Fictions aims to ameliorate the growing problem of what Martin Heidegger refers to as psychological and cultural "homelessness" by diagnosing the nature of the latter's current manifestations and offering readings of literature that seek to inspire the genuine, and genuinely subversive, alterity required by an authentic mode of being. Specifically, it advocates for the value of subversive literature and its capacity to impose itself on the multitude of cultural and psychological preconceptions that govern the generalized but deeply personal, contemporary self. Subversiveness in this context implies pushing against the grain of identity formation as commonly dictated by the hegemony of technology. It does so both stylistically and thematically by foregrounding the imperative of figurative death in the service of authenticity. With the theoretical frameworks of Martin Heidegger and Alain Badiou as central guideposts, literary texts ranging from genre horror to American and French fiction are examined for their contributions to the legitimization of a metaphoric death drive and a concomitant, ameliorative quality of being that ultimately assumes the form of what some philosophers and fiction writers alike call love.
£135.00
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Heresy and Heterotopia in Works by Lawrence
Book Synopsis
£999.99
Amazon Digital Services LLC - Kdp Twilight
£11.83
Engage Books Against Nature (A rebours) (Royal Collector's Edition) (Case Laminate Hardcover with Jacket)
£24.95
£16.59
Troubador Publishing Ltd Italo Svevo and His Legacy for the Third Millennium Volume I Philology and Interpretation Troubador Italian Studies
Book SynopsisThe first of a two volume set of books which looks at the work of all those who wish to understand the important of Italo Svevo's work
£999.99
Troubador Publishing Ltd Italo Svevo and His Legacy for the Third Millennium Volume II Contexts and Influences Troubador Italian Studies
Book SynopsisThe second of a two volume set of books which looks at the work of all those who wish to understand the important of Italo Svevo's work
£16.56
Open Humanities Press Thinking with AI
Book Synopsis
£50.18
£16.51
Shearsman Books Free Verse as Formal Restraint: An Alternative to Metrical Conventions in Twentieth-Century Poetic Structure
Book SynopsisThis volume contains the remarkable PhD thesis submitted by Crozier in 1972, and for which his external examiner was J.H. Prynne-whose comments on the thesis are also included here, as an afterword. "My intention in writing this thesis has been to cast some light on the prima facie case that free verse, in abandoning the exercise of metre, has abandoned that principle of restraint upon which the creation of artistic form depends. This point of view contrasts with a general contention on the part of the exponents of free verse that their works possess form which is not only unique but which also bears an immediate relation to the significance of the work, a relationship felt to be 'musical', although not in any directly analogical sense."Table of ContentsIntroduction by Ian BrintonChapter 1: Summary & Introduction: Critical Reservations about "Modern" or Experimental Poetry Chapter 2: The Concept of Metre and the Relation of Prosody to MeaningChapter 3: Prose and Speech as Criteria for the Organisation of Poetic DiscourseChapter 4: The Influence of Humanist Notions of Organisation on Sixteenth Century PoeticsChapter 5: The Harmony of the World and the Harmony of Verse: an Idea in DegradationChapter 6: Sound and Sense: the Direct Action of Poetic Rhythm on the Passions and the Theory of ExpressionChapter 7: Natural Rhythmic Standards and the Demand for Prosodic VarietyChapter 8: Conclusion: Free Verse and the Natural Restraints of LanguageReport by J.H. Prynne
£14.95
Open Book Publishers Les Bienveillantes De Jonathan Littell
£23.61
Open Book Publishers Bourdieu and Literature
£21.88
Amazon Digital Services LLC - Kdp Under the Lens
£10.67
Clemson University Digital Press Love and Sex in D. H. Lawrence
Book Synopsis
£999.99
Punctum Books The Retro-Futurism of Cuteness
£17.81
£15.75
Punctum Books Matches: A Light Book second, expanded edition
£21.38
Springer Nature Switzerland AG Empathy in Contemporary Poetry after Crisis
Book SynopsisThis book examines the representation of empathy in contemporary poetry after crisis, specifically poetry after the Holocaust, the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and Hurricane Katrina. The text argues that, recognizing both the possibilities and dangers of empathy, the poems under consideration variously invite and refuse empathy, thus displaying what Anna Veprinska terms empathetic dissonance. Veprinska proposes that empathetic dissonance reflects the texts’ struggle with the question of the value and possibility of empathy in the face of the crises to which these texts respond. Examining poems from Charlotte Delbo, Dionne Brand, Niyi Osundare, Charles Reznikoff, Robert Fitterman, Wisława Szymborska, Cynthia Hogue, Claudia Rankine, Paul Celan, Dan Pagis, Lucille Clifton, and Katie Ford, among others, Veprinska considers empathetic dissonance through language, witnessing, and theology. Merging comparative close readings with interdisciplinary theory from philosophy, psychology, cultural theory, history and literary theory, and trauma studies, this book juxtaposes a genocide, a terrorist act, and a natural disaster amplified by racial politics and human disregard in order to consider what happens to empathy in poetry after events at the limits of empathy. Table of Contents1. Chapter 1: Introduction 1.1 The Permeability of Terms 1.2 The Benefits and Dangers of Empathy 1.3 The Poetry of Empathetic Dissonance after Three Contemporary Crises 1.4 The Chapters 2. Chapter 2: The Unsaid 2.1 & the Holocaust 2.2 & 9/11 2.3 & Hurricane Katrina 3. Chapter 3: The Unhere 3.1 & the Holocaust 3.2 & 9/11 3.3 & Hurricane Katrina 4. Chapter 4: The Ungod 4.1 & the Holocaust 4.2 & 9/11 4.3 & Hurricane Katrina 5. Conclusion 5.1 Challenges and Limitations 5.2 Empathy: Thread and Needle 5.3 Alternative Avenues 5.4 Future Directions 5.5. To the Reader 5.6 Unconclusion
£64.99
Springer Nature Switzerland AG Games and Gaming in Early Modern Drama: Stakes
Book SynopsisThis book is a close taxonomic study of the pivotal role of games in early modern drama. The presence of the game motif has often been noticed, but this study, the most comprehensive of its kind, shows how games operate in more complex ways than simple metaphor and can be syntheses of emblem and dramatic device. Drawing on seventeenth-century treatises, including Francis Willughby’s Book of Games, which only became available in print in 2003, and divided into chapters on Dice, Cards, Tables (Backgammon), and Chess, the book brings back into focus the symbolism and divinatory origins of games. The work of more than ten dramatists is analysed, from the Shakespeare and Middleton canon to rarer plays such as The Spanish Curate, The Two Angry Women of Abington and The Cittie Gallant. Games and theatre share common ground in terms of performance, deceit, plotting, risk and chance, and the early modern playhouse provided apt conditions for vicarious play. From the romantic chase to the financial gamble, and in legal contest and war, the twenty-first century is still engaging the game. With its extensive appendices, the book will appeal to readers interested in period games and those teaching or studying early modern drama, including theatre producers, and awareness of the vocabulary of period games will allow further references to be understood in non-dramatic texts.Table of Contents1. Chapter 1: Introduction.2. Chapter 2: Games in Early Modern Culture.3. Chapter 3: Dice: the roll/role of chance and luck .4. Chapter 4: Cards: face cards, rules, and secrecy.5. Chapter 5: Tables: Backgammon and race games between the sexes.6. Chapter 6: Chess: war, harmony, sex and politics.- 7Chapter 7: Conclusion.
£44.99
Springer Nature Switzerland AG Children’s Literature and Intergenerational
Book SynopsisChildren’s Literature and Intergenerational Relationships: Encounters of the Playful Kind explores ways in which children’s literature becomes the object and catalyst of play that brings younger and older generations closer to one another. Providing examples from diverse cultural and historical contexts, this collection argues that children’s texts promote intergenerational play through the use of literary devices and graphic formats and that they may prompt joint play practices in the real world. The book offers a distinctive contribution to children’s literature scholarship by shifting critical attention away from the difference and conflict between children and adults to the exploration of inter-age interdependencies as equally crucial aspects of human life, presenting a new perspective for all who research and work with children’s culture in times of global aging.Table of Contents Chapter 1. Play, Children’s Literature, and Intergenerational Connectivity. - Chapter 2: The Child Reader’s Playful Adventures in Wonderland. - Chapter 3. The Nature of Play and Adult-Child Interaction in the Alice Books and Coraline. -Chapter 4. Embracing the Childlike: Play in Picturebook Poetics. - Chapter 5. Intergenerational Encounters in Contemporary Picturebooks. - Chapter 6. Rabindranath Tagore the Grandfather: Shey as a Playful Encounter between a Poet and His Granddaughter. - Chapter 7. How Fictional Representations of Intergenerational Play May Be Important for Child Readers: A Cognitive Approach. - Chapter 8. “How did Child of Light save me?” Engagement with a Children’s Multimodal Game Narrative as Adult play and Self-therapy. - Chapter 9. No Adults in the Woods: Relationships between Adults and Children during Outdoor Play in Award-Winning Picturebooks from the United States. - Chapter 10. Don’t Tell the Parents! The Illicitness of Intergenerational Play. - Chapter 11. Not Your (Ordinary) Grandma: Old Age in Three Contemporary Dutch Children’s Books. - Chapter 12. Barbie Unbound: The Satirical Representation of the Barbie Doll as an Exemplification of Realism and Crossover Attitude in Young Adult Literature. - Chapter 13. Deconstructing Stereotypes through Reading Children’s Literature as Intergenerational Play: The Case of the Stepmother. - Chapter 14. Family in Finnish Picturebooks: Playful Books Challenging Normative Representation of Family.
£94.99
Springer Nature Switzerland AG Joseph Conrad and Postcritique: Politics of Hope,
Book SynopsisThis book takes a postcritical perspective on Joseph Conrad’s central texts, including Heart of Darkness, The Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes, and Lord Jim. Whereas critique is a form of reading that prioritizes suspicion, unmasking, and demystifying, postcritique ascribes positive value to the knowledge, affect, ethics, and politics that emerge from literature. The essays in this collection recognize the dark elements in Conrad’s fiction—deceit, vanity, avarice, lust, cynicism, and cruelty—yet they perceive hopefulness as well. Conrad’s skepticism unveils the dark heart of politics, and his critical heritage can feed our fear that humanity is incapable of improving. This Conrad is a well-known figure, but there is another, neglected Conrad that this book aims to bring to light, one who delves into the politics of hope as well as the politics of fear. Chapters 1 and 2 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.comTable of ContentsChapter 1: IntroductionPart I: Finding Hope—Recuperative Reading, Reparative ReadingChapter 2: Quixotic Conrad: Betrayal, Conversion, and Flight, Jay ParkerChapter 3: "The new sun is rising": Conrad, Women, and Hope, Rachel HollanderPart II: Understanding the Politics of FearChapter 4: Doubling Down on the Politics of Fear, Opening Up the Politics of Hope, Joyce WexlerChapter 5: Joseph Conrad’s “Strange Air of Finality”: Negative Affect and the Politics of Fear in “The Tale, Jarica Linn WattsChapter 6: "Pulsating Wrongfully":Critique, Cliché, and The Secret Agent, James BrophyPart III: Ethics and AestheticsChapter 7: "Heart of Darkness" and the Memory of the Holocaust, Riccardo CapoferroChapter 8: The Beating Heart of Sublime Empire: The Secret Agent as Sequel to “Heart of Darkness”, Jana M. GilesChapter 9: Cross-cultural Accord in the Malay Fiction: The Performative Politics of Conrad’s Eastern World, Mark DegganChapter 10: "Some Knowledge of Yourself": “Heart of Darkness” in the Twenty-First Century Literature Classroom—An Ethical Approach, Anna Lindhé.
£71.24
Springer Nature Switzerland AG Trauma and Motherhood in Contemporary Literature
Book SynopsisTrauma and Motherhood in Contemporary Literature and Culture repositions motherhood studies through the lens of trauma theory by exploring new challenges surrounding conception, pregnancy, and postpartum experiences. Chapters investigate nine case studies of motherhood trauma and recovery in literature and culture from the last twenty years by exploring their emotional consequences through the lens of trauma, resilience, and “working through” theories. Contributions engage with a transnational corpus drawn from the five continents and span topics as rarely discussed as pregnancy denial, surrogacy, voluntary or involuntary childlessness, racism and motherhood, carceral mothering practices, surrogacy, IVF, artificial wombs, and mothering through war, genocide, and migration. Accompanied by an online creative supplement, this volume deals with silenced aspects of embodied motherhood while enhancing a better understanding of the cathartic effects of storytelling.Table of Contents1. Trauma and Recovery New Challenges to Motherhood.- Part I: Pregnancy, Childbirth and Trauma.- 2. Understanding the Trauma of Pervasive Pregnancy Denial in L’enfant que je n’attendais pas.- 3. Salvaging the Bones Means Fighting for Reproductive Justice: Jesmyn Ward’s Literary Representations of the Trauma Produced by Attacks on Reproductive Rights, Comprehensive Sex Education, and Access to Maternal Health Care.- 4. Social Trauma and the Anti-Maternal Body in Diane a les épaule.- Part II: Trauma and Disrupted Mother-Child Bonds.- 5. Trauma Behind Bars: Maternal Dilemma in Rossella Schillaci’s Ninna nanna prigioniera.- 6. “Pour dire la souffrance des innocents?” Problematics of the Madonna-Son Trope in Representing Trauma in Philippe Aractingi’s Under the Bombs and Nadine Labaki’s Capernaum.- 7. Traumatic Memory and Narrative Healing in Contemporary Diasporic Chinese British Women’s Writing.- Part III. New Challenges with ART.- 8. Tragedy, In Vitro: The Function of Reproductive Science in Simon Stone’s Adaptation of Yerma.- 9. “I have an enterprise:” Transnational Surrogacy, Neoliberal Repropreneurship, and the Potential Trauma of Clinical Labor in Zippi Brand Frank’s Google Baby.- 10. No Trauma for Artificial Women: Monstrous, Cybernetics, and Anomalous Mothers in Current Latin American Science Fiction
£104.49
Springer Nature Switzerland AG Science Fiction in Translation: Perspectives on
Book SynopsisScience Fiction in Translation: Perspectives on the Global Theory and Practice of Translation focuses on the process of translation and its implications. The volume explores the translation of works of science fiction (SF) from one language to another and the translation of SF tropes, terms, and ideas of SF theory into cultures outside the West. Providing a comprehensive examination of the state of translation into English, the essays consider how representative the body of translated work of SF is from the source language/culture. It also considers the social, political, and economic choices in selecting a work to translate. The book illustrates the dramatic growth both in SF production outside the Anglosphere, the translation of works from other languages into English, and the practice of translating English-language SF into other languages. Altogether, the essays map the theory, practice, and business of SF translation around the world.Trade Review“Campbell’s volume is an indispensable collection of new voices and media spanning from at least the 1830s to the close of the 2010s, which … provides a tangible, though far reaching, web from which to choose a new vision for SF. … In a world where the lenses of SF and conscious reality seem to blur more and more, Campbell’s volume and the authors included are a beacon of hope.” (Alice G. Fulmer, SFRA Review, Vol. 53 (4), 2023)Table of Contents1: Introduction: Translation and SF: Theory and Practice.- 2: Translation of/and Speculative Fiction.- 3: Ponying the Slovos: A Parallel Linguistic Analysis of Translations of A Clockwork Orange.- 4: Is Jean-Pierre April’s Story a “Canadian Dream”, or a Linguistic Nightmare?- 5: Promoting the Science Fiction of Stateless Languages: Militant Translation and Translating the Catalan Masterpiece Typescript of the Second Origin.- 6: Censorship or cultural adjustment? Sexual violence in Hungarian translations of Asimov’s Second Foundation.- 7: A Feminist Utopia : Language, Translation & Reproduction in Chroniques du Pays des Mères.- 8: Ungendering the Women’s Language in the English Translation of Strugatsky’s Snail on the Slope.- Philip K. Dick in French: A Voice Changing in Time.- 9: Retranslating HG Wells into Turkish.- 10: Speculative Orientalism? On “Eastern” and “Western” Referents in Boualem Sansal’s 208.- 11: Otared and The Second Dog War : Two Arabic SF Novels.- 12: Social Technologies and Trauma in Two Novels.- 13: Alien Invasion, Brutalization and Hostile Takeover in the Enslavement Poetry of Juan Francisco Manzano 13: Ghosts, Aliens, and Machines: Epistemic Continuity and Assemblage in Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay’s Science Fiction.- 14: Pure of Heart and Strong of Stature: Retranslating the “Sick Man of Asia”.- 15: Translating the Chinese Monster in Waste.- 15: Missing Mars: Cosmic Homelessness and the Transfiguration of Anglo-American Science Fiction Tropes in Harry Martinson’s.- 16: Ménageries of an Unstable Canon: Some Notes on Three Portuguese SF Short Story Anthologies Compiled by Portuguese Editors.
£104.49
Springer Nature Switzerland AG The Palgrave Handbook of Utopian and Dystopian
Book SynopsisThe Palgrave Handbook of Utopian and Dystopian Literatures celebrates a literary genre already over 500 years old. Specially commissioned essays from established and emerging international scholars reflect the vibrancy of utopian vision, and its resiliency as idea, genre, and critical mode. Covering politics, environment, geography, body and mind, and social organization, the volume surveys current research and maps new areas of study. The chapters include investigations of anarchism, biopolitics, and postcolonialism and study film, art, and literature. Each essay considers central questions and key primary works, evaluates the most recent research, and outlines contemporary debates. Literatures of Africa, Australia, China, Latin America, and the Middle East are discussed in this global, cross-disciplinary, and comprehensive volume.Table of ContentsIntroduction, Peter Marks, Fátima Vieira, Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor.- Utopia Patricia Vieira.- Dystopia, Gregory Claeys.- Critical Dystopia, Ildney de Fátima Souza Cavalcanti.- Prefigurations, Francisco L. Lisi.- The Renaissance, Marie-Claire Phelippeau.- The Eighteenth Century, Brenda Tooley.- The Early Nineteenth Century (1800-1850), Peter Sands.- The Late Nineteenth Century (1848-1899), Matthew Beaumont.- The Twentieth Century, Dr. Adam Stock.- The Twenty-First Century, Matt Tierney.- Narrative, Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor.- Science Fiction, Caroline Edwards.- Young Adult (YA) Fiction, Carire Hintz.- Apocalyptic Visions, Gib Prettyman, Utopian Realism, Sam McAuliffe.- Cinema, Peter Marks.- Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels, Miguel Ramalhete Gomes.- Gaming, Brian Greenspan.- Deaftopias, Cristina Gil, Micronations and Hyperutopias, Fátima Vieira.- Humanism, Carlos Eduardo Ornelas Berriel.- Eugenics, Claire C. Curtis.- Marxism, Antonis Balasopoulos.- Anarchism, Laurence Davis.- Labor, Peter Sands.- Race, Edward K. Chan.- Biopolitics, Christian P. Haines.- War, Andrew Byers.- Postcolonialism, Bill Ashcroft.- Human Rights, Miguel A Ramiro Avilés.- Animal Rights, José Eduardo Reis.- Food, Etta Madden.- Environment, Anne L. Melano.- Space, Phillip E. Wegner.- Urbanism, David Pinder.- Home, Jennifer Wgner-Lawlor.- Oceans, Killian Quigley.- Moons and Planets, Maria Luísa Malato and Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor.- Geographical Poetics, Liam Benison.- Non-Western Cultures, Jaqueline Dutton.- Africa, Ainehi Ejieme Edoro.- South Asia, Barnita Bagchi.- Latin America, Kim Beauchesne and Alessandra Santos.- The Pacific and Australasia, Peter Marks.- China, Roland Boer.- Russia and the Soviet Union, Mikhail Suslov.- Psychoanalysis, Edson Luiz André De Sousa.- Education, Darren Webb.- Religion, Jose Eduardo Franco.- Hospitality, Goncalo Marcelo.- Sexualities, Quitterie de Beauregard.- Death, Paola Spinozzi , The Posthumanism, Naomi Jacobs.
£113.99
Palgrave Macmillan SelfPublished Psychogeographies
£104.49
