Literary theory Books

Book SynopsisA Dictionary of Postmodernism presents an authoritative A-Z of the critical terms and central figures related to the origins and evolution of postmodernist theory and culture.Trade Review“Quirky, colourful and polemical, this volume is as much mosaic as dictionary, re-laying and reconfiguring established positions, suggesting new angles, and helping current understanding both to encompass, and perhaps finally move beyond, postmodern theories so influential in the late twentieth century.”—Randall Stevenson, University of Edinburgh “Niall Lucy's Dictionary of Postmodernism is as sharp and sprightly an assembly of essays on postmodernism as one could wish for, which demonstrates the continuing traction and reach of postmodern thought in contemporary art and culture. All the principal persons and preoccupations are considered and the essays are clear-eyed and invigorating.”—Steven Connor, University of CambridgeTable of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Preface x Note on contributors xiii Description xiv Introduction 1 Dictionary Barthes, Roland (Tony Thwaites) 3 Baudrillard, Jean (Niall Lucy) 7 Cultural studies (John Hartley) 12 Culture (Niall Lucy) 19 Deconstruction (Claire Colebrook) 27 Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix (Claire Colebrook) 30 Derrida, Jacques (Tony Thwaites) 34 Dialogue (John Hartley) 39 Differend (Niall Lucy) 44 Discourse (Robert Briggs) 52 Eco, Umberto (John Hartley) 56 Essence (Robert Briggs) 62 Foucault, Michel (Robert Briggs) 69 Globalization (John Hartley) 76 Habermas, Jürgen (Claire Colebrook) 81 Hassan, Ihab (Darren Tofts) 84 Hyperreality (Robert Briggs) 89 Jameson, Fredric (Niall Lucy) 96 Jencks, Charles (John Hartley) 105 Lacan, Jacques (Tony Thwaites) 110 Lyotard, Jean-François (Niall Lucy) 113 Metanarrative (Niall Lucy) 118 Minor(itarian) (Niall Lucy) 128 Modernism (Niall Lucy) 130 Modernity (Niall Lucy) 137 New media (McKenzie Wark) 139 Paraliterature (Darren Tofts) 144 Phrase (Claire Colebrook) 148 Poststructuralism (Tony Thwaites) 149 Punk (McKenzie Wark) 151 Remix (Darren Tofts) 156 Representation (Darren Tofts) 160 Ronell, Avital (Claire Colebrook) 164 Semiotics (Niall Lucy and John Hartley) 167 Simulation (Niall Lucy) 172 Situationism (McKenzie Wark) 178 Sokal affair (McKenzie Wark) 182 Transcendental signified (Robert Briggs) 188 Truth (Tony Thwaites) 190 Žižek, Slavoj (Tony Thwaites) 194 References 196 Index 213

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Book SynopsisIn a clear and readable style, Living with Theory maps out contemporary theory, tracing its complex configurations, its political preoccupations, and its relations with literature.Trade Review“The depth of knowledge, range and intellectual authority contained in Living with Theory, combined with the leading reputation of Professor Leitch, makes this book a key contribution to the study, teaching, and evaluation of literature, theory, and criticism. Rigorous and fair-minded, but ultimately affirmative, Leitch’s book should be recommended reading on both undergraduate and graduate courses.” William Cain, Wellesley College “Vincent Leitch is one of the leading cultural theorists in the US. Engaging and readable, Living with Theory is firmly grounded in cutting-edge debates about teaching theory, the economics of academe, and the role of literary criticism in a postmodern age. The book will appeal to a wide readership within the academy and among general readers concerned with the nexus between theory and politics.” Helen Fulton, Swansea UniversityTable of ContentsPreface. Part I: Theory. 1. Theory Ends. 2. Teaching Theory Now. 3. Applied Theory. 4. Theory Fusions. Part II: Politics. 5. Late Derrida. 6. The Politics of Academic Labor. Part III: Literature. 7. Late Contemporary U.S. Poetry. 8. Globalization of Literatures. Notes. Index

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Book SynopsisJyotsna G. Singh is Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture and Postcolonial Studies at Michigan State University, USA.Trade ReviewAn excellent, thoroughly researched book that breaks new ground pushing the field of postcolonial Shakespeare studies in a promising direction … This text provides richly detailed, in-depth analysis of specific productions and the key critical influences of seminal scholarly works … Highly engaging. * Renaissance Quarterly *Reminds readers of the stakes of a postcolonial lens in contemporary engagements with Shakespeare in scholarship, performance and pedagogy. * Shakespeare in Southern Africa *Table of ContentsContents List of Illustrations Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Series Editor’s Preface Introduction: ‘An Inventory of Traces’ PART I – SHAKESPEARE AND EARLY COLONIAL HISTORY Chapter One: Historical Contexts 1: Shakespeare and the Colonial Imaginary Chapter Two: Historical Contexts 2: Shakespeare’s World and Productions of Difference PART II – SHAKESPEARE, DECOLONIZATION, POSTCOLONIAL THEORY Chapter Three: Past and Present: Shakespeare–Postcoloniality Chapter Four: Intersectionalities: Postcoloniality and Difference PART III – SHAKESPEARE, POSTCOLONIALITY, AND RECEPTION HISTORIES: PERFORMANCE AND FILM Chapter Five: Global, Intercultural Shakespeares Chapter Six: Boundary-Crossings on the British Shakespearean Stage Chapter Seven: Shakespeare in Postcolonial Cinema: A Meditation on Haider/Hamlet: Reconstituting the Cultural Ruins of Kashmir Notes References Index

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Book SynopsisAs such, the book is ideal both as a primary text in women's and gender studies courses and as a reference for faculty and students outside the discipline applying gender issues to their teaching and research.Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroductionPart I: Engaging the Issue: Masculinity and Women's and Gender StudiesChapter 1. Making Masculinities: Book ReviewsChapter 2. Reflections on "Male Bashing"Chapter 3. Feminist Intentions: Race, Gender, and Power in a High School ClassroomChapter 4. The Biology and Philosophy of Race and Sex: A CourseChapter 5. Gender and Masculinity Texts: Consensus and Concerns for Feminist ClassroomsChapter 6. Student Responsiveness to Women's and Gender Studies Classes: The Importance of Initial Student Attitudes and Classroom RelationshipsPart II: Embodying Masculinity: Science and SocietyChapter 7. Reading Transgender, Rethinking Women's StudiesChapter 8. Biological Behavior? Hormones, Psychology, and SexChapter 9. Do Boys Have to Be Boys? Gender, Narrativity, and the John/Joan CaseChapter 10. Reading Sex and Temperament in Taiwan: Margaret Mead and Postwar Taiwanese FeminismPart III: Performing Social Expectations: The Domestic SceneChapter 11. "His Wife Seized His Prize and Cut It to Size": Folk and Popular Commentary on Lorena BobbittChapter 12. Representing Domestic Violence: Ambivalence and Difference in What's Love Got to Do with ItChapter 13. "Non- Combatant's Shell- Shock": Trauma and Gender in F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the NightChapter 14. Microcredit, Men, and MasculinityPart IV: Performing Social Expectations: The Public StageChapter 15. The Hillbilly Defense: Culturally Mediating U.S. Terror at Home and AbroadChapter 16. The Sexual Politics of Abu Ghraib: Hegemony, Spectacle, and the Global War on TerrorChapter 17. Uncle Sam Wants You to Trade, Invest, and Shop! Relocating the Battlefield in the Gendered Discourses of the Pre- and Early Post- 9/11 PeriodList of Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisHer interdisciplinary approach allows a deeper understanding of a time when exploration of the natural world was a culture-wide enchantment.Trade ReviewAny college-level science holding and many a history collection will appreciate the multi-facted coverage. Midwest Book Review Clandestine Marriage is a veritable encyclopedia of botany in the Romantic period, a book that not only discovers, enumerates, and illuminates key details and facts but also crafts a truly amazing argument: that the literary, aesthetic, philosophical, and scientific disruptions of the Romantic period were shaped and paralleled by the ways in which plants were seen to disrupt the kingdom of nature. Clandestine Marriage opens up new avenues for thinking, reading, and writing about a variety of Romantic texts, and it should be of interest to anyone studying Romanticism and the nineteenth century. -- Seth Reno NEW BOOKS ON LITERATURE 19 Clandestine Marriage makes an important contribution to our understanding of the essential role that plants played in the conceptual transformation of nature as a place where taxonomic hegemony reigned to one complicated by chance and contingency. More than this, Kelley's focus on plants as both insistently 'idea' and 'material' furthers the conversationabout why plants-as plants-mattered so much to so many for so long. -- Tina Gianquitto, Colorado School of Mines ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment Kelley begins with Linnaeus, and develops the clandestine marriage theme, passes through Erasmus Darwin and the 'rustic' poet John Clare with a fascinating side trip into women botanists of the 19th century, journeys to India in the days of the Raj, then ends up with Percy Bysshe Shelley by way of Goethe and Hegel and the quite wonderful Orchidaceae of Mexico and Guatemala. At first sight a seemingly unconnected set of points, but Kelley weaves a compelling tale of interconnection, all underpinned by the way people saw and used plants in diverse and creative ways. -- Sandra Knapp Linnean Kelley's comprehensive survey of the riches of Romantic botany and botanizing is a book that helps to shape our understanding of the sources of our own current thinking and the distances that thinking has traveled from the pagan cosmology of Erasmus Darwin. -- Ashton Nichols European Romantic Review Kelley's expertly rendered Clandestine Marriage provides a powerful and nuanced examination of the material and figurative presence of plants in the romantic era. Kelley argues that the 'unruliness' of romantic plants, which 'resist or exceed conceptual location,' raised difficult questions about the individual and collective identities and challenged the 'epistemological mastery' of nature promised by Enlightenment-era classificatory systems. This unruly 'nature of romantic nature,' as Kelley demonstrates, can best be determined by examining the 'productive friction' generated by organizing categories-of matter, species, cultural material, and poetic figuration-coming under question and into conflict. -- Tina Gianquitto ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment Clandestine Marriage is the first book-length study of botany in the Romantic era. It offers a fascinating view of botany as a transgessive discourse that crossed epistemic boundaries of all sorts. -- James C. McKusick Wordsworth Circle This is a very erudite and provocative thesis. The Year's Work in English Studies This book is meticulously researched and it exceptionally well illustrated, with three ample gatherings of botanical art that help to inform Kelley's discussion. Clandestine Marriage is an intellectually rigorous and well-conceived scholarly contribution both to the study of botanical history and to the study of Romantic-era literature. Readers interested in the confluence of these areas of study will find Kelley's book especially intriguing. -- Ben P. Robertson BARS Bulletin and Review [ Clandestine Marriage] is a fine work, a superb contribution to the study of the Romantic period and the relationship between botany and literature. In its deep commitment to historical understanding and to close reading, capturing the figural play occasioned by the material nature of plants and their culture, Kelley's Clandestine Marriage provides a unique account of complex stirrings that lie just below the surface of the Romantic love of plants. -- Alan Bewell Studies in RomanticismTable of ContentsList of IllustrationsAcknowledgments1. Introduction2. Botanical Matters3. Botany's Publics and Privates4. Botanizing Women5. Clare's Commonable PlantsInterlude One: Mala's Garden6. Reading Matter and PaintInterlude Two: A Romantic Garden7. Restless Romantic Plants and Philosophers8. ConclusionNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisThis engaging book exemplifies the new interdisciplinary field of cognitive cultural studies, demonstrating that collaboration between cognitive science and cultural studies is both exciting and productive.Trade ReviewZunshine's book was difficult to stop reading; while she handles all these genres with skill, clearly her strength is in reading literature (as she returns to literary references even in the other chapters). Having an understanding of human evolution and how the brain works makes reading a book such as Zunshine's more satisfying. -- Gregory F. Tague ASEBL Journal Offers readers a good deal of food for thought and exemplifies how illuminating the principles from science can be when applied to other forms of culture. Highly recommended. Choice Drawing widely and judiciously on recent research in neuroscience, Getting Inside Your Head expands [theory of mind] to cover all of human culture, from novels to films, plays, musicals, paintings and reality shows. -- Michael Berube American ScientistTable of ContentsList of IllustrationsPreface: Fantasies of Access1. Culture of Greedy Mind Readers2. I Know What You're Thinking, Mr. Darcy!3. Sadistic Benefactors4. Theaters, Hippodromes, and Other Mousetraps5. Movies: The Power of Restraint6. Mockumentaries, Photography, and Stand-Up Comedy: Upping the Agony7. Reality TV: Humiliation in Real Time8. Musicals (Particularly around 11 pm)9. Painting Feelings10. Painting MysteriesCodaNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisThe book will appeal to readers interested in the vital connection between literature and moral philosophy.Trade ReviewThis elegantly written book amounts to a defense of poetry... It is required reading in any case. Choice Generous, probing, and comprehensive. Wordsworth Circle Wordsworth's Ethics is a nuanced and carefully argued book that will command attention and respect from all romanticists... It is a great virtue of Potkay's book that without excessive reliance on the intentional fallacy, and with compelling new insights about important passages we thought we knew, its author is able to outline a system of thought that Wordsworth would almost certainly have endorsed. Modern Philology It is both a fine exposition of the workings of Wordsworth's verse, and a stirring defense of poetry, in an age in which the value of the humanities themselves is constantly being challenged. CerclesTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Audition and Attachment2. Close Encounters I3. Close Encounters II4. The Ethics of Things5. Music versus Conscience6. Captivation and Liberty in Poems on Music7. The Moral Sublime8. Independence and Interdependence9. Surviving Death10. The Poetics of LifeEnvoyNotesWorks CitedIndex

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Book SynopsisThe resulting picture of the emotional agency of criticism opens up a new angle on Blake's literary and visual legacy and offers a vivid interrogation of the practical potential of theoretical discourse.Trade ReviewGoldsmith's subtle, complicated and counterintuitive study, flows out of what he calls a 'sustained interdisciplinary "surge" in the theoretical, historical and cognitive study of emotion.' -- Simon Jarvis Times Literary Supplement An imaginative, deeply learned, and passionately argued book. The thinking and writing are sustained throughout at exceptionally high levels... The book makes an original and important contribution to Blake studies. -- G.A. Rosso Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly A major reading of Blake, a significant contribution to affect studies, and a provocative meditation on the state of the profession... Seeing critical reading s the interaction of agitation with slow time could offer a healing message for a divided profession, but there will always be those who are impatient to make a positive difference. Thanks to Steven Goldsmith's outstanding book, both sides can now find sustenance in the work of William Blake. -- David Simpson Modern Language QuarterlyTable of ContentsIntroduction: The Future of EnthusiasmPart I: Devil's Party1. Blake's Agitation2. Blake's VirtuePart II: A Passion for BlakeIntroduction: Critique of Emotional Intelligence3. "On Anothers Sorrow"Toward an Auditory Imagination: Interlude on Kenzaburo Oe's Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age4. Strange PulseWordsworth's Pulsation Machine, or the Half-Life of Mary Hutchinson: Interlude on "She was a Phantom of delight"5. Criticism and the Work of EmotionAcknowledgmentsAppendixNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisThese stories of trauma cannot be limited to the catastrophes they name, and the theory of catastrophic history may ultimately be written in a language that already lingers in a time that comes to us from the other side of the disaster.Trade ReviewOf immense significance to scholars in multiple disciplines, including history, literature and literary theory, cultural studies, and psychoanalysis, this book will set the tone for future discussion... Essential. Choice Caruth, then, presents a "new kind" of history: a history that is itself under erasure and that calls for an urgent reimagining of the way we think of-and write about-the past. Journal of Literature and Trauma StudiesTable of ContentsPrefaceAcknowledgmentsPart One: Literature and the Life Drive1. Parting Words: Trauma, Silence, and SurvivalSigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle2. The Claims of the Dead: History, Haunted Property, and the LawHonoré de Balzac, Colonel ChabertPart Two: After the End3. Lying and HistoryHannah Arendt, "Truth and Politics" and "Lying in Politics"4. Disappearing History: Scenes of Trauma in the Theater of Human RightsAriel Dorfman, Death and the Maiden5. Psychoanalysis in the Ashes of HistoryWilhelm Jensen, Sigmund Freud, and Jacques DerridaAfterwordNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisOther contributors include Jack Abecassis, Marina Brownlee, Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, Andreas Kablitz, and Ursula Peters.Trade ReviewThe present volume in many ways celebrates and continues Nichols's ideas and influence in the past 25 years, but it does much more than that. As Bloch (French and Romance philology, Columbia Univ.) puts it in his introduction, the essays "contain many elements belonging to the New Philology-an attention to the material conditions of the medieval work, especially to the givens of manuscript culture, a questioning of authorship and authority, an interrogation of the integrity of medieval texts, recognition of the relation between the verbal and the visual."... Nichols's discussion of the challenges and opportunities for new philology in the digital age will be required reading in graduate seminars on digital humanities. Choice The essays ranged here by German and American scholars, in homage to Nichols and his cohort of new materialists, new philologists, new medievalists, are strong and ambitious attempts to revisit the twenty-year-old call for methodological reinvention. Common KnowledgeTable of ContentsIntroduction. The New Philology Comes of AgeChapter 1. New Challenges for the New MedievalismChapter 2. Reflections on The New PhilologyChapter 3. Virgil's "Perhaps": Mythopoiesis and Cosmogony in Dante's Commedia (Remarks on Inf. 34, 106–26)Chapter 4. Dialectic of the Medieval CourseChapter 5. Religious Horizon and Epic Effect: Considerations on the Iliad, the Chanson de Roland, and the NibelungenliedChapter 6. The Possibility of Historical Time in the Crónica SarracinaChapter 7. Good Friday Magic: Petrarch's Canzoniere and the Transformation of Medieval Vernacular PoetryChapter 8. The Identity of a TextChapter 9. Conceiving the Text in the Middle AgesChapter 10. Dante's Transfigured Ovidian Models: Icarus and Daedalus in the CommediaChapter 11. Ekphrasis in the Knight's TaleChapter 12. Montaigne's Medieval Nominalism and Meschonnic's Ethics of the SubjectChapter 13. The Pèlerinage Corpus in the European Middle Ages: Processes of Retextualization Reflected in the ProloguesChapter 14. Narrative Frames of Augustinian Thought in the Renaissance: The Case of RabelaisChapter 15. From Romanesque Architecture to RomanceList of Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisAn innovative and moving study, The Calendar of Loss illuminates how AIDS mourning confounds and traverses how we have come to think about loss and grief, insisting that the bereaved can confront death in the face of shame and stigma in eloquent ways that imply a fierce political sensibility and a longing for justice.Trade ReviewEarly AIDS mourning, especially by gay men of color, is more than worthy of study. However, with the recent rise of Black Lives Matter, Woubshet's larger questions about the ways in which mourning structures Black subjectivity and the political value of sorrow in the midst of unspeakable loss make this work especially timely. In The Calendar of Loss, Woubshet brings together queer studies and African-Americans' studies to examine a rich and varied "archive of mourning" . . . Herein lies Woubshet's chief contribution to AIDS scholarship, as he reads the mourning of both Black and White gay men through an analytical lens that is explicitly both Black and queer. Whereas much of the critical AIDS scholarship has marginalized people of color, and particularly queer people of color, here they take center stage.—Dan Royles, Florida International University, Modesto Maidique Campus, National Political Science ReviewWoubshet's text demonstrates the indispensability of the arts to more democratic imaginings of the history, aesthetics, and politics of AIDS. A model of interdisciplinary scholarship, the book develops a new theory of mourning that will be of interest to scholars in African diaspora studies, queer studies, literary studies, gender and sexuality studies, and American studies. Woubshet's engagement with critical theory makes the text appealing to specialists and graduate students, but the author's careful distillation of these theories through lucid prose makes the book accessible to multiple readers, including undergraduates and community activists.—Darius Bost, CallalooTable of ContentsPrefaceAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Looking for the Dead1. Lyric Mourning2. Archiving the Dead3. Visions of Loss4. Epistles to the DeadConclusionTallying LossNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisHow scrapbooking, book collecting, and other ways of handling print media informed modernist poetry.In Poetic Modernism in the Culture of Mass Print, Bartholomew Brinkman argues that an emerging mass print culture conditioned the production, reception, and institutionalization of poetic modernism from the latter part of the nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth centurywith lasting implications for the poetry and media landscape. Drawing upon extensive archival research in the United States and Britain, Brinkman demonstrates that a variety of print collecting practicesincluding the anthology, the periodical, the collage poem, volumes of selected and collected poems, and the modern poetry archivehelped structure key formal and institutional sites of poetic modernism. Brinkman focuses on the generative role of book collecting practices and the negotiation of print ephemera in scrapbooks. He also traces the evolution of the modern poetry archTrade ReviewAn indirect critique of New Criticism, Poetic Modernism will appeal to anyone interested in the intersection of modernism and cultural materialism. Recommended. ChoiceTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: Poetic Modernism and the Culture of Mass Print Chapter One: As Good as Gold: Palgrave's Golden Treasury, Poetic Value, and the ObjectiveAnthologyChapter Two: Making Modern Poetry: Format, Form, and Modern Poetic GenreChapter Three: Scrapping Modernism: Marianne Moore and the Making of the Modern Collage PoemChapter Four: Selecting Modernism: Eliot, Faber, and Poetic ReproductionChapter Five: Instituting Modernism: The Rise of the Modern American Poetry ArchiveCoda: Remaking Poetic Modernism after a Culture of Mass Print NotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisA collection of engaging essays that seeks to uniquely reperiodize American literature. It is all but inevitable for literary history to be divided into periods. Early American, antebellum, modern, post-1945such designations organize our knowledge of the past and shape the ways we discuss that past today. These periods tend to align with the watershed moments in American history, even as the field has shifted its perspective away from the nation-state. It is high time we rethink these defining periods of American literary history, as the drawing of literary timelines is a necessaryeven illuminatingpractice. In these short, spirited, and imaginative essays, 23 leading Americanists gamely fashion new, unorthodox literary periodsfrom 600 B.C.E. to the present, from the Age of Van Buren to the Age of Microeconomics. They bring to light literary and cultural histories that have been obscured by traditional timelines and raise provocative questions. What is our definition of modernism ifTable of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgments1. Introduction Cody Marrs and Christopher HagerPart 1. Prehistories and Transitions2. Prologue. What's in a Date? Sandra GustafsonPrehistories3. 1833-1932: American Literature's Other Scripts Erica Fretwell4. 1922-1968: The Disenchanted Literature of Homeownership Adrienne Brown5. 1830-1924: The Literatures of Sovereignty Phillip Round6. 600 BCE-1830 CE: The Book of Mormon and the Lived Eschatology of Settler Colonialism Jared HickmanTransitions7. 1629-1852: American Literature, Democracy, and the Patroons Jennifer Greiman8. 1973: When It Changed Gerry Canavan9. The Three Burials of Confederate Nationalism Coleman Hutchison10. 1819-1857: Romantic Cycles from the Panic of 1819 to the Panic of 1857 Andrew Kopec11. Reimagining 1820-1865 Robert S. LevinePart 2. Ages and the Long Present 12. Prologue. The Anthropocene, 1945/1783/1610/1492-???? (or, I Wish I Knew How to Quit You) Dana LucianoAges13. The Age of US Latinidad Jesse Alemán14. The Age of Van BurenJustine S. Murison15. The Ages of Appalachian Literature Rachel A. Wise16. The Civil War in the Age of Civil Rights Michael LeMahieu17. The Age of Warhol Bryan WatermanThe Long Present18. All of It Is Now: Slavery and the Post-black Moment in Contemporary African American Literature Yogita Goyal19. Propaganda and the Movement of American Literary History Russ Castronovo20. De-ciphering American Literature: Caroline Levander21. Methodological Individualism and the Novel in the Age of Microeconomics, 1871 to the Present Annie McClanahan22. 1980 to the Present: Formalism and the New Authoritarianism Rachel Greenwald Smith23. American Captivity Narratives from the Colonial Era to the Present: A New Timeline Birgit Brander Rasmussen24. Afterword. The Newer Newest Thing: Reperiodizing, Redux Susan GillmanAppendix. Sample Syllabi Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisAnglo-India's regional literature was both a practical and imaginative response to a pivotal period in the early colonialism of South Asia. Awarded as Honorable Mention of the Louis Gottschalk Prize by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS). Shortlisted for the Kenshur Prize by the Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Indiana University, John Ben Snow Prize by the North American Conference on British Studies, Marilyn Gaull Book Award by the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association. During the later decades of the eighteenth century, a rapid influx of English-speaking Europeans arrived in India with an interest in expanding the creation and distribution of anglophone literature. At the same time, a series of military, political, and economic successes for the British in Asia created the first global crisis to shepherd in an international system of national ideologies. In this study of colonial literary production, James Mulholland proposes that the East India Company Trade ReviewBy excavating [archives] and reading it from new theoretical positions (like translocal regionalism and middle reading), Mulholland is giving us a shing example in how to engage in that kind of scholarship in Before for Raj.—Eighteenth-Century IntelligencerTable of ContentsList of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsA Note on Spelling and UsageIntroduction. Translocal Anglo-IndiaChapter 1. A Cultural Company-State and the Colonial Public SphereChapter 2. Newspaper Poetry and Reading Publics in Eighteenth-Century IndiaChapter 3. The Vagrant Muse: Making Reputation across EurasiaChapter 4. Undoing Britain in Bengal Chapter 5. Tristram Shandy in BombayChapter 6. Agonies of Empire: Captivity Narratives and the Mysore Wars, 1767–1799Chapter 7. Literary Culture of Colonial Outposts: Penang, Sumatra, and Java, 1771–1816NotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisTable of ContentsList of IllustrationsSeries Editor's ForewordAcknowledgmentsIntroduction. The Material (Con)Texts of Global ModernityPart 1. The Empire's New Clothes: British Publics and Imperial Politics, 1650–1720Chapter 1. Patterns for Plantation: New World Silk and the Natural History of Settler ColonialismChapter 2. Indo-Atlantic Modernity: The Early Global Cotton Trade and the Emergence of Racial CapitalismPart 2. Revolutionary Threads: New World Publics and Insurgent Economies, 1750–1800Chapter 3. The Republic of Homespun: Material Economies of the American RevolutionChapter 4. Materializing the Black Atlantic: African Captives, Caribbean Slaves, and Creole FashioningPart 3. The Fabric of American Empire: Imagined Communities and New Geographies, 1600–1865Chapter 5. Oriental America: Silk Geographies in the Era of the Early RepublicChapter 6. Empires in Rags: Hemispheric American Material and Literary TextsConclusion. Weaving Revolution in the Global SouthNotesEssay on SourcesIndex

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Book SynopsisChristopher Schaberg is Associate Professor of English & Environment at Loyola University New Orleans, USA. He is the author of The Textual Life of Airports: Reading the Culture of Flight (2011, reprinted in paperback, 2013).Trade Review...[a] well-fuelled study of air travel’s fading profile in our digitally transported age. -- Nathan Heller * The New Yorker *Schaberg, an associate professor of English and Environment at Loyola University New Orleans, waxes philosophical as he contemplates the role airports play in today’s society. His short essays and anecdotes draw on his years as an airport employee as well as other personal experiences. In his eyes, airports have gone from magical to mundane, enjoyable to tedious, joyful to grim. And yet his stories of working at them have traces of humor and fascination, revealing the type of behind-the-scenes knowledge that always feels a little bit exotic to the uninformed. * Publishers Weekly *The romance of flying has all but gone, replaced by convenience and an oddly whorish aesthetic, involving fusion food, kitsch art, massage chairs and, at every turn, screens that play with the relation between inside and outside, here and there. Is the modern airport a venue like a shopping mall or an out-of-town chicken ranch, Christopher Schaberg wonders in The End of Airports, or a wormhole between states? … [Schaberg is] a very good writer, with a delicate eye for detail. … His previous book, The Textual Life of Airports (2011), was a work of literary analysis. This one goes deeper, its tone somewhere between elegiac and apocalyptic. …. Just as Hannah Arendt’s ‘banality of evil’ is easily overstated or misunderstood, so is Schaberg’s thoughtful sense of the banality of modern flight. But ‘end’ also means purpose and, as Schaberg knows, we will still spend countless hours waiting for transport. -- Brian Morton * Times Literary Supplement *The End of Airports is an energetic meditation, replete with ethnography and metaphor. The writing is not only illuminating, it’s also fun, allowing travelers the opportunity to glimpse behind the scenes at those parts of the airport—the tarmac, the break room, the luggage hold—where access is strictly forbidden. […] I can think of no better place to read it than at an airport, waiting to board, while the dramas within pages unfold around you. -- Anya Groner * Terrain *A strong and innovative book. Tracing speculative paths around and through airports and commercial flight, The End of Airports finds new ways to think about, among other things, drones, airport/aircraft seating, weather, jet bridges, viral stories about flight, tensions with new media expectations and technologies, and seatback pockets. A fascinating read for anyone interested in airports and airplanes, but also for readers of cultural studies, media studies, and creative nonfiction. * Kathleen C. Stewart, Professor of Anthropology, The University of Texas at Austin, USA *The golden age of air travel is over, but thanks to Schaberg the airport may become the new figure with which to think place, time, labor, leisure, organization, and communication, as well as hope, fatigue, loneliness, and desire—in other words, the most fundamental problems of life in late capitalism. In the tradition of Benjamin, Barthes, and Baudrillard, this book is theoretically incisive, intimate, pleasurable, and on time. Air travel in all of its multidimensionality, as idea and experience, but also as mood, may finally assume its rightful place in the modern psychic infrastructure. * Margret Grebowicz, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Goucher College, USA, and author of The National Park to Come *Schaberg's provocative theme implies the end of our ability to appreciate airports as bustling and forward-looking spaces....A prescient requiem for contemporary airports as abetting agents and reflectors of America’s declining cultural standards. Recommended for specialists in the fields of aviation and transportation, social and intellectual history, sociological studies, media, and libraries. * Library Journal *Christopher Schaberg’s The End of Airports is part memoir, part history, and part speculation. Schaberg’s past as a part-time airport worker intersects with his present as a frequently flying academic researcher of airport cultures, and his experience and research inform his thoughts on the future of airports in an age of drones and instant communication. […] The airport is both a terminal and a threshold, and Schaberg’s work reminds us that travel must include pauses as well as movement. -- Rebecca Mills * Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Points of Departure Part I: Work Part II Travel Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Questionnaires are everywhere: we fill them out at doctors' offices and at job interviews, to express ourselves and to advance knowledge, to find love and to kill time. But where did they come from, and why have they proliferated? Evan Kindley's Questionnaire investigates the history of the form as form, from the Victorian confession album to the BuzzFeed quiz. By asking questions about the questions we ask ourselves, Kindley uncovers surprising connections between literature and science, psychology and business, and journalism and surveillance.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewA marvelous book that gathers an unexpected array of materials under the heading of the questionnaire: from IQ tests to the early days of marriage counseling, from data-mining Facebook quizzes to Scientology's rigged personality tests. Playful, smart and rich with dizzying connections, Evan Kindley’s Questionnaire is no less than a secret history of how we became a nation of oversharers. * Hua Hsu, author of A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific (2016); Contributor, The New Yorker; Associate Professor of English, Vassar College, USA *Evan Kindley's crisp and fleet Questionnaire travels with extraordinary speed from the quaint and idle to the flat-out alarming, with huge implications for our digital culture now and in the future. * Luc Sante, author of The Other Paris *Be vigilant, friend, for we live in the age of the BuzzFeed Quiz. … Beneath every expression of preference is a rat’s nest of prejudices, insecurities, and empty assertions of selfhood. Fortunately, there’s Evan Kindley’s Questionnaire, one in a new crop from Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series—it offers a rich primer on humankind’s submission to inane paperwork. In the questionnaire, Kindley demonstrates, bureaucrats found a ridiculously simple solution to a long-standing problem: How do you get people to open up about themselves to total strangers? Turns out that just asking, ideally with some veneer of officialdom, is a great way to start. As Kindley writes in his introduction, ‘The decision to provide information about oneself, as irresistible as it sometimes seems, is neither a natural human instinct nor an automatic social good’; it takes a finely tuned questionnaire to coax us out of our shells, and there are dubious intentions behind just about every form. Eugenics, managerial power-plays, electoral politics, Christian matchmaking, latent fascism, female desire—you name it, some questionnaire has interrogated it. Kindley’s book provides a lucid, distressing look at the backbone of demography. -- Dan Piepenbring * The Paris Review *The story of Francis Galton begins the story of Questionnaire, Evan Kindley’s new entry into 'Object Lessons,' a series from Bloomsbury 'about the hidden lives of ordinary things.' … Kindley’s approach keeps with the spirit and method of the series, tracking the evolution of this particular thing—in this case, standardized sets of questions designed to elicit self-report, and the question of whether or not self-reported answers, no matter how well-designed, no matter how robust their sample, can ever be entirely honest or accurate—over the history of its existence. … Kindley does an admirable job of presenting that history, especially given that Object Lesson entries are, as a rule, very short. … [T]he pervasive, vaguely Orwellian character of Big Data is among is the first world’s most pronounced animating anxieties. It is a worry I share, but in reading Questionnaire, I was put in mind of another—not explicitly named, but more remarkable and more troubling: the possibility, already somewhat realized, of a world where the collection of facts is not a means to some nefarious end, but the empty end itself. -- Emmett Rensin * Bookforum *People with a paranoid streak will feel vindicated by Evan Kindley's Questionnaire, a thoughtful exploration of the subject from the Proust questionnaire through Buzzfeed quizzes. As Kindley documents, nearly everyone who puts a quiz in front of you is trying to mine something from you, often (though not always) for profit or to influence your behavior ... Kindley's final chapters on computer dating questionnaires and Buzzfeed quizzes illustrate how powerful and potentially dangerous data science has become, even when personal responses are anonymized. * Milwaukee Journal Sentinel *Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Form as Form 1. Private Publicity 2. The Rise and Fall of Testing 3. Your Opinion of You 4. The Art of Asking 5. Pandora’s Checklist 6. Dating and Data 7. Quiz Mania Acknowledgments Endnotes Index

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Book SynopsisThe first major literary and cultural history of color in America, 1880–1930Chromographia tells the story of how color became modern and how literature, by engaging with modern color, became modernist. From the vivid pictures in children’s books to the bold hues of abstract painting, from psychological theories of perception to the synthetic dyes that brightened commercial goods, color concerned both the material stuff of modernity and its theoretical and artistic formulations. Chromographia spans these diverse practices to reveal the widespread effects on U.S. literature and culture of the chromatic revolution that unfolded at the turn of the twentieth century.In analyzing color experience through the lens of U.S. writers (including Charlotte Perkins Gilman, L. Frank Baum, Stephen Crane, Charles Chesnutt, Gertrude Stein, Nella Larsen, and William Carlos Williams), Chromographia argues that modern aesthetic techniques are inseparable from the theories and technologies that drove modern color. Nicholas Gaskill shows how literature registered the social worlds within which chromatic technologies emerged, and also experimented with the ideas about perception, language, and the sensory environment that accompanied their proliferation.Chromographia is the only study of modern color in U.S. literature. It presents a new reading of perception in literature and a theory of experience that uses color to move beyond the usual divisions of modern thought.Trade Review"What happened when chemists invented mauve? When The Wonderful Wizard of Oz taught us childhood meant colorfulness? When Stephen Crane painted courage red? In Nicholas Gaskill’s brilliant, beautiful, and mind-expanding book, we learn the myriad ways in which being modern in America meant no less than an encounter with color itself. And that meant thinking anew about mind and body, language and world, the challenges of the avant-garde and the pleasures of popular culture. Chromographia is that rare and iridescent thing: a philosophically searching contribution to literary-cultural history."—Jennifer Fleissner, Indiana University, Bloomington"Between the 1880s and the 1930s the world changed color. Nicholas Gaskill’s multilayered study of the period shows how a number of factors—an emerging relational understanding of chromatic experience, the commercial production of synthetic dyes, and theories of vision derived from evolutionary biology—together gave color a new visibility and brilliance and transformed it into a vitally important subject for literary and artistic modernism. If the cultural study of color—let’s call it Chromotology—was a recognized discipline, then this would be one if its principal texts."—David Batchelor, author of Chromophobia"Chromographia is a study of color perception just as brilliant as all the saturated hues that the new chromatic technologies and synthetic dyes of the nineteenth century brought out like never before. Nicholas Gaskill explores the meaning of this modern, multicolored world from the perspective of the writers, philosophers, psychologists, and educators who, in trying to cultivate a feeling for color, believe that language has the power to augment our sensory encounter with the world and to make life more vivid. This is a dazzling book that puts us in immediate relation with the vibrancy of these decades as we learn about the dynamic forms that color takes, its importance to aesthetic experience, and its intensifying, clarifying role in modern thought."—Elisa Tamarkin, University of California, BerkeleyTable of ContentsIntroduction: How Color Became Modern1. The Place of Perception: Local Color’s Colors2. Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Progressive Arts of Pure Color3. The Production and Consumption of a Child’s View of Color4. Lurid Realism: Stephen Crane, Gertrude Stein, and the Synthesis of Modernism5. On Feeling Colorful and Colored in the Harlem RenaissanceEpilogue: Albers after the Color SenseAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisAwareness Inside Language is the most comprehensive discussion of poet-artist George Quasha's "axial poetics" as it plays out in his work of the past twenty years, called "preverbs," represented in four published volumes: Verbal Paradise, Things Done for Themselves, The Daimon of the Moment, and Glossodelia Attract. In the form of an interview conducted by poet Thomas Fink, it addresses how apparently difficult poetry teaches new ways of reading and thinking.

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