Literature: history and criticism Books

Book SynopsisEarly Readers presents a number of innovative ways through which we might capture or infer traces of readers in cultures where most evidence has been lost.

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Book Synopsis2023 Outstanding Book Award, National Association for Ethnic Studies A thorough examination of the political and economic exploitation of Latinx subjects, migrants, and workers through the lens of Latinx literature, photography, and film. Globalization in the United States can seem paradoxical: free trade coincides with fortification of the southern border, while immigration is reimagined as a national-security threat. US politics turn aggressively against Latinx migrants and subjects even as post-NAFTA markets become thoroughly reliant on migrant and racialized workers. But in fact, there is no incongruity here. Rather, anti-immigrant politics reflect a strategy whereby capital uses specialized forms of violence to create a reserve army of the living, laboring dead. Visible Borders, Invisible Economies turns to Latinx literature, photography, and films that render this unseen scheme shockingly vivid. Works such as Valeria Luiselli’Trade ReviewUlibarri offers a model for reading other Latinx literature in the context of rising immigrant detentions . . . The interplay of border visibility and economic invisibility reveals a politically charged truth about the disposability of immigrant life hidden within the auspices of border/national security. Further, these truths are visible in the imagined world of art be it prose, photography, or film. * Latin@ Literatures *Table of Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: Imagination in the Age of National Security and Market Neoliberalization Part I. Documenting the Living Dead Chapter 1. Games of Enterprise and Security in Luis Urrea, Valeria Luiselli, and Karla Cornejo Villavicencio Chapter 2. Documenting the US-Mexico Border: Photography, Movement, and Paradox Chapter 3. Latinx Realisms: The Cinematic Borderworlds of Josefina López, David Riker, and Alex Rivera Part II. Imagining the Living Dead Chapter 4. Markets of Resurrection: Cat Ghosts, Aztec Zombies, and the Living Dead Economy Chapter 5. Speculative Governances of the Dead: The Underclass, Underworld, and Undercommons Coda: Dreaming of Deportation, or, When Everything “Goes South” Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisExploring the question of human agency amidst a world teeming with powerful nonhuman influences, Jane Bennett draws upon Whitman, Thoreau, Caillois, Whitehead, and other poetic writers to link a non-anthropocentric model of self to a democratic pluralism and a syntax and style of writing appropriate to the entangled world in which we live.Trade Review“Jane Bennett has always been interested in reading the ecological from a political point of view and articulating an ecological politics. But this book will be a new moment in how we think about ecology and democracy. For it explains to us not only the possibility of ‘ecological democracy’ but also why a truly democratic personality must be ecological: open and attentive, susceptible to otherness, and welcoming influences. Influx & efflux is a wonderful achievement.” -- Branka Arsic, author of * Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau *“In this remarkable book Jane Bennett shows us just why a capacious sense of influence matters so much to our efforts to shape the circumstances we find ourselves in. Generous, surprising, and beautifully illustrated, influx & efflux resounds as a compelling affirmation of the value of drawing diverse elements and agencies into new lines of thinking and feeling. This book does nothing less than shift the tone and terms of political theory, offering us a vital poetic vocabulary for making more of the world's participation in the political and ecological stances we take.” -- Derek P. McCormack, author of * Atmospheric Things: On the Allure of Elemental Envelopment *"Arguing for an aspirational rather than a polemical Whitman, Bennett charts a body of work generous, egalitarian, and democratic 'wherein the forces of nonhuman agencies and the ubiquity of stupendous, ethereal influences are acknowledged' (p. 116). Ultimately, she concludes that Whitman’s 'I is creative in that it alters and inflects what is taken in, taken on, taken up' (p. 117). Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty." -- J. N. Barron * Choice *"Theorists who figure prominently in Bennett’s argument include Gilles Deleuze, Alfred North Whitehead, Harold Bloom, and Michel Serres. This amalgam of influences gives rise to a hybrid style of theorising that blends conventional literary analysis with philosophical and political argument. The result is an exciting and rich intervention in several fields at once." -- Sean Seeger * Green Letters *“Influx and Efflux is a welcome contribution to political theory, and the thoughtful, challenging, and charming approach to things here is one that will be of benefit to any reader.” -- Michael Epp * Political Theory *“Influx & Efflux is an excellent follow-up to Vibrant Matter.... Influx & Efflux manages no easy task: bringing out the vibrancy of Whitman’s poetry as a living political force that needs to be reckoned with in the present.” -- Christian P. Haines * ALH Online Review *“[Influx and Efflux] calls the reader to respond with distinctly spiritual and artistic gestures. . . . Bennett effectively exemplifies that democracy does not come from political policies alone, but from a community that prioritizes a porosity, that allows for an influx of the world into the self, and is committed to the efflux of speaking back out and into the world of human, animal, and vibrant matter.” -- Karah Lain * Religion and the Arts *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Prologue.Influx and efflux ix 1. Position and Disposition 1 2. Circuits of Sympathy 27 3. Solar Judgment 46 Refrain. The Alchemy of Affects 63 4. Bad Influence 75 5. Thoreau Experiments with Natural Influences 92 Epilogue. A Peculiar Efficacy 113 Notes 119 Bibliography 173 Index 189

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Book SynopsisNick Bromell examines how Frederick Douglass forged a distinctively black political philosophy out of his experiences as an enslaved and later nominally free man in ways that challenge Anglo-Continental traditions of political thought.Trade Review“The Powers of Dignity is an impressive, thorough, and detailed reconstruction of Frederick Douglass as political philosopher, and should immediately become a major reference text not just for Douglass scholarship but also for the broader project of retrieving and theorizing a distinct African American political tradition. Nick Bromell's book distinguishes itself by his impressive interdisciplinary ambition to bring together philosophy, literary studies, political theory, cognitive science, and new materialism. This is an exciting reconceptualization of the political cartography.” -- Charles W. Mills, author of * Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism *“Nick Bromell writes beautifully, and he has an illuminating story to tell about Frederick Douglass's political imagination from the 1840s to the 1890s. As Bromell shows, Douglass's political thinking about race and democracy was constantly in flux, mediated by his experience in slavery and his commitment to the Black freedom struggle. This is an exemplary contribution to our understanding of one of the most important figures in American history.” -- Robert S. Levine, author of * The Lives of Frederick Douglass *"This is an important study at a time when critical race theory is being banned in states like Oklahoma and Texas. Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty." -- R. T. Prus * Choice *“The Powers of Dignity is exactly the kind of book our nation and era needs.... [It] is both an exciting contribution to the literature on Frederick Douglass and a sobering reminder that the roots of our democracy and the theorizing that accompanies it are ‘a site of endless struggle.’” -- Ange-Marie Hancock * Perspectives on Politics *“[The Powers of Dignity]—gracefully written, wide-ranging, and compelling—makes a laudable contribution to Douglass scholarship. Scholars in political theory, literature, African American studies, and related fields will benefit from Nick Bromell’s excellent monograph.” -- Nathan Pippenger * Review of Politics *“The Powers of Dignity is an ingenious, determined, and stimulating interpretation of a part of Frederick Douglass’s political philosophy. . . . I greatly admire Bromell’s book, particularly for its subtlety and originality.” -- Bernard R. Boxill * American Political Thought *“At once dialectical and venturesome, it reimagines the mind of Frederick Douglass on Douglass’s own exceptional terms. One hopes academic philosophy and US political thought take notice.” -- Maurice Wallace * American Literary History *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Introduction. "The Thing Looked Absurd": The Black in Douglass's Political Philosophy 1 1. "To Become a Colored Man": Proposing Black Powers to the Black Public Sphere 17 2. "A Chapter of Political Philosophy Applicable to the American People": Human Nature, Human Dignity, Human Rights 38 3. "One Method for Expressing Opposite Emotions": Douglass's Fugitive Rhetoric 55 4. "Assault Compels Defense": Douglass on Black Emigration and Violence 82 5. "A Living Root, Not a Twig Broken Off": Douglass's Constitutionalism and the Paradox of Democracy's Foundations 101 6. "Somebody's Child": Awakening, Resistance, and Vulnerability in My Bondage and My Freedom 124 7. "Nothing Less Than a Radical Revolution": Douglass's Struggle for a Democracy without Race 159 8. "That Strange, Mysterious, and Indescribable": The Fugitive Legacy of Douglass's Political Thought 188 Notes 207 Bibliography 243 Index 263

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Book SynopsisMichael K. Bourdaghs presents a radical reframing of the works of Natsume Sosekiwidely considered to be Japan's greatest modern novelistas critical and creative responses to the emergence of new forms of property ownership in nineteenth-century Japan.Trade Review“Michael K. Bourdaghs's A Fictional Commons provides a strikingly new approach to thinking about the fiction and theories of Natsume Sōseki as well as for thinking how literature as a practice gestures to something beyond the modern regime of private property. Literature, Bourdaghs demonstrates, is one of the sites where we imagine the return in a higher dimension of the commons, the gift, and primitive communism.” -- Karatani Kojin, author of * Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy *“Both erudite and innovative, A Fictional Commons brilliantly demonstrates how Natsume Sōseki, through his fiction and criticism, explored literature as a domain for imagining the alternatives to modern private property regime and the related conceptualization of modern personhood. It is a major contribution to Sōseki studies and modern Japanese literary studies. It also joins broader debates over the value of literature in the twenty-first century—how literature may inspire creative modes of sharing that traverse national, regional, and other boundaries dividing our troubled present.” -- Tomiko Yoda, Takashima Professor of Japanese Humanities, Harvard University"As more and more people question the extremes of capitalism, Bourdaghs’ study of Soseki adds a fascinating lens for further examining other works of literature. . . . In A Fictional Commons, Bourdaghs reveals Soseki’s sharp mind, ever wrestling with the most important sociological issue of his time. Through this book, Bourdagh also reminds us that the role of literature is to rethink what is possible — and thereby literally rewrite the world." -- Kris Kosaka * Japan Times *“[Bourdaghs] makes extensive use of Japanese and Western sources, both primary and secondary, drawing seamlessly on work in multiple languages. [A Fictional Commons] is extensively referenced and comes with an exhaustive list of bibliographic studies . . . which will be of immense help to both students and scholars interested in Sōseki, and in Meiji- and Taisho-era Japanese literature more broadly.” -- Gouranga Charan Pradhan * Japan Review *“Bourdaghs’s exploration of the question of property for Sōseki is broad, trenchant, and productive, and it drew connections for me that I would not have otherwise imagined.” -- Edward Mack * Journal of Japanese Studies *Table of ContentsNote on Usage ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction. Owning up to Sōseki 1 1. Fables of Property: Nameless Cats, Trickster Badgers, Stray Sheep 13 2. House under a Shadow: Disowning the Psychology of Possessive Individualism in The Gate 51 3. Property and Sociological Knowledge: Sōseki and the Gift of Narrative 91 4. The Tragedy of the Market:Younger Brothers, Women, and Colonial Subjects in Kokoro 121 Conclusion. Who Owns Sōseki? Or, How Not to Belong in World Literature 147 Notes 177 Bibliography 205 Index 219

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Book SynopsisUses literature to understand and remake our ethics regarding nonhuman animals, old human beings, disabled human beings, and cloned posthumansLiterary Bioethics argues for literature as an untapped and essential site for the exploration of bioethics. Novels, Maren Tova Linett argues, present vividly imagined worlds in which certain values hold sway, casting new light onto those values; and the more plausible and well rendered readers find these imagined worlds, the more thoroughly we can evaluate the justice of those values. In an innovative set of readings, Linett thinks through the ethics of animal experimentation in H.G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau, explores the elimination of aging in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, considers the valuation of disabled lives in Flannery O'Connor's The Violent Bear It Away, and questions the principles of humane farming through reading Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. By analyzing novels puTrade ReviewLinett’s articulation of literature as a site of bioethical exploration offers new and essential inroads for conversations on disability. Moving past the ‘thought experiment,’ Linett positions literature as an alternative kind of thought laboratory, one far more interested in whose lives are valued when we think bioethically -- Alison Kafer, author of Feminist, Queer, CripThe book's writing is lucid, the structure is well organized, the research is meticulously conducted, and the main claims are masterfully argued. Literary Bioethics will be useful for those working in the fields of disability studies, literary studies, sociology, animal studies, age studies, and bioethics. It will be especially helpful for those trying to think through thorny questions having to do with justice for both disabled people and animals. * Disability Studies Quarterly *Ranging widely across the long twentieth century and skillfully weaving together disparate (and sometimes adversarial) disciplinary and critical perspectives, Literary Bioethics promises to persuade a broad array of readers of the distinctive value of literary ways of knowing as we strive toward justice for sentient lives. * Journal of Modern Literature *

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Book SynopsisPostcolonial Hauntologies is an interdisciplinary and comparative analysis of critical, literary, visual, and performance texts by women from different parts of Africa. While contemporary critical thought and feminist theory have largely integrated the sexual female body into their disciplines, colonial representations of African women’s sexuality “haunt” contemporary postcolonial African scholarship, which—by maintaining a culture of avoidance about women’s sexuality—generates a discursive conscription that ultimately holds the female body hostage. Ayo A. Coly employs the concepts of “hauntology” and “ghostly matters” to formulate an explicative framework in which to examine postcolonial silences surrounding the African female body as well as a theoretical framework for discerning the elusive and cautious presences of female sexuality in the texts of African women. In illuminating the pervasive silence abou

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Book SynopsisPhenomenology, Transversality, and World Philosophy explores the concept of world philosophy (Weltphilosophie) to take into account the reality of today's multicultural and globalizing world. It challenges the assumption that the particular in the West is universalizable, but the particular in the non-West is particular forever, using the concept of transversality to construct an intercontinental philosophy. In the tradition of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's world literature (Weltliteratur), and in dialogue with work in ethics and political philosophy, Hwa Yol Jung examines the roles that phenomenology and transversality play in constructing world philosophy. Trade Review“Hwa Yol Jung charts incisively how transversality, as an ethics, philosophy, and way of being, moves creatively in-between the binary ‘anarchy of differences’ versus ‘totalitarianism of identity’ that paralyzes contemporary political praxis. Whether it be discussing sincerity, harmony, alterity, or the ethics of responsibility, Jung’s scholarly reflections, with a Sinic accent, embodies the Dao of transversal phenomenology – a dialogic engagement with the other so desperately needed in a time of polarization.” -- John Francis Burke, Trinity UniversityTable of ContentsForeword by Michael JungAcknowledgmentsIntroductionPart I Origins of Transversality1The Dao of Transversality as a Global Approach to Truth: A Metacommentary on Calvin O. SchragChapter 1 Addendum: Review Essay on Calvin O. Schrag’s The Self after Postmodernity (1997)2Transversality and Geophilosophy in the Age of Globalization3The Task of Public Philosophy in the Transversal World of Politics4Edward O. Wilson’s Theory of Consilience: A Hermeneutical CritiquePart II Two Elemental Preconditions of World Philosophy5Transversality, Harmony, and Humanity between Heaven and Earth6Phenomenology and Body PoliticsPart III World Literature and World Philosophy7Zhang Longxi’s Contribution to World Literature in the Globalizing World ofMulticulturalism8Wang Yangming and the Way of World Philosophy9Transversality and Fred Dallmayr’s Comparative Political Theory10Edouard Glissant’s Aesthetics of Relation as Diversality and CreolizationPart IV Heterotopia and Responsibility as First Ethics11Reading Maurice Natanson Reading Alfred Schutz12Responsibility as First Ethics: John Macmurray and Emmanuel Levinas13Taking Responsibility Seriously14Václav Havel’s New Statecraft of Responsible PoliticsBibliography

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Book SynopsisFor this edited volume, the editors solicited chapters that investigate the place of nonhuman animals in the purview of rhetorical theory; what it would mean to communicate beyond the human community; how rhetoric reveals our "brute roots." In other words, this book investigates themes that enlighten us about likely or possible implications of the animal turn within rhetorical studies. The present book is unique in its focus on the call for nonanthropocentrism in rhetorical studies. Although there have been many hints in recent years that rhetoric is beginning to consider the implications of the animal turn, as yet no other anthology makes this its explicit starting point and sustained objective. Thus, the various contributions to this book promise to further the ongoing debate about what rhetoric might be after it sheds its long-standing humanistic bias.Trade ReviewIn the excellent collection Rhetorical Animals, Bjørkdahl and Parrish have collected a range of robust investigations on the persuasive capacities of animals. These chapters expand existing conversations on ethics, rhetorics, and materiality, while pointing to new directions for exploring intra-animal persuasions, human-animal relationships, and the biotic bases for persuasion. Further, the scholars assembled here trouble longstanding assumptions about what rhetoric is, how it functions, and who has access to it, all while being critical and personal in equal measure. -- Ehren Helmut Pflugfelder, Oregon State UniversityTable of ContentsPart I: Expanding Boundaries – InternallyChapter 1: Multiple Rhetorical Animals: Motivation and Fairness in a Paradigm of Rhetoric as Emotive ConsciousnessDavid GruberChapter 2: A Humanimal Rhetorics of Biological MaterialityHayley Zertuche Chapter 3: Let’s Listen With Our Feet: Animals, Neurodivergence, Vulnerability, and Haptic RhetoricityKelin LoeChapter 4: Human Boundary Seepage and Bacterial RhetoricsJennifer Saltmarsh Part II: Expanding Boundaries – ExternallyChapter 5: The Biotic Turn in Rhetoric: Ethical Internatural Communication as Suasory PeacebuildingEllen Gorsevski Chapter 6: Towards an Ethological RhetoricDustin GreenwaltChapter 7: Beyond a Patriarchal Rhetorical Economy: Nonhuman Animals as Agents in Turkic Legends and Political CultureIklim GokselChapter 8: Human, Dolphins, and Other PeopleAlex Parrish Part III: Further Expansion: Cross-Species and Across CulturesChapter 9: Learning to Howl: An Exercise in Internatural AbductionEmily Plec and Susan HafenChapter 10: Touring the Sixth Persona: Dodos and the Rhetorical Effects of Missed CommunicationJake DionneChapter 11: How Dogs (and Other Nonhuman Animals) Become Interesting)Marilyn CooperChapter 12: How to Understand a Parrot’s Words and What You Can Learn from Him: Early Indian Writers on Animal Speech Andrea GutierrezChapter 13: The Rhetoric of Nonanthropocentric RhetoricBjørkdahl, Kristian

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Book SynopsisThis book offers the first sustained argument against the philosophy of Walter Benjamin and his readings of Charles Baudelaire. More broadly, it is also a critique of politicized aesthetics and cultural Marxism, of which Benjamin is a pioneering and emblematic figure. Cristaudo and Beibei argue that Baudelaire was not mistaken in refusing to subject aesthetics to morality and politics. Baudelaire's refusal was based on the recognition that existential matters, such as sickness, evil, death, sexual longing, melancholy, and beauty itselfall themes at the center of his poetryare by nature intrinsically political moral. By contrast, Benjamin's faith in political redemption, while breaking with the enlightenment's faith in progress, nevertheless conforms to another core element of faith of the enlightenment, via faith in the ability of morals and politics to liberate humanity. The authors make the case that Benjamin's understanding of politics is severely deficient because it is not sufficiTrade ReviewThe authors show how the politicized approach to literature that dominates the academy today, bolstered by Walter Benjamin as tutelary genius, strips the mind and heart of their deepest and most necessary resources (starting from empathy) for understanding literature and human affairs in general. Unquestioning belief in one’s own idea of what is right – in a political ideology rather than in humanity and its unfathomable complexity – demonstrably leads to the gulags and genocides that have blighted contemporary history since Benjamin. On the basis of a deeper understanding of the workings of politics in history, grounded on analyses by Weber and Tocqueville rather than on slogans taken from Marx, this book pleads for restoring to their place of honor poetic insight and aesthetic vision, which have been tragically forsaken for political ideology in so much contemporary criticism. The book has a sharp, specific, and topical focus in diagnosing Benjamin’s (mis)reading of Baudelaire, but it also has broad scope and relevance in touching the nerve of what is vitiating literary studies and the humanities across disciplines in their present crisis. -- William Franke, Vanderbilt UniversityTo present a reading that goes against the grain of the critical orthodoxies relating to any major figure is a brave undertaking indeed, so to do this in relation to not one but two such figures in a single volume is surely foolhardy to say the least. When each of those figures has transmogrified into something resembling a brand behind which there lays an entire scholarly industry invested in the maintenance of that brand identity, such an endeavour is tantamount to a declaration of war. Yet such is precisely the project of Guan and Cristaudo here, knowing that such a move is justified only if the stakes are high enough. Their argument is as compelling as its ramifications are damning for any who tow the party line in relation to Baudelaire or Benjamin and crucial for anyone wishing to reconsider the relationship between aesthetics and politics. -- Greg Hainge, FAHA, University of QueenslandWalter Benjamin sees Charles Baudelaire as a touchstone for the zeitgeist of Paris during the rise of the bourgeoisie, and indeed Benjamin strives to recruit the poetry of Baudelaire to the Marxist project of revolutionary transformation. Beibei Guan and Wayne Cristaudo, however, demonstrate that the “artistic” sovereignty in the aesthetic values of Baudelaire might, in fact, resist such “priestly” recruitment to the political causes of Benjamin. Guan and Cristaudo offer their own spirited defenses of l’art pour l’art, and they rescue Baudelaire from the apparatchiks of literature, arguing that Benjamin has spawned an academic industry of critics, who assess the merits of poetry, based upon its devotion to an agenda of popular, leftist salvation (even though much of poetry argues for the “evil” of its own freedom in defiance of such crusades). Guan and Cristaudo strive to give poetry back to the poets, like me. -- Christian Bök, Charles Darwin UniversityTable of ContentsChapter One Political and Artistic Divides in Baudelaire. Chapter Two The Diabolical Character of Modern Political Redemption. Chapter Three Benjamin’s Politicized Aesthetics. Chapter Four The God’s Eye View of the Historical Materialist. Chapter Five Paris, Melancholy and Phantasmagoria: Economic Determinations or a Human Soul-scape? Chapter Six Flâneurs – Baudelaire’s Urban Self-Makers, Benjamin’s Accomplices of Commodity Capitalism, and Redeeming Rag-pickers. Chapter Seven Baudelaire’s “Depraved” View of Women and Benjamin’s Redemption of Commodified Fallen Women.

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Book SynopsisFrom the teeming streets of Dickens''s London to the households of domestic fiction, nineteenth-century British writers constructed worlds crammed beyond capacity with human life. In Populating the Novel, Emily Steinlight contends that rather than simply reflecting demographic growth, such pervasive literary crowding contributed to a seismic shift in British political thought. She shows how the nineteenth-century novel in particular claimed a new cultural role as it took on the task of narrating human aggregation at a moment when the Malthusian specter of surplus population suddenly and quite unexpectedly became a central premise of modern politics.In readings of novels by Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Mary Braddon, Thomas Hardy, and Joseph Conrad that link fiction and biopolitics, Steinlight brings the crowds that pervade nineteenth-century fiction into the foreground. In so doing, she transforms the subject and political stakes of the VictoTrade ReviewPopulating the Novel is an impressive and thought-provoking work. It lays down a gauntlet to other scholars for further examination of biopower and surplus in nineteenth-century literature and culture. * Dickens Quarterly *Steinlight's study moves across a truly impressive array of materials and does so without ever sacrificing close attention to the particular texts under consideration. The book moves fluently beyond the rigid periodizations that continue to govern the professional life of nineteenth-century scholars. * Modern Philology *Populating the Novel is an extremely accomplished and wide-ranging monograph that contributes forcefully to the field of nineteenth-century novel studies. The argument that the multitude, not the individual, is the focus of nineteenth-century fiction takes criticism in an exciting new direction. * Modern Language Review *Populating the Novel is a compelling, thought-provoking work of criticism. Steinlight's reading of traditional narratives in the nineteenth century helps redefine pre-existing ideas about the novel's cultural role while simultaneously considering how its form was heavily influenced by demographics. This significant contribution to scholarship helps reimagine life in the aggregate while demonstrating a unique approach to socio-political aspects of the English novel. * Victorian Review *A work of scholarship that fulfills and exceeds the multitude of promises contained in its title. After describing and delineating the overcrowded demographics of Romantic and Victorian writing, Steinlight makes a provocative claim about population: in an age of efflorescence of biopolitical principles and quantitative social science, population becomes a political, economic, sociological, and, above all, literary problem. * V21 Collations Book Forum *While England's population more than tripled during the nineteenth century, the congested narratives of this era's fiction do not simply reflect demographic change. Instead, as Steinlight powerfully contends, they turn that reality into a pressing political problem that exposes the limits of social and political institutions to contain, manage, and care for the biological life of the populace. * Studies in the Novel *

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Book SynopsisThis book is the story of the emergence and development of writing for children in modern Korea. Starting in the 1920s, a narrator-adult voice began to speak directly to a child-reader. This child audience was perceived as unique because of a new concept: the child-heart, the perception that the child's body and mind were transparent and knowable, and that they rested on the threshold of culture. This privileged location enabled writers and illustrators, educators and psychologists, intellectual elite and laypersons to envision the child as a powerful antidote to the present and as an uplifting metaphor of colonial Korea's future. Reading children's periodicals against the political, educational, and psychological discourses of their time, Dafna Zur argues that the figure of the child was particularly favorable to the project of modernity and nation-building, as well as to the colonial and postcolonial projects of socialization and nationalization. She demonstrates the ways in which Korean children's literature builds on a trajectory that begins with the child as an organic part of nature, and ends, in the post-colonial era, with the child as the primary agent of control of nature. Figuring Korean Futures reveals the complex ways in which the figure of the child became a driving force of nostalgia that stood in for future aspirations for the individual, family, class, and nation.Trade Review"Figuring Korean Futures is a remarkable achievement, a rigorous study based on extensive archival research of the virtual explosion of children's literature in early twentieth-century Korea and its investment in the nation's future. The book gives welcome new insights into colonial modernity and astutely illuminates some of the most fundamental concerns of the colonial period." -- Karen Thornber * Harvard University *"Dafna Zur's superb study of the rise of Korean children's literature from 1908 to 1950 is based on remarkably thorough research and critical analysis. It is the first profound history of Korea's children's literature in English and covers all the political and social complexities involving the nation's aspirations, the modern focus on the child as a symbol of hope, and the transformative power of imagination." -- Jack Zipes * University of Minnesota *"Figuring Korean Futures offers a powerful and important history of children's literature in Korea from the early 1900s through the late 1940s. Drawing on a wealth of textual and visual sources, Dafna Zur's groundbreaking book demonstrates the ways in which the notions of the child and a literature for children stand at the center of Korean articulations of the modern itself." -- Theodore Hughes * Columbia University *"Thoughtfully presented and informative, the book makes it clear that Zur read widely and conscientiously, combing through not only the magazines themselves for worthwhile opportunities to put her considerable powers of close reading to work, but also a great number of secondary sources on a wide range of subjects....Zur's book...gives an admirably cogent overview of an important subfield of modern Korean literary studies, and, in the process, manages to illuminate broader concerns regarding modernity, coloniality, nationalism, and translation." -- Youngju Ryu * Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review *"Figuring Korean Futures: Children's Literature in Modern Korea is a valuable contribution to the literary history of the colonial and postcolonial period. With this publication, Zur provides scholars and casual readers alike with an exhaustively researched and masterfully written analysis of how the Korean child was imagined, appropriated, entertained, mobilized, and educated through children's literature in the tumultuous first half of the twentieth century in Korea." -- Steven D. Capener * Pacific Affairs *"A remarkable new work of scholarship....The defining English language history of this defining era of modern Korean children's literature, Figuring Korean Futures is a tremendous achievement." -- Christopher Richardson * European Journal of Korean Studies *"As a first monograph in the English language on children's literature, Zur's study is an invaluable contribution to scholarship on the print culture of modern Korea. The richness of her study is further enhanced through her keen analyses of visual materials. Also impressive is Zur's contextualization of children's literature through histories of education and welfare institutions in Korea...Zur's study provides an astute analysis of the development of children's literature and its connection to the inexorable forces of colonialism, nationalism, and modernity." -- Susan Hwang * Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth *Table of ContentsContents and Abstracts1The Youth Magazine in Early Colonial Korea chapter abstractThis chapter outlines the social, political, and economic conditions that enabled the emergence of a print culture for young readers in colonial Korea. It historicizes this emergence globally and locally, against the backdrop of discourses on the role of youth that circulated among intellectuals and educators in Korea, Japan, and China. With the emergence of the modern political subject, youth came to embody the nation's aspirations. The figure of the child that emerged a decade later contrasted with this early configuration of the political, non-adult youth. This chapter sets the stage for the book's argument: that children were celebrated as privileged protagonists of the future because, like youth, they were intellectually and emotionally unburdened by the past and ideally situated to build a modern nation. But unlike youth, the new children possessed a child-heart conducive to the colonial project of engineering a new, affectively privileged modern subject. 2Figuring the Child-Heart chapter abstractThe child-heart became a salient concept in Japan and Korea in the 1920s, and in Korea it drove fresh and diverse content in conjunction with the emerging visual turn in print media. This chapter explores the mechanisms of the child-heart concept that served as the foundation of children's literature in Korea, and it argues that texts and images in children's magazines worked together to create a natural and affectively privileged child. The concept of the child-heart made the child visible for the first time, and facilitated the building of a cultural literacy of text and image. At the same time, the manner in which it hinged on the relationship between child and nature reflected a certain degree of nostalgic yearning that coded future aspirations at a time when the colonization of Korea made such dreams uncertain at best. 3Writing the Language of the Child-Heart chapter abstractThis chapter introduces one of the important contributions of children's writers to Korean literary history, namely, their intervention in the debates on the "gap" between the spoken and written languages and the perceived inability of literature to capture and respond to the spirit of the people. While Kim Tong-in and Yi Kwang-su are largely credited with the development of a modern literary vernacular, this chapter shows that because of the conception of the affective nature of the child-heart as one that deserved both respect and appropriate content, Pang Chŏng-hwan developed techniques that were appropriate for the child-heart through his theories of and application of the craft of writing and folktale adaptations. This piece of linguistic and literary history gives a more comprehensive picture of how child-specific language began to play a role in the development of young readers' print culture. 4The Proletarian Child Fights Back chapter abstractThis chapter explores children's literature during a time when new leftist visions demanded that content and form be merged to better capture the child-heart. Proletarian writers wrote against the bourgeois child-heart and translated it into a moral instinct and outrage over the exploitation of the working class. These writers, many of whom went on to become prominent literary figures in North Korea, sought to create a child-heart that, unlike the angelic disposition of its bourgeois counterpart, was fueled by resentment and choreographed action. Noting the transnational connections with proletarian cultures in Japan, the Soviet Union, and the United States, this chapter examines the content and language of leftist writing and points to emerging developments in children's literature that spilled over into the formative period of 1950s North Korea, which became home to many of the prominent writers and illustrators active in the mid-twenties and thirties. 5Playing War in Late Colonial Korea chapter abstractThis chapter examines literature for children at the height of imperialization (kōminka) policies in the late 1930s, the era considered most aggressive in its attempt to efface the Korean language and culture. The cultural production for children from this era is often referenced for its normalization of militarism, which is evident in the celebration of war in the texts and images of children's culture. This chapter argues that this transition to the militarized child was facilitated by organic qualities so celebrated in earlier decades, which made the hearts and bodies of children susceptible to regulation and discipline. Still, humor, irony, and the celebration of the transformative power of the imagination served as a powerful counternarrative to the view of late colonial culture as foreclosed. This was the era that voiced some of colonial Korea's most powerful anticapitalist resistance. 6Liberating the Child-Heart chapter abstractThis chapter turns to children's literature at its most significant watershed moment: the liberation of Korea from its thirty-five-year colonization. In the five years between 1945 and the Korean War in 1950, the Korean peninsula experienced the euphoria of liberation, the arrival of the United State Military Government in Korea, the hardening of ideological positions, and the ensuing mass migration up and down the peninsula, as well as the official establishment of two separate and mutually intolerant regimes. Children's literature provides a fascinating counterpoint to these historical shifts by showcasing powerful nationalist tendencies that set the tone for a new beginning, while simultaneously presenting strong undercurrents remaining from the colonial past. Most significantly, this chapter looks at the much-celebrated and freshly liberated child-heart and questions the extent of liberation in light of a newly forged relationship between Korea's new young citizens and their liberated land. Epilogue: The Turn to Science in Postwar North and South Korea chapter abstractThe dropping of atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the devastation of the Korean War signaled the period known globally as the "loss of innocence." The Epilogue hints at some of the implications of the language of science and technology and its penetration into the fiction of the postwar Koreas. The genre of science fiction, found only in children's literary magazines in this period, put into practice a variety of contested theories of education, of the relationship between science and art, and of the role of fiction in both describing and prescribing better futures. Ultimately, the postwar era demonstrates the break between the long-sustained bond between child and nature, and by extension a recalibration of the relationship between humans, culture, and the natural world. Introduction: The Child and Modern Korea chapter abstractChildren's literature in Korea emerged in the early twentieth century under Japanese colonial rule. This literature was marked by what Korean writers called the child-heart, the conflation of nature and culture whose shaping and interaction was deeply implicated in colonial modernity. The Introduction argues that what made children's literature possible was a combination of internal and external factors, including influences from Japan and educational and psychological theories of childrearing from the West. Children's literature was recognized as important enough to warrant censorship, and as key to shaping ideologies of gender and politics. The movement of the child from the periphery of culture to the center and the interest in visual culture combined to produce a range of visually compelling magazines for children. Writers conveyed their visions of the past and present, and their future aspirations at a time of growing uncertainty about the fate of the Korean nation.

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Book SynopsisToday, churches, political parties, trade unions, and even national sports teams are no guarantee of social solidarity. At a time when these traditional institutions of social cohesion seem increasingly ill-equipped to defend against the disintegration of sociability, K. Ludwig Pfeiffer encourages us to reflect on the cultural and literary history of social gatherings—from the ancient Athenian symposium to its successor forms throughout Western history. From medieval troubadours to Parisian salons and beyond, Pfeiffer conceptualizes the symposium as an institution of sociability with a central societal function. As such he reinforces a programmatic theoretical move in the sociology of Georg Simmel and builds on theories of social interaction and communication characterized by Max Weber, George Herbert Mead, Jürgen Habermas, Niklas Luhmann, and others. To make his argument, Pfeiffer draws on the work of a range of writers, including Dr. Samuel Johnson and Diderot, Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust, Dorothy Sayers, Joseph Conrad, and Stieg Larsson. Ultimately, Pfeiffer concludes that if modern societies do not find ways of reinstating elements of the Athenian symposium, especially those relating to its ritualized ease, decency and style of interaction, they will have to cope with increasing violence and decreasing social cohesion.Trade Review"Sociability and Society switches with ease and elegance between theoretical argumentation, historical narrative, and literary criticism. An intensive, interesting, and inviting book for students of European cultural history, qualitative social theory, and literature."—Rüdiger Campe, Yale University"In this important and thought-provoking book, Pfeiffer tracks the history of the social form of the symposium and its multifarious successors. His open, essayistic style perfectly suits his protean subject matter."—Peter Gilgen, Cornell UniversityTable of Contents0. Introduction 1. Conceptualizing the Symposium 2. Power and Signs of Power in the Middle Ages 3. Sociability and the Humanities 4. The Splintering of Culture: Reading versus Salon 5. Proust and Nineteenth-Century Salons 6. The Silence of Power: English Clubs or Oligarchy versus Democracy 7. A Symptomatology of Critical Shifts 8. Securing Power and Auxiliary Evidence 9. The Paradigm of Isolation and Its Consequences: Joseph Conrad 10. Beyond the Sympotic: Aesthetic Productivity and Sociable Bonding in the Detective Novel 11. Consequences and Conclusion(s): The Anthropological-Institutional Trap and the Resurrection of Literature

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Book SynopsisWhat Pornography Knows offers a new history of pornography based on forgotten bawdy fiction of the eighteenth century, its nineteenth-century republication, and its appearance in 1960s paperbacks. Through close textual study, Lubey shows how these texts were edited across time to become what we think pornography is—a genre focused primarily on sex. Originally, they were far more variable, joining speculative philosophy and feminist theory to sexual description. Lubey's readings show that pornography always had a social consciousness—that it knew, long before anti-pornography feminists said it, that women and nonbinary people are disadvantaged by a society that grants sexual privilege to men. Rather than glorify this inequity, Lubey argues, the genre's central task has historically been to expose its artifice and envision social reform. Centering women's bodies, pornography refuses to divert its focus from genital action, forcing readers to connect sex with its social outcomes. Lubey offers a surprising take on a deeply misunderstood cultural form: pornography transforms sexual description into feminist commentary, revealing the genre's deep knowledge of how social inequities are perpetuated as well as its plans for how to rectify them.Trade Review"What if pornography built the body as we know it and can also help dismantle it? In What Pornography Knows, Kathleen Lubey tracks texts like a detective across centuries as they hide on secret library shelves, analyzes them with verve, and shows us, brilliantly, how pornography doesn't just celebrate endless sex but in fact constructed sex as we know it, and with more ambivalence than we'd realized. A masterful rethinking of the history of pornography."—Whitney Strub, author of Perversion for Profit: The Politics of Pornography and the Rise of the New Right"Kathleen Lubey's dazzling study makes available an astounding new history of pornographic narrative––or, rather, of pornographic dilation, since 'narrative' is among the categories of representation we will have to rethink in response to this landmark study, along with 'knowledge,' 'embodiment,' and 'sexuality.' This book will make a lasting impact in a number of scholarly fields––and it is sorely needed: a non-phobic, but characteristically skeptical, treatment of a pornography as a far more complex genre than hitherto perceived."—Grace Lavery, author of Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis"With analysis that is nothing short of astonishing, Lubey offers a dramatic, eloquent cultural history of pornography with an ingenious throughline in a single much-transformed text. What Pornography Knows offers significant new information about literary fields from the eighteenth century to the present and makes available new insights about the social hierarchies in which they participated."—Frances Ferguson, University of Chicago, author of Pornography, The Theory: What Utilitarianism Did To Action"Lubey's greater argument, that pornography places sex in a discursive whirl that assesses how culture and sex refract each other, remains useful for porn studies and histories of erotic literature. This monograph will feel especially interesting to researchers working on porn's reception history and the intersection of eighteenth century book history with spheres of erotic production."—Gabriel Ojeda-Sague, Critical Inquiry"What Pornography Knows is a rare achievement in that it balances serious archival acumen and book history with theoretical sophistication and, in the end, a consequential presentism which left me thinking differently about a period and topic that I have long researched. It is as much a virtuoso literary history as it is a roadmap for the exciting directions that eighteenth-century scholarship can take."—Jason S. Farr, Eighteenth-Century FictionTable of ContentsIntroduction: Pornography Without Sex 1. Genital Parts: Detachable Properties in the Eighteenth Century 2. Feminist Speculations: Penetration and Protest in Pornographic Fiction 3. The Victorian Eighteenth Century: Publishing an Erotics of Inequity 4. Uncoupling: Pornography and Feminism in the Countercultural Era Coda: A Mindful Pornography

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Book SynopsisIn this moment of climate precarity, Victorian studies scholar Barbara Leckie considers the climate crisis as a problem of time. Spanning the long nineteenth century through our current moment, her interdisciplinary treatment of climate change at once rethinks time and illustrates that the time for climate action is now. Climate Change, Interrupted argues that linear, progress-inflected temporalities are not adequate to a crisis that defies their terms. Instead, this book advances a theory and practice of interruption to rethink prevailing temporal frameworks. At the same time, it models the anachronistic, time-blending, and time-layering temporality it advances. In a series of experimental chapters informed by the unlikely trio of Walter Benjamin, Donna Haraway, and Virginia Woolf, Leckie reinflects and cowrites the traditions and knowledges of the long nineteenth century and the current period in the spirit of climate action collaboration. The current moment demands as many approaches as possible, invites us to take risks, and asks scholars and activists adept at storytelling to participate in the conversation. Climate Change, Interrupted, accordingly, invests in interruption to tell a different story of the climate crisis.Trade Review"Climate Change, Interrupted is a moving and voracious experiment that inspires more than it alarms. I so appreciate the capacious and unexpected circles it draws, and Leckie's sage and spirited company on every page."—Maggie Nelson, author of On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint"What a treat to read such brilliantly surprising readings of Benjamin, Eliot, and Shelley, braided together in an exquisitely crafted experimental work. Leckie makes a powerful case for the crucial role of the humanities in the climate crisis."—Caroline Levine, author of Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network"Highly original, boldly conceived, and extremely thought-provoking. The genuine honesty and directness of Leckie's voice, and the approachability of her experimentation, will ensure this book finds a wide audience."—Kate Flint, author of Flash! Photography, Writing, and Surprising Illumination"This is a dazzling piece of work, and a joy to read—deeply adventurous and undisciplined in the best sense of that term."—Jesse Oak Taylor, coeditor of Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times"The staggering originality of Barbara Leckie's Climate Change, Interrupted: Representation and the Remaking of Time rests upon the title's most innocuous term: representation.... Climate Change, Interrupted unforgettably activates its own claims on an aesthetic level."—Shawna Ross, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment

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Book SynopsisMany people today experience the climate crisis with a divided state of mind: aware of the extreme effects, but living everyday life as if the crisis is not actually happening. This book argues that this structure of feeling has roots that can be traced back to the nineteenth century, when Western culture encountered the profound shock of Charles Darwin''s theory of evolution.Darwin''s theory made it increasingly difficult for secular humanists to flatly deny that humans are animals, fully enmeshed in natural systems and processes. But like those of us confronting climate change today, many writers and scientists struggled to integrate its depersonalizing vision into their understanding of the place of humans in the natural order. The result was that the radical environmental implications of The Origin of Species were evaded as soon as they were articulated, abetted by a culture of denial structured by the illusions of capital and empire.In light of the c

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Book SynopsisFollowing the killing of George Floyd in 2020, a moral panic gripped the US and UK. To atone for an alleged history of racism, statues were torn down and symbols of national identity attacked. Across universities, fringe theories became the new orthodoxy, with a cadre of activists backed by university technocrats adopting a binary worldview of moral certainty, sin and deconstructive redemption through Western self-erasure. This hard-hitting book surveys these developments for the first time. It unpacks and challenges the theories and arguments deployed by ‘decolonisers’ in a university system now characterised by garbled leadership and illiberal groupthink. The desire to question the West’s sense of itself, deconstruct its narratives and overthrow its institutional order is an impulse that, ironically, was underpinned by a more confident and assured Western hegemony, which is now waning and under great strain. If its light continues to dim, who or what will carry the torch for human freedom and progress?Trade ReviewA TLS Book of the Year 2023 ‘incisive, humane and brave’Times Literary Supplement ‘Doug Stokes's book forensically dissects the ideas and practices concerning race, equality, identity and grievance, which are having such an explosive impact on our intellectual and cultural life. Whatever one's sentiments and sympathies, this is a concise and lucid guide to what lies behind the “culture war”.’Robert Tombs, University of Cambridge‘A highly insightful and persuasive contribution to the ongoing global debate about race, equality and decolonisation, going far beyond the walls of academia into wider institutions and the international world order.’Munira Mirza, former head of the No. 10 Policy Unit and CEO of Civic Future‘Doug Stokes’s incisive analysis of the threat posed by critical theory to wider society, particularly the universities, should stand at the top of every reading list about racism, gender and attempts to “decolonise” the curriculum.’David Abulafia, University of Cambridge‘Perhaps books like this one will encourage more academics to summon up the courage to resist the bullying and to challenge the new conformity. Not everyone will agree with them. But everyone who truly cares about truth will welcome the opening up of a debate which the universities have largely foreclosed.’Jonathan Sumption, The Spectator‘Stokes has just struck a match; the result may well be explosive.’The Critic‘an excellent book that can shock as well as inspire’ Graeme Kemp, The Equiano ProjectTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Identity politics, decolonisation and social theory 2. Racism on campus 3. Moral panic and illiberalism in Universities 4. History reclaimed 5. Accounting for Wokery Conclusion: the future of the West?

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Book SynopsisA deep dive into mid-century African American newspapers, exploring how Black pulp fiction reassembled genre formulas in the service of racial justice In recent years, Jordan Peele’s Get Out, Marvel’s Black Panther, and HBO’s Watchmen have been lauded for the innovative ways they repurpose genre conventions to criticize white supremacy, celebrate Black resistance, and imagine a more racially just world—important progressive messages widely spread precisely because they are packaged in popular genres. But it turns out, such generic retooling for antiracist purposes is nothing new. As Brooks E. Hefner’s Black Pulp shows, this tradition of antiracist genre revision begins even earlier than recent studies of Black superhero comics of the 1960s have revealed. Hefner traces it back to a phenomenon that began in the 1920s, to serialized (and sometimes syndicated) genre stories written by Black authors in Black newspapers with large circulations among middle- and working-class Black readers. From the pages of the Pittsburgh Courier and the Baltimore Afro-American, Hefner recovers a rich archive of African American genre fiction from the 1920s through the mid-1950s—spanning everything from romance, hero-adventure, and crime stories to westerns and science fiction. Reading these stories, Hefner explores how their authors deployed, critiqued, and reassembled genre formulas—and the pleasures they offer to readers—in the service of racial justice: to criticize Jim Crow segregation, racial capitalism, and the sexual exploitation of Black women; to imagine successful interracial romance and collective sociopolitical progress; and to cheer Black agency, even retributive violence in the face of white supremacy. These popular stories differ significantly from contemporaneous, now-canonized African American protest novels that tend to represent Jim Crow America as a deterministic machine and its Black inhabitants as doomed victims. Widely consumed but since forgotten, these genre stories—and Hefner’s incisive analysis of them—offer a more vibrant understanding of African American literary history. Trade Review "Brooks Hefner’s compelling and insightful book asks us to reconsider not only what counts as Black imaginative writing but what it means to read Black literature at all. Attending to a vast yet overlooked archive of serial genre fiction, Hefner highlights the pleasures afforded by African Americans’ engagement with popular formulas in the Black press. The result is an eye-opening account of modern literary production that centers the tastes and experiences of Black readers themselves. Beyond the predominance of the protest novel in the white imagination, Hefner reveals the narrative forms and medial formats out of which Black America’s imagined communities were built."—Kinohi Nishikawa, author of Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground "Black Pulp tells a much needed and long overdue literary history of the short fiction and serial narratives featured in the African American periodical press of the mid-twentieth century. As Brooks E. Hefner’s deft and compelling close readings and contextual accounts of the pulp fiction industry’s developments demonstrate, Black popular fiction’s fresh formulas offered Black readers utopian (not nihilist) visions of the justice they deserved—but were denied—in Jim Crow America. Thoroughly researched, shrewdly argued, wonderfully illustrated, and bracingly written, Black Pulp is as thrilling to read as the literature it surveys. This is a work that anyone interested in mid-century African American and American popular literature, genre criticism, and US periodical history must read."—Jacqueline Goldsby, Yale University "Beyond the invaluable historical work it performs, Black Pulp offers numerous and exciting theoretical suggestions regarding the politics of reading, the innovations of popular fiction and the huge gulf between the historical experience of readers in a given period and the retrospective constructions of literary history. It constitutes essential reading for whoever is interested in Black studies, pulp fiction or the sociology of reading, probing the limits of these intersecting fields and helping to recover the forgotten hinterlands that lie beyond them."—Journal of Social History "Hefner stitches together the seams of genre and race... Black Pulp challenges us to reimagine and expand our conceptualization of African American literary culture by adopting Black bibliographic practice that simultaneously recovers relationships between lost texts and a larger network of literary practice, even as it might redefine what we mean as Black bibliography."—Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America "A fascinating glimpse into a part of Black history that isn’t well known."—Real Change News "Black Pulp is important and valuable because of the stories Hefner chronicles and the convincing argument he makes that they are worthy of careful investigation, and that in transforming white pulp to create new imaginative worlds, they fulfill an important role by offering new possibilities for readers who have often been deprived of them even in the realm of imagination."—Los Angeles Review of Books "Hefner’s study is—from beginning to end—an absolute pleasure to read, just as it is a convincing case for the political importance of Black pleasure in reading."—Modernism/modernity "Hefner reveals the dauntless envisioning of emancipatory futures by Black writers and illustrators. "—Colors of Influence "For Hefner, recovering African American newspaper fiction is significant because it provides archival evidence of fertile genre experimentation among Black writers in the pulp era... a major achievement. Black Pulp should make it impossible for scholars of popular genre fiction to suggest that Black creators entered the field late or that antiracist approaches to genre are a new development. "—American Periodicals "Breathtakingly researched and astutely argued, Hefner shines a light on a hidden corner of Black cultural production that has remained mostly out of sight." —Modern Fiction Studies Table of ContentsContentsIntroduction: Signifying Genre, Articulating Race1. Beneath the Harlem Renaissance: The Rise of Black Popular Fiction2. Romancing the Race: The Politics of Black Love Stories3. News from Elsewhere: Speculative Fiction in the Black Press4. Battling White Supremacy: A Prehistory of the Black SuperheroConclusion: Writing New HistoriesNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisThis new study raises fundamental questions about the nature of imaginative writing in the age of ‘England’s troubles’. Drawing energy from recent debates in Stuart history, this book looks past the traditional watersheds of Restoration and Revolution, plotting the responsiveness of seventeenth-century writers to the tremors of civil conflict and to the enduring crises and contradictions of Stuart governance. Augustine draws freely from the insights and strategies of contextual analysis, close reading, and critical theory in a bid to defamiliarise major texts of the period, from the poetry of young Milton to the brilliant works of adaptation, translation, and bricolage that characterised Dryden’s last decade. Muting the antagonisms and conflicts that have dominated previous accounts, Aesthetics of contingency thus proposes to write the literary history of this period anew.Trade Review'For a work concerned to muddy critical waters, Aesthetics of Contingency is admirably clear, and its arguments broadly convincing.'Taylor & Francis Online'Aesthetics of Contingency is admirably clear, and its arguments broadly convincing. Augustine’s study is a salutary reminder of something too often overlooked: that poets and writers did not usually consider themselves ambassadors for the ideals of whatever literary period posterity has since consigned them to – and that the contingencies of history always blind writers in any given moment to the outcomes of a future that seems to us so self-evident.' The Seventeenth Century -- .Table of ContentsIntroduction: remapping early modern literature1. ‘He saw a greater Sun appear’: waiting for the apocalypse in Milton’s Poems 16452. ‘We goe to heaven against each others wills’: revising Religio Medici in the English Revolution3. ‘But Iconoclastes drawn in little’: making and unmaking a Whig Marvell4. ‘It had an odde promiscuous tone’: Lord Rochester and Restoration modernity5. ‘Transprosing and Transversing’: religion, revolution, and the end of history in Dryden’s late works6. CodaIndex

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Book SynopsisSame old offers a rethinking of positions that have defined queer theory since its inception in the early 1990s. Steeped in philosophical and political commitments to ‘difference’, queer theoretical frameworks have tended to assume that ideas related to ‘sameness’ only thwart and stymie queer forms of life. But this book takes a number of these ideas as its focus – uselessness, reproduction, normativity and reductionism – and reveals their unexpected formal and thematic importance to a range of queer literary genres from across the long twentieth century: fin-de-siècle aestheticism, feminist speculative fiction, lesbian middlebrow writing, and the ‘stud file’ or record of serial sex. Demonstrating how queer cultural objects often stand at odds with the frameworks that have been meant to help interpret and comprehend them, Same old interrogates the genealogy of the aversion to sameness that has kept those frameworks in place.Table of ContentsIntroduction: Same old1. Useless2. Reproductive3. Normative4. ReductiveCoda: Same againReferences

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Book SynopsisRochester and the pursuit of pleasure provides a reading of Rochester's poems, dramatic works, and letters in a biographical context. It argues that there is a thematic unity--the pursuit of pleasure--underlying his work, that this pursuit is religiously motivated and reflects Rochester's preoccupation with and, finally, acceptance of Christianity. -- .

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Book SynopsisPart recovery and part new reading method, this work locates the few kept mistresses in Victorian literature, while offering a queer way to read for their existences when less legible. This book offers a way to read old material with new eyes and a social justice ethic. -- .

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Book SynopsisThis compelling collection examines the lived devotion' of men and women in England's Long Reformation. Through cutting-edge research, fourteen chapters explore how English piety was at once segregational and social, fixed in principle yet fluid in practice, and where authors worked out their faith in painstaking and sometimes painful ways. -- .

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Book SynopsisThis book explores the intimate relationship between literature and class in England (and later Britain) from the Peasants' Revolt at the end of the fourteenth century to the impact of the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth. -- .

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Book SynopsisA Taytsh Manifesto calls for a translational paradigm for Yiddish studies and for the study of modern Jewish culture. Saul Noam Zaritt calls for a shift in vocabulary, from Yiddish to taytsh, in order to promote reading strategies that account for the ways texts named as Jewish move between languages and cultures. Yiddish, a moniker that became dominant only in the early twentieth century, means Jewish and thus marks the language with a single identity: of and for a Jewish collective. In contrast, this book calls attention to an earlier and, at one time, more common name for the language: taytsh, which initially means German. By using the term taytsh, speakers indicated that they were indeed speaking a Germanic language, a language that was not entirely their own. In time, when the word shifted to a verb, taytshn, it came to mean the act of translation. To write or speak in Yiddish is thus to render into taytsh and inhabit the gap between languages.

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Book SynopsisThe Quest for Redemption: Central European Jewish Thought in Joseph Roth's Works by Rares Piloiu fills an important gap in Roth scholarship, placing Roth's major works of fiction for the first time in the context of a generational interest in religious redemption among the Jewish intellectuals of Central Europe. In it, Piloiu argues that Roth's challenging, often contradictory and ambivalent literary output is the result of an attempt to recast moral, political, and historical realities of an empirically observable world in a new, religiously transfigured reality through the medium of literature. This diegetic recasting of phenomenological encounters with the real is an expression of Roth's belief that, since the self and the world are in a continuing state of crisis, issuing from their separation in modernity, a restoration of their unity is necessary to redeem the historical existence of individuals and communities alike. Piloiu notes, however, that Roth's enterprise in this is not unique to his work, but rather is shared by an entire generation of Central European Jewish intellectuals. This generation, disillusioned by modernity's excessive secularism, rationalism, and nationalism, sought a radical solution in the revival of mystical religious traditions—above all, in the Judaic idea of messianic redemption. Their use of the Chasidic notion of redemption was highly original in that it stripped the notion of its original theological meaning and applied it to the secular experience of reality. As a result, Roth's quest for redemption is a quest for a salvation of the individual not outside, but within, history.

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Book SynopsisPrepare to be delightfully surprised to discover that the godfather of all vampires and the infamous dark wizard share a deep character bond that goes far beyond the title ''monster.'' Be intrigued to uncover what a coffin and a horcrux share or to dig further to unearth that the often-overlooked scars which Bram Stoker wrote of in Victorian England are just as significant as those described by J. K. Rowling in the modern era. Indeed, it cannot be a mere coincidence that Dracula was hurt in 1897 and 100 years later, Harry is too. Bookshelves and databases are full of fascinating sources celebrating the supernatural worlds created by beloved authors Bram Stoker and J.K. Rowling. The millions of fans of Dracula and Harry Potter consist of all age groups and varied enthusiasm, ranging from a curious reader or leisure cinema observer to seriously devoted academic scholars. However, followers of each universe have been chiefly segregated ? rarely mingling apart from an occasional culture convention, widely dominated by Star Wars, Star Trek, and Marvel heroes'' groupies. This is most unfortunate because Stoker and Rowling readers have a lot in common. This is because Count Dracula and Lord Voldemort have much in common. In fact, these two internationally acclaimed bestselling novels possess a remarkable kinship. A Tale of Two Villains is a love letter to both sets of fans paying homage to two superb authors and their extraordinary respective works. It is the first text to set both masterpieces on pedestals, side by side, analyzing the words on the page and the thoughts behind them - exploring their similar themes, unique parallelism, and mystical symbolism. The author delves profoundly into the interesting characters, their traits, conflicts, and motivations, to show how literary art is born. This book is a must have for any Stoker or Rowling reader, as it is the first of its kind ever published.

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Book SynopsisAzade Seyhan's Tales of Crossed Destinies: The Modern Turkish Novel in a Comparative Context, second in the MLA series World Literatures Reimagined, offers a much-needed guide to the vast, underexplored territory of modern Turkish literature.Seyhan situates the Turkish novel in relation to such influences as the poetic and oral traditions of Ottoman Islamic culture, the early Turkish Republic, and Western Romantic and Enlightenment thought. She demonstrates that the evolution of the Turkish novel is inseparable from that of the Turkish state.Readers will discover a wealth of Turkish authors, from those with international renown, such as Ahmet Hamdi Tanp?nar and the Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, to others less widely read. Among them are Re?sat Nuri Güntekin, whose Autobiography of a Turkish Girl prompted thousands of young Turkish women to seek teaching posts; Halide Edib Ad?var, who envisioned a harmonious coexistence of Islamic spirituality with Western ideals; Aziz Nesin, Turkey's master humorist, who instructs the reader in censor-resistant code; and Ya?sar Kemal and Adalet A?ao?lu and their blendings of myth, memory, and politics.Appendixes provide a chronology, a pronunciation guide to Turkish, and a list of modern Turkish novels in English translation, preparing readers to embark on further exploration.

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Book SynopsisThis book is a unique scholarly attempt to examine Don Quixote from multiple angles to see how the re-accentuation of the world’s greatest literary hero takes place in film, theatre, and literature. To accomplish this task, eighteen scholars from the USA, Canada, Spain, and Great Britain have come together, and each of them has brought his/her unique perspective to the subject. For the first time, Don Quixote is discussed from the point of re-accentuation, i.e. having in mind one of the key Bakhtinian concepts that will serve as a theoretical framework. A primary objective was therefore to articulate, relying on the concept of re-accentuation, that the history of the novel has benefited enormously from the re-accentuation of Don Quixote helping us to shape countless iconic novels from the eighteenth century, and to see how Cervantes’s title character has been reinterpreted to suit the needs of a variety of cultures across time and space.Trade ReviewThe 17 essays in this volume, which also includes an introduction by Gratchev (Marshall Univ.) and Mancing (Purdue Univ.), take as their point of departure the concept of re-accentuation, initially proposed by Mikhail Bakhtin in The Dialogic Imagination (1975; Eng. tr., 1981). The interpretive and analytical openness of key works of prose fiction allow for re-reading and re-imagination in subsequent ages and through different media and approaches. In particular cases, the possibilities seem infinite. A primary example for Bakhtin was Cervantes’s Don Quixote and its eponymous protagonist. The present collection is divided into sections on imagery and ideology, literature, film, and theater and television. The great majority of the contributors are academics (in various fields), but one is a professional puppeteer and another a marketing consultant. A special pleasure of this text lies in the diversity of references and juxtapositions: Doré, Dalí, Fielding, Unamuno, Borges, Thomas Mann, Waldo Salt, Kathy Acker, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the Chinese director Ah Gan, Orhan Pamuk, multiple Russian connections, and so on. The essays are intriguing in their range and methodologies, and they become testaments to the afterlife—what Bakhtin termed the “unfinalizability”—of Don Quixote in both public and artistic spheres. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. * CHOICE *Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction by Howard Mancing and Slav N. Gratchev Part I: Re-accentuation: Theoretical Introduction Chapter I: On Re-accentuation, Adaptation, and Imitation of Don Quixote by Tatevik Gyulamiryan Part II: Imagery and Ideology Chapter 2: Don Quixote Re-depicted by Eduardo Urbina & Fernando González Moreno Chapter 3: Don Quixote in the Rise of Modern Novel: The Satirical Interpretation by Emilio Martínez Mata Chapter 4: Don Quixote and the Chivalric Ideal in Classics Illustrated Comics (1941-1971) by Ricardo Castells Chapter 5: A Horse of a Different Color: Salvador Dalí and the Re-imagining of Clavileño by S. Alleyn Smythe Chapter 5: Image not Found: Portraiture, Identity, and the future of Cervantismo by Stephen Hessel Part III: Literature Chapter 6: Borges and the Hermeneutics of the Novel by J. A. Garrido Ardila Chapter 7: World War and the Novel: Responding to Don Quixote in 1914 and 1934 by Rachel Schmidt Chapter 8: The Don Quixotes of Science Fiction by Howard Mancing Part IV: Film Chapter 9: The Art of re-accentuation: Don Quixote by Grigori Kozintsev by Slav N. Gratchev Chapter 10: Surviving the Hollywood Blacklist: Waldo Salt's adaptation of Don Quixote by William Childers Chapter 11: Crouching Squire, Hidden Madman: Ah Gan’s Don Quixote and Postmodern China by Bruce Burningham Chapter 12: Amélie as Re-accentuation of Cervantes by Jonathan Wade Chapter 13: Extracting the Essence of Don Quixote for a Puppet film by Steven Ritz-Barr Part V: Theater and Television Chapter 14: The Spanish Knight Among the Soviet People: Dramatic Re-accentuations of Don Quixote as a Doomed Performer by Margarita Marinova & Scott Pollard Chapter 15: A Russian Lancelot and His Don Quixote by Victor Fet Part VI: Don Quixote in The New World Chapter 16: The Visionary’s Quixote by Roy H. Williams Bibliography Index About the Editors

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Book SynopsisBaudelaire's work entered China in the twentieth century amidst political and social upheavals accompanied by a "literary revolution" that called for classical models and modes of expression to be replaced by vernacular language and contemporary content. Chinese writers welcomed their meeting with the West and openly embraced Western literature as providing models in developing their "new" literature. Baudelaire's reception in China provides a representative study of this "meeting of East and west." His work, which has been declared to stand between tradition and modernity, also lies at the intersection between classical and modern literature in China. Many of the best known and most highly regarded writers in twentieth-century China were drawn to Baudelaire's work, and some addressed it directly in their own writings. Bien draws upon H.R. Jauss's theory of the shifting and expanding horizons of expectation in the reading and interpretation of a literary work, and upon James J.Y. Lin's notion of "worlds" received and created by both author and reader, to show how poetic lines, images, and ideas, as well as Chinese critics' comments, eventually weave into a rich picture of Baudelaire's reception in China.Table of ContentsContents Introduction Part I. The Critical Reception Chapter 1. Baudelaire and Traditional Chinese Poetry Chapter 2. Horizons Chapter 3. Baudelaire in Chinese Translation Chapter 4. Baudelaire in Chinese Literary Criticism Part II. The Creative Response Chapter 5. Lu Xun & Xu Zhimo Chapter 6. The Decadents Chapter 7. Chinese Symbolists Chapter 8. From Symbolism to Modernism Chapter 9. Other comparisons Summary and Conclusions Appendix 1 Appendix 2 Appendix 3 Works cited – English and French Works cited—Chinese About the Author Index

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Book SynopsisCourtney Love has never been less than notorious. Her intelligence, ambition and appetite for confrontation have made her a target in a music industry still dominated by men. As Kurt Cobain's wife she was derided as an opportunistic groupie; as his widow she is pitied, and scorned, as the madwoman in rock's attic. Yet Hole's second album, Live Through This, awoke a feminist consciousness in a generation of young listeners. Live Through This arrived in 1994, at a tumultuous point in the history of American music. Three years earlier Nirvana's Nevermind had broken open the punk underground, and the first issue of a zine called Riot Grrrl had been published. Hole were of this context and yet outside of it: too famous for the strict punk ethics of riotgrrrl, too explicitly feminist to be the world's biggest rock band. Live Through This is an album about girlhood and motherhood; desire and disgust; self-destruction and survival. There have been few rock albums before or since so intimately concerned with female experience. It is an album that changed lives – so why is Courtney Love’s achievement as a songwriter and musician still not taken seriously, two decades on?Trade ReviewWhile many may not admit to it immediately, it's probably a safe bet that your average rock fan from the ’90s keeps Hole's Live Through This in their collection. And why not? … The immensely successful 33 1/3 series from Bloomsbury examines the album track-by-track through the eyes of writer Anwen Crawford (The Monthly), giving both a historical frame of mind to the album, as well as deconstructing the themes behind seven tracks … If you haven't had a chance to experience this album, give it a listen, then give this book a read, and then give the album a second shot … it will definitely give you an appreciation for what Hole was trying to make and the impact they had on grunge. -- Gavin Sheehan * SLUG Magazine *Crawford's book in the 33 1/3 series about Hole's Live Through This is passionate, thoughtful, empathetic and well-argued, an explanation of what the album meant to smart suburban teenagers trying to figure out where they fit into the world. -- Tim Byron * The Vine *This book made me care about an artist I had long ago written off. Yes, Courtney Love has pretty much retired from making meaningful music, but for Anwen Crawford, an Australian journalist and critic, that only makes Hole’s 1994 album Live Through This all the more compelling. As she chronicles the decisions that produced the band’s grunge-era breakthrough—which was released just days after Kurt Cobain’s suicide—Crawford writes movingly about the effect these songs had on herself and on other women around the world … In that regard, the album’s anger and ferocious self-determination haven’t diminished in two decades. -- Stephen M. Deusner * Pitchfork *Table of ContentsAcknowledgements 1. Violet 2. Miss World 3. Asking for It 4. Credit in the Straight World 5. Softer, Softest 6. I Think That I Would Die 7. Rock Star Notes Bibliography

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Book SynopsisPrint culture expanded significantly in the nineteenth century due to new print technologies and more efficient distribution methods, providing literary critics, who were alternately celebrated and reviled, with an ever-increasing number of venues to publish their work. Adam Gordon embraces the multiplicity of critique in the period from 1830 to 1860 by exploring the critical forms that emerged. Prophets, Publicists, and Parasites is organized around these sometimes chaotic and often generative forms and their most famous practitioners: Edgar Allan Poe and the magazine review; Ralph Waldo Emerson and the quarterly essay; Rufus Wilmot Griswold and the literary anthology; Margaret Fuller and the newspaper book review; and Frederick Douglass's editorial repurposing of criticism from other sources. Revealing the many and frequently competing uses of criticism beyond evaluation and aesthetics, this insightful study offers a new vision of antebellum criticism, a new model of critical history, and a powerful argument for the centrality of literary criticism to modern life.

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Book SynopsisThis volume celebrates the literary oeuvres of David Shrayer-Petrov—poet, fiction writer, memoirist, essayist and literary translator (and medical doctor and researcher in his parallel career). Author of the refusenik novel Doctor Levitin, Shrayer-Petrov is one of the most important representatives of Jewish-Russian literature. Published in the year of Shrayer-Petrov's eighty-fifth birthday, thirty-five years after the writer's emigration from the former USSR, this is the first volume to gather materials and investigations that examine his writings from various literary-historical and theoretical perspectives. By focusing on many different aspects of Shrayer-Petrov's multifaceted and eventful literary career, the volume brings together some of the leading American, European, Israeli and Russian scholars of Jewish poetics, exilic literature, and Russian and Soviet culture and history. In addition to fifteen essays and an extensive interview with Shrayer-Petrov, the volume features a detailed bibliography and a pictorial biography.

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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