For much of the 20th century the modernist city was articulated in terms of narratives of progress and development. Today the neoliberal city confronts us with all the cultural 'noise' of disorder and excess meaning. As this book demonstrates, for more than 40 years London-based writer, film-maker and 'psychogeographer' Iain Sinclair has proved to be one of the most incisive commentators on the contemporary city: tracing the emerging contours of a metropolis where the meeting of global and local is never without incident. Iain Sinclair: Noise, Neoliberalism and the Matter of London explores Sinclair's investigations into the nature of conflicting urban realities through an examination of the ways in which the noise of neoliberal excess intersects with the noise of literary experiment. In this way, the book casts new light on theorisations of the city in the contemporary era.

Jonathan Coe is one of the most popular and critically acclaimed contemporary British writers. This comprehensive introduction places his work in clear historical and theoretical context, offering extensive readings of the author's ten novels from The Accidental Woman to Expo 58, including the remarkable What a Carve Up! The book explores Coe's biography and his experimentations with narrative, genre and comedy, as well as his thematic preoccupations with history, memory, loss and nostalgia. The first volume devoted entirely to Coe, this book includes: - A supporting timeline of key dates in literature and current events - An examination of the critical reception to Coe's works - An exclusive interview with Jonathan Coe himself

In novels such as What A Carve Up! and The Rotters' Club, Jonathan Coe has established himself as one of the great satirical writers of our time. Covering all of his major novels, including his most recent book Number 11, Jonathan Coe: Contemporary British Satire includes chapters by leading and emerging scholars of contemporary British writing. The book features a preface by Coe himself and covers the ways in which his work grapples with such themes as class politics, popular music, sex, gender and the media.

This book offers a different, original approach to the work of Paul Auster, one of America's best-known contemporary authors. With a special focus on his films and collaborative projects, it explores the entangled relationships between his texts by reading them in largely posthumanist terms as a rhizomatic facto-fictional network produced by a set of writing tools. The book is a bold scholarly quest to follow the work of these few recurrent things in Auster's texts, which together assemble his emblematic writer-figure - the smoking, typewriting New York writer. This character, that resembles the empirical author himself, is what seems to work as both Auster's writing machine and the text being written. This book, then, is also an exploration of various writing tools (cigarettes, typewriters, doppelgangers, cityscapes) used by the writer, and the ways their metaphoric potencies work to produce texts and meanings. Taking the work of Auster as an illustrative case, this is, in a broader sense, a book about assembling texts and textual networks, the writing machines that produce them, and the ways that such machines invest them with meaning.This work is not only of critical investigation, but also of critical collaboration, as in the final chapter its author ends up tracing the pathways that Auster's characters mark in the spaces of New York, and confronts Paul Auster himself with a doubled version of him produced by this book.This raises not only questions about the ultimate meaning of Auster's work, but also, more generally, about the relationship between texts, their authors, their readers and their interpretive critics

This study proposes that - rather than trying to discern the normative value of Afropolitanism as an identificatory concept, politics, ethics or aesthetics - Afropolitanism may be best approached as a distinct historical and cultural moment, that is, a certain historical constellation that allows us to glimpse the shifting and multiple silhouettes which Africa, as signifier, as real and imagined locus, embodies in the globalized, yet predominantly Western, cultural landscape of the 21st century. As such, Making Black History looks at contemporary fictions of the African or Black Diaspora that have been written and received in the moment of Afropolitanism. Discursively, this moment is very much part of a diasporic conversation that takes place in the US and is thus informed by various negotiations of blackness, race, class, and cultural identity. Yet rather than interpreting Afropolitan literatures (merely) as a rejection of racial solidarity, as some commentators have, they should be read as ambivalent responses to post-racial discourses dominating the first decade of the 21st century, particularly in the US, which oscillate between moments of intense hope and acute disappointment. Please read our interview with Dominique Haensell here: https://blog.degruyter.com/de-gruyters-10th-open-access-book-anniversary-dominique-haensell-and-her-winning-title-making-black-history/

Exploring fiction, film and art from across the USA, South America, Asia, Europe and Australia, 'New Suburban Stories' brings together new research from leading international scholars to examine cultural representations of the suburbs, home to a rapidly increasing proportion of the world's population. Focusing in particular on works that challenge conventional attitudes to suburbia, the book considers how suburban communities have taken control of their own representation to tell their own stories in contemporary novels, poetry, autobiography, cinema, social media and public art.

Explores the confrontation between cultures and environments which are seen to limit and censure natural behaviour whilst at the same time imposing upon humankind unnecessary notions of sin and guilt. Analysis of her stories (especially 'Babette s Feast') and of her world view show how Karen Blixen maps out hostility to destiny -- this being a violation of Creation, which is viewed as both divine and demonic. Karen Blixen's works are explored in the light of a passionate insistence on living out a double nature of the divine and the demonic. The 'aristocratic' is examined as her depiction of a conduct of life that is faithful to destiny: the aristocratic viewpoint is in tune with eternity, and places no obstructive morality between self and life. Vitality has its source in direct access to the ocean of inexhaustible opportunities with which life presents us. The 'world' of Africa, for example, plays a key role as the consummate illustration of an aristocratic culture. The aesthetic guidelines for literary form (as well as art) as advocated by KB are discussed, and her view of art is similarly defined and explained as 'aristocratic'. Her private correspondence (including the recentl

Recent critical studies of late modernism have explored the changing sense of both history and artistic possibility that emerged in the years surrounding World War II. However, relatively little attention has been devoted to the impact of poets' theological deliberations on their visions of history and their poetic strategies. Divine Cartographies: God, History, and Poiesis in W. B. Yeats, David Jones, and T. S. Eliot triangulates key texts as attempts to map theologically driven visions of the relation between history and eternity. W. David Soud considers several poems of Yeats's final and most fruitful engagement with Indic traditions, Jones's The Anathemata, and Eliot's Four Quartets. For these three poets, working at the height of their powers, that project was inseparable from reflection on the relation between the individual self and God; it was also bound up with questions of theodicy, subjectivity, and the task of the poet in the midst of historical trauma. Drawing on the fields of Indology, theology, and history of religions as well as literary criticism, Soud explores in depth and detail how, in these texts, theology is poetics.

Contemporary debates on the role of religion in American public life ignore the overlap between religion and race in the formation of American democratic traditions and more often than not imagine democracy within the terrain of John Rawls's political liberalism. This kind of political liberalism, which focuses on political commitments at the expense of our religious beliefs, fosters the necessary conditions to open historically closed doors to black bodies, allows blacks to sit at the King's table and creates the necessary safeguards for black protest against discrimination within a constitutional democracy. By implication of its emphasis on rights and inclusion, political liberalism assumes that the presence of black bodies signifies the materialization of a robust American democracy. However, political liberalism discounts the historical role of religion in forming and fashioning the nation's construction of race. Tragic Soul-Life argues that the collision between religion and politics during U.S. slavery and segregation created the fragments from which emerged a firm but shifting moral disdain for blackness within the nation's collective moral imagination.
The very problem political liberals want to avoid, our comprehensive philosophy, is central to solving the political and economic problems facing blacks.

As a poet and literary critic, Thomas MacGreevy is a central force in Irish modernism and a crucial facilitator in the lives of key modernist writers and artists. The extent of his legacy and contribution to modernism is revealed for the first time in The Life and Work of Thomas MacGreevy. Split into four sections, the volume explains how and where MacGreevy made his impact: in his poetry; his role as a literary and art critic; during his time in Dublin, London and Paris and through his relationships with James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Wallace Stevens, Jack B Yeats and WB Yeats. With access to the Thomas MacGreevy Archive, contributors draw on letters, his early poetry, and contributions to art and literary journals, to better understand the first champion of Jack B. Yeats, and Beckett's chief correspondent and closest friend in the 1930s. This much-needed reappraisal of MacGreevy, the linchpin between the main modernist writers, fills missing gaps, not only in the story of Irish modernism, but in the wider history of the movement.

Despite the brevity of its run and the diminutive size of its audience, The English Intelligencer is a key publication in the history of literary modernism in the British Isles. Emerging in the mid-1960s from a dissatisfaction with the prevailing norms of 'Betjeman's England', the young writers associated with it were catalysed by the example of Donald Allen's The New American Poetry as they sought to establish a revitalised modernist poetics. Late Modernism and The English Intelligencer gives the first full account of the extraordinary history of this publication, bringing to light extensive new archival material to establish an authoritative contextualisation of its operation and its relationship with post-war British poetry. This material provides compelling new insights into the work of the Intelligencer poets themselves and, more broadly, the continued presence of an international poetic modernism as a vital force in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century.

James Joyce's 1916 novella A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is about the early manhood of Stephen Dedalus, later one of the leading characters in Ulysses. Stephen's growing self-awareness as an artist forces him to reject the whole narrow world in which he has been brought up, including family ties, nationalism, and the Catholic religion.

British Literature and Classical Music explores literary representations of classical music in early 20th century British writing. Covering authors ranging from T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf to Aldous Huxley, H.G. Wells and D.H. Lawrence, the book examines literature produced during a period of widely proliferating philosophical, educational, and performance-oriented musical activities in both public and private settings. David Deutsch demonstrates how this proliferation caused classical music to become an increasingly vital element of British culture and a vehicle for exploring contentious issues such as social mobility, sexual freedoms, and international political rivalries. Through the use of archives of concert programs, cult novels, and letters written during the First and Second World Wars, the book examines how authors both celebrated and satirized the musicality of the lower-middle and working classes, same-sex desiring individuals, and cosmopolitan promoters of a shared European culture to depict these groups as valuable members of and - less frequently as threats to - British life.

This is an examination of developments in contemporary narrative, placing them in the context of wider social, cultural and technological trends, using a case-study approach. "Contemporary Narrative" introduces key issues and trends in contemporary narrative studies. Taking a case study approach, it traces key narrative developments in the context of a range of theoretical approaches, including multimodality, multilingualism and transliteracy. It offers students of contemporary narrative an overview of the way in which twenty-first century narratives are constructed and the extent to which their construction depends on a range of social, cultural, linguistic and technological factors as well as on individual creativity and expressivity. The book brings together insights from narratology, semiotics, linguistics and translation studies and applies them to the issues raised by contemporary literary and cultural texts, particularly in relation to processes of adaptation, translation and transformation across modes and media. Highlighting the key features of contemporary narrative from a critical and analytic perspective, it also explores the close relationships between reading and writing and the critical and creative dimensions of text to reveal the creativity at work in a range of innovative contemporary narratives.

Jordan Cofer examines the influence of the Bible upon Flannery O'Connor's fiction. While there are many studies exploring how her Catholicism affected her fiction, this book argues that O'Connor is heavily influenced by the Bible itself. Specifically, it explicates the largely undocumented ways in which she used the Bible as source material for her work. It also shows that, rhetorically, many of O'Connor's stories (and/or characters) are based upon biblical models. Furthermore, Cofer explains how O'Connor's stories engage their biblical analogues in unusual, unexpected, and sometimes grotesque ways, as her stories manage to convey essentially the same message as their biblical counterparts. Throughout O'Connor's work there are significant biblical allusions which have been neglected or previously undiscovered. This book acknowledges her biblical source material so readers can understand the impact it had on her fiction. Cofer argues that readers can better appreciate her work by examining how her stories are often grounded in specific biblical texts, which she similarly distorts, exaggerates, and subverts, in order to shock and teach readers. Simply put, O'Connor doesn't merely reference these biblical stories, she rewrites them.

Since the development of British Aestheticism in the 1870s, the concept of irony has focused a series of anxieties which are integral to modern literary practice. Examining some of the most important debates in post-Romantic aesthetics through highly focused textual readings of authors from Walter Pater and Henry James to Samuel Beckett and Alan Hollinghurst, this study investigates the dialectical position of irony in Aestheticism and its twentieth-century afterlives.

Aesthetic Afterlives constructs a far-reaching theoretical narrative by positioning Victorian Aestheticism as the basis of Literary Modernity. Aestheticism's cultivation of irony and reflexive detachment was central to this legacy, but it was also the focus of its own self-critique. Anxieties about the concept and practice of irony persisted through Modernism, and have recently been positioned in Hollinghurst's work as a symptom of the political stasis within post-modern culture. Referring to the recent debates about the 'new aestheticism' and the politics of aesthetics, Eastham asks how a utopian Aestheticism can be reconstructed from the problematics of irony and aesthetic autonomy that haunted writers from Pater to Adorno.

Masculinity and the Paradox of Violence in American Fiction, 1950-75 explores the intersections of violence, masculinity, and racial and ethnic tension in America as it is depicted in the fiction of Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, James Baldwin, and Philip Roth. Maggie McKinley reconsiders the longstanding association between masculinity and violence, locating a problematic paradox within works by these writers: as each author figures violence as central to the establishment of a liberated masculine identity, the use of this violence often reaffirms many constricting and emasculating cultural myths and power structures that the authors and their protagonists are seeking to overturn.

Bringing together new accounts of the pulp horror writings of H.P. Lovecraft and the rise of the popular early 20th-century religious movements of American Pentecostalism and Social Gospel, Pentecostal Modernism challenges traditional histories of modernism as a secular avant-garde movement based in capital cities such as London or Paris. Disrupting accounts that separate religion from progressive social movements and mass culture, Stephen Shapiro and Philip Barnard construct a new Modernism belonging to a history of regional cities, new urban areas powered by the hopes and frustrations of recently urbanized populations seeking a better life. In this way, Pentecostal Modernism shows how this process of urbanization generates new cultural practices including the invention of religious traditions and mass-cultural forms.

In the aftermath of the September 11 terror attacks, the political situation in both the United States and abroad has often been described as a "state of exception": an emergency situation in which the normal rule of law is suspended. In such a situation, the need for good decisions is felt ever more strongly. This book investigates the aesthetics, ethics, and politics of various decisions represented in novels published around 9/11: Martel's Life of Pi, Eugenides' Middlesex, Coetzee's Disgrace, and Sebald's Austerlitz. De Boever's readings of the novels revolve around what he calls the aesthetic decision.' Which aesthetics do the characters and narrators in the novels adopt in a situation of crisis? How do these aesthetic decisions relate to the ethical and political decisions represented in the novels? What can they reveal about real-life ethical and political decisions? This book uncovers the politics of allegory, autobiography, focalization, and montage in today's planetary state of exception.

The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction attempts to descry the historical and cultural contours of SF in the wake of technoculture studies. Rather than treating the genre as an isolated aesthetic formation, it examines SF's many lines of cross-pollination with technocultural realities since its inception in the nineteenth century, showing how SF's unique history and subcultural identity has been constructed in ongoing dialogue with popular discourses of science and technology. The volume consists of four broadly themed sections, each divided into eleven chapters. Section I, "Science Fiction as Genre," considers the internal history of SF literature, examining its characteristic aesthetic and ideological modalities, its animating social and commercial institutions, and its relationship to other fantastic genres. Section II, "Science Fiction as Medium," presents a more diverse and ramified understanding of what constitutes the field as a mode of artistic and pop-cultural expression, canvassing extra-literary manifestations of SF ranging from film and television to videogames and hypertext to music and theme parks. Section III, "Science Fiction as Culture," examines the genre in relation to cultural issues and contexts that have influenced it and been influenced by it in turn, the goal being to see how SF has helped to constitute and define important (sub)cultural groupings, social movements, and historical developments during the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Finally, Section IV, "Science Fiction as Worldview," explores SF as a mode of thought and its intersection with other philosophies and large-scale perspectives on the world, from the Enlightenment to the present day.

Do you want a better understanding of the text? Do you want to know what the critics say? Do you want to know how to improve your grade? Whatever you want, York Notes can help. York Notes Advanced offers a fresh and accessible approach to English Literature. This market-leading series has been completely updated to meet the needs of today's A-level and undergraduate students. Written by established literature experts, York Notes Advanced introduce students to more sophisticated analysis, a range of critical perspectives and wider contexts. Key Features: Summaries with detailed commentaries Extended commentaries on key passages Discussion of themes and literary techniques Author biography Historical and literary background Check the net/film/book features Glossary of literary terms Self-test questions

Henry Green: Class, Style, and the Everyday offers a critical prism through which Green's fiction-from his earliest published short stories, as an Eton schoolboy, through to his last dialogic novels of the 1950s-can be seen as a coherent, subtle, and humorous critique of the tension between class, style, and realism in the first half of the twentieth century. The study extends on-going critical recognition that Green's work is central to the development of the novel from the twenties to the fifties, acting as a vital bridge between late modernist, inter-war, post-war, and postmodernist fiction. The overarching contention is that the shifting and destabilizing nature of Green's oeuvre sets up a predicament similar to that confronted by theorists of the everyday. Consequently, each chapter acknowledges the indeterminacy of the writing, whether it be: the non-singular functioning (or malfunctioning) of the name; the open-ended, purposefully ambiguous nature of its symbols; the shifting, cinematic nature of Green's prose style; the sensitive, but resolutely unsentimental depictions of the working-classes and the aristocracy in the inter-war period; the impact of war and its inconsistent irruptions into daily life; or the ways in which moments or events are rapidly subsumed back into the flux of the everyday, their impact left uncertain. Critics have, historically, offered up singular readings of Green's work, or focused on the poetic or recreative qualities of certain works, particularly those of the 1940s. Green's writing is, undoubtedly, poetic and extraordinary, but this book also pays attention to the cliched, meta-textual, and uneventful aspects of his fiction.

Michel Foucault continues to be regarded as one of the most essential thinkers of the twentieth century. A brilliantly evocative writer and conceptual creator, his influence is clearly discernible today across nearly every discipline-philosophy and history, certainly, as well as literary and critical theory, religious and social studies, and the arts. This volume exploits Foucault's insistent blurring of the self-imposed limits formed by the disciplines, with each author in this volume discovering in Foucault's work a model useful for challenging not only these divisions but developing a more fundamental interrogation of modernism. Foucault himself saw the calling into question of modernism to be the permanent task of his life's work, thereby opening a path for rethinking the social. Understanding Foucault, Understanding Modernism shows, on the one hand, that literature and the arts play a fundamental structural role in Foucault's works, while, on the other hand, it shifts to the foreground what it presumes to be motivating Foucault: the interrogation of the problem of modernism. To that end, even his most explicitly historical or strictly epistemological and methodological enquiries directly engage the problem of modernism through the works of writers and artists from de Sade, Mallarme, Baudelaire to Artaud, Manet, Borges, Roussel, and Bataille. This volume, therefore, adopts a transdisciplinary approach, as a way to establish connections between Foucault's thought and the aesthetic problems that emerge out of those specific literary and artistic works, methods, and styles designated "modern." The aim of this volume is to provide a resource for students and scholars not only in the fields of literature and philosophy, but as well those interested in the intersections of art and intellectual history, religious studies, and critical theory.

The author of such works as "Lamb, Cal, " and "Grace Notes," Bernard MacLaverty is one of Northern Ireland's leading--and most prolific--contemporary writers. Bringing together leading scholars from a full range of critical perspectives, this is a comprehensive survey of contemporary scholarship on MacLaverty. Covering all of his novels and many of his short stories, the book explores the ways in which the author has grappled with such themes as The Troubles, the Holocaust, Catholicism, and music. "Bernard MacLaverty: Critical Readings" also includes coverage of the film adaptations of his work.