This project is a feminist study of the idiosyncratic oeuvre of Kathy Acker and how her unique art and politics, located at the explosive intersection of punk, postmodernism, and feminism, critiques and exemplifies late twentieth-century capitalism. There is no female or feminist writer like Kathy Acker (and probably no male either). Her body of work-nine novels, novellas, essays, reviews, poetry, and film scripts, published in a period spanning the 1970s to the mid 1990s-is the most developed body of contemporary feminist postmodernist work and of the punk aesthetic in a literary form. Some 20 years after her death, Kathy Acker: Punk Writer gives a detailed and comprehensive analysis of how Acker melds the philosophy and poetics of the European avant-garde with the vernacular and ethos of her punk subculture to voice an idiosyncratic feminist radical politics in literary form: a punk feminism. With its aesthetics of shock, transgression, parody, Debordian detournement, caricature, and montage, her oeuvre reimagines the fin-de-siecle United States as a schlock horror film for her punk girl protagonist: Acker's cipher for herself and other rebellious and nonconformist women. This approach will allow the reader to more fully understand Acker as a writer who inhabits an explosive and creative nexus of contemporary women's writing, punk culture, and punk feminism's reimagining of late capitalism. This vital work will be an important text at both undergraduate and graduate levels in gender and women's studies, postmodern studies, and twentieth-century American literature.

Following the spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences, Spatial Literary Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Space, Geography, and the Imagination offers a wide range of essays that reframe or transform contemporary criticism by focusing attention, in various ways, on the dynamic relations among space, place, and literature. These essays reflect upon the representation of space and place, whether in the real world, in imaginary universes, or in those hybrid zones where fiction meets reality. Working within or alongside related approaches, such as geocriticism, literary geography, and the spatial humanities, these essays examine the relationship between literary spatiality and different genres or media, such as film or television. The contributors to Spatial Literary Studies draw upon diverse critical and theoretical traditions in disclosing, analyzing, and exploring the significance of space, place, and mapping in literature and in the world, thus making new textual geographies and literary cartographies possible.

A welcome addition to the "Routledge Critical Thinkers" series, "Judith Butler" is the first guidebook on this renowned feminist and queer theory scholar, which will help not only students of literary criticism but also students of law, sociology, philosophy, film and cultural studies. Examining Butler's work through a variety of contexts, including the formation of gender performativity, identity and subjecthood, Sarah Salih address Butler's crucial ideas on the gender agenda, the body, pornography, race, gay self-expression and power and psychoanalysis. Concluding with an annotated bibliography, this book will be the ideal starting point for all new to Butler.

Narrative Machine: The Naturalist, Modernist, and Postmodernist Novel advances a new history of the novel, identifying a crucial link between narrative innovation and the historical process of mechanization. In the late nineteenth century, the novel grapples with a new and increasingly acute problem: In its attempt to represent the colossal power of modern machinery-the steam-driven machines of the Industrial Revolution, the electrical machines of the modern city, and the atomic and digital machines developed after the Second World War-it encounters the limitations of traditional representative strategies. Beginning in the naturalist novel, the machine is typically portrayed as a mythic monster, and though that monster represents a potentially horrific reality-the superhuman power of mechanization-it also disrupts the documentary objectives of narrative realism (the dominant mode of nineteenth-century fiction). The mechanical monster, realistic and yet at odds with traditional realist strategies, tears the form of the novel apart. In doing so, it unleashes a series of innovations that disclose, critique, and contest the force of mechanization: the innovations associated with literary naturalism, modernism, and postmodernism.

California and the Melancholic American Identity in Joan Didion's Novels: Exiled from Eden focuses on the concept of Californian identity in the fiction of Joan Didion. This identity is understood as melancholic, in the sense that the critics following the tradition of both Sigmund Freud and Walter Benjamin use the word. The book traces the progress of the way Californian identity is portrayed in Joan Didion's novels, starting with the first two in which California plays the central role, Run River and Play It As It Lays, through A Book of Common Prayer to Democracy and The Last Thing He Wanted, where California functions only as a distant point of reference, receding to the background of Didion's interests. Curiously enough, Didion presents Californian history as a history of white settlement, disregarding whole chapters of the history of the region in which the Californios and Native Americans, among other groups, played a crucial role: it is this reticence that the monograph sees as the main problem of Didion's fiction and presents it as the silent center of gravity in Didion's oeuvre. The monograph proposes to see the melancholy expressed by Didion's fiction organized into four losses: of Nature, History, Ethics, and Language; around which the main analytical chapters are constructed. What remains unrepresented and silenced comes back to haunt Didion's fiction, and it results in a melancholic portrayal of California and its identity - which is the central theme this monograph addresses.

This volume explores the genre of the historical novel and the variety of ways in which writers choose to represent the past. How does an author's nationality or gender impact their artistic choices? To what extent can historical novels appeal to a transnational audience? This study demonstrates how histories can communicate across national borders, often by invoking or deconstructing the very notion of nationhood. Furthermore, it traces how the concerns of the postmodern era, such as postmodern critiques of historiography, colonialism, identity, and the Enlightenment, have impacted the genre of the historical novel, and shows this impact has not been uniform throughout Western culture. Not all historical novels written during the postmodern era are postmodern. The historical novel as a genre occupies a problematic, yet significant space in Cold War literary currents, torn between claims of authenticity and the impossibility of accessing the past. Historical novels from England, America, Germany, and France are compared and contrasted with historical novels from Sweden, testing a variety of theoretical perspectives in the process. This pitting of a center against a periphery serves to highlight traits that historical novels from the West have in common, but also how they differ. The historical novel is not just a local, regional phenomenon, but has become, during the postmodern era, a transnational tool for exploring how we should think of nations and nationalism and what a society should, or should not, look like.

Taking a fresh look at the state of autobiography as a genre, The Phenomenology of Autobiography: Making it Real takes a deep dive into the experience of the reader. Dr. Schmitt argues that current trends in the field of life writing have taken the focus away from the text and the initial purpose of autobiography as a means for the author to communicate with a reader and narrate an experience. The study puts autobiography back into a communicational context, and putting forth the notion that one of the reasons why life writing can so often be aesthetically unsatisfactory, or difficult to distinguish from novels, is because it should not be considered as a literary genre, but as a modality with radically different rules and means of evaluation. In other words, not only is autobiography radically different from fiction due to its referentiality, but, first and foremost, it should be read differently.

The argument has been made that memoir reflects and augments the narcissistic tendencies of our neo-liberal age. Mediating Memory: Tracing the Limits of Memoir challenges and dismantles that assumption. Focusing on the history, theory and practice of memoir writing, editors Bunty Avieson, Fiona Giles and Sue Joseph provide a thorough and cutting-edge examination of memoir through the lenses of ethics, practice and innovation. By investigating memoir across cultural boundaries, in its various guises, and tracing its limits, the editors convincingly demonstrate the plurality of ways in which memoir is helping us make sense of who we are, who we were and the influences that shape us along the way.

Shame and Modern Writing seeks to uncover the presence of shame in and across a vast array of modern writing modalities. This interdisciplinary volume includes essays from distinguished and emergent scholars in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and shorter practice-based reflections from poets and clinical writers. It serves as a timely reflection of shame as presented in modern writing, giving added attention to engagements on race, gender, and the question of new media representation.

This book investigates the clash between social uniformity and personal anomalies as a key to understanding the functions of laughter in four major Italian authors from the early twentieth century, highlighting some essential differences between traditional realism and modernism.

Using the aesthetic and political concerns of Parry's oeuvre as a touchstone, this book explores new directions for postcolonial studies, Marxist literary criticism, and world literature in the contemporary moment, seeking to re-imagine the field, and alongside it, new possibilities for left critique. It is the first volume of essays focusing on the field-defining intellectual legacy of the literary scholar Benita Parry. As a leading critic of the post-structuralist turn within postcolonial studies, Parry has not only brought Marxism and postcolonial theory into a productive, albeit tense, dialogue, but has reinvigorated the field by bringing critical questions of resistance and struggle to bear on aesthetic forms. The book's aim is two-fold: first, to evaluate Parry's formative influence within postcolonial studies and its interface with Marxist literary criticism, and second, to explore new terrains of scholarship opened up by Parry's work. It provides a critical overview of Parry's key interventions, such as her contributions to colonial discourse theory; her debate with Spivak on subaltern consciousness and representation; her critique of post-apartheid reconciliation and neoliberalism in South Africa; her materialist critique of writers such as Kipling, Conrad, and Salih; her work on liberation theory, resistance, and radical agency; as well as more recent work on the aesthetics of "peripheral modernity." The volume contains cutting-edge work on peripheral aesthetics, the world-literary system, critiques of global capitalism and capitalist modernity, and the resurgence of Marxism, communism, and liberation theory by a range of established and new scholars who represent a dissident and new school of thought within postcolonial studies more generally. It concludes with the first-ever detailed interview with Benita Parry about her activism, political commitments, and her life and work as a scholar.

Judge for Yourself guides interested and advanced-level readers through the challenge of judging the quality of hyper-contemporary literature. Whether reading the latest bestseller or the book that everyone is recommending, Judge for Yourself guides you through the challenge of the text. Reading the longlist of the 2019 International Dylan Thomas Prize through five chapters, Judge for Yourself introduces readers to current critical debates that inform engagement and the reading experience of hyper-contemporary writing. Topics covered include feminism, postcolonialism, critical race theory, queer theory, class, and book reviews. Each chapter includes introductory questions for the reader, and Judge for Yourself is accompanied by an exploration of book prize culture and the challenge posed by hyper-contemporary literature. Judge for Yourself puts judging firmly in the hands of the reader, and not the academic or professional reviewers.

Judge for Yourself guides interested and advanced-level readers through the challenge of judging the quality of hyper-contemporary literature. Whether reading the latest bestseller or the book that everyone is recommending, Judge for Yourself guides you through the challenge of the text. Reading the longlist of the 2019 International Dylan Thomas Prize through five chapters, Judge for Yourself introduces readers to current critical debates that inform engagement and the reading experience of hyper-contemporary writing. Topics covered include feminism, postcolonialism, critical race theory, queer theory, class, and book reviews. Each chapter includes introductory questions for the reader, and Judge for Yourself is accompanied by an exploration of book prize culture and the challenge posed by hyper-contemporary literature. Judge for Yourself puts judging firmly in the hands of the reader, and not the academic or professional reviewers.

close reading of key canonical modernist authors to reveal new insights into how female sexuality is constructed

Peril and Protection in British Courtship Novels: A Study in Continuity and Change explores the use and context of danger/safety language in British courtship novels published between 1719 and 1920. The term "courtship novel" encompasses works focusing on both female and male protagonists' journeys toward marriage, as well as those reflecting the intertwined nature of comic courtship and tragic seduction scenarios. Through careful tracking of peril and protection terms and imagery within the works of widely-read, influential authors, Professor Chavis provides a fresh view of the complex ways that the British novel has both maintained the status quo and embodied cultural change. Lucid discussions of each novel, arranged in chronological order, shed new light on major characters' preoccupations, values, internal struggles, and inter-actional styles and demonstrate the ways in which gender ideology and social norms governing male-female relationships were not only perpetuated but also challenged and satirized during the course of the British novel's development. Blending close textual analysis with historical/cultural and feminist criticism, this multi-faceted study invites readers to look with both a microscopic lens at the nuances of figurative and literal language and a telescopic lens at the ways in which modifications to views of masculinity and femininity and interactions within the courtship arena inform the novel genre's evolution.

Discussion concerning the 'musicality' of Samuel Beckett's writing now constitutes a familiar critical trope in Beckett Studies, one that continues to be informed by the still-emerging evidence of Beckett's engagement with music throughout his personal and literary life, and by the ongoing interest of musicians in Beckett's work. In Beckett's drama and prose writings, the relationship with music plays out in implicit and explicit ways. Several of his works incorporate canonical music by composers such as Schubert and Beethoven. Other works integrate music as a compositional element, in dialogue or tension with text and image, while others adopt rhythm, repetition and pause to the extent that the texts themselves appear to be 'scored'. But what, precisely, does it mean to say that a piece of prose or writing for theatre, radio or screen, is 'musical'? The essays included in this book explore a number of ways in which Beckett's writings engage with and are engaged by musicality, discussing familiar and less familiar works by Beckett in detail. Ranging from the scholarly to the personal in their respective modes of response, and informed by approaches from performance and musicology, literary studies, philosophy, musical composition and creative practice, these essays provide a critical examination of the ways we might comprehend musicality as a definitive and often overlooked attribute throughout Beckett's work.

This book fills a gap in the field of contemporary trauma studies by interrogating the relevance of trauma for African literatures. Kurtz argues that a thoughtful application of trauma theory in relation to African literatures is in fact a productive exercise, and furthermore that the benefits of this exercise include not only what it can do for African literature, but also what it can do for trauma studies. He makes the case for understanding trauma healing within the larger project of peacebuilding, with an emphasis on the transformative potential of what he terms the African moral imagination as embodied in the creative work of its writers. He offers readings of selected works by Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Chimamanda Adichie, and Nuruddin Farah as case studies for how African literature can influence our understanding of trauma and trauma healing. This will be a valuable volume for those with interests in current trends and developments in trauma studies, African literary studies, postcolonial studies, and memory studies.

This original volume examines the collaboration between East Timorese and international staff in the rebuilding of the education sector during the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) 1999-2002. Using interviews, contemporary newspaper articles and reports from UN sources and the World Bank, the book enables a comprehensive analysis of Timorese agency. Examining choices made by the Timorese and drawing comparison with other former Portuguese colonies, the text considers the power of the Timorese elite, the role of nepotism and corruption, the preservation of the Indonesian curriculum and the selection of Portuguese as the medium of instruction and official language - together with Tetum. Concluding with a contemporary discussion on the educational achievements for East Timorese children during UNTAET compared with those of today, Rebuilding the Education Sector in East Timor during UNTAET will be of interest to academics, researchers and post-graduate students in the fields of post-conflict studies, post-colonial education and language policy as well as East Timor more specifically. This book will also benefit graduate students and scholars in teacher education. Trina Supit completed her PhD at the University of Sydney, Australia. She was a member of the UNTAET Division of Education.

An incisive demonstration of how Orwell's body of work was defined by the four major conflicts that punctuated his life: World War I, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the Cold War. Few English writers wielded a pen so sharply as George Orwell, the quintessential political writer of the twentieth century. His literary output at once responded to and sought to influence the tumultuous times in which he lived-decades during which Europe and eventually the entire world would be torn apart by war, while ideologies like fascism, socialism, and communism changed the stakes of global politics. In this study, Stanford historian and lifelong Orwell scholar Peter Stansky incisively demonstrates how Orwell's body of work was defined by the four major conflicts that punctuated his life: World War I, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the Cold War. Young Orwell came of age against the backdrop of the First World War, and published his final book, Nineteen Eighty-Four, nearly half a century later, at the outset of the Cold War. The intervening three decades of Orwell's life were marked by radical shifts in his personal politics: briefly a staunch pacifist, he was finally a fully committed socialist following his involvement in the Spanish Civil War. But just before the outbreak of World War II, he had adopted a strong anti-pacifist position, stating that to be a pacifist was equivalent to being pro-Fascist. By carefully combing through Orwell's published works, notably "My Country Right or Left," The Lion and the Unicorn, Animal Farm, and his most dystopian and prescient novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, Stansky teases apart Orwell's often paradoxical views on patriotism and socialism. The Socialist Patriot is ultimately an attempt to reconcile the apparent contradictions between Orwell's commitment to socialist ideals and his sharp critique of totalitarianism by demonstrating the centrality of his wartime experiences, giving twenty-first century readers greater insight into the inner world of one of the most influential writers of the modern age.

This book is a comprehensive critical re-reading of Nayantara Sahgal's oeuvre. One of the most significant Indian English writers, her fictional and non-fictional engagement with historical events and political dilemmas inextricably links her to the colonial, anti-colonial and post-colonial discourse in India. Drawing transcontinental connections with the ideas of Fanon, Foucault, Said, Beauvoir, White, Beck and Habermas the monograph juxtaposes recurring themes in her writing with the ideas of significant Indian post-colonial commentators. Tracing the subliminal tendencies in her writing to Gandhian humanity and Nehruvian pragmaticism, the book moves beyond cliches of feminist criticism and genealogical ties to unveil a unique artist who has folded nearly a century of Indian experience in her work. Drawing on novels, essays, speeches, journalism and interviews by Nayantara Sahgal, this volume will be of great interest to scholars of South Asian literature, post-colonialism, politics and contemporary history/culture/change.

Historically, the Atlantic Ocean has served to define the relationship between the so-called worlds of the 'Old' and the 'New'. A geographical divide between continents, it is also no less a historical space across which peoples have travelled, sharing ideas and cultural practices, a site of encounter and exchange that has shaped the lives of communities and nations across the globe. This book maps this productive web of multi-layered connections, not just in terms of military, migratory, economic and commercial actions and processes, but also of shifting lines of translation that have mobilised ideas, fomented the exchange of experiences and opened up channels of communication. The Atlantic is considered here a global translation zone that has been created through a myriad of crossings, physical and conceptual, and historically shaped through the reciprocal influences between the different communities situated around and beyond its shores. In the final analysis, the book explores the Atlantic as a zone of created relation, characterised by the interaction between processes of translation, mobility and, in the best of cases, of hospitality; and most importantly, as a space no longer defined by economic and military power but by the multiplicity of identities forged in its ambit. This book will be of interest to scholars and advanced students of translation studies, literature, history, human geography, politics, sociology, and cultural studies. It was originally published as a special issue of the journal, Atlantic Studies.

Reflecting on the "clash of civilizations" as its point of departure, this book is based on a series of sixteen of the author's interconnected, thematically focused lectures and calls for new perspectives to resist imperialistic homogeneity. Situated within a neo-humanist context, the book applies interactive cognition from an Asian perspective within which China can be perceived as an essential "other," making it highly relevant in the quest for global solutions to the many grave issues facing mankind today. The author critiques American, European, and Chinese points of view; highlighting the significance of difference and the necessity of dialogue; before ultimately, rethinking the nature of world literature and putting forward interactive cognition as a means of "reconciliation" between cultures. Chinese culture, as a frame of reference endowed with traditions of "harmony without homogeneity", may help to alleviate global cultural confrontation and even reconstruct the understanding of human civilization. The book will be essential reading for scholars and students of Comparative Literature, Chinese Studies, and all those who are interested in cross-cultural communication and Chinese culture in general.

Examining a range of South Asian Anglophone diasporic fiction and poetry, this monograph opens a new dialogue between diaspora studies and gender studies. It shows how discourses of diaspora benefit from re-examining their own critical relation to concepts of the maternal and the motherland. Rather than considering maternity as a fixed or naturally given category, it challenges essentialist conceptions and explores mothering as a performative practice which actively produces discursive meaning. This innovative approach also involves an investigation of central metaphors in nationalist and diasporic rhetorics, bringing critical attention to the strategies they employ and the unique aesthetic forms they produce.

While much scholarly attention has focused on travel literature relating to T.E. Lawrence and Wilfred Thesiger, among other Arabian desert explorers, there has been little critical attention regarding the work of those who follow in their footsteps; by addressing that gap through the consideration of a range of texts between 1950 to the present day, this study illustrates for the benefit of those who study travel literature that Arabia and its inhabitants continue to occupy a place in the Western imagination, albeit nuanced by postcolonial debate and Arab modernities. Why do Western travellers continue to adopt Arab headwear and rope up reluctant camels when they could explore the Empty Quarter in a comfortable, air-conditioned 4x4 vehicle? This book answers that question by referring to key themes that are relevant not just to those with a scholarly interest in travel literature but to all those who have ever sensed the magic of open spaces. Covering concepts such as belatedness, authorial anxiety, dark tourism and the accelerated sublime, this book looks at contemporary literary concepts through the focused lens of Arabian desert travel; authored by a Lonely Planet writer, it acts as a guidebook to the kinds of ethical and emotional dilemma confronting today's travellers and tourists in the world's most extreme regions. In considering "where are the women" in Arabian desert literature, it soon becomes clear they have been systematically written out of male travel literature or relegated to a role of "pay, pack and follow": by including a particular focus, in a chapter on modern female desert explorers, on the traditional gendering of the desert and indeed throughout this book, some gender balance is restored to the genre. Recognising we live in the age of the Anthropocene, this book employs ecocriticism to explore the continuing magnetism of the deserts of Arabia as a context of human endeavour; it does so through analysis of travel writing that engages with the modern inhabitants of the desert space (both wild and urban) and through highlighting the quests of the secular pilgrims who are inspired by its borders and margins.

How does literature matter politically in the 21st century? This book offers an ecocritical framework for exploring the significance of literature today. Featuring a diverse body of texts and authors, it develops a future-oriented politics embedded in those transgressive realities which our political system finds impossible to tame. This book re-imagines political agency, voices, bodies and borders as transformative processes rather than rigid realities, articulating a 'dia-topian' literary politics. Taking a contextual approach, it addresses such urgent global issues as biopolitics, migration and borders, populism, climate change, and terrorism. These readings revitalize fictional worlds for political enquiry, demonstrating how imaginative literature seeds change in a world of closed-off horizons. Prior to the pragmatics of power-play, literary language breathes new energy into the frames of our thought and the shapes of our affects. This book shows how relation, metamorphosis and enmeshment can become salient in a politics beyond the conflict line.