Documents open up another an approach complementary to the overwhelming richness of literary tradition as preserved in manuscripts. This volume combines studies on Greek, Sogdian and Arabic documents (letters, legal agreements, and amulets) with studies on Arabic and Judeo-Arabic manuscripts (poetry, science and divination).

Maurice Blanchot is perhaps best known as a major French intellectual of the twentieth century: the man who countered Sartre's views on literature, who affirmed the work of Sade and Lautreamont, who gave eloquent voice to the generation of '68, and whose philosophical and literary work influenced the writing of, among others, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault. He is also regarded as one of the most acute narrative writers in France since Marcel Proust. In Clandestine Encounters, Kevin Hart has gathered together major literary critics in Britain, France, and the United States to engage with Blanchot's immense, fascinating, and difficult body of creative work. Hart's substantial introduction usefully places Blanchot as a significant contributor to the tradition of the French philosophical novel, beginning with Voltaire's Candide in 1759, and best known through the works of Sartre. Clandestine Encounters considers a selection of Blanchot's narrative writings over the course of almost sixty years, from stories written in the mid-1930s to L'instant de ma mort (1994). Collectively, the contributors' close readings of Blanchot's novels, recits, and stories illuminate the close relationship between philosophy and narrative in his work while underscoring the variety and complexity of these narratives. Contributors: Christophe Bident, Arthur Cools, Thomas S. Davis, Christopher Fynsk, Rodolphe Gasche, Kevin Hart, Leslie Hill, Michael Holland, Stephen E. Lewis, Vivian Liska, Caroline Sheaffer-Jones, Christopher A. Strathman, Alain Toumayan

Writing Ambition: Literary Engagements between Women in France analyzes pairs of women writing in French. Through examining pairs of writers, ranging from Colette and Anne de Pene to Nancy Huston and Leila Sebbar, Katharine Ann Jensen assesses how their literary ambitions affected their engagements with each other. Focused on the psychological aspects of the women's relationships, the author combines close readings of their works with attention to historical and biographical contexts to consider how and why one or both women in the pair express contradictory or anxious feelings about literary ambition.

While the world often categorizes women in reductive false binaries—careerist versus mother, feminine versus fierce—romance novels, a unique form of the love story, offer an imaginative space of mingled alternatives for a heroine on her journey to selfhood. In Creating Identity, Jayashree Kamblé examines the romance genre, with its sensile flexibility in retaining what audiences find desirable and discarding what is not, by asking an important question: "Who is the romance heroine, and what does she want?" To find the answer, Kamblé explores how heroines in ten novels reject societal labels and instead remake themselves on their own terms with their own agency. Using a truly intersectional approach, Kamblé combines gender and sexuality, Marxism, critical race theory, and literary criticism to survey various aspects of heroines' identities, such as sexuality, gender, work, citizenship, and race. Ideal for readers interested in gender studies and literary criticism, Creating Identity highlights a genre in which heroines do not accept that independence and strong, loving relationships are mutually exclusive but instead demand both, echoing the call from the very readers who have made this genre so popular.

In Public Works: Infrastructure, Irish Modernism, and the Postcolonial, Michael Rubenstein documents the relationship between Irish modernism and a restricted segment of the material culture of the modern state known colloquially as "public utilities" or "water, gas, and electricity." The water tap, the toilet, the gas jet, and the electrical light switch: these are all sites, in Irish modernism, of unexpected literary and linguistic intensities that burst through the routines of everyday life, defamiliarizing and reconceptualizing that which we might not normally consider worthy of literary attention. Such public utilities-material networks of power and provision, submission and entitlement-are taken up in Irish modernism not only as a nexus of anxieties about modern life, but also as a focal point for the hopes held out for the postcolonial Irish Free State. Public utilities figure a normative and utopian standard of modernity and modernization; they embody in Irish modernism and in other postcolonial literatures an ideal for the postcolonial state; and they figure a continuity between the material networks of the modern state and the abstract ideals of revolutionary republicanism (liberty, equality, and brotherhood). They define a new territory of contestation within the discourses of civil and human rights. Moreover, public utilities influence the formal qualities of both Irish modernist and postcolonial literature. In analyses of literary works by James Joyce, Flann O'Brien, Elizabeth Bowen, Denis Johnston, Samuel Beckett, and Patrick Chamoiseau, Rubenstein asks us to think about the industrial networks of the twentieth century alongside self-consciously "national" literary works and to understand them as different but inherently related forms of public works. In doing so his book maps thematic and formal relationships between national infrastructure and national literature, revealing an intimate dialogue between the nation's literary arts and the state's engineering cultures.