The Routledge Companion to Humanism and Literature provides readers with a comprehensive reassessment of the value of humanism in an intellectual landscape. Offering contributions by leading international scholars, this volume seeks to define literature as a core expressive form and an essential constitutive element of newly reformulated understandings of humanism. While the value of humanism has recently been dominated by anti-humanist and post-humanist perspectives which focused on the flaws and exclusions of previous definitions of humanism, this volume examines the human problems, dilemmas, fears, and aspirations expressed in literature, as a fundamentally humanist art form and activity. Divided into three overarching categories, this companion will explore the histories, developments, debates, and contestations of humanism in literature, and deliver fresh definitions of "the new humanism" for the humanities. This focus aims to transcend the boundaries of a world in which human life is all too often defined in terms of restrictions-political, economic, theological, intellectual-and lived in terms of obedience, conformity, isolation, and fear. The Routledge Companion to Humanism and Literature will provide invaluable support to humanities students and scholars alike seeking to navigate the relevance and resilience of humanism across world cultures and literatures.

How does Toni Morrison create and form her literary places? As one of the first studies exploring Morrison's archived drafts, notes, and manuscripts together with her published novels, this book offers fresh insights into her creative processes. It analyses the author's textual choices, her writerly strategies, and her process of writing, all combining in shaping her literary places. In a methodology combining close reading and genetic criticism, the book examines Morrison's writing-her drafting and crafting-of her fictional places. Focusing primarily on the novels Beloved (1987), Paradise (1997), and A Mercy (2008), it analyses particular instances of written places, illuminating the manifold ways in which they are formed as text, and showing the centrality of the ideas of joining in Beloved, transformation in Paradise, and articulation in A Mercy. Toni Morrison is a major literary figure in contemporary literature, and is commonly considered one of the most influential American writers of the post-1960s era. Investigating the conjunction of her texts and manuscripts, this book continues, extends, and supplements the rich body of Morrison scholarship by illuminating how the genesis and formation of her multifaceted literary places constitute vital parts of her fictional writing.

The emergence of national education in France is often viewed as a struggle between spiritual and secular authorities, church and state. When one looks at the role of literature in education, however, a different picture appears. By assuming control over the teaching of French language and literature, the state claimed spiritual guardianship over the nation. The issue was therefore not so much of conflict between spiritual and secular forces, as the attempt by one institution to appropriate the spiritual authority of another. Situated at the intersection of history and literary criticism, this book casts new light on literary pedagogy, canon formation, and the relationship between culture and the modern French state.

Restoring the Human Context to Literary and Performance Studies argues that much of contemporary literary theory is still predicated, at least implicitly, on outdated linguistic and psychological models such as post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, and behaviorism, which significantly contradict current dominant scientific views. By contrast, this monograph promotes an alternative paradigm for literary studies, namely Contextualism, and in so doing highlights the similarities and differences among the sometimes-conflicting contemporary cognitive approaches to literature and performance, arguing not in favor of one over the other but for Contextualism as their common ground.

How does literature work? And what does it mean? How does it relate to the world: to politics, to history, to the environment? How do we analyse and interpret a literary text, paying attention to its specific poetic and fictitious qualities? This wide-ranging introduction helps students to explore these and many other essential questions in the study of literature, criticism and theory. In a series of introductory chapters, leading international scholars present the fundamental topics of literary studies through conceptual definitions as well as interpretative readings of works familiar from a range of world literary traditions. In an easy-to-navigate format, Literature: An Introduction to Theory and Analysis covers such topics as: *Key definitions - from plot, character and style to genre, trope and author *Literature's relationship to the surrounding world - ethics, politics, gender and nature *Modes of literature and criticism - from books to performance, from creative to critical writing With annotated reading guides throughout and a glossary of major critical schools to help students when studying, revising and writing essays, this is an essential introduction and reference guide to the study of literature at all levels. The companion website to the book litdh.au.dk focuses on digital humanities and literary studies. For each topic in the book you will find an introduction to computational aspects of the topic, approaches for both newcomers and advanced users, and references to tools, scripts and articles. The website also has a comprehensive and well-structured reference page.

Through close attention to the representation of the reader in 10 of Dickens novels, this study brings their specifically Victorian assumptions into direct confrontation with the insights of modern critical theory. In doing so, the study locates in Dickens a tendency to reanimate the ancient principle of mimesis that not only does the text become a mirror held up to its reader but, in a radical revision of our post-Saussurean understanding, language becomes not so much a decontructive system of differences as a reconstructive system of resemblances. In short, Schad is finally concerned with some new and quite mythical idea of language.

The Beginnings of University English: Extramural Study, 1885-1910 draws on previously unseen archival material to explore the innovative and scholarly ways in which English literature was taught to extramural students in England during the fin de siecle. It begins by tracing the development of the subject from 1650 onwards, before looking at the impassioned debates surrounding the introduction of English as an honours degree at Oxford and Cambridge in the 1880s and '90s. The book then examines exactly how the subject was taught in various non-university settings such as novel-reading unions, the University Extension Movement, and informal literary advice columns written by Arnold Bennett for a popular Edwardian newspaper. At a time when the future of the humanities feels increasingly uncertain, this book sheds new light on the modern roots of tertiary-level English teaching.

A pioneering text in its first edition, this revised publication of Cognitive Poetics offers a rigorous and principled approach to literary reading and analysis. The second edition of this seminal text features: * updated theory, frameworks, and examples throughout, including new explanations of literary meaning, the power of reading, literary force, and emotion; * extended examples of literary texts from Old English to contemporary literature, covering genres including religious, realist, romantic, science fictional, and surrealist texts, and encompassing poetry, prose, and drama; * new chapters on the mind-modelling of character, the building of text-worlds, the feeling of immersion and ambience, and the resonant power of emotion in literature; * fully updated and accessible accounts of Cognitive Grammar, deictic shifts, prototypicality, conceptual framing, and metaphor in literary reading. Encouraging the reader to adopt a fresh approach to understanding literature and literary analyses, each chapter introduces a different framework within cognitive poetics and relates it to a literary text. Accessibly written and reader-focused, the book invites further explorations either individually or within a classroom setting. This thoroughly revised edition of Cognitive Poetics includes an expanded further reading section and updated explorations and discussion points, making it essential reading for students on literary theory and stylistics courses, as well as a fundamental tool for those studying critical theory, linguistics, and literary studies.

This accessible and jargon-free book features readings of over 20 key texts and authors in Western poetry and philosophy, including Homer, Plato, Beowulf , Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare and Rousseau. Simon Haines presents a thought-provoking and theoretically aware account of Western literature and philosophy, arguing that the history of both can be seen as a struggle between two different conceptions of the self: the 'romantic' (or dualist) vs the 'realist' or ('extended').

This book rethinks the concept of community taking Jean-Luc Nancy's influential essay "La communaute desoeuvree" as its starting point, tracing subsequent scholarship on community and adding new insights on avant-garde aesthetics and politics. Extensively exploring the communitarian dimension of avant-garde aesthetics and politics (focusing on artistic groups, intellectual circles and theoretical collectives), the author aims to bring literature and art into a philosophical examination of the paradoxical and complex idea of community.

Mitchell Wilson explores the fundamental role that lack and desire play in psychoanalytic interpretation by using a comparative method that engages different psychoanalytic traditions: Lacanian, Bionian, Kleinian, Contemporary Freudian. Investigating crucial questions Wilson asks: What is the nature of the psychoanalytic process? How are desire and counter-transference linked? What is the relationship between desire, analytic action, and psychoanalytic ethics?

This is the 3rd volume in the definitive guide to Lacan's work in English; Lacan is very influential in the fields of psychoanalysis, literary criticism and cultural studies, but poorly understood; Lacanian psychoanalysis is the single biggest school of thought globally

Modern European literature has traditionally been seen as a series of attempts to assert successive styles of writing as 'new'. In this groundbreaking study, Ben Hutchinson argues that literary modernity can in fact be understood not as that which is new, but as that which is 'late'. Exploring the ways in which European literature repeatedly defines itself through a sense of senescence or epigonality, Hutchinson shows that the shifting manifestations of lateness since romanticism express modernity's continuing quest for legitimacy. With reference to a wide range of authors-from Mary Shelley, Chateaubriand, and Immermann, via Baudelaire, Henry James, and Nietzsche, to Valery, Djuna Barnes, and Adorno- he combines close readings of canonical texts with historical and theoretical comparisons of numerous national contexts. Out of this broad comparative sweep emerges a taxonomy of lateness, of the diverse ways in which modern writers can be understood, in the words of Nietzsche, as 'creatures facing backwards'. Ambitious and original, Lateness and Modern European Literature offers a significant new model for understanding literary modernity.

This volume offers original essays exploring what 'fictive narrative philosophy' might mean in the research and teaching of philosophy. The first part of the book presents theoretical essays that examine Boylan's recent books: Teaching Ethics with Three Philosophical Novels and Fictive Narrative Philosophy: How Literature can Act as Philosophy. The second and third part offer essays on how Boylan executes his theory in the practice within his novels from his two series De Anima and Arche. The book clearly shows the unique aspects of the fictive narrative philosophy approach. First, it makes story-telling accessible to wide audiences. Second, story-telling techniques invoke devices that can set out complicated existential problems to the reader that offer an additional approach to thorny problems through the presentation of lived experience. Third, the discussion of these devices is a way to explore philosophical problems in a way that many can profit from. The book concludes with an essay in which Boylan responds to the critical challenges set out in Part One and the practical criticism set out in Parts Two and Three. Boylan addresses the key claims made by his objectors and defends his position. He engages with the authors in the way his theory is matched against his actual novels. This is useful reading for both philosophers and professors of literature teaching introductory as well as upper-level courses in the fields of philosophy, literature and criticism.

C.G. Jung and Literary Theory remedies a significant omission in literary studies by doing for Jung and poststructuralist literary theories what has been achieved for Freud and Lacan. Offering radically new Jungian theories of deconstruction, feminism, the body, sexuality, spirituality, postcolonialism, reader-response, the book also investigates the controversial occult and fascist heritage of Jung. By using the work of Derrida, Kristeva and Irigaray and examining Jungian fiction, this book transforms modern literary theory in ways which simultaneously critique Jung's work.

In this elegant and personal new work, Michael P. Steinberg reflects on the story of Moses and the Exodus as a foundational myth of politics-of the formation not of a nation but of a political community grounded in universal law. Modern renderings of the story of Moses, from Michelangelo to Spinoza to Freud to Schoenberg to Derrida, have seized on the story's ambivalences, its critical and self-critical power. These literal returns form the first level of the afterlife of Moses. They spin a persistent critical and self-critical thread of European and transatlantic art and argument. And they enable the second strand of Steinberg's argument, namely the depersonalization of the Moses and Exodus story, its evolving abstraction and modulation into a varied modern history of political beginnings. Beginnings, as distinct from origins, are human and historical, writes Steinberg. Political constitutions, as a form of beginning, imply the eventuality of their own renewals and their own reconstitutions. Motivated in part by recent reactionary insurgencies in the US, Europe, and Israel, this astute work of intellectual history posits the critique of myths of origin as a key principle of democratic government, affect, and citizenship, of their endurance as well as their fragility.

The novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch and the painter Harry Weinberger engaged in over twenty years of close friendship and intellectual discourse, centred on sustained discussion of the practice, teaching and morality of art. This book presents a reappraisal of Murdoch's novels - chiefly, three mature novels, The Sea, The Sea (1978), Nuns and Soldiers (1980) and The Good Apprentice (1985), and two enigmatic late novels, The Green Knight (1993) and Jackson's Dilemma (1995) - which are perceived through the prism of her discourse with Weinberger. It draws on a run of almost 400 letters from Murdoch to Weinberger, and on Murdoch's philosophical writings, Weinberger's private writings, the remarks of both artists in interviews, and other material relating to their views on art and art history, much of which is unpublished and has received no previous critical attention. Scrutiny of their shared values, methods and the imagistic dialogue that takes place in their art provides original perspectives on Murdoch's creativity, and new ways of understanding her experimentation with the visual arts. This book offers a new line of enquiry into Murdoch's novels, and into the relationship between literature and the visual arts.

This Pivot traces the rise of the so-called "vegetarian" vampire in popular culture and contemporary vampire fiction, while also exploring how the shift in the diet of (some) vampires, from human to animal or synthetic blood, responds to a growing ecological awareness that is rapidly reshaping our understanding of relations with others species. The book introduces the trope of the vegetarian vampire, as well as important critical contexts for its discussion: the Anthropocene, food studies, and the modern practice, politics and ideologies of vegetarianism. Drawing on references to recent historical contexts and developments in the genre more broadly, the book investigates the vegetarian vampire's relationship to other more violent and monstrous forms of the vampire in popular twenty-first century horror cinema and television. Texts discussed include Interview with the Vampire, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Twilight, The Vampire Diaries and True Blood. Reading the Vegetarian Vampire examines a new aspect of contemporary interest in considering vampire fiction.

A captivating portrait of futurist artist Iliazd infused with the reflections of his accidental biographer on the stickiness of the genre. The poet Ilia Zdanevich, known in his professional life as Iliazd, began his career in the pre-Revolutionary artistic circles of Russian futurism. By the end of his life, he was the publisher of deluxe limited edition books in Paris. The recent subject of major exhibitions in Moscow, his native Tbilisi, New York, and other venues, the work of Iliazd has been prized by bibliophiles and collectors for its exquisite book design and innovative typography. Iliazd collaborated with many major figures of modern art-Pablo Picasso, Sonia Delaunay, Max Ernst, Joan Miro, Natalia Goncharova, and Mikhail Larionov, among others. His 1949 anthology, The Poetry of Unknown Words, was the first international anthology of experimental visual and sound poetry ever published. The list of contributors is a veritable "Who's Who" of avant-garde writing and visual art. And Iliazd's unique hands-on engagement with book production and design makes him the ideal case study for considering the book as a modern art form. Iliazd is the first full-length biography of the poet-publisher, as well as the first comprehensive English-language study of his life and work. Johanna Drucker weaves two stories together: the history of Iliazd's work as a modern artist and poet, and the narrative of the author's encounter with his widow and other figures in the process of researching his biography. Drucker's reflection on what a biographical project entails addresses questions about the relationship between documentary evidence and narrative, between contemporary witnesses and retrospective accounts. Ultimately, Drucker asks how we should understand the connection between the life of an artist and their work. Enriched with photographs from the Iliazd archive and a wealth of primary documents, the book is a vivid account of a unique contributor to modernism-and to the way we continue to reevaluate the history of twentieth-century culture. Accounts of Drucker's research during the mid-1980s in the personal archive of Madame Helene Zdanevich, the poet's widow, lend the narrative an incredible intimacy. Drucker recounts how, sitting in the studio that Iliazd occupied from the late 1930s until his death in 1975, she was drawn into the circle of scholars who had made him their focus and were doing foundational work on his significance. She also coped with the difference between the widow's view of the artist as a man she loved and Drucker's own perception of Iliazd's significance within a critical approach to history. Iliazd is at once a rich study of a significant figure and a thoughtful reflection on the way a biography creates an encounter with its always absent subject.

TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS is a series of books that open new perspectives in our understanding of language. The series publishes state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across theoretical frameworks, as well as studies that provide new insights by approaching language from an interdisciplinary perspective. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS considers itself a forum for cutting-edge research based on solid empirical data on language in its various manifestations, including sign languages. It regards linguistic variation in its synchronic and diachronic dimensions as well as in its social contexts as important sources of insight for a better understanding of the design of linguistic systems and the ecology and evolution of language. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS publishes monographs and outstanding dissertations as well as edited volumes, which provide the opportunity to address controversial topics from different empirical and theoretical viewpoints. High quality standards are ensured through anonymous reviewing.

The British Eighteenth Century and the Postcolonial Moment challenges reigning cliches about 'modernity'. It intervenes in debates within current literary theory by means of a close engagement with texts from the British eighteenth-century, viewing the latter as a resource for the contemporary postcolonial future. Indeed, rather than 'applying' postcolonial theory to eighteenth-century texts, the book instead refines postcolonial theory by using such eighteenth-century authors as Swift, Gay, Johnson, Sterne, and Equiano. The book will interest eighteenth-century scholars, historians of the Enlightenment, scholars of postcolonial fiction, and literary historians following in the wake of Michel Foucault and Edward Said.