Traversing the themes of language, terror and representation, this is the first study to engage Coleridge through the sublime, showing him to have a compelling position in an ongoing conversation about finitude. Drawing on close readings of both his poetry and prose, it depicts Coleridge as a thinker of "the limit" with contemporary force.

Throughout the twentieth century, the realist novel has developed in idiosyncratic, heterodox and unruly forms. As many writers have recognized, the elaborate description and assured perspective of a Balzac or Eliot no longer suit the times: how can the description of a banana in a fruit basket tell us anything about the intricacies of conquest and exploitation that carried it halfway across the globe? Thus, the best contemporary realism employs linguistic and formal experimentation in its portrayal. Nicholas Robinette argues that a kind of realist backbeat structures the cacophony of perspectives, moods, philosophical excursions, and linguistic density of novels like Nuruddin Farah's Sweet and Sour Milk and George Lamming's The Emigrants. Realism, Form and the Postcolonial Novel recovers this underlying realism and shows how the postcolonial novel has employed formal experiment in order to map our social experience.

Life Writing in the Posthuman Anthropocene is a timely collection of insightful contributions that negotiate how the genre of life writing, traditionally tied to the human perspective and thus anthropocentric qua definition, can provide adequate perspectives for an age of ecological disasters and global climate change. The volume's eight chapters illustrate the aptness of life writing and life writing studies to critically reevaluate the role of "the human" vis-a-vis non-human others while remaining mindful of persisting inequalities between humans regarding who causes and who suffers damage in the Anthropocene age. The authors in this collection not only expand the toolbox of life writing studies by engaging with critical insights from the fields of posthumanism and ecocriticism, but, in turn, also enrich those fields by offering unique approaches to contemplate the responsibility of humans for as well as their relational existence in the posthuman Anthropocene.

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.

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.

Concentrating on W. H. Auden's work from the late 1930s, when he seeks to understand the poet's responsibility in the face of a triumphant fascism, to the late 1950s, when he discerns an irreconcilable "divorce" between poetry and history in light of industrialized murder, this startling new study reveals the intensity of the poet's struggles with the meanings of history. Through meticulous readings, significant archival findings, and critical reflection, Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb presents a new image and understanding of Auden's achievement and reveals how his version of modernism illuminates urgent contemporary issues and theoretical paradigms: from the meaning of marriage equality to the persistence of fascism; from critical theory to psychoanalysis; from precarity to postcolonial studies. "The muse does not like being forced to choose between Agit-prop and Mallarme," Auden writes with characteristic lucidity, and this study elucidates the probity, humor, and technical skill with which his responses to historical reality in the mid-twentieth century illuminate our world today.

Melanie L. Harris dives into the spirituality and life work of Alice Walker, literary genius and poet. Through the lens of Womanist ethics, Harris takes an inside look into the virtues and values that can be lifted from a study of Walker's non-fiction work. This work enlivens the debate in African and African American religious thought about the fluidity of spirituality and widens the conversation to encourage readers to embrace religious traditions inclusive of and beyond Christianity as the foundations for empowerment of both women and ethical values.

"Joseph Conrad and the Reader" is the first book fully devoted to Conrad's relation to the reader, visual theory and authorship. This challenging study proposes new approaches to modern literary criticism and deftly examines the limits of deconstructionist theories, introducing groundbreaking new theoretical concepts of reading and reception.

Understanding Merleau-Ponty, Understanding Modernism brings into dialogue Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology with modernist art, literature, music, film and neurophysiological discoveries, opening up the complexities of the philosopher's phenomenology of perception to a broader audience across the arts. An important resource for anyone interested in the links between modernism and philosophy, Understanding Merleau-Ponty, Understanding Modernism offers close readings of Merleau-Ponty's key texts, explores modernist works in light of his thought, and provides an extended glossary of Merleau-Ponty's central terms and concepts.

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.

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.

Post-Theories in Literary and Cultural Studies focuses on the shifting paradigms in literary and cultural studies. Prompted by the changes and problems on the global scale, the last two decades have seen a resurgence of scholarly interest in theories which are more embedded in the social realities and human condition. This volume shows that theory can reinvent theory and re-define criticism according to the demands of the new millennium. In this context, it examines new ways of considering the relation of post-theory to the concepts such as ethics, aesthetics, truth, value, authenticity, human, and reality to understand the mindset of the new century. Without disregarding or neglecting the legacy of "Theory," this volume presents the various suggestions and concerns of post-theoretical studies that reflect the sensibilities of the contemporary social and cultural life. It is a timely and relevant source of reference to those who wish to develop an understanding of this change of attitude in post-theoretical studies towards a more directly and sincerely responsive approach to the current problems worldwide, their representations in literature and language, reflections in theory, roots in socio-political domains, and effects on the material reality.

This collection explores the intersection of gender and mobility across the Global Middle Ages. Medieval Mobilities questions how medieval people, texts, images, and ideas move across physiological, geographical, literary, and spiritual boundaries. In what ways do these movements afford new configurations of gender, sexuality, and being? Enacting a dialogue between medieval studies, feminist thought, and queer theory, Medieval Mobilities proposes that attending to the undulations of premodern gender and sexuality may help destabilize unstated assumptions about ways of being and loving in the Middle Ages. This volume also brings together emergent and established scholars to challenge an increasingly static academy and instead envision a scholarly practice focused on intergenerational, international, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Drawing upon wide range of primary sources and theoretical frameworks, the resultant essays unsettle the imagined fixity of gender and propose alternative conceptualizations of embodiment, identity, and difference in the medieval world.

What happens if we read nineteenth-century and Victorian texts not for the autonomous liberal subject, but for singularity-for what is partial, contingent, and in relation, rather than what is merely "alone"? Feminine Singularity offers a powerful feminist theory of the subject-and shows us paths to thinking subjectivity, race, and gender anew in literature and in our wider social world. Through fresh, sophisticated readings of Lewis Carroll, Christina Rossetti, Charles Baudelaire, and Wilkie Collins in conversation with psychoanalysis, Black feminist and queer-of-color theory, and continental philosophy, Ronjaunee Chatterjee uncovers a lexicon of feminine singularity that manifests across poetry and prose through likeness and minimal difference, rather than individuality and identity. Reading for singularity shows us the ways femininity is fundamentally entangled with racial difference in the nineteenth century and well into the contemporary, as well as how rigid categories can be unsettled and upended. Grappling with the ongoing violence embedded in the Western liberal imaginary, Feminine Singularity invites readers to commune with the subversive potentials in nineteenth-century literature for thinking subjectivity today.

The Intermedial Experience of Horror: Suspended Failures is an exploration of the phenomenon of horror from an unusual angle. Whereas many past studies have concentrated either on establishing horror as a genre across the media or on observing horror as a catalogue of mental disturbances or collective cultural trauma, this book takes a different approach. Focusing on reading specific examples of literature from Romanticism to Modernism, the study brings together the phenomenon of horror with the topical concepts of experience and intermediality and highlights the complex relations they present. Horror is explored as an experience, one defined and brought into being by a break between the media of words and images. In literature, where images as such are frequently absent and the reader works from words alone, the experience of horror hinges on a suspended failure of the imagination.

This book offers a much needed reassessment of F.R. Leavis. Gary Day argues that post-structuralist theory has defined itself in opposition to Leavis when in fact there are certain parallels between the two types of criticism. Day also draws attention to the connections between Leavis's early work and the emergent discourses of consumerism and scientific management. In particular he notes how at the centre of each is an image of the body and he analyses what this means for Leavis's conception of reading. By situating Leavis in relation to the concerns of post-structuralism and by locating him firmly in his historical context, Day is able to chart how far criticism can justly claim to be oppositional. At the same time, Day is able to recuperate from Leavis's work a notion of value; a topic which is becoming increasingly important in literary and cultural studies today.

An interdisciplinary study of Victorian women of faith as portrayed in the fiction and non-fiction of the period. The book explores how novelists, biographers and other writers depicted religious women, with special reference to the influence of the ideal of the "Angel in the House" as embodied in Coventry Patmores's poem of that name. Among those whose worked is explored are George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Christina Rossetti, George Moore and Anne Brontë, as well as hymnwriters, missionary biographers, non-conformists obituarists and artists of the Aesthetic Movement.

Twentieth Century Literary Criticism is a major anthology of key representative works by fifty leading modern literary critics writing before the structuralist revolution. It is a companion volume to Modern Criticism and Theory (Longman 1988), also edited by David Lodge, which anthologises contemporary criticism as it has developed through structuralism and post-structuralist theory. Together these volumes provide the most comprehensive survey available of traditional and radical literary theory in action. The critics collected together in this volume have been drawn from England, America and Europe, and each essay has been prefaced by an editor's introduction which suggests the historical and methodological significance of the piece and gives bibliographical and biographical information. This writers collected are: M. H. Abrams, W. B. Yeats, Sigmund Freud,Henry James, Ezra Pound, T. S Eliot, Virginia Woolf, T.E. Hulme, I. A. Richards, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, William Empson, G. Wilson Hight, C. G. Jung, Maud Bodkin, Christopher Caudwell, L. C. Knights, John Crowe Ransom, Edmund Wilson, Paul Valery, D. W. Harding, Lionel Trilling, Cleanth Brooks, Yvor Wiinters, Erich Auerbach, W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, George Orwell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Mark Schorer, Francis Fergusson, Northrop Frye, C. S. Lewis, Leslie Fielder, Alain Robbe-Grillet, George Lukacs, Richard Hoggart, Walter J. Ong, Norman O. Brown, Ian Watt, Claude Levi-Strauss, Rene Welleck, Wayne Booth, Raymond Williams, R. S. Crane, Marshall McLuhan, George Steiner, Susan Sontag, W. H. Auden, Frank Kermode.

Ludwig Wittgenstein's brief Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) is one of the most important philosophical works of the twentieth century, yet it offers little orientation for the reader. The first-time reader is left wondering what it could be about, and the scholar is left with little guidance for interpretation. In Tractatus in Context, James C. Klagge presents the vital background necessary for appreciating Wittgenstein's gnomic masterpiece. Tractatus in Context contains the early reactions to the Tractatus, including the initial reviews written in 1922-1924. And while we can't talk with Wittgenstein, we can do the next best thing-hear what he had to say about the Tractatus. Klagge thus presents what Wittgenstein thought about germane issues leading up to his writing the book, in discussions and correspondence with others about his ideas, and what he had to say about the Tractatus after it was written-in letters, lectures and conversations. It offers, you might say, Wittgenstein's own commentary on the book. Key Features: Illuminates what is at stake in the Tractatus, by providing the views of others that engaged Wittgenstein as he was writing it. Includes Wittgenstein's earlier thoughts on ideas in the book as recorded in his notebooks, letters, and conversations as well as his later, retrospective comments on those ideas. Draws on new or little-known sources, such as Wittgenstein's coded notebooks, Hermine's notes, Frege's letters, Hansel's diary, Ramsey's notes, and Skinner's dictations. Draws connections between the background context and specific passages in the Tractatus, using a proposition-by-proposition commentary.

Objects of affection recovers the emotional attraction of the medieval book through an engagement with a fifteenth-century literary collection known as Oxford, Bodleian Library Manuscript Ashmole 61. Exploring how the inhabitants of the book's pages - human and nonhuman, tangible and intangible - collaborate with its readers then and now, this book addresses the manuscript's material appeal in the ways it binds itself to different cultural, historical and material environments. In doing so it traces the affective literacy training that the manuscript provided its late-medieval English household, whose diverse inhabitants are incorporated into the ecology of the book itself as it fashions spiritually generous and socially mindful household members. -- .

This book contains a classic guide to historical study of early modern Chinese fiction from the late Qing Dynasty till early republican China. It does not merely study the new fiction writing in China, which was strongly influenced by the western fiction, but also draws a comparison between classical Chinese fiction and the early modern Chinese fiction. This book is an excellent reference in the study of early modern Chinese literature since it conveys a point of view to the readers with abundant and solid historical materials. At the heart of the book, it is the matter of a specific value in trans-cultural studies between the western world and China.

In this book, a case study of a humanistic reading of an essential evolutionary theorist, George C. Williams (May 12, 1926-September 8, 2010), the author contends that certain classic works of evolutionary theory and history are the most important nature writing of recent times. What it means to be scientifically literate-is essential for humanistic scholars, who must ground themselves with literary reading of scientific texts. As the most influential American evolutionary theorist of the second half of the twentieth century, Williams masters critique, frames questions about adaptation and natural selection, and answers in a plain, aphoristic writing style. Williams aims for parsimony-to "recognize adaptation at the level necessitated by the facts and no higher"-through a minimalist writing style. This voice articulates a powerful process that operates at very low levels by blind and selfish chance at the expense of its designed products, using purely trial and error.