This is the first book monograph devoted to Anglophone Ukrainian Canadian children's historical fiction published between 1991 and 2021. It consists of five chapters offering cross-sectional and interdisciplinary readings of almost forty books - novels, novellas, picturebooks, short stories, and a graphic novel. The first three chapters focus on texts about the complex process of becoming Ukrainian Canadian, ones showcasing the experiences of the first two waves of Ukrainian immigration to Canada, including encounters with Indigenous Peoples and the First World War Internment. The last two chapters are devoted to the significance of the cultural memory of the Holodomor, the Great Famine of 1932-1933, and the Second World War for Ukrainian Canadians. All of the chapters demonstrate the entanglements of Ukrainian and Canadian history and point to the role Anglophone children's literature can play in preventing the symbolical seeds of memory from withering. This volume argues that reading, imagining, and reimagining history can lead to the formation of beyond-textual next-generation memory. Such memory created through reading is multi-dimensional as it involves the interpretation of both the present and the past by an individual whose reality has been directly or indirectly shaped by the past over which they have no influence. Next-generation memory is of anticipatory character, which means that authors of historical fiction anticipate the readers - both present-day and future - not to have direct links to any witnesses of the events they discuss and have little knowledge of the transcultural character of the Ukrainian Canadian diaspora.

Modernity theory approaches modern experience as it incorporates a sense of itself as 'modern' (modernity), along with the possibilities and limitations of representing this in the arts and culture generally (modernism). The book interrogates modernity in the name of a fluid, unsettled, unsettling modernism. As the offspring of the Enlightenment and the Age of Sensibility, modernity is framed here through a cultural aesthetics that highlights not just an instrumental, exploitative approach to the world but the distinctive configuration of embodiment, feeling, and imagination, that we refer to as 'civilization', in turn both explored and subverted through modernist experimentalism and reflexive thinking in culture and the arts. This discloses the rationalizing pretensions that underlie the modern project and have resulted in the sensationalist, melodramatic conflicts of good and evil that traverse our contemporary world of politics and popular culture alike. This innovative approach permits modernity theory to link otherwise fragmented insights of separate humanities disciplines, aspects of sociology, and cultural studies, by identifying and contributing to a central strand of modern thought running from Kant through Benjamin to the present. One aspect of modernity theory that results is that it cannot escape the paradoxes inherent in reflexive involvement in its own history.

Henry Crabb Robinson (1775-1867) earned his place in literary history as a perceptive diarist from 1811 onwards. Drawing substantially on hitherto unpublished manuscript sources, this book discusses his formal and informal engagement with a wide variety of English and European literature prior to this point. Robinson emerges as a pioneering literary critic whose unique philosophical erudition underpinned his activity as a cross-cultural disseminator of literature during the early Romantic period. A Dissenter barred from the English universities, Robinson educated himself thoroughly during his teenage years and began to publish in radical journals. Godwin's philosophy subsequently inspired his first theory of literature. When in Germany from 1800 to 1805, he became the leading British scholar of Kant, whose philosophy informed his discussions of Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, and August Wilhelm Schlegel. After his return to London, Robinson aided Hazlitt's understanding of Kant and, thus, Hazlitt's early career as a writer. His distinctive comparative criticism further enabled him to draw compelling parallels between Wordsworth, Blake, and Herder, and to discern 'moral excellence' in Christian Leberecht Heyne's Amathonte. This also prompted Robinson's transmission of Friedrich Schlegel and Jean Paul in 1811, as well as a profound exchange of ideas with Coleridge. In this new study, Philipp Hunnekuhl finds that Robinson's ingenious adaptation of Kantian aesthetic autonomy into a revolutionary theory of literature's moral relevance anticipated the current 'ethical turn' in literary studies.

Filling a significant gap in contemporary criticism of recent prose fiction, this book offers a provocative analysis of the work of Nobel Laureate Olga Tokarczuk, situating her output in comparative contexts. The chapters making up the volume range from myth-critical focused readings, to interdisciplinary and intercultural perspectives. Tokarczuk's fiction is explored as mythopoeic and heterotopian experimentation, as well as being read alongside other arts and other authors of various national and linguistic backgrounds. This wide-ranging collection is the first monograph on Tokarczuk in English.

This collection of essays explores the hotel as a site of modernity, a space of mobility and transience that shaped the transnational and transcultural modernist activity of the first half of the twentieth century. As a trope for social and cultural mobility, transitory and precarious modes of living, and experiences of personal and political transformation, the hotel space in modernist writing complicates binaries such as public and private, risk and rootedness, and convention and experimentation. It is also a prime location for modernist production and the cross-fertilization of heterogeneous, inter- and trans- literary, cultural, national, and affective modes. The study of the hotel in the work of authors such as E. M. Forster, Katherine Mansfield, Kay Boyle, and Joseph Roth reveals the ways in which the hotel nuances the notions of mobilities, networks, and communities in terms of gender, nation, and class. Whereas Mary Butts, Djuna Barnes, Anais Nin, and Denton Welch negotiate affective and bodily states which arise from the alienation experienced at liminal hotel spaces and which lead to new poetics of space, Vicki Baum, Georg Lukacs, James Joyce, and Elizabeth Bishop explore the socio-political and cultural conflicts which are manifested in and by the hotel. This volume invites us to think of "hotel modernisms" as situated in or enabled by this dynamic space. Including chapters which traverse the boundaries of nation and class, it regards the hotel as the transcultural space of modernity par excellence.

This book uses an interdisciplinary inter-mediational approach to reflect on the relational complexity of unsettlement as a predominant sensibility of the present epoque. The book tackles interrelated aspects of unsettlement including temporality, the disconcerting effects of the Anthropocene, the biomedical facets of unsettlement and the post-pandemic futures. It uses a chimeric approach combining essayistic and speculative fiction writing methods, negotiating rational, affective and imaginative ways of inquiry, and showing rather than merely explaining. The book poses questions, but gives no ready-made answers, and invites to think together on the unsettlement as a negatively global human condition that can be collectively made into a generative move of resurgence and refuturing. Contributing to critical reflections on the main features and sensibilities of the current epoque, the book will be of interest to scholars and undergraduate and graduate students, as well as the general public, interested in critical global and future perspectives, in decolonial research, gender studies and posthumanities.

Who was Mark Twain? Was he the genial author of two beloved boys books, the white-haired and white-suited avuncular humorist, the realistic novelist, the exposer of shams, the author repressed by bourgeois values, or the social satirist whose later writings embody an increasingly dark view? In light of those and other conceptions, the question we need to ask is not who he was but how did we get so many Mark Twains? The Mercurial Mark Twains(s): Reception History and Iconic Authorship provides answers to that question by examining the way Twain, his texts, and his image have been constructed by his audiences. Drawing on archival records of responses from common readers, reviewer reactions, analyses by Twain scholars and critics, and film and television adaptations, this study provides the first wide-ranging, fine-grained historical analysis of Twain's reception in both the public and private spheres, from the 1860s until the end of the twentieth century.

Does fiction enhance reality or threaten our sense of what is real? What, if anything, is special about experiencing fictional works and worlds? Today we speak casually of parallel universes and virtual reality; how much do we really know about what these phenomena involve? In Fictionality, Karen Petroski explains how philosophers and literary theorists have approached these questions in the Western literary tradition from Greek antiquity to the present day. The book introduces readers to both long-running and contemporary debates about: * The value and dangers of engagement with fiction; * The origins of fictional artworks, especially literary works, in Western literature; * The role played by imagination in engaging with fiction; * The peculiarities of fictional "worlds"; * The structure of linguistic reference within fictional artworks; * The functions of fictionality in non-linguistic artworks such as film and television; * The role played by fictionality outside artworks, for example in philosophy, law, and politics. Fictionality offers an accessible and comprehensive introduction to this field of increasing critical and theoretical interest. Bringing together theoretical insights from a variety of perspectives, it will be an essential resource for anyone studying fictionality.

The book examines prominent literary works from the past two decades by Russian women writers dealing with the Soviet past. It explores works such as Daniel Stein, Interpreter by Ludmilla Ulitskaya, The Time of Women by Elena Chizhova, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich, and In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova, and uncovers connecting thematic structures and features. Focusing on the concepts of displacement and postmemory, the book shows how these works have given voice to those on the margins of society and of 'great history' whose resistance was often silent. In doing so, these women writers portray the everyday experiences and trauma of displaced women and girls during the second half of the twentieth century. This study offers new insights into the importance of these women writers' work in creating and preserving cultural memory in post-Soviet Russia.

This open access book offers innovative and wide-ranging responses to the continuously flourishing literary phenomenon of autofiction. The book shows the insights that are gained in the shift from the genre descriptor to the adjective, and from a broad application of "the autofictional" as a theoretical lens and aesthetic strategy. In three sections on "Approaches," "Affordances," and "Forms," the volume proposes new theoretical approaches for the study of autofiction and the autofictional, offers fresh perspectives on many of the prominent authors in the discussion, draws them into a dialogue with autofictional practice from across the globe, and brings into view texts, forms, and media that have not traditionally been considered for their autofictional dimensions. The book, in sum, expands the parameters of research on autofiction to date to allow new voices and viewpoints to emerge.

The contemporary moment is characterized by precarity - an expanding and intensifying vulnerability conditioned by political and economic structures. Using literary and cultural texts to develop a nuanced and critical exploration of the concept of precarity that emphasizes its contemporary manifestations while also attending to its historical roots and existential dimensions, this book examines the vulnerabilities which characterize our anxious existence, including unemployment, environmental crisis, temporary contracts and patterns of migration. Broken down into three key themes of feelings, bodies and time, Precarity in Contemporary Literature and Culture asks whether precarity can be considered a new phenomenon; explores the relationship between precarity and traditional class politics; analyses precarity's global dimensions; and reflects on the links between contemporary crisis and underlying existential human vulnerability. With reference to a wide range of forms such as contemporary, realist, science fiction and modernist novels, film, theatre, and the lyric poem, this book goes beyond one national context to consider texts from the US, UK, Germany and South Africa.

This book discusses the ethical dimension of the interpretation of texts and events. Its purpose is not to address the neutrality or ideological biases of interpreters, but rather to discuss the underlying issue of the intervention of interpreters into the process of interpretation. The author calls this intervention the "ethical" aspect of interpretation and argues that interpreters are neither neutral nor necessarily activists. He examines three models of interpretation, all of which recognize the role that interpreters play in the process of interpretation. In these models, the question of the truth or validity of interpretation is dependent upon the attitude of interpreters. These three models are: (1) the principle of charity in interpretation in the two different versions defended by Hans-Georg Gadamer and Donald Davidson; (2) the production of truth, as developed by Paul Ricoeur and Michel Foucault; and (3) the regulative principle in interpretation as formal validity claims-as presented by Karl-Otto Apel and Jurgen Habermas-and as benevolence or love as an epistemic virtue-as defended by Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher. The critical discussion of these three models, which brings to the fore the different manners in which interpreters intervene in the process of interpretation as persons, lays the foundations for an ethics of interpretation. The Ethics of Interpretation will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in hermeneutics, 19th- and 20th-century philosophy, literary theory, and cultural theory.

Literature and Poverty offers an engaging overview of changes in literary perceptions of poverty and the poor. Part I of the book, from the Hebrew Bible to the French Revolution, provides essential background information. It introduces the Scriptural ideal of the 'holy poor' and the process by which biblical love of the poor came to be contested and undermined in European legislation and public opinion as capitalism grew and the state took over from the Church; Part II, from the French Revolution to World War II, shows how post-1789 problems of industrialization, population growth, war, and urbanization came to dominate much European literature, as poverty and the poor became central concerns of major writers such as Dickens, Dostoyevsky, and Hugo. David Aberbach uses literature - from the Bible, through Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Zola, Pushkin, and Orwell - to show how poverty changed from being an endemic and unavoidable fact of life, to a challenge for equality that might be attainable through a moral and rational society. As a literary and social history of poverty, this book argues for the vital importance of literature and the arts in understanding current problems in International Development.

This collection of essays examines the legacy of H.P. Lovecraft's most important critical work, Supernatural Horror in Literature. Each chapter illuminates a crucial aspect of Lovecraft's criticism, from its aesthetic, philosophical and literary sources, to its psychobiological underpinnings, to its pervasive influence on the conception and course of horror and weird literature through the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. These essays investigate the meaning of cosmic horror before and after Lovecraft, explore his critical relevance to contemporary social science, feminist and queer readings of his work, and ultimately reveal Lovecraft's importance for contemporary speculative philosophy, film and literature.

Joyce as Theory is the first study to argue James Joyce can be read as a theorist. Joyce is not just a favourite case study of literary theory; he wrote about how we make meaning, and to what effect. The present volume traces his hermeneutics in those narratives in Finnegans Wake which deal with textual production and interpretation, showing that the Wake's difficulty exemplifies Joyce's theoretical stance. All reading involves responding to problems we cannot quite fathom. This preoccupation places Joyce alongside Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan. Joyce as Theory revives debates on theory with a linguistic focus, laying open misconceptions that have muddled attempts to be over and done with this kind of thought. It demonstrates that Derrida and Lacan, almost exclusively presented as rivals, converge on a common position. It opposes the myth of linguistic theory as a formalist approach, instead showing that Joyce, Derrida, and Lacan give us a hermeneutic ethics alert to how meaning-making impacts our lived experience. And it challenges the notion that theory imposes matters alien to Joyce, demonstrating that it is an appreciation of Joyce's arguments in Finnegans Wake that generates a theoretical perspective. Joyce as Theory is essential reading for researchers and students in Joyce studies, continental philosophy, literary theory, and modernist literature.

First published in 1979, Irish Identity and the Literary Revival, through the works of W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, J. M. Synge, and Sean O'Casey, documents the complex spectrum of political, social and other pressures that helped fashion modern Ireland. At least three sets of cultural assumptions coexisted in Ireland during the years between 1890 and 1930, -- English, Irish and Anglo-Irish, each united by a common language but divided by considerable tensions and strain. The question of Irish identity forms the central theme of the study, and illustrates how it was a major, even obsessive concern for these writers. Subsidiary and interwoven themes constantly recur. Themes such as the concepts of the peasant and the hero, political nationalism, the meaning of Ireland's history and the validity of her cultural traditions. Rather than use the literature concerned as merely endorsing evidence for a sociological or political thesis, this study allows its major themes and issues to emerge and develop from direct and close study of the work of the writers. This book will be of interest to students of literature and history.

As one of the foundational texts in the field of postcolonial writing, Barbara Harlow's Resistance Literature introduced new ground in Western literary studies. Originally published in 1987 and now reissued with a new Preface by Mia Carter, this powerfully argued and controversial critique develops an approach to literature which is essentially political. Resistance Literature introduces the reader to the role of literature in the liberation movements of the developing world during the 20th Century. It considers a body of writing largely ignored in the west. Although the book is organized according to generic topics - poetry, narrative, prison memoirs - thematic topics, and the specific historical conditions that influence the cultural and political strategies of various resistance struggles, including those of Palestine, Nicaragua and South Africa, are brought to the fore. Among the questions raised are the role of women in the developing world; communication in circumstances of extreme atomization; literature versus propaganda; censorship; and the problem of adopting literary forms identified with the oppressor culture.

This book discusses the elusive centrality of silence in modern literature and philosophy, focusing on the writing and theory of Jean-Luc Nancy and Roland Barthes, the prose of Samuel Beckett, and the poetry of Wallace Stevens. It suggests that silence is best understood according to two categories: apophasis and reticence. Apophasis is associated with theology, and relates to a silence of ineffability and transcendence; reticence is associated with phenomenology, and relates to a silence of listenership and speechlessness. In a series of diverse though interrelated readings, the study examines figures of broken silence and silent voice in the prose of Samuel Beckett, the notion of shared silence in Jean-Luc Nancy and Roland Barthes, and ways in which the poetry of Wallace Stevens mounts lyrical negotiations with forms of unsayability and speechlessness.

Memory in German Romanticism treats memory as a core element in the production and reception of German art and literature of the Romantic era. The contributors explore the artistic expression of memory under the categories of imagination, image, and reception. Romantic literary aesthetics raises the subjective imagination to a level of primary importance for the creation of art. It goes beyond challenging reason and objectivity, two leading intellectual faculties of eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and instead elevates subjective invention to form and sustain memory and imagination. Indeed, memory and imagination, both cerebral functions, seek to assemble the elements of one's own experience, either directed toward the past (memory) or toward the future (imagination), coherently into a narrative. And like memories, images hold the potential to elicit charged emotional responses; those responses live on through time, becoming part of the spatial and temporal reception of the artist and their work. While imagination creates and images trigger and capture memories, reception creates a temporal-spatial context for art, organizing it and rendering it "memorable," both for good and for bad. Thus, through the categories of imagination, images, and reception, this volume explores the phenomenon of German Romantic memory from different perspectives and in new contexts.

Considering new perspectives on writers such as Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, and Louise Erdrich, Confronting Visuality in Multi-ethnic Women's Writing traces a cross-cultural tradition in which contemporary female writers situate images of women within larger contexts of visuality.

First published in 1989, this book analyses fiction and long narrative, drawing on a broad range of writing from earlier periods and on recent narrative theory. Gillian Beer looks at the work of writers as diverse as Thomas Carlyle and Philip Sydney, Samuel Richardson, and George Eliot. Three chapters on Virginia Woolf demonstrate how Woolf's reading of past literature, philosophy, and science gave her an intellectual and emotional purchase on problems of feminism and modernism. Beer examines how writers create dialogues with past writing, how readers of the present day engage with the difference of past literature, and how we make contact with the desires and debates of past readers.

Musica Naturalis delivers the first systematic account of speculative music theory as a discursive horizon for literary poetics. The title refers to the late medieval French poet Eustache Deschamps, whose 1392 treatise on verse writing, L'Art de Dictier, famously casts verse as "natural music" in explicit distinction to song, which Deschamps defines as "artificial." Philipp Jeserich links the significance of the speculative branch of medieval musicology to literary theory and literary production, opening up a field of study that has been largely neglected. Beginning with Augustine and Boethius, he traces the discourse of speculative music theory to the late fifteenth century, giving attention to medieval Latin and vernacular sources. Ultimately, Jeserich calls for the conservatism of Deschamps' poetics and develops a new perspective on the poetics and poetry of the Grands rhetoriqueurs. Given Jeserich's reliance on the intellectual inheritance of late medieval French poetics and poetry, this book will appeal to English-speaking specialists of Old and Middle French, as well as scholars of the French Renaissance. It will also interest English language medievalists of several other disciplines: intellectual historians and specialists of English, as well as scholars of Italian and Iberian literature.

This companion presents a transnational and interdisciplinary study of refugee narratives. In response to the oversaturation of sociological, governmental, and journalistic narratives about refugees, this book examines the narratives refugees tell to, for, and about themselves. Engaging a rich variety of genres-fiction, autobiography, prose, poetry, graphic novels, film, photography, performance, social media-the chapters included in this anthology examine how conditions of forced displacement and encounters with different asylum regimes shape the form and content of refugee cultural production. Chapters are organized around three key forms-storytelling, testimony, (auto)ethnography-and four key themes-memory (and forgetting), human rights (and its limitations), border-crossing (and nation-states), and cartographies (of displacement and diaspora). This volume will be of interest to researchers, teachers, students, and practitioners. In addition to analyzing refugee narratives, contributors offer pedagogical strategies for how to teach, discuss, and engage refugee narratives in the contemporary political moment.

1. This book is the first to frame Tolstoy's life and work through a queer, psychoanalytical and historico-political lens 2. It uniquely blends literary theory, queer/gender studies, sexology and ethics 3. Using illustrations throughout, this book also draws on the work of Freud, Cervantes, Rousseau and Kant.