Slavoj Zizek is one of today's leading theorists, whose polemical works span topics from German idealism to Lacanian psychoanalysis, from Shakespeare to Beckett, and from Hitchcock to Lynch. Critical through and through of both post-modern ideological complacencies-e.g., the death of the subject and the return to ethics-and pre-modern ones-e.g., the re-enchantment of the world, the embrace of postcritique-Zizek doubles down on the virtues of the modern, on what it means to be modern, and to ask modern questions (about the subject, nature, and political economy) in the age of the Anthropocene. This volume takes up the challenges laid out by Zizek's iconoclastic thinking and its reverberations in an array of fields: philosophy, psychoanalysis, political theory, literary studies, and film studies, among others. Zizek's multi-disciplinary appeal attests to the provocation, if not scandal, of his politically incorrect thought. Understanding Zizek, Understanding Modernism makes the force and inventiveness of Zizek's writings accessible to a wide range of students and scholars invested in the open question of modernism and its legacies.

Representing Vulnerabilities in Contemporary Literature includes a collection of essays exploring the ways in which recent literary representations of vulnerability may problematize its visibilization from an ethical and aesthetic perspective. Recent technological and scientific developments have accentuated human vulnerability in many and different ways at a cross-national, and even cross-species level. Disability, technological, and ecological vulnerabilities are new foci of interest that add up to gender, precarity and trauma, among others, as forms of vulnerability in this volume. The literary visualization of these vulnerabilities might help raise social awareness of one's own vulnerabilities as well as those of others so as to bring about global solidarity based on affinity and affect. However, the literary representation of forms of vulnerability might also deepen stigmatization phenomena and trivialize the spectacularization of vulnerability by blunting readers' affective response towards those products that strive to hold their attention and interest in an information-saturated, global entertainment market.

Representing Vulnerabilities in Contemporary Literature includes a collection of essays exploring the ways in which recent literary representations of vulnerability may problematize its visibilization from an ethical and aesthetic perspective. Recent technological and scientific developments have accentuated human vulnerability in many and different ways at a cross-national, and even cross-species level. Disability, technological, and ecological vulnerabilities are new foci of interest that add up to gender, precarity and trauma, among others, as forms of vulnerability in this volume. The literary visualization of these vulnerabilities might help raise social awareness of one's own vulnerabilities as well as those of others so as to bring about global solidarity based on affinity and affect. However, the literary representation of forms of vulnerability might also deepen stigmatization phenomena and trivialize the spectacularization of vulnerability by blunting readers' affective response towards those products that strive to hold their attention and interest in an information-saturated, global entertainment market.

What should literature with political aims look like? This book traces two rival responses to this question, one prizing clarity and the other confusion, which have dominated political aesthetics since the late nineteenth century. Revisiting recurrences of the avant-garde experimentalism versus critical realism debates from the twentieth century, Geoffrey A. Baker highlights the often violent reductions at work in earlier debates. Instead of prizing one approach over the other, as many participants in those debates have done, Baker focuses on the manner in which the debate itself between these approaches continues to prove productive and enabling for politically engaged writers. This book thus offers a way beyond the simplistic polarity of realism vs. anti-realism in a study that is focused on influential strands of thought in England, France, and Germany and that covers well-known authors such as Zola, Nietzsche, Arnold, Mann, Brecht, Sartre, Adorno, Lukacs, Beauvoir, Morrison, and Coetzee.

Moving effortlessly from Greek to Shakespearean tragedies, to nineteenth and twentieth-century British, American and Russian drama, and fiction and contemporary television, this study sheds new light on the art of comedy.

Historical and Cultural Transformations of Russian Childhood is a collection of multidisciplinary scholarly essays on childhood experience. The volume offers new critical approaches to Russian and Soviet childhood at the intersection of philosophy, literary criticism, film/visual studies, and history. Pedagogical ideas and practices, and the ideological and political underpinnings of the experience of growing up in pre-revolutionary Russia, the Soviet Union, and Putin's contemporary Russia are central venues of analysis. Toward the goal of constructing the "multimedial childhood text," the contributors tackle issues of happiness and trauma associated with childhood and foreground its fluidity and instability in the Russian context. The volume further examines practices of reading childhood: as nostalgic text, documentary evidence, and historic mythology. Considering Russian childhood as historical documentation or fictional narrative, as an object of material culture, and as embodied in different media (periodicals, visual culture, and cinema), the volume intends to both problematize but also elucidate the relationship between childhood, history, and various modes of narrativity.

This collection contributes to an understanding of queer theory as a "queer share," addressing the urgent need to redistribute resources in a university world characterized by stark material disparities and embedded gendered, racial, national, and class inequities. From across a range of precarious and relatively secure positions, authors consider the changing politics of queer theory and the shifting practices of queers who, in moving from the margins toward the academic mainstream, differently negotiate resources, recognition, and returns. Contributors engage queer redistributions in all tiers of the class-stratified academy and across the UK, the US, Australia, Armenia, Canada, and Spain. They both indict academic hierarchy as a form of colonial knowledge-making and explore class contradictions via first-generation epistemologies, feminist care work in the pandemic, Black working-class visibility, non-peer institutional collaborations, and student labor. The volume reflects a commitment to interdisciplinary empirical and theoretical approaches and methodologies across anthropology, Black studies, cultural studies, education, feminist and women's studies, geography, Latinx studies, performance studies, postcolonial studies, public health, transgender studies, sociology, student affairs, and queer studies. This book is for readers seeking to better understand the broad class-based knowledge project that has become a defining feature of the field of queer studies.

This collection contributes to an understanding of queer theory as a "queer share," addressing the urgent need to redistribute resources in a university world characterized by stark material disparities and embedded gendered, racial, national, and class inequities. From across a range of precarious and relatively secure positions, authors consider the changing politics of queer theory and the shifting practices of queers who, in moving from the margins toward the academic mainstream, differently negotiate resources, recognition, and returns. Contributors engage queer redistributions in all tiers of the class-stratified academy and across the UK, the US, Australia, Armenia, Canada, and Spain. They both indict academic hierarchy as a form of colonial knowledge-making and explore class contradictions via first-generation epistemologies, feminist care work in the pandemic, Black working-class visibility, non-peer institutional collaborations, and student labor. The volume reflects a commitment to interdisciplinary empirical and theoretical approaches and methodologies across anthropology, Black studies, cultural studies, education, feminist and women's studies, geography, Latinx studies, performance studies, postcolonial studies, public health, transgender studies, sociology, student affairs, and queer studies. This book is for readers seeking to better understand the broad class-based knowledge project that has become a defining feature of the field of queer studies.

Boasian Verse explores the understudied poetic output of three major twentieth-century anthropologists: Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead. Providing a comparative analysis of their anthropological and poetic works, this volume explores the divergent representations of cultural others and the uses of ethnographic studies for cultural critique. This volume aims to illuminate central questions, including: Why did they choose to write poetry about their ethnographic endeavors? Why did they choose to write the way they wrote? Was poetry used to approach the objects of their research in different, perhaps ethically more viable ways? Did poetry allow them to transcend their own primitivist, even evolutionist tendencies, or did it much rather refashion or even amplify those tendencies? This in-depth examination of these ethnographic poems invites both cultural anthropologists and students of literature to reevaluate the Boasian legacy of cultural relativism, primitivism, and residual evolutionism for the twenty-first century. This volume offers a fresh perspective on some of the key texts that have shaped twentieth- and twenty-first-century discussions of culture and cultural relativism, and a unique contribution to readers interested in the dynamic area of multimodal anthropologies.

Religion, Narrative, and the Environmental Humanities provides a fresh look at rhetoric, religion, and environmental humanities through narratives of evangelical culture, analyses of evangelical writing, and their connection to environmental topics. This volume aims to present a cultural understanding between evangelical and non-evangelical communities, exploring how environmental priorities and differences fit within the thinking and felt experiences of American evangelicalism. Offering a variety of theological topics, chapters include discussion of key themes such as eschatology, scriptural authority, or stewardship, and their relationship to evangelical thinking and conceptualization within climate change rhetoric. To help readers better access evangelicalism and translate these ideas, each chapter utilizes individual narratives located within evangelicalism to set an affective or experiential base for readers. In addition, this volume includes textual analysis of key documents within each section to further explore the environmental issues, values, and elements within the subculture of American evangelicalism. This volume will be essential for all scholars interested in bridging the gap of cultural translation and exploring the deep rhetorical roots of evangelical attitudes toward environmental issues.

Enric Valor is one of the most important Valencian authors of the 20th century. This selection of his highly popular rondalles (folk tales) will for the first time introduce his work to an English-speaking audience. At a time when Catalan was under threat from the cultural bulldozer of the Franco regime, which condemned the use of anything but Castilian Spanish in public communication, Valor went to great lengths to disseminate knowledge of the language, through writing grammars and linguistic studies, as well as teaching it to fellow inmates when he was imprisoned by the regime for his cultural activities. These tales, collected over a number of years in small villages in the province of Alacant, were a significant part of his ongoing efforts to safeguard the Valencian language and the culture and history of the region. The Rondalles Valencianes have been compared to Italo Calvino's Italian Folk Tales and Henri Pourrat's Treasury of French Folk Tales. Like them, Valor aimed in rewriting the oral material to establish a common national body of folk narratives and to make the stories more appealing to Valencian readers, young and old alike. The critical Introduction provides an outline of the author's life and an overview of his work as novelist, grammarian and folklorist, as well as an assessment of the tales which identifies their place within the broader European folklore tradition.

Jane Austen and the Ethics of Description demonstrates that Elizabeth Bennet and her creator are misunderstood, and often unrecognized, geniuses of moral philosophy, but not simply because of their virtue or wit or natural skills in game theory. The engine driving the moral judgement and growth of Austen's protagonists consists of a particular and not well-understood ability to reason by description, a skill which we moderns must recover and remaster in order to negotiate the complexities of contemporary life. The forms of rational description this book derives from Austen will be of great interest not only to literary critics and theorists, but also to philosophers and anyone interested in ethics, the dynamics of power, and practical reasoning. Written in a clear style, the book is for those who love Austen and for those who want to understand how we should reason about our lives, how we should understand power, social conflict, and our own motives and prejudices. It is a literary analysis, a philosophical argument, and a practical guide to ethical thinking.

This book was first published in 2008. Modernist writers in the early twentieth century aimed to write in inventive and transformative ways, but they lived in places celebrated for their association with the achievements of past generations. For E. M. Forster, T. S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf, this contrast was strongly felt: living and writing in London, they found themselves in a city that was being fashioned as 'historic' in ways incongruous with their own critical ideals. In this innovative study, Andrea Zemgulys reads the early writings of Forster, Eliot and Woolf against the development of a growing heritage industry in England generally and London in particular. Her study offers fresh analyses of major works and a fascinating history of the making of literary and historical heritage in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain.

This book argues that Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., helps us see the law through an Emersonian lens by the way in which he wrote his judicial dissents. Holmes's literary style mimics and enacts two characteristics of Ralph Waldo Emerson's thought: "superfluity" and the "poetics of transition," concepts ascribed to Emerson and developed by literary critic Richard Poirier. Using this aesthetic style borrowed from Emerson and carried out by later pragmatists, Holmes not only made it more likely that his dissents would remain alive for future judges or justices (because how they were written was itself memorable, whatever the value of their content), but also shaped our understanding of dissents and, in this, our understanding of law. By opening constitutional precedent to potential change, Holmes's dissents made room for future thought, moving our understanding of legal concepts in a more pragmatic direction and away from formalistic understandings of law. Included in this new understanding is the idea that the "canon" of judicial cases involves oppositional positions that must be sustained if the law is to serve pragmatic purposes. This process of precedent-making in a common-law system resembles the construction of the literary canon as it is conceived by Harold Bloom and Richard Posner.

This open access book uses Swedish literature and the Swedish publishing field as recurring examples todescribe and analyse the role of the literary semi-peripheral position in world literature from various perspectives and on meso, micro and macro levels, using both quantitative and qualitative methods. This includes the role of translation in the semi-periphery and the conditions under which literature travels to and from that position. The focus is not on Sweden, as such, but rather on the semi-peripheral transitional space as exemplified by the Swedish case. Consisting of three co-written chapters, this study sheds light on what might be called the semi-peripheral condition or the semi-periphery as an area of transition. As part of the Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Dynamics in World Literatures series, it makes continuous use of the concepts of 'cosmopolitan' and 'vernacular' - or rather, the processual terms, cosmopolitanization and vernacularization - which provide an overall structure to the analysis of literature and literary phenomena. In this way, the authors show that the semi-periphery is an ideal point of departure to further the understanding of world literature, because it is a place where the cosmopolitan (the literary universal) and the vernacular (the rootedness in a particular culture or place) interact in ways that have not yet been thoroughly explored. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

When asked the question "what is the power of poetry?," writer Ian Williams said "poetry punctures the surface." Williams' statement-that poetry matters and that it does something-is at the heart of this book. Building from this core idea that poetry perforates the everyday to give greater range to our lives and our thinking, the practical and pedagogical aim of this book is twofold: the first aim is to provide students with an introduction to the key cultural, political, and historical events that inform twentieth- and twenty-first-century Canadian poetry; and to familiarize those same readers with poetic movements, trends, and forms of the same time period. This book addresses the aesthetic and social contexts of Canadian poetry written in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: it models for its readers the critical and theoretical discourses needed to understand the contexts of literary production in Canada. Put differently, readers need a sense of the "where" and "how" of poetic production to help situate them in the "what" of poetry itself. In addition to offering a historically contextualized overview of the significant movements, developments, and poets of this time period, this book also familiarizes readers with key moments of reflection and rupture, such as the effects of economic and ecological crisis, global conflicts, and debates around appropriation of culture. This book is built on the premise that poetry in Canada does not happen outside of political, social, and cultural contexts.

Violent liminalities in Early Modern Culture is a methodologically innovative book combining the twin disciplines of queer theory and disability studies. It investigates the violence feared from, and directed at, inhabitants of the 'betwixt and between' spaces of early modern literature and culture, through a focus on the perpetuated metamorphic states of Shakespeare's and Spenser's liminal figures including Lavinia, Puck, and Britomart. With chapters on gender, sexuality, adolescence, madness, and physical disability, Kaye McLelland applies a bi-theoretical lens to interrogate the ways in which being simultaneously 'neither' and 'both' brings to bear the non-normative disruption identified by queer theory in ways that use binary systems against themselves. For many of Spenser's and Shakespeare's characters, the 'in-between' state, whether ritually or otherwise induced, transforms the instantaneous binary threshold of the limen into a permanent 'habitation'. This created space is one of great power that is feared and violently countered by those who would shut it down. Set against the literary history of Spenser's and Shakespeare's Ovidianism and festivity, and the historical context of the post-Reformation transformation from a tertiary to a binary model of the afterlife, this volume identifies a persistent positioning of liminal literary figures in proximity to the liminality of the dead and dying, whilst simultaneously tracing the positive ways in which these inhabitants of the powerful 'betwixt and between' are depicted.

A Complete Guide to Literary Analysis and Theory offers an accessible introduction to all the current approaches to literary analysis. Ranging from stylistics and historicism to post-humanism and new materialism, it also includes chapters on media studies and screen studies. The Guide is designed for use in introductory literature courses and as a primer in theory courses. Each chapter summarizes the main ideas of each approach to the study of literature in clear prose, providing lucid introductions to the practice of each school, and conducts readings using classic and modern works of literature from around the world. The book draws on examples from a wide range of works from classics such as F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Shakespeare's King Lear to contemporary works such as Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous and Amanda Gorman's "The Hill We Climb." This wide-ranging introduction is ideal for students encountering literary study for the first time, as well as more advanced students who need a concise summary of critical methods. It strives to make complex ideas simple and provides readings that undergraduates should be able to understand and enjoy as well as training them to conduct analyses of their own.

A Complete Guide to Literary Analysis and Theory offers an accessible introduction to all the current approaches to literary analysis. Ranging from stylistics and historicism to post-humanism and new materialism, it also includes chapters on media studies and screen studies. The Guide is designed for use in introductory literature courses and as a primer in theory courses. Each chapter summarizes the main ideas of each approach to the study of literature in clear prose, providing lucid introductions to the practice of each school, and conducts readings using classic and modern works of literature from around the world. The book draws on examples from a wide range of works from classics such as F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Shakespeare's King Lear to contemporary works such as Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous and Amanda Gorman's "The Hill We Climb." This wide-ranging introduction is ideal for students encountering literary study for the first time, as well as more advanced students who need a concise summary of critical methods. It strives to make complex ideas simple and provides readings that undergraduates should be able to understand and enjoy as well as training them to conduct analyses of their own.

Seeing Shakespeare's Style offers new ways for readers to perceive Shakespeare and, by extension, literary texts generally. Organized as a series of studies of Shakespeare's plays and poems, poetry, and prose, it looks at the inner functioning of language and form in works from all phases of this writer's career. Because the very concept of literary style has dropped out of so many of our conversations about writing, we need new ways to understand how words, phrases, speeches, and genres in literature work. Responding to this need, this book shows how visual representations of writing can lead to a deeper understanding of language's textures and effects. Starting with chapters that a beginning reader of Shakespeare can benefit from, its second half puts these tools to use in more in-depth examinations of Shakespeare's language and style. Although focused on Shakespeare's works, and the works of his contemporaries, this book provides tools for all readers of literature by defining style as material, graphic, and shaped by the various media in which all writers work.

Tang and Wijaya present a range of new and established scholarly voices, including local activists directly involved in developments in Southeast Asia. This groundbreaking collection presents the current state of play and longstanding LGBTQ+ debates in this often-overlooked region of Asia. The diversity of both the subject and the region is reflected in the broad scope of topics addressed, from the impact of Japanese queer popular culture on queer Filipinos, to the politics of public toilets in Singapore, and the impact of digital governance on queer communities across ASEAN. Taken in combination, these investigations not only highlight the operations of queer politics in Southeast Asia, but also present a concrete basis to reflect on queer knowledge production in the region. A vital resource for students and scholars of gender and sexuality in Southeast Asia, or any Queer or LGBTQ+ studies looking beyond the West.

Extending the limits of the award-winning Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century Periodicals and Newspapers (2016) and its companion volume (and also award-winning) Researching the Nineteenth-Century Press: Case Studies (2017), Work and the Nineteenth-Century Press: Living Work for Living People advances our knowledge of how our identities have become inextricably defined by work. The collection's innovative focus on the nineteenth-century British press's relationship to work illuminates an area whose effects are still evident today but which has been almost totally neglected hitherto. Offering bold new interpretative frameworks and provocative methodologies in media history and literary studies developed by an exciting group of new and established talent, this volume seeks to set a new research agenda for nineteenth-century interdisciplinary studies.

This is a book of meditative reading. Each of the sixty-one aphoristic entries aims to interpret Rilke's poetry as a musician might play Debussy's Clair de lune, to transpose into the key of language the song, the melody, and the refrain of Rilke's gentle disposition: his recognition of the transience of things; his acknowledgment of the vulnerability and fragility of people, animals, and flowers; his empathy toward those who suffer. The cut flowers gently laid out on the garden table "recovering from their death already begun" in one of theSonnets to Orpheus form a thread now visible now faint through most of this book. And because of the flowers, the concept of gentleness forms another thread, and because of gentleness, hands-agents of gentleness throughout Rilke's poetry-enfold these pages. The German word leise (gentle, tender, quiet) weaves the first thread; the second is woven by flowers, then by girls' hands, then by angels, the beloved, the poor, the dying and the dead, animals, birds, dogs, fountains, things, vanishings. The purpose of this essay is to experience and to examine gentleness, how it shapes and pervades Rilke's work, how his poetry might gently inspire us to become more gentle people.

First published in 1987, The Literature of Controversy is a collection of essays by scholars from Britain, the United States, and Australia on major works from a classic epoch of English controversial prose. Each essay engages a single text or series of texts, less to discuss the ideas and arguments per se than to consider the rhetorical techniques assumed for the political manipulation of the readers. Though emphasis varies from contribution to contribution, the purpose, broadly, is to explore how the constituents of those texts are organised to coax, cajole, persuade or inspire those to whom they address. As the editor argues in his introduction, this approach, the critique of polemical strategy, for the most part accepts the validity of paying regard to the author and his intentions; it engages questions about the responses of the readership at which the texts were targeted; and it proceeds intertextuality in its attempts to reconstruct the controversies in which the texts were embedded and the codes within which they operated. This book will be of interest to students of literature, rhetoric and history.

The virtual suppression of explicit ethical and evaluative discourse by current literary theory can be seen as the momentary triumph of a sceptical post Enlightenment reflective tradition over others vital to a full account of human and literary worth. In Ethics, Theory and the Novel, David Parker brings together recent developments in moral philosophy and literary theory. He questions many currently influential movements in literary criticism, showing that their silences about ethics are as damaging as the political silences of Leavisism and New Criticism in the 1950s and 1960s. He goes on to examine Middlemarch, Anna Karenina, and three novels by D. H. Lawrence, and explores the consequences for major literary works of the suppression of either the Judeo-Christian or the Romantic-expressivist ethical traditions. Where any one tradition becomes a master-narrative, he argues, imaginative literature ceases to have the deepest interest and relevance for us.