Transhumanism and Posthumanism in Twenty-First Century Narrative brings together fifteen scholars from five different countries to explore the different ways in which the posthuman has been addressed in contemporary culture and more specifically in key narratives, written in the second decade of the 21st century, by Dave Eggers, William Gibson, John Shirley, Tom McCarthy, Jeff Vandermeer, Don DeLillo, Margaret Atwood, Cixin Liu and Helen Marshall. Some of these works engage in the premises and perils of transhumanism, while others explore the qualities of the (post)human in a variety of dystopian futures marked by the planetary influence of human action. From a critical posthumanist perspective that questions anthropocentrism, human exceptionalism and the centrality of the 'human' subject in the era of the Anthropocene, the scholars in this collection analyse the aesthetic choices these authors make to depict the posthuman and its aftereffects.

Offering innovative, psychoanalytic readings of Nathaniel Hawthorne's mature novels, this volume expertly applies Freudian theory to present new insights into the psychology of Hawthorne's characters and their fates. By critically examining scenes in which protagonists confront past traumas, Diamond underscores the transformative potential which Hawthorne attributes to confrontations with the unconscious. Psychoanalytic narrative technique is used to illuminate psychological crises of the protagonists in The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, and The Marble Faun, showing the transformations they undergo to be central to our understanding of the trajectory and resolution of Hawthorne's romances. The text will benefit researchers, academics, and educators with an interest in applied psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic technique, and Freud in particular. Since its conclusions challenge many currently held critical views, this volume is especially relevant to those interested in interdisciplinary literary studies, Hawthorne studies, 19th century literature and romanticism.

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.

This groundbreaking work by one of the world's foremost theoreticians of culture and scholars of Russian philosophy gives for the first time a systematic examination of the development of Russian philosophy during the late Soviet period. Countering the traditional view of an intellectual wilderness under the Soviet regime, Mikhail Epstein provides a comprehensive account of Russian thought of the second half of the 20th century that is highly sophisticated without losing clarity. It provides new insights into previously mostly ignored areas such as late-Soviet Russian nationalism and Eurasianism, religious thought, cosmism and esoterism, and postmodernism and conceptualism. Epstein shows how Russian philosophy has long been trapped in an intellectual prison of its own making as it sought to create its own utopia. However, he demonstrates that it is time to reappraise Russian thought, now freed from the bonds of Soviet totalitarianism and ideocracy but nevertheless dangerously engaged into new nationalist aspirations and metaphysical radicalism. We are left with not only a new and exciting interpretation of recent Russian intellectual history, but also the opportunity to rethink our own philosophical heritage.

This book offers an original philosophical perspective on exemplarity. Inspired by Wittgenstein's later work and Derrida's theory of deconstruction, it argues that examples are not static entities but rather oscillate between singular and universal moments. There is a broad consensus that exemplary cases mediate between singular instances and universal concepts or norms. In the first part of the book, Macha contends that there is a kind of differance between singular examples and general exemplars or paradigms. Every example is, in part, also an exemplar, and vice versa. Furthermore, he develops a paracomplete approach to the logic of exemplarity, which allows us to say of an exemplar of X neither that it is an X nor that it is not an X. This paradox is structurally isomorphic to Russell's paradox and can be addressed in similar ways. In the second part of the book, Macha presents four historical studies that exemplify the ideas developed in the first part. This part begins with Plato's Forms, understood as standards/paradigms, before considering Kant's theory of reflective judgment as a general epistemological account of exemplarity. This is then followed by analyses of Hegel's conceptual moment of particularity and Kuhn's concept of paradigm. The book concludes by discussing the speculative hypothesis that all our knowledge is based on paradigms, which, following the logic of exemplarity, are neither true nor false. The Philosophy of Exemplarity will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of language, logic, history of philosophy, and literary theory.

Publishing for children between 1930 and 1960 has been denigrated as a relatively fallow period for creativity and quality, certainly in comparison with the 'golden ages' of children's literature that preceded and succeeded it. This book questions this perception by using archival evidence to argue that the work of what was predominantly a female group of editors, illustrators, authors and librarians (collectively referred to as bookwomen) resulted in many titles which are still considered as 'classics' today. The bookwomen reframed ideas about how children's publishing should be approached and valued and, in doing so, laid the foundations for a subsequent generation of children's authors and publishers who were to achieve far greater prominence. The key to the success of the bookwomen was their willingness to experiment, the strength of their relationships and their comprehensive understanding of the book production process. By focusing on a selection of women working across all aspects of the book production process, this book demonstrates that, both individually and collectively, women capitalised on their position as 'other' to the existing male institutions.

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.

1) This book offers a comprehensive understanding of Amrita Pritam's work. 2) It includes representative selections from her creative writings; her life and times in English translations; her nonfictional writings and also demonstrate her editing acumen as editor for over thirty years. 3) This book will be of interest to departments of South Asian Literature and Cultural studies across UK.

Stealing Things traces the representations of thieves and thievery in nineteenth-century French novels. Re-reading canonical texts by Balzac, the Comtesse de Segur, and Zola through the lens of crime, Peters highlights bourgeois anxiety about ownership and objects while considering the impact of literature on popular attitudes about crime and its legislation and punishment. A detailed analysis of the role of objects, this work chronicles nineteenth-century changes in legal attitudes, popular mentalities, and individual and social identity, focusing particularly on the resulting transformations in representations of gender, class, and (criminal) subjectivity.

Breathing Earth: The Polyphonic Lyric of Robert Bringhurst examines the innovative poems for multiple voices composed by the Canadian poet by drawing on the main insights of biosemiotics, ecophilosophy and material ecocriticism. In seeking to emulate the polyphonic texture of reality, Bringhurst's ecopoetry directs readers' attention to vibrant matter and to the entanglements of (non)human and (in)animate actants in a world that is a semiotic-material unity. In light of the current climate crisis, his polyphonic poems are a timely, wise reminder of the need to rethink the way humanity relates to the more-than-human world and to restore a deep ecological bond with breathing earth.

In the context of a systematic overview of the possibilities of applying narratological concepts to a study of TV series, ten case studies are explored in depth, demonstrating how series such as "24, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Twin Peaks, Star Trek, Blackadder," and "Sex and the City" make use of innovative audiovisual means of storytelling. Transgressing the traditional confines of narrative theory, the chapter authors address the question of how form, content, and function intersect in these series.

Interpretation has historically been understood as a method to shrink the distance between the interpreter and the interpreted. This view has dominated the comprehension of the interpretation of art: it always entails the interpretation of something, and this something must then govern our effort to understand it. If not, we are left with mere subjective whims. This book tries to modify this well-worn view by altering the dualist position to incorporate the very object within the sense-making activity. Interpretation rather becomes the creative making of something different, and this explains why it is deemed unfinished. The notion of "re-contextualization" covers this in between operation (between work and interpretation), and the very object of interpretation remains just an enabling condition of transference. Interpretation preserves the challenge, by re-making and re-locating meaning.

The LGBTQ+ Muslim Experience presents an accessible, applied discussion of transformative and intersectional approaches to LGBTQ+ Muslim research, training and clinical practice. The book asserts that LGBTQ+ Muslims can agentively build resilience pathways as they negotiate multiple minority identities and stressors. Through consciously recognizing the power-laden contexts of both conflict and development, scholars and clinicians can partner with multiple minority populations such as LGBTQ+ Muslims as they pursue social justice and enact their own transformative development. To this end, this book aims to address four goals: (1) to amplify the voices of both sexual and gender minority Muslims; (2) to acknowledge the intersectional challenges and stressors that LGBTQ+ Muslims encounter as a multiple minority group; (3) to highlight LGBTQ+ Muslims' relational and cultural resilience tools and (4) to introduce transformative intersectional psychology frameworks for future research and clinical practice with sexual and gender minority people of faith. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Homosexuality.

This volume is a study of eight major novels from the postwar period (1945-65) in conjunction with the films made from them during a later period of a little less than three decades straddling the millennium (1985-2012). The comparison of these novels (by Ken Kesey, Paul Bowles, Carson McCullers, Jack Kerouac, James Baldwin, Alexander Trocchi, William Burroughs, and Peter Matthiessen) with their film adaptations offers the opportunity for a historical reassessment not only of the novelsthemselves but also of the global counterculture of the years 1965-75, which they prefigure in a variety of ways. Appearing more than a decade after the waning of the counterculture and in some cases as much as fifty years after the novels on which they are based, the films display significant revisions and omissions prompted by the historical and cultural changes of the intervening years. Whereas these changes are nowadays often interpreted in purely political terms, this book argues that the experience of mystery and its decline is central to the novels and films and is a key feature of the period of cultural transformation that they bookend. At once a work of literary criticism, film studies, and cultural history, this book has the potential to reach both an academic audience and the broader readership that has long existed for these novels as well as the even broader one interested in reappraising the period of the global counterculture-among the most important of the influences that have shaped the contemporary world. Chapters 1 and 2 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDFs under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com

This expansive edited collection explores in depth the georgic genre and its connections to the natural world. Together, its chapters demonstrate that georgic-a genre based primarily on two classical poems about farming, Virgil's Georgics and Hesiod's Works and Days-has been reworked by writers throughout modern and early modern English-language literary history as a way of thinking about humans' relationships with the environment. The book is divided into three sections: Defining Georgic, Managing Nature and Eco-Georgic for the Anthropocene. It centres the georgic genre in the ecocritical conversation, giving it equal prominence with pastoral, elegy and lyric as an example of 'nature writing' that can speak to urgent environmental questions throughout literary history and up to the present day. It provides an overview of the myriad ways georgic has been reworked in order to address human relationships with the environment, through focused case studies on individual texts and authors, including James Grainger, William Wordsworth, Henry David Thoreau, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Seamus Heaney, Judith Wright and Rachel Blau DuPlessis. This is a much-needed volume for literary critics, academics and students engaged in ecocritical studies, environmental humanities and literature, addressing a significantly overlooked environmental literary genre.

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.

In Breathing Aesthetics Jean-Thomas Tremblay argues that difficult breathing indexes the uneven distribution of risk in a contemporary era marked by the increasing contamination, weaponization, and monetization of air. Tremblay shows how biopolitical and necropolitical forces tied to the continuation of extractive capitalism, imperialism, and structural racism are embodied and experienced through respiration. They identify responses to the crisis in breathing in aesthetic practices ranging from the film work of Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta to the disability diaries of Bob Flanagan, to the Black queer speculative fiction of Renee Gladman. In readings of these and other minoritarian works of experimental film, endurance performance, ecopoetics, and cinema-verite, Tremblay contends that articulations of survival now depend on the management and dispersal of respiratory hazards. In so doing, they reveal how an aesthetic attention to breathing generates historically, culturally, and environmentally situated tactics and strategies for living under precarity.

Using a framework based on J. L. Austin's understanding of performative speech and Angela Esterhammer's work on how things are done with words in Milton's and Blake's poetry, this study provides an extended close reading of the speech acts of characters in Blake's epic poem Milton. With the exception of what we learn about in the part of the poem known as the Bard's Song, Blake's Milton is dedicated to providing an incredibly detailed account of the numerous facets of the instant of time immediately prior to apocalypse, an instant in which Milton is the protagonist, and Blake himself a participant. This study explores how in the poem sacred history proceeds towards and through the instant by means of the speech act. This extended commentary is intended for not just Blake scholars but also the common reader who wishes to approach Blake's brief epic for the first time. For scholars, this monograph offers a full account of a crucial but previously unexplored theme in the scholarship about Milton. For the common reader, it offers a comprehensive introduction to what Northrop Frye called 'one of the most gigantic imaginative achievements in English poetry'.

Literatures of Madness: Disability Studies and Mental Health brings together scholars working in disability studies, mad studies, feminist theory, Indigenous studies, postcolonial theory, Jewish literature, queer studies, American studies, trauma studies, and comics to create an intersectional community of scholarship in literary disability studies of mental health. The collection contains essays on canonical authors and lesser known and sometimes forgotten writers, including Sylvia Plath, Louisa May Alcott, Hannah Weiner, Mary Jane Ward, Michelle Cliff, Lee Maracle, Joanne Greenberg, Ann Bannon, Jerry Pinto, Persimmon Blackbridge, and others. The volume addresses the under-representation of madness and psychiatric disability in the field of disability studies, which traditionally focuses on physical disability, and explores the controversies and the common ground among disability studies, anti-psychiatric discourses, mad studies, graphic medicine, and health/medical humanities.

Post-millennial writings function as a useful prism through which we can understand contemporary English culture and its compulsion to revisit the immediate past. The critical practice of hauntology turns to the past in order to make sense of the present, to understand how we got to this place and how to build a better future. Since the Year 2000, popular culture has been inundated with representations of those who occupy a space between being and non-being and defy ontological criteria. This Pivot explores a range of contemporary English literatures - from the poetry of Simon Armitage and the drama of Jez Butterworth, to the fiction of Zadie Smith and the stories of David Peace - that collectively unite to represent a twenty-first century world full of specters, reminiscence and representations of spectral encounters. These specters become visible and significant as they interact with a range of social, political and economic discourses that continue to speak to the contemporary period. The enduring fascination with the spectral offers valuable insights into a contemporary English culture in which spectral manifestations signal towards larger social anxieties as well as to specific historical events and recurrent cultural preoccupations. The specter confronts the contemporary with the necessity of participation, encouraging the realisation that we must engage with it in order to create meaning. Narrative agency is the primary motivating force of its return, and the repetition of the specter functions to highlight new meanings and perspectives. Harnessing hauntology as a lens through which to consider the specters haunting twenty-first century English writings, this Pivot examines the emergence of a vein of hauntological literature that profiles the pervasive presence of the past in our new millennium.

This book brings together a model of time and a model of language to generate a new model of narrative, where different stories with different temporalities and non-chronological modes of sequence can tell of different worlds of human - and non-human - experience, woven together (the 'texture of time') in the one narrative. The work of Gerald Edelman on consciousness, J.T. Fraser on time, and M.A.K. Halliday on language is introduced; the categories of systemic functional linguistics are used for detailed analysis of English narrative texts from different literary periods. A summary chapter gives an overview of previous narrative studies and theories, with extensive references. Chapters on 'temporalization' and 'spatialization' of language contrast the importance of time in narrative texts with the effect of 'grammatical metaphor', as described by M.A.K. Halliday, for scientific discourse. Chapters on prose fiction, poetry and the texts of digital culture chart changes in the 'texture of time' with changes in the social context: 'narrative as social semiotic'.

Environmental crisis is more than a passing phase; it is the modern condition. Thus environmental issues remain controversial and topical, and ecocriticism is one of the most vibrant fields of literary and cultural study today. From its origins in the study of nature writing and Romantic literature, it has extended into every period, region and genre of cultural analysis. Teaching Ecocriticism and Green Cultural Studies captures the diversity and excitement of green reading, including contributions on digital media, film, climate change and digital media. It reflects on the relationship of 'slow reading' to the haste and commercialism of the modern academy, and provides practical guidance for dealing with the specific difficulties that face teachers in the field: the problem of global scale; interdisciplinary links with ecology; and the debilitating attitudes of some students: corrosive irony, scepticism or apathy. It is an invaluable toolkit for teachers in the environmental humanities.