Classical Hollywood Cinema, Sexuality, and the Politics of the Face examines the representation of iconic female faces in the golden age of Hollywood - Greta Garbo, Gloria Swanson, Elizabeth Taylor - and the gay male fetishization of those faces. Classical Hollywood cinema is given to an aesthetic and ideological struggle between rival scopic economies: an erotics of "to-be-looked-at-ness" is countered by a hermeneutics of "to-be-seen-through-ness." The latter emerges triumphant, but the legendary female faces of Hollywood resist, in their different ways, a coercive and normalizing knowledge, which is the source of the gay male investment in them. A disciplinary society privileges a hermeneutics of gaze; the iconomic female faces of classical Hollywood cinema demand an erotics. Classical Holly Cinema, Sexuality, and the Politics of the Face explores the tension between the two through detailed readings of Ninotchka, Sunset Boulevard, and Suddenly, Last Summer in the context of early and mid-century cinema and culture. It includes, for instance, an analysis of D. W. Griffith and blackface, the Stonewall riots and the coming-into-voice of the modern gay subject, several major films by Hitchcock, Citizen Kane, and the emergence of rival standards of beauty, both female and male, in figures such as Katharine Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman, Humphrey Bogart, Rock Hudson, and James Dean. This is an important study for students of queer theory, film theory and history, and gender and sexuality studies.

Climate Change, Ecological Catastrophe, and the Contemporary Novel responds to the critical need for transdisciplinary research on the relationship between colonialism and catastrophe. It represents the first sustained analysis of the connection between colonial legacy and present-day ecological catastrophe in postcolonial fiction. Analyzing contemporary South Asian and South Pacific novels that grapple with climate change and catastrophe, environmental exploitation and instability, and human-nonhuman relationships in degraded environments, it offers a much-needed corrective to dominant narratives about climate, crisis, and the everyday. Highlighting the contributions of literary fiction from the postcolonial South to the growing field of the environmental humanities, this book reconsiders the novel's relationship with climate change and the contemporary environmental imaginary. Counter to dominant current theoretical discourses, it demonstrates that the novel form is ideally suited to literary and imaginative engagements with climate change and ecological catastrophe. The six case studies it examines connect contemporary ecological vulnerability to colonial legacies, reveal the critical role animals and the environment play in literary imaginations of post-catastrophe recovery, and together constellate a decolonial perspective on ecological catastrophe in the era of climate change. Drawing on the work of Indigenous authors and scholars who write about and against the Anthropocene, this book displaces conventional ways of thinking about the relationship between the mundane and the catastrophic and promotes greater dialogue between the largely siloed fields of postcolonial, Indigenous, and disaster studies.

Brings together philosophy, psychoanalysis and religious elements. Examines current 'crisis' in mental health and social stability. Unique in its contradictory orientation towards Christianity. Zizek, Baudrillard, Levinas and Steiner are strong influences on the author. Likely to appeal to academic followers of Jordan Peterson.

Jane Austen was one of the most adventurous thinkers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but one would probably never guess that by reading her critics. Perhaps no canonical author in English literature has proven, until now, more resistant to theory. Tracing the political motives for this resistance, Jane Austen and Literary Theory proceeds to counteract it. The book's detailed interpretations guide readers through some of the important intellectual achievements of Austen's career-from the stunning teenage parodies "Evelyn" and "The History of England" to her most accomplished novels, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma. While criticism has largely been content to describe the various ways Austen was a product of her time, Jane Austen and Literary Theory reveals how she anticipated the ideas of formidable literary thinkers of the twentieth century, especially Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man. Gift and exchange, speech and writing, symbol and allegory, stable irony and Romantic irony-these are just a few of the binary oppositions her dazzling texts deconstruct. Although her novels are major achievements of nineteenth-century realism, critics have hitherto underestimated their rhetorical cunning and their fascination with the materiality of language. Doing justice to Austen's language requires critical methods as ruthless as her irony, and Jane Austen and Literary Theory supplies these methods. This book will enable both her devotees and her detractors to appreciate her genius in unusual ways.

Transformative Fictions: World Literature and Personal Change engages with current debates in world literature over the past twenty years, addressing the nature of literary influence in centers and peripheries, the formation of transnational literary and pedagogical canons, and the role of translation and regionalism in how we relate to texts from around the globe. The author, Daniel Just, argues for a supranational but sub-global perspective of regions that emphasizes practical reasons for reading and focuses on the potential of literary texts to stimulate personal transformation in readers. One of the recurring dilemmas in these debates is the issue of delimitation of world literature. The trouble with the world as a frame of reference is that no single researcher is bound to have the in-depth knowledge and linguistic skills to discuss works from all countries. In response, this book revives literary theory and recasts it for the purposes of world literature, by making a case for the continuing relevance of literature in the age of new media. With the examples of fictional and nonfictional writings by Milan Kundera, Witold Gombrowicz and Bohumil Hrabal, Just shows that regional literatures offer differing methods of activating readers and thereby prompting personal change. This book would be of general interest to anyone who wants to explore personal change through literature but is particularly indispensable for literary professionals, researchers, and postgraduate and graduate students.

Literature has never looked weirder--full of images, colors, gadgets, and footnotes, and violating established norms of character, plot, and narrative structure. Yet over the last 30 years, critics have coined more than 20 new "realisms" in their attempts to describe it. What makes this decidedly unorthodox literature "realistic"? And if it is, then what does "realism" mean anymore? Examining literature by dozens of writers, and over a century of theory and criticism about realism, The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism sorts through the current critical confusion to illustrate how our ideas about what is real and how best to depict it have changed dramatically, especially in recent years. Along the way, Mary K. Holland guides the reader on a lively tour through the landscape of contemporary literary studies--taking in metafiction, ideology, posthumanism, postmodernism, and poststructuralism--with forays into quantum mechanics, new materialism, and Buddhism as well, to give us entirely new ways of viewing how humans use language to make sense of--and to make--the world.

This book argues that superhero revision offers new perspectives on the theory and practice of revision in broader contexts, in particular composition studies. Key developments in the history of superhero and composition revision reveal that both are deeply embedded in questions of narrative temporality. The book looks at three unorthodox revision strategies: sideshadowing, in which traditional tropes of superhero narratives are told with "new" characters that clearly evoke traditional ones; excavation, the reintegration and reinterpretation of elements and influences from earlier texts that have been de-emphasized or written out of continuity; and homodoxy, the narrative coexistence of inconsistent elements culled from different versions of a character's textual history. The ensuing cross-disciplinary exploration helps correct a distorted stereotype of revision as a neutral mechanical process, revealing it instead as a potent force operating across a spectrum that ranges from restrictive adherence to orthodoxies, to radical resistance against the primacy of tradition.

In its first edition, this book was a new opening in the study of the Arabian Nights as an index of literary taste, a case study for the engagements of poets and writers, along with the common reading public, with an art that took Europe by surprise, and forced new patterns of response and writing. Borges thought of its advent as a dynamic that helped generate the romantic mode and sensibility. It certainly disturbed old habits of thought and made significant cultural inroads throughout European cultures. Almost no one in 18th-19th century literatures remained oblivious to that sweeping phenomenal appearance. The book analyzes and studies modes and patterns of reading, response, engagement, commentary, translations, claims to authentication, abridgements, and illustrations. It focuses on debates and controversies around the Arabian Nights, and shows how these happened to be at the center of a growing colonial culture. This book can never lose its significance for students, scholars, and general readership, not only in the field of comparative and cultural studies, English and French departments, but also in postcolonial studies and the basics of narrative and narratology.

Austerity and Irish Women's Writing and Culture, 1980-2020 focuses on the under-represented relationship between austerity and Irish women's writing across the last four decades. Taking a wide focus across cultural mediums, this collection of essays from leading scholars in Irish studies considers how economic policies impacted on and are represented in Irish women's writing during critical junctures in recent Irish history. Through an investigation of cultural production north and south of the border, this collection analyses women's writing using a multimedium approach through four distinct lenses: austerity, feminism, and conflict; arts and austerity; race and austerity; and spaces of austerity. This collection asks two questions: what sort of cultural output does austerity produce? And if the effects of austerity are gendered, then what are the gender-specific responses to financial insecurity, both national and domestic? By investigating how austerity is treated in women's writing and culture from 1980 to 2020, this collection provides a much-needed analysis of the gendered experience of economic crisis and specifically of Ireland's consistent relationship with cycles of boom and bust. Thirteen chapters, which focus on fiction, drama, poetry, women's life writing, and women's cultural contributions, examine these questions. This volume takes the reader on a journey across decades and forms as a means of interrogating the growth of the economic divide between the rich and the poor since the 1980s through the voices of Irish women.

Addressing the influential analysis of law and literature, this book offers a new perspective on their relationship. The law and literature movement that has gained global prominence in the course of last decades of the twentieth and the first decades of the twenty-first centuries has provided the research and teaching of law with a considerable body of new and valuable knowledge and understanding. Most of the knowledge and insights generated by the movement concern either a thematic overlap between legal and literary discourses - suggesting they deal with the same moral concerns - or a rhetorical, semiotic or general linguistic comparability or 'sameness' between them - imputing to both the same or very similar narrative structures. The Literary Exception and the Rule of Law recognises the wealth of knowledge generated by this approach to the relationship between law and literature, and acknowledges its debt to this genre of scholarship. It nevertheless also proposes, on the basis of a number of revealing phenomenological inquiries, a different approach to law and literary studies: one that emphasises the irreducible difference between law and literature. It does so with the firm believe that a regard for the very different and indeed opposite discursive trajectories of legal and literary language allows for a more profound understanding of the unique and indeed separate roles that the discourses of law and literature generally play in the sustenance of relatively stable legal cultures. This important rethinking of the relationship between law and literature will appeal to scholars and students of legal theory, jurisprudence, philosophy, politics and literary theory.

Feminist Discourse in Irish Literature addresses the role of young adult (YA) Irish literature in responding and contributing to some of the most controversial and contemporary issues in today's modern society: gender, and conflicting views of power, sexism and consent. This volume provides an original, innovative and necessary examination of how "rape culture" and the intersections between feminism and power have become increasingly relevant to Irish society in the years since Irish author Louise O'Neill's novels for young adults Only Ever Yours and Asking For It were published. In consideration of the socio-political context in Ireland and broader Western culture from which O'Neill's works were written, and taking into account a selection of Irish, American, Australian and British YA texts that address similar issues in different contexts, this book highlights the contradictions in O'Neill's works and illuminates their potential to function as a form of literary/social fundamentalism which often undermines, rather than promotes, equality.

How can Clarice Lispector's writings help us make sense of the Anthropocene? How does race intersect with the treatment of animals in the works of Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis? What can Indigenous philosopher and leader Ailton Krenak teach us about the relationship between environmental degradation and the production of knowledge? Literature Beyond the Human is the first collection of essays in English dedicated to an investigation of Brazilian literature from the viewpoint of the environmental humanities, animal studies, Anthropocene studies, and other critical and theoretical perspectives that question the centrality of the human. This volume includes 15 chapters by leading scholars covering two centuries of Brazilian literary production, from Goncalves Dias to Astrid Cabral, from Euclides da Cunha to Davi Kopenawa, and others. By underscoring the vast theoretical potential of Brazilian literature and thought, from the influential Modernist thesis of "cultural cannibalism" (antropofagia) to the renewed interest in Amerindian perspectivism in culture. Post-Anthropocentric Brazil shows how the theoretical strength of Brazilian thought can contribute to contemporary debates in the anglophone realm.

The first comprehensive critique of the critical and cultural theories after postmodernism by a Chinese scholar in a international and comparative manner. Offers a panoramic overview of the critical and cultural theories in the 20th century in a theoretical way. Offers non-EuroAmerican perspectives on Western literary theories and cultural trends.

This book is a theoretical and practical guide to implementing an inquiry-based approach to teaching which centers creative responses to works of art in curriculum. Guided by Maxine Greene's philosophy of Aesthetic Education, the authors discuss the social justice implications of marginalized students having access to the arts and opportunities to find their voices through creative expression. They aim to demystify the process of inquiry-based learning through the arts for teachers and teacher educators by offering examples of lessons taught in high school classrooms and graduate level teaching methods courses. Examples of student writing and art work show how creative interactions with the arts can help learners of all ages deepen their skills as readers, writers, and thinkers.

Landscapes of Liminality expands upon existing notions of spatial practice and spatial theory, and examines more intricately the contingent notion of "liminality" as a space of "in-between-ness" that avoids either essentialism or stasis. It capitalises on the extensive research that has already been undertaken in this area, and elaborates on the increasingly important and interrelated notion of liminality within contemporary discussions of spatial practice and theories of place. Bringing together international scholarship, the book offers a broad range of cross-disciplinary approaches to theories of liminality including literary studies, cultural studies, human geography, social studies, and art and design. The volume offers a timely and fascinating intervention which will help in shaping current debates concerning landscape theory, spatial practice, and discussions of liminality.

How can theology think and talk about history? Building on the work of the major twentieth-century theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar as well as entering into sharp critical debate with him, this book sets out to examine the value and the potential of a 'theodramatic' conception of history. By engaging in dialogue not only with theologians and philosophers like von Balthasar, Hegel and Barth, but with poets and dramatists such as the Greek tragedians, Shakespeare and Gerard Manley Hopkins, the book makes its theological principles open and indebted to literary forms, and seeks to show how such a theology might be applied to a world intrinsically and thoroughly historical. By contrast with theologies that stand back from the contingencies of history and so fight shy of the uncertainties and openness of Christian existence, this book's theology is committed to taking seriously the God who works in time.

This book is the first to develop a Baudrillardian critique of the problematic way Lacanian psychoanalysis, as a clinical practice and by extension as a source of socio-cultural and philosophical theory, continues its vain attempt to (re)animate a subject of the unconscious. The text throws into question Lacan's notion of the 'real,' the unconscious 'structured as a language,' and his construct of surplus, while interrogating the links between psychoanalysis and Marxism. It shows how Lacanian psychoanalysis, with its questionable ethics, transpires as an endlessly recursive simulation model. Lacan's clinical seminar was influential in the intellectual milieu of Paris while Baudrillard was writing. Although frequently referring to psychoanalysis, Baudrillard never wrote a detailed critique of psychoanalysis; the scaffolding of such a work, however, transpires throughout the extent of his writing. The text also outlines Deleuze and Guattari's critique of psychoanalysis stressing how the alternative they propose remains within the oppressive terms of our current world. This book is an essential resource for social, critical, cultural, literary, feminist, and psychoanalytic theory. While of interest to students, researchers, and scholars of Jean Baudrillard's work and Lacanian psychoanalysis, this book particularly addresses those for whom not all is well with psychoanalysis, opening towards renewed directions through questioning.

This is the first full commentary on Walter Benjamin's "The Task of the Translator,". the essay is very popular and widely taught at p/g level, but is also cryptic and misunderstood, hence the need for this detailed and nuanced treatment. It is also the only commentary on Benjamin's essay at book or article length ever to experiment with the mode of translating that he himself championed.

Includes a first-hand account of the experience of depersonalization Examines depersonalization in relation to well-known literary texts, including Camus's The Strange and Sartre's Nausea, and shows how the concept of depersonalized writing can be found in the work of literary theorists, including T.S. Eliot, Roland Barthes and Viktor Shklovsky Explores how creative writers can make use of the lessons learned from the study of depersonalization to arrive at a deeper understanding of writing

1) This volume questions the colonially structured interpretations and binaries in understanding post-colonial history and myths. 2) It contains articles written by scholars based in South Asia, Latin America and Europe. 3) Interdisciplinary and challenging the stereotypes, this book will be of interest to departments of post-colonial studies and cultural studies across UK and USA.

This collection of essays focuses on the representations of a variety of "bad girls"-women who challenge, refuse, or transgress the patriarchal limits intended to circumscribe them-in television, popular fiction, and mainstream film from the mid-twentieth century to the present. Perhaps not surprisingly, the initial introduction of women into Western cultural narrative coincides with the introduction of transgressive women. From the beginning, for good or ill, women have been depicted as insubordinate. Today's popular manifestations include such widely known figures as Lisbeth Salander (the "girl with the dragon tattoo"), The Walking Dead's Michonne, and the queen bees of teen television series. While the existence and prominence of transgressive women has continued uninterrupted, however, attitudes towards them have varied considerably. It is those attitudes that are explored in this collection. At the same time, these essays place feminist/postfeminist analysis in a larger context, entering into ongoing debates about power, equality, sexuality, and gender.

1. The last specialised study of Deburau (the most famous and influential mime actor of all time) in French or English was the biography by Tristan Remy in 1954, Jean-Gaspard Deburau. 2. This book is very wide-ranging: starting with Deburau's Pierrot figure, it discusses nineteenth-century theatre, novels, poetry, society, and twentieth-century echoes in cinema and modern mime. 3. Readers who think they know who and what 'Pierrot' is (and was) will be surprised by what they find in this book; for example, his relation to colonialism and race. 4. There are 26 figures in the book, all of them discussed in depth. 5. Deburau is well-known among scholars, and the wider public know his image even if they can't necessarily put a name to it, but he has never been studied through such a wide range of manuscript as well as published sources, many of them identified for the first time.

Caroline Alphin presents an original exploration of biopolitics by examining it through the lens of cyberpunk science fiction. Comprised of five chapters, Neoliberalism and Cyberpunk Science Fiction is guided by four central themes: biopolitics, intensification, resilience, and accelerationism. The first chapters examine the political possibilities of cyberpunk as a genre of science fiction and introduce one kind of neoliberal subject, the self-monitoring cyborg. These are individuals who join fitness/health tracking devices and applications to their body to "self-cultivate". Here, Alphin presents concrete examples of how fitness trackers are a strategy of neoliberal governmentality under the guise of self-cultivation. Moving away from Foucault's biopolitics to themes of intensity and resilience, Alphin draws largely from William Gibson's Neuromancer, Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon, along with the film Blade Runner to problematize notions of neoliberal resilience. Alphin returns to biopolitics, intensity, and resilience, connecting these themes to accelerationism as she engages with biohacker discourses. Here she argues that a biohacker is, in part, an intensification of the self-monitoring cyborg and accelerationism is in the end another form of resilience. Neoliberalism and Cyberpunk Science Fiction is an invaluable resource for those interested in security studies, political sociology, biopolitics, critical IR theory, political theory, cultural studies, and literary theory.

Adopting an intersectional lens, this timely volume explores the lived experiences of members of the queer and trans community in post-secondary STEM culture in the US to provide critical insights into progressing socially just STEM education pathways. Offering contributions from students, faculty, practitioners, and administrators, the volume highlights prevailing issues of heteronormativity and marginalization across a range of STEM disciplines. Autoethnographic accounts place minority experiences within the broader context of social and cultural phenomena to reveal subtle and overt forms of exclusion, and systematic barriers to participation in STEM professions, academia, and research. Finally, the book offers key recommendations to inform future research and practice. This volume will benefit researchers, academics, and educators with an interest in higher education, engineering education, and the sociology of education more broadly. Those involved with diversity, equity, and inclusion within education, queer theory, and gender and sexuality studies will also benefit from this volume.

First published in 1974, New Directions in Literary History is a comprehensive attempt to present approaches to literary studies that have developed from phenomenology, stylistics and linguistics, Marxist reconsiderations of literature, interdisciplinary studies and analysis of reader response. Written by an international group of scholars, the essays are taken from the pages of New Literary History. They range from the Middle Ages to contemporary literature. European and American literary critics are here represented, together with an art critic, a philosopher and a novelist. Their essays deal with crucial problems in the study of literature: the relationship of the contemporary critic to works of the past; the place of method in literary study; how reading takes place; the role of the reader in different literary periods in providing a guide to interpretation; the language of literature and its relation to natural or ordinary language; the origin and decline of literary forms; and what constitutes literature, especially in the relation between fictional character and autobiography. Although the essays are essentially concerned with theoretical issues, they also examine the practical applications to literature. Students of English literature and literary theory will find this book particularly interesting.