This is the first extended study to specifically focus on character in dystopia. Through the lens of the "last man" figure, Character and Dystopia: The Last Men examines character development in Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Nathanael West's A Cool Million, David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, Lois Lowry's The Giver, Michel Houellebecq's Submission, Chan Koonchung's The Fat Years, and Maggie Shen King's An Excess Male, showing how in the 20th and 21st centuries dystopian nostalgia shades into reactionary humanism, a last stand mounted in defense of forms of subjectivity no longer supported by modernity. Unlike most work on dystopia that emphasizes dystopia's politics, this book's approach grows out of questions of poetics: What are the formal structures by which dystopian character is constructed? How do dystopian characters operate differently than other characters, within texts and upon the reader? What is the relation between this character and other forms of literary character, such as are found in romantic and modernist texts? By reading character as crucial to the dystopian project, the book makes a case for dystopia as a sensitive register of modern anxieties about subjectivity and its portrayal in literary works.

Originally published in 1985, as with the earlier volumes in the series, the reader of The Rover is here provided a Verbal Index, citing each type and its location, a Word Frequency Table, and a Field of Reference. Using the tables in this concordance, the reader should be better able to address the issue of style and determine on a more informed basis whether Conrad has deliberately eschewed the adjectival and even the figurative in favour of a lean, spare style, or whether he has simply tangled his style in rhetorical excesses and imprecisions.

Originally published in 1984, this volume falls in to three parts: the verbal index, the word frequency table, and the field reference. The user can look to the alphabetical listing in the word frequency table to see how many times a word occurs in the text of An Outcast of the Islands. Then turning to the verbal index they can see the page number and line at which each occurrence falls. Then turning to the field of reference they can look at the actual context of each word in the text.

Originally published in 1986, this is a powerful and original book. It offers textual interpretation of Conrad's major work and articulates the subtlety and richness of his treatment of social-political institutions and of the forces that complicate and distort private and public life. Suresh Raval argues that the social-personal relations in Conrad's fiction cannot be conceived apart from their existence in the political life of a community; but at the same time they cannot be accommodated institutionally. The author's concern is with the problematic status of the self under various perspectives: experience and understanding (Heart of Darkness), an ethical ideal (Lord Jim), history (Nostromo), ideology (The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes), scepticism (Victory). What the self is remains ambiguous and elusive. Conrad's fiction is concerned with exhibiting the failure of language, but always as a result of an immense effort of language itself. As language undoes itself in the act of seeking utterance, so Conrad's fictional mode - romance - turns into the opposite of itself as it unfolds. Raval demonstrates that incompatible alternatives - intention and action, thought and experience, the individual and the social, the logical and the contingent - are entangled with each other, and how this entanglement works in the fiction. Raval's exploration of Conrad's scepticism shows why Conrad cannot be characterized as a political conservative or radical without distorting the complexity and seriousness of his reflection on society. For his scepticism is the product not just of intelligence but of intelligence conscious of its limitations, and is thus able to make a devastating critique of the nihilism sometimes attributed to Conrad by critics. Only those who think that morality has to have a secure single foundation if it is to be real are pushed into regarding Conrad's scepticism as a form of nihilism. Professor Raval's important study brings philosophical and literary interests to bear on Conrad's major fiction and illuminates those aspects of his art which have puzzled and fascinated his readers. It will be deservedly valued by those studying and teaching modern literature.

Originally published in 1981, this concordance can afford particular benefits to the critic and textual scholar because of several specialized problems that The Arrow of Gold presents. It should be able to shed light on problems distinct to The Arrow of Gold even as it provides information on questions pertinent to Conrad's work as a whole. This volume is part of a series which produced verbal indexes, concordances, and related data for all of Conrad's works.

Originally published in 1979, this concordance to Heart of Darkness is intended for use by the general student of Conrad who wants to determine the exact denotation and connotation of Conrad's vocabulary, or the patterns of imagery in his work, quickly and effortlessly. It prints under each word every logical context in which it occurs. This volume is part of a series which produced verbal indexes, concordances, and related data for all of Conrad's works.

Originally published in 1982, this title supplies a complete verbal index, listing all the words in the texts with their locations, a word frequency table, and a field of reference which establishes a page/line reference system for locating each context. The user will look first in the word frequency table to see whether or not the word in question occurs in these works. Then they will turn to the verbal index to find the line and page on which it occurs, and finally, turning to the location in the field of reference, they will find the context for their word.

Originally published in 1983, this volume follows others in the series. The user is provided with a Verbal Index, citing each type and its location, a Word Frequency Table, and a Field of Reference. This volume is part of a series which produced verbal indexes, concordances, and related data for all of Conrad's works.

Originally published in 1985, this concordance lists all the words in the text indexed, along with the locations of their appearance in the Field of Reference. The Verbal Index lists the location of the context of each word in the Field of Reference. There is also a table listing alphabetically all words employed in the text and giving their frequency of occurrence. This volume is part of a series which produced verbal indexes, concordances, and related data for all of Conrad's works.

Undecidability is a fundamental quality of literature and constitutive of what renders some works appealing and engaging across time and in different contexts. This book explores the essential literary notion and its role, function and effect in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and literary theory. The book traces the notion historically, providing a map of central theories addressing interpretative challenges and recalcitrance in literature and showing 'theory of uncertainty' to be an essential strand of literary theory. While uncertainty is present in all literature, and indeed a prerequisite for any stabilisation of meaning, the Modernist period is characterised by a particularly strong awareness of uncertainty and its subforms of undecidability, ambiguity, indeterminacy, etc. With examples from seminal Modernist works by Woolf, Proust, Ford, Kafka and Musil, the book sheds light on undecidability as a central structuring principle and guiding philosophical idea in twentieth-century literature and demonstrates the analytical value of undecidability as a critical concept and reading-strategy. Defining undecidability as a specific 'sustained' and 'productive' kind of uncertainty and distinguishing it from related forms, such as ambiguity, indeterminacy and indistinction, the book develops a systematic but flexible theory of undecidability and outlines a productive reading-strategy based on the recognition of textual and interpretive undecidability.

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

Dany Nobus is a leading figure in Lacanian psychoanalytic studies. Presented in three interlinked parts. Studies areas which have previously been neglected.

Dany Nobus is a leading figure in Lacanian psychoanalytic studies. Presented in three interlinked parts. Studies areas which have previously been neglected.

Since the reform and opening up of China in 1978, Western literary criticism has begun to flourish and gain in popularity within the country's academic literature community. These two volumes meticulously select and examine nine of the most influential keywords from Western literary theory while identifying the intricate historical sources of these terms and analyzing their relevance to other disciplines and ideas. The result shows how these words function as heterogeneous cultural contexts in the complexity of experience but also how they function within the context of Chinese culture as well as Chinese literature and criticism. In this volume, the editors focus on discourse, text, narrative, literariness and irony from the perspectives of etymology, documentation, meanings and other core factors. Students of literature and languages, and especially Chinese literature, will benefit from this two-volume set.

Nineteenth-Century Italian Women Writers and the Woman Question focuses on the literary, journalistic and epistolary production of Italian woman writer Neera, pseudonym for Anna Radius Zuccari, one of the most prolific and successful women writers of late nineteenth-century Italy. This study proposes to bring Neera out of the shadows of literary marginality to which she has long been confined by analyzing her contribution to literary and cultural debates as testimony to the pivotal role she played in the creation of a female literary voice within the Italian fin-de-siecle context. Drawing from the Anglo-American feminist critical tradition; modern Italian feminist theory on the maternal order and sexual difference; and a close reading of Neera's literary, theoretical and epistolary writings this volume examines Neera's work from a three-pronged perspective: as promoter of a maternal order in contrast to the existent paternal order, as one of few women writers to participate actively in Italy's verismo movement and as epistolary correspondent of leading representatives within fin-de-siecle Italian literary and journalistic circles. Nineteenth-Century Italian Women Writers and the Woman Question represents the first monographic volume in English dedicated exclusively to this important Italian woman writer, repositioning her within the Italian literary landscape and canon.

Modernist Literature and European Identity examines how European and non-European authors debated the idea of Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. It shifts the focus from European modernism to modernist Europe, and shows how the notion of Europe was constructed in a variety of modernist texts. Authors such as Ford Madox Ford, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Aime Cesaire, and Nancy Cunard each developed their own notion of Europe. They engaged in transnational networks and experimented with new forms of writing, supporting or challenging a European ideal. Building on insights gained from global modernism and network theory, this book suggests that rather than defining Europe through a set of core principles, we may also regard it as an open or weak construct, a crossroads where different authors and views converged and collided.

Comparing and evaluating modern theories of myth, this book offers an overview of explanations of myth from the social sciences and the humanities. This ambitious collection of essays uses the viewpoints of a variety of disciplines - psychology, anthropology, sociology, politics, philosophy, religious studies, and literature. Each discipline advocates a generalization about the origin, the function, and the subject matter of myth. The subject is always not what makes any myth distinct but what makes all myths "myth". The book is divided into five sections, covering topics such as myth and psychoanalysis, hero myths, myth and science, myth and politics, and myth and the physical world. Chapters engage with an array of theorists--among them, Freud, Jung, Campbell, Rank, Winnicott, Tylor, Frazer, Malinowski, Levy-Bruhl, Levi-Strauss, Harrison, and Burkert. The book considers whether myth still plays a role in our lives is one of the issues considered, showing that myths arise anything but spontaneously. They are the result of a specific need, which varies from theory to theory. This is a fascinating survey by a leading voice in the study of myth. As such, it will be of much interest to scholars of myth and how it interacts with Sociology, Anthropology, Politics and Economics.

This volume considers the highly convoluted relationship between F. R. Leavis and T. S. Eliot, comparing their ideas in literary and cultural criticism, and connecting it to the broader discourse of English Studies as a university subject that developed in the first half of the twentieth century. Comparing and contrasting all the many writings of Leavis on Eliot, and the two on Lawrence, the study examines how Eliot is formative for the theory and practice of Leavis's literary criticism in both positive and negative ways, and investigates Lawrence's significance in relation to Leavis's changing attitude to Eliot. It also examines how profound differences in social, cultural, religious and national thinking strengthened Leavis's alliance with Lawrence to the detriment of his relationship with Eliot. These differences between the two writers are presented as dichotomies between nationalism and Europeanism/internationalism, ruralism/organicism and industrialism/metropolitanism, and relate to the two men's views on literary education, the subject of 'English' and the position of the Classics in the curriculum. It explores how Leavis's increasingly conflicted feelings about a figure to whom he owned an enormous critical debt and inspiration, but whose various beliefs and literary affiliations caused him much misgiving, result in a deep sense of division in Leavis himself which he sought to transfer onto Eliot as what he called a pathological 'case'.

This book reconstructs Istanbul through the prism of Orhan Pamuk's fiction. It navigates the multiple selves and layers of Istanbul to present how the city has shaped the writings of Pamuk and has, in turn, been shaped by it. Through everyday objects and architecture, it shows how Pamuk transforms the city into a living museum where different objects converse along with characters to present a rich tapestry across space and time. Further, the monograph explores the formation of communal and literary identity within and around nation-building narratives informed by capitalism and modernization. The book also examines how Pamuk uses the postmodern city to move beyond its postmodern confines, and utilizes the theories and universes of Bakhtin, Benjamin, and Foucault to open up his fiction and radically challenge the idea of the novel. The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literature, literary theory, museum studies, architecture, and cultural studies, and especially appeal to readers of Orhan Pamuk.

1. Offers a new approach to teaching/thinking and analysing in literary studies 2. Responds to the key concerns of most researchers and students right now - global social justice and sustainability and the value of literature/humanities 3. There are no other books that tie together systems thinking, wisdom, literary studies and social justice - it is unique

Literary Animal Studies and the Climate Crisis connects insights from the field of literary animal studies with the urgent issues of climate change and environmental degradation, and features considerations of new interventions by literature in relation to these pressing questions and debates. This volume informs academic debates in terms of how nonhuman animals figure in our cultural imagination of topics such as climate change, extinction, animal otherness, the posthuman, and environmental crises. Using a diverse set of methodologies, each chapter presents relevant cases which discuss the various aspects of these interstices. This volume is an intersection between literary animal studies and climate fiction intended as an interdisciplinary intervention that speaks to the global climate debate and is thus relevant across the environmental humanities.

Ecological Form brings together leading voices in nineteenth-century ecocriticism to suture the lingering divide between postcolonial and ecocritical approaches. Together, these essays show how Victorian thinkers used aesthetic form to engage problems of system, interconnection, and dispossession that remain our own. The authors reconsider Victorian literary structures in light of environmental catastrophe; coordinate "natural" questions with sociopolitical ones; and underscore the category of form as a means for generating environmental-and therefore political-knowledge. Moving from the elegy and the industrial novel to the utopian romance, the scientific treatise, and beyond, Ecological Form demonstrates how nineteenth-century thinkers conceptualized the circuits of extraction and violence linking Britain to its global network. Yet the book's most pressing argument is that this past thought can be a resource for reimagining the present.

This collection of essays offers twelve innovative approaches to contemporary literary criticism. The contributors, women scholars who range from undergraduate students to contingent faculty to endowed chairs, stage a critical dialogue that raises vital questions about the aims and forms of criticism- its discourses and politics, as well as the personal, institutional, and economic conditions of its production. Offering compelling feminist and queer readings of avant-garde twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts, the essays included here are playful, performative, and theoretically savvy. Written for students, scholars, and professors in literature and creative writing, Reading and Writing Experimental Texts provides examples for doing literary scholarship in innovative ways. These provocative readings invite conversation and community, reminding us that if the stakes of critical innovation are high, so are the pleasures.

How do the stories we tell about money shape our economies? Beginning in the late eighteenth century, as constant growth became the economic norm throughout Europe, fictional stories involving money were overwhelmingly about loss. Novel after novel tells the tale of bankruptcy and financial failure, of people losing everything and ending up in debtor's prison, of inheritances lost and daughters left orphaned and poor. In Downward Mobility, Katherine Binhammer argues that these stories of ruin are not simple tales about the losers of capitalism but narratives that help manage speculation of capital's inevitable collapse. Bringing together contemporary critical finance studies with eighteenth-century literary history, Binhammer demonstrates the centrality of the myth of downward mobility to the cultural history of capitalism-and to the emergence of the novel in Britain. Deftly weaving economic history and formal analysis, Binhammer reveals how capitalism requires the novel's complex techniques to render infinite economic growth imaginable. She also explains why the novel's signature formal developments owe their narrative dynamics to the contradictions within capital's form. Combining new archival research on the history of debt with original readings of sentimental novels, including Frances Burney's Cecilia and Camilla, Sarah Fielding's David Simple, and Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield, Downward Mobility registers the value of literary narrative in interpreting the complex sequences behind financial capitalism, especially the belief in infinite growth that has led to current environmental crises. An audacious epilogue arms humanists with the argument that, in order to save the planet from unsustainable growth, we need to read more novels.

This book is the first study of writers who are both Victorian and indigenous, who have been educated in and write in terms of Victorian literary conventions, but whose indigenous affiliation is part of their literary personae and subject matter. What happens when the colonised, indigenous, or 'native' subject learns to write in the literary language of empire? If the romanticised subject of colonial literature becomes the author, is a new kind of writing produced, or does the native author conform to the models of the coloniser? By investigating the ways that nineteenth-century concerns are adopted, accommodated, rewritten, challenged, re-inscribed, confronted, or assimilated in the work of these authors, this study presents a novel examination of the nature of colonial literary production and indigenous authorship, as well as suggesting to the discipline of colonial and postcolonial studies a perhaps unsettling perspective with which to look at the larger patterns of Victorian cultural and literary formation.