This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Drawing on a wide range of examples from literature, comics, film, television and digital media, Nerd Ecology is the first substantial ecocritical study of nerd culture's engagement with environmental issues. Exploring such works as Star Trek, Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly, the fiction of Thomas Pynchon, The Hunger Games, and superhero comics such as Green Lantern and X-Men, Anthony Lioi maps out the development of nerd culture and its intersections with the most fundamental ecocritical themes. In this way Lioi finds in the narratives of unpopular culture - narratives in which marginalised individuals and communities unite to save the planet - the building blocks of a new environmental politics in tune with the concerns of contemporary ecocritical theory and practice.

The reputation of the Marquis de Sade is well-founded. The experience of reading his works is demanding to an extreme. Violence and sexuality appear on almost every page, and these descriptions are interspersed with extended discourses on materialism, atheism, and crime. In this bold and rigorous study William S. Allen sets out the context and implications of Sade's writings in order to explain their lasting challenge to thought. For what is apparent from a close examination of his works is the breadth of his readings in contemporary science and philosophy, and so the question that has to be addressed is why Sade pursued these interests by way of erotica of the most violent kind. Allen shows that Sade's interests lead to a form of writing that seeks to bring about a new mode of experience that is engaged in exploring the limits of sensibility through their material actualization. In common with other Enlightenment thinkers Sade is concerned with the place of reason in the world, a place that becomes utterly transformed by a materialism of endless excess. This concern underlies his interest in crime and sexuality, and thereby puts him in the closest proximity to thinkers like Kant and Diderot, but also at the furthest extreme, in that it indicates how far the nature and status of reason is perverted. It is precisely this materialist critique of reason that is developed and demonstrated in his works, and which their reading makes persistently, excessively, apparent.

Explaining both why theory is important and how to use it, Lois Tyson introduces beginning students of literature to this often daunting field in a friendly and readable style. The new edition of this textbook is clearly structured with chapters based on major theories frequently covered both in courses on literature and on critical theory. Key features include: * coverage of major theories including reader-response theory, New Criticism (formalism), psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, lesbian/gay/queer theories, African American theory, and postcolonial theory * practical demonstrations of how to use these theories to interpret short literary works selected from canonical authors including William Faulkner and Alice Walker * a chapter on reader-response theory that shows students how to use their personal responses to literature while avoiding typical pitfalls * sections on cultural criticism for each chapter that use our selected theories to interpret productions of popular culture This new edition also includes updated and expanded theoretical vocabulary, as well as "basic concepts" and "further study" sections, and an expanded "next-step" appendix that suggests additional literary works for extra practice. Comprehensive, easy to use, and fully updated throughout, Using Critical Theory is the ideal first step for students beginning degrees in literature, composition, and cultural studies.

Sharing Common Ground makes a compelling contribution to an important emerging field that affects a broad swath of humanities. It uses historical, photographic, and literary examples, including an entirely new translation of a little known work by Marguerite Duras, presented here in full, to showcase the ethical capacity of art. Robert Harvey deploys critical tools borrowed from literature, aesthetics, and philosophy to mobilize the thought of several seminal figures in literature and theory including Michel Foucault, Marguerite Duras, Georges Didi-Huberman, and Giorgio Agamben, among a host of others. Construction sites, concentration camps, cemeteries, slums-such are only a few of the spaces that impel our imagination naturally toward what we commonly call "cultural memory." Sharing Common Ground reveals how the endeavor to think and imagine in common, and especially about the spaces we inhabit together, is critically important to human beings, artistically, culturally, and ethically.

"Milton, Evil and Literary History" addresses the ways in which we read literary history according to quite specific images of growth, development, progression, flourishing and succession. Goodness has always been aligned with a life of expansion, creation, production and fruition, while evil is associated with the inert, non-relational, static and stagnant. These associations have also underpinned a distinction between good and evil notions of capitalism, where good exchange enables the agents to enhance their living potential and is contrasted with the evils of a capitalism system that circulates without any reference to life or spirit. Such images of a ghostly and technical economy divorced from animating origin are both central to Milton's theology and poetry and to the theories of literary history through which Milton is read.Regarded as a radical precursor to Romanticism, Milton's poetry supposedly requires the release of his radical spiritual content from the fetters of received orthodoxy. This literary and historical imagery of releasing the radical spirit of a text from the dead weight of received tradition is, this book argues, the dominant doxa of historicism and one which a counter-reading of Milton ought to question.

"Encountering Derrida" explores the points of engagement between Jacques Derrida and a host of other European thinkers, past and present, in order to counter recent claims that the era of deconstruction is finally drawing to a close. The book rereads Derrida in order to renew deconstruction's various conceptions of language, poetry, philosophy, institutions, difference and the future.This impressive collection of essays from the world's leading Derrida scholars re-evaluates Derrida's legacy and looks forward to the possible futures of deconstruction by confronting various challenges to Derrida's thought. Collectively, the essays argue that Derrida must be read alongside others, an approach that produces some surprising new accounts of this challenging critical thinker.

The imaginary as a critical concept originated in the twentieth century and has been theorized in diverse ways. It can be understood as a register of thought; the way we interpret the world; the universe of images, signs, texts, and objects of thought. In this volume, it is explored as it manifests itself in encounters between the verbal and the visual. A number of the essays brought together here explore the transposition of the imaginary in illustrations of texts and verbal renditions of images, as well as in comic books based on paintings or on verbal narratives. Others analyze ways in which books deal with film or television and investigate the imaginary in digital media. Special attention is paid to the imaginary of places and the relationship of the imaginary with memory. Written in English and French, these contributions by European and American scholars demonstrate the various concerns and approaches characteristic of contemporary scholarship in word and image studies.

The invention of the present-tense novel is a literary event whose importance is on par with the discovery of perspective in painting. From the first novels shaped by interior monologues and the use of the present tense in the tradition of modernism, the present tense has, over the course of its century-long evolution, changed the conditions of fictional narration, along with our conceptions of time in a philosophical and linguistic framework. Indeed, to understand the work of an increasing number of contemporary writers - J.M. Coetzee, Tom McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, to name only a few - it is necessary to both understand the distinct linguistic and literary qualities of the present tense as well as its historical transformation into a genuine tense of contemporary storytelling. For the first time in literary scholarship, Present Tense: A Poetics offers an account of a profound development in 20th- and 21st-century fiction.

In Postcolonial Past & Present twelve outstanding scholars of literature, history and visual arts look to those spaces Epeli Hau'ofa has insisted are full not empty, asking what it might mean to Indigenise culture. A new cultural politics demands new forms of making and interpretation that rethink and reroute existing cultural categories and geographies. These 'makers' include Mukunda Das, Janet Frame, Xavier Herbert, Tomson Highway, Claude McKay, Marie Munkara, Elsje van Keppel, Albert Wendt, Jane Whiteley and Alexis Wright. Case studies from Canada to the Caribbean, India to the Pacific, and Africa, analyse the productive ways that artists and intellectuals have made sense of turbulent local and global forces. Contributors: Bill Ashcroft, Debnarayan Bandyopadhyay, Anne Brewster, Diana Brydon, Meeta Chatterjee-Padmanabhan, Anne Collett, Dorothy Jones, Kay Lawrence, Russell McDougall, Tekura Moeka'a, Tony Simoes da Silva, Teresia Teaiwa, Albert Wendt, Lydia Wevers, Diana Wood Conroy

Edward Said and the Question of Subjectivity explores the notion of subjectivity implicated in and articulated by Said in his writings. Analyzing several of his major works, Pannian argues that there is a shift in Said's intellectual trajectory that takes place after the composition of Orientalism. In so doing, Said forthrightly attempts to retrieve a theoretical and political humanism, as Pannian identifies, despite the difficult and sanguinary aspects of its past. He elaborates upon Said's understanding that only after recognising the structures of violence and coming to discern strategies of interpellation, may the individual subject effectively resist them. Pannian also explores Said's ideas on exilic subjectivity, the role of intellectuals, acts of memory, critical secularism, affiliation and solidarity before dwelling on his interface with Marxist thinkers such as Antonio Gramsci, Theodor Adorno, and Raymond Williams. This engagement marks Said's own subject formation, and shapes his self-reflexive mode of knowledge production.

Recent narrative fiction and film increasingly exploit, explore and thematize the embodied mind, revealing the tenacity of a certain brand of humanism. The presence of narratively based concepts of personal identity even in texts which explore posthuman possibilities is strong proof that our basic understanding of what it means to be human has, despite appearances, remained mostly unchanged. This is so even though our perception of time has been greatly modified by the same technology which both interrupts and allows for the rearrangement of our experience of time at a rate and a level of ease which, until recently, had never been possible. Basing his views on a long line of philosophers and literary theorists such as Paul Ricoeur, Daniel Dennett and Francisco Varela, Escobar maintains in The Persistence of the Human that narrative plays an essential role in the process of constituting and maintaining a sense of self. It is narrative's effect on the embodied mind which gives it such force. Narrative projects us into possible spaces, shaping a temporary corporeality termed the "meta-body," a hybrid shared by the lived body and an imagined corporeal sense. The meta-body is a secondary embodiment that we inhabit for however long our narrative immersion lasts - something which, in today's world, may be a question of milliseconds or hours. The more agreeable the meta-body is, the less happy we are upon being abruptly removed from it, though the return is essential. We want to be able to slip back and forth between this secondary embodiment and that of our lived body; each move entails both forgetting and remembering different subject positions (loss and recuperation being salient themes in the works which highlight this process). The negotiation of the transfer between these states is shaped by culture and technology and this is something which is precisely in flux now as multiple, ephemeral narrative immersion experiences are created by the different screens we come into contact with.

Focusing on the first journal in The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, this book writes a convincing case for the value of corpus-based stylistics and narrative psychology in the analysis of representations of the experience of affective states. Situated at the intersection between language study, psychology and healthcare, this study of the personal writing of a poet and novelist showcases a cutting-edge combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches, including metaphor analysis, corpus methods, and second person narration. Techniques that systematically account for representations of experiences of affective states, such as those in this book, are rare and crucial in improving understanding of these experiences. The findings and methods of this book therefore potentially have bearing on the study, diagnosis and treatment of depression and other mental illnesses. Zsofia Demjen follows the cognitive turn in both literary studies and linguistics here, emerging with a greater understanding of Plath, her diarized output and her experience of her inner world.

In this stimulating collection of essays, twenty scholars apply new theoretical approaches to the fiction and poetry of southern writers ranging from Poe to Dickey, from Faulkner to Hurston. Departing from earlier traditions of southern literary scholarship, this book seeks not to create a new orthodoxy but to suggest the diversity of critical tools that can now be used to explore the literature and culture of the South. Including essays based on deconstructionist, feminist, and Marxist theory, the book features contributions from such critics as Henry Louis Gates, Harold Bloom, Fred Chappell, and Joan DeJean. Yet, for all their variety, the essayists share the same central concern. ""We have in common,"" writes Jefferson Humphries, ""one thing that sets us apart from our elders in our conception of the South and our approach to southern literature: the basic assumption that the meaning and significance of literature is not in the immanence of the literary object, or in history, but in the complex ways in which the literary, the historical, and all the 'human sciences' that study both, are interrelated."" Instead of simply taking ""the South"" for granted, the contributors to this volume see it as a text and an idea - as something whose ideological underpinnings, complexities, and contradictions must be subjected to close reading and questioning. Southern Literature and Literary Theory represents a major effort to redefine the relationship of southern writing and the South itself to the larger world.

This title includes new essays by a range of leading theorists on the interdisciplinary study of literature and history. "Literature as History" presents a selection of specially commissioned essays by a range of key contemporary thinkers on the interdisciplinary study of literature and history. Chapters include: Catherine Belsey on Historicism, Helen Carr on Modernism, Terry Eagleton on tragedy, John Lucas on the First World War, R. C. Richardson on Servants in the 18th Century, Judy Simons on Rosamund Lehmann, and Stan Smith on Edward Thomas. The unifying theme is the interrelationship between literary/cultural production and its historical moment. The essays in the collection are astute and exciting in terms of their engagement with ever-changing developments in critical and theoretical practice while retaining an invaluable focus on familiar and engaging texts and authors. The contributors offer a reappraisal of the nature of literary studies today, looking back over the thirty-five years of Peter Widdowson's career - a career which has coincided with the emergence of, challenges to, and reformulations of critical theory - and ask what the future holds, particularly for the interdisciplinary ways of working which Widdowson pioneered. Bringing together distinguished scholars in the interdisciplinary study of English and History, it seizes the opportunity to take stock of the current field of literary studies and to ask searching questions about its future development.

How does literature represent, challenge and help us understand our experience of globalization? Taking literary globalization studies beyond its traditional political focus, Literature and the Experience of Globalization explores how writers from Shakespeare through Goethe to Isak Dinesen, J.M. Coetzee, Amitav Ghosh and Bruce Chatwin engage with the human dimensions of globalization. Through a wide range of insightful close readings, Svend Erik Larsen brings contemporary world literature approaches to bear on cross-cultural experiences of migration and travel, translation, memory, history and embodied knowledge. In doing so, this important intervention demonstrates how literature becomes an essential site for understanding the ways in which globalization has become an integral part of everyday experience.

This book assesses the importance of poetry for the Old Icelandic literary flowering of c. 1150-1350. It addresses the apparent paradox that an extremely conservative form of literature, namely skaldic poetry, was at the core of the most innovative literary and intellectual experiments in the period. The book argues that this cannot simply be explained as a result of strong local traditions, as in most previous scholarship. Thus, for instance, the author demonstrates that the mix of prose and poetry found in kings' sagas and sagas of Icelanders is roughly contemporary to the written sagas. Similarly, he argues that treatises on poetics and mythology, including Snorri's Edda, are new to the period, not only in their textual form, but also in their systematic mode of analysis. The book contends that what is truly new in these texts is the method of the authors, derived from Latin learning, but applied to traditional forms and motifs as encapsulated in the skaldic tradition. In this way, Christian Latin learning allowed for its perceived opposite, vernacular oral literature of pagan extraction, to reach full fruition and to largely replace the very literature which had made this process possible in the first place.

World Literature in Theory provides a definitive exploration of the pressing questions facing those studying world literature today. * Coverage is split into four parts which examine the origins and seminal formulations of world literature, world literature in the age of globalization, contemporary debates on world literature, and localized versions of world literature * Contains more than 30 important theoretical essays by the most influential scholars, including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Hugo Meltzl, Edward Said, Franco Moretti, Jorge Luis Borges, and Gayatri Spivak * Includes substantive introductions to each essay, as well as an annotated bibliography for further reading * Allows students to understand, articulate, and debate the most important issues in this rapidly changing field of study

The metaphor of contagion pervades critical discourse across the humanities, the medical sciences, and the social sciences. It appears in such terms as 'social contagion' in psychology, 'financial contagion' in economics, 'viral marketing' in business, and even 'cultural contagion' in anthropology. In the twenty-first century, contagion, or 'thought contagion' has become a byword for creativity and a fundamental process by which knowledge and ideas are communicated and taken up, and resonates with Andre Siegfried's observation that 'there is a striking parallel between the spreading of germs and the spreading of ideas'. In "Contagious Metaphor," Peta Mitchell offers an innovative, interdisciplinary study of the metaphor of contagion and its relationship to the workings of language. Examining both metaphors of contagion and metaphor "as" contagion, "Contagious Metaphor" suggests a framework through which the emergence and often epidemic-like reproduction of metaphor can be better understood.

"Free will: mental energy that poofs into existence from scratch?"In pairing key ideas from the history of philosophy with examples from everyday life and culture, David Cunning produces a clear, incisive and engaging introduction to philosophy. "Everyday Examples" explores historical philosophy and the contemporary theory scene and includes ideas from both the analytic and continental traditions. This broad sweep of topics provides a synoptic overview of philosophy as a discipline and philosophizing as an activity.With examples drawn from everything from "The Matrix "and "Sesame Street "to sleepwalking, driving, dancing, playing a sport and observing animals, students are pointed to ways in which they can be a philosopher outside the classroom in the everyday world.As well as providing entertaining and relatable examples from everyday life, this book will be especially useful in the classroom, it is accessible and discussion-oriented, so that students can get first-hand practice at actually 'doing' philosophy. This accessibility does not come at the expense of rigour but, rather, provides a 'way in' to thinking about the major issues, figures and moments in the history of philosophy. The chapters are divided into brief sustainable nuggets so that students can get a definite handle on each issue and also be the expert for the day on a given section.There are suggested study questions at the end of each chapter that bring out the force of each side of the many different issues.An indispensable tool for those approaching philosophy for the first time.

The Drift: Affect, Adaptation, and New Perspectives on Fidelity offers a new perspective on the complex interrelations between literature and cinema. It does so by articulating an 'affective turn' for adaptation studies, a field whose traditional focus has been the critical castigation of film adaptations of canonical plays or novels. Drawing on theorists such as Gilles Deleuze, Brian Massumi, and Marco Abel, the author is able to re-conceive literary and cinematic works as textual engines generating and circulating affect, and the adaptive process as a drifting of those affective intensities from one medium to another. By conceptualizing adaptation in this manner, the work steers clear of the chimerical notion of 'fidelity' (to character, to theme, to narrative) which has anchored so many analyses of adaptive texts over the years-and the reproving language that inevitably attends it-in favor of more productive avenues of investigation: What affective work are certain literary and filmic texts performing? What can this tell us, more broadly, about the underexplored affective dimensions of literature and cinema, and the dialogic interactions between them? The Drift addresses such questions through close, careful readings which put a variety of realist, modernist, and postmodernist works into conversation with each other, among them the fiction of John Dos Passos, Don DeLillo, and Susanna Moore, the films of Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein, as well as recent cinematic adaptations by Jane Campion and Charles Burnett. This methodological approach, helps to elevate adaptation studies into a discourse that speaks more directly and pertinently to our fluid, hypertextual era

In this book, Author Katharine N. Harrington examines contemporary writers from the French-speaking world who can be classified as literary "nomads." The concept of nomadism, based on the experience of traditionally mobile peoples lacking any fixed home, reflects a postmodern way of thinking that encourages individuals to reconsider rigid definitions of borders, classifications, and identities. Nomadic identities reflect shifting landscapes that defy taking on fully the limits of any one fixed national or cultural identity. In conceiving of identities beyond the boundaries of national or cultural origin, this book opens up the space for nomadic subjects whose identity is based just as much on their geographical displacement and deterritorialization as on a relationship to any one fixed place, community, or culture. This study explores the experience of an existence between borders and its translation into writing that. While nomadism is frequently associated with post-colonial authors, this study considers an eclectic group of contemporary Francophone writers who are not easily defined by the boundaries of one nation, one culture, or one language. Each of the four writers, J.M.G. LeClezio, Nancy Huston, Nina Bouraoui, and Regine Robin maintains a connection to France, but it is one that is complicated by life experiences, backgrounds, and choices that inevitably expand their identities beyond the Hexagon. Harrington examines how these authors' life experiences are reflected in their writing and how they may inform us on the state of our increasingly global world where borders and identities are blurred.

Providing close readings of well-known British realist writers including Pat Barker, A. S. Byatt, Rose Tremain, Sarah Hall, Bernadine Evaristo and Zadie Smith, this book uses new directions in material and posthuman feminism to examine how contemporary women writers explore the challenges we collectively face today. Walezak redresses negative assumptions about realism's alleged conservatism and demonstrates the vitality and relevance of the realist genre in experimenting with the connections between individual and collective voices, human and non-human meditations, local and global scales, and author and reader. Considering how contemporary realist writing is attuned to pressing issues including globalization, climate change, and interconnectivity, this book provides innovative new ways of reading realism, examines how these writers are looking to reinvent the genre, and shows how realism helps reimagine our place in the world.

Including applied readings, this book explores the divide between practical criticism and theory in 20th century criticism to propose a new way of reading poetry. The history of poetry criticism in the 20th Century is often told as the story of two opposing sides. On the one hand, practical criticism emphasized close reading and a concern with authorial intention and technique; by contrast, the 'theory revolution' reacted against this in favour of a concern with the anonymous ideological forces at play in the text. Critically exploring this history of 20th Century literary criticism, "On Modern Poetry" draws on the insights of both traditions to offer a new way of reading poetry. Taking students through the work of such critics as T.S. Eliot, William Empson, Harold Bloom, Jacques Derrida and Martin Heidegger, the book considers such topics as rhyme, poetic 'voice' and language. The second part of the book then goes on to apply these critical insights through close readings of poems by such writers as Matthew Arnold, Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Alfred Lord Tennyson. A new exploration of poetry criticism in the last hundred years, "On Modern Poetry" is an essential guide for readers and students at all levels.

Combining cognitive and evolutionary research with traditional humanist methods, Nancy Easterlin demonstrates how a biocultural perspective in theory and criticism opens up new possibilities for literary interpretation.

Easterlin maintains that the practice of literary interpretation is still of central intellectual and social value. Taking an open yet judicious approach, she argues, however, that literary interpretation stands to gain dramatically from a fair-minded and creative application of cognitive and evolutionary research. This work does just that, expounding a biocultural method that charts a middle course between overly reductive approaches to literature and traditionalists who see the sciences as a threat to the humanities.

Easterlin develops her biocultural method by comparing it to four major subfields within literary studies: new historicism, ecocriticism, cognitive approaches, and evolutionary approaches. After a thorough review of each subfield, she reconsiders them in light of relevant research in cognitive and evolutionary psychology and provides a textual analysis of literary works from the romantic era to the present, including William Wordsworth's "Simon Lee" and the Lucy poems, Mary Robinson's "Old Barnard," Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode," D. H. Lawrence's "The Fox," Jean Rhys's "Wide Sargasso Sea," and Raymond Carver's "I Could See the Smallest Things."

"A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation" offers a fresh and reasoned approach to literary studies that at once preserves the central importance that interpretation plays in the humanities and embraces the exciting developments of the cognitive sciences.

The Ruins of Urban Modernity examines Thomas Pynchon's 2006 novel Against the Day through the critical lens of urban spatiality. Navigating the textual landscapes of New York, Venice, London, Los Angeles and the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, Against the Day reimagines urban modernity at the turn of the 20th century. As the complex novel collapses and rebuilds anew the spatial imaginaries underlying the popular fictions of urban modernity, Utku Mogultay explores how such creative disfiguration throws light on the contemporary urban world. Through critical spatial readings, he considers how Pynchon historicizes issues ranging from the commodification of the urban landscape to the politics of place-making. In Mogultay's reading, Against the Day is shown to offer an oblique negotiation of postmodern urban spaces, thus directing our attention to the ongoing erosion of sociospatial diversity in North American cities and elsewhere.