In this wide-ranging and original account of Modernism, Michael Levenson draws on more than twenty years of research and a career-long fascination with the movement, its participants, and the period during which it thrived. Seeking a more subtle understanding of the relations between the period's texts and contexts, he provides not only an excellent survey but also a significant reassessment of Modernism itself. Spanning many decades, illuminating individual achievements and locating them within the intersecting histories of experiment (Symbolism to Surrealism, Naturalism to Expressionism, Futurism to Dadaism), the book places the transformations of culture alongside the agitations of modernity (war, revolution, feminism, psychoanalysis). In this perspective, Modernism must be understood more broadly than simply in terms of its provocative works, experimental forms, and singular careers. Rather, as Levenson demonstrates, Modernism should be viewed as the emergence of an adversary culture of the New that depended on audiences as well as artists, enemies as well as supporters.

This is an original study aiming to explain fully Lacanian thought and apply it to the study of literary texts.In contemporary academic literary studies, Lacan is often considered impenetrably obscure, due to the unavailability of his late works, insufficient articulation of his methodologies and sometimes stereotypical use of Lacanian concepts in literary theory.This study aims to integrate Lacan into contemporary literary study by engaging with a broad range of Lacanian theoretical concepts, often for the first time in English, and using them to analyse a range of key texts from different periods.Azari explores Lacan's theory of desire as well as his final theories of lituraterre, littoral, and the sinthome and interrogates a range of poststructuralist interpretive approaches. In the second part of the book, he outlines the variety of ways in which Lacanian theory can be applied to literary texts and offers detailed readings of texts by Shakespeare, Donne, Joyce and Ashbery. This ground-breaking study provides original insights into a number of the most influential intellectual discussions in relation to Lacan and will fill a recognised gap in understanding Lacan and his legacy for literary study and criticism.

Although the short story has often been called America's unique contribution to the world's literature, relatively few critics have taken the form seriously. May's collection of essays by popular commentators, academic critics, and short story writers attempts to assess the reasons for this neglect and provides significant theoretical directions for a reevaluation of the form. The essays range from discussions by Poe to comments by John Cheever. Frank O'Connor describes the short story as depicting \u201can intense awareness of human loneliness,\u201d and Nadine Gordimer suggests that the story is more suitable than the novel in rendering the fragmentary modern experience. Eudora Welty sees the story as something \u201cwrapped in an atmosphere\u201d of its own; Randall Jarrell speaks of the mythic basis of the genre. Elizabeth Bowen and Alberto Moravia discuss thematic and structural distinctions between the novel and the story. The collection also includes discussions of various types of stories, as satiric and lyric, critical surveys of the development of the modern short story, and the status of the form at the present time. An excellent annotated bibliography is also included, which describes 135 books and articles on the short story, evaluating their contribution to a unified theory of the form.

In this wide ranging collection of essays, eleven literary scholars and creative writers examine authorship and authority in relation to the production and reception of cultural texts. Ranging in time from the Renaissance to the era of digital publishing, the essays invite us to reconsider the influential theories of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Bourdieu for our understanding of writers such as Philip Sydney, Thomas Hardy, Laura Riding, W.B. Yeats, Gertrude Stein, and J.M. Coetzee. Shedding new light on authoritys complex role in the generation of cultural meaning, the essays will be of interest to students and teachers of literary history and critical theory alike.

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.

Previous attempts to critique the canonical approach of Brevard Childs have remained largely theoretical in nature. One of the weakness of canonical criticism, then, is its failure to have generated new readings of extended biblical passages. Reviewing the hermeneutics and the praxis of Childs's approach, Lyons then turns to the Sodom narrative (Gen 18-19) as a test of a practical exegesis according to Childs' principles, and then to reflect critically upon the reading experience generated. Surprisingly, the canonical reading produced is a wholly new one, centred around the complex, irreducible - even contradictory - request of Abraham for Yahweh to do justice (18:23-25).

The present age of omnipresent terrorism is also an era of ever-expanding policing. What is the meaning - and the consequences - of this situation for literature and literary criticism? Policing Literary Theory attempts to answer these questions presenting intriguing and critical analyses of the interplays between police/policing and literature/literary criticism in a variety of linguistic milieus and literary traditions: American, English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and others. The volume explores the mechanisms of formulation of knowledge about literature, theory, or culture in general in the post-Foucauldian surveillance society. Topics include North Korean dictatorship, spy narratives, censorship in literature and scholarship, Russian and Soviet authoritarianism, Eastern European cultures during communism, and Kafka's work. Contributors: Vladimir Biti, Reingard Nethersole, Calin-Andrei Mihailescu, Sowon Park, Marko Juvan, Kyohei Norimatsu, Peter Hajdu, Norio Sakanaka, John Zilcosky, Yvonne Howell, and Takayuki Yokota-Murakami.

Picturing America: Photography and the Sense of Place argues that photography is a prevalent practice of making American places. Its collected essays epitomize not only how pictures situate us in a specific place, but also how they create a sense of such mutable place-worlds. Understanding photographs as prime sites of knowledge production and advocates of socio-political transformations, a transnational set of scholars reveals how images enact both our perception and conception of American environments. They investigate the power photography yields in shaping our ideas of self, nation, and empire, of private and public space, through urban, landscape, wasteland and portrait photography. The volume radically reconfigures how pictures alter the development of American places in the past, present, and future.

The scholarship devoted to American literary realism has long wrestled with problems of definition: is realism a genre, with a particular form, content, and technique? Is it a style, with a distinctive artistic arrangement of words, characters, and description? Or is it a period, usually placed as occurring after the Civil War and concluding somewhere around the onset of World War I? This volume aims to widen the scope of study beyond mere definition, however, by expanding the boundaries of the subject through essays that reconsider and enlarge upon such questions. The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism aims to take stock of the scholarly work in the area and map out paths for future directions of study. The Handbook offers 35 vibrant and original essays of new interpretations of the artistic and political challenges of representing life. It is the first book to treat the subject topically and thematically, in wide scope, with essays that draw upon recent scholarship in literary and cultural studies to offer an authoritative and in-depth reassessment of major and minor figures and the contexts that shaped their work. Contributors here tease out the workings of a particular concept through a variety of authors and their cultural contexts. A set of essays explores realism's genesis and its connection to previous and subsequent movements. Others examine the inclusiveness of representation, the circulation of texts, and the aesthetic representation of science, time, space, and the subjects of medicine, the New Woman, and the middle class. Still others trace the connection to other arts-poetry, drama, illustration, photography, painting, and film-and to pedagogic issues in the teaching of realism. As a whole, this volume forges exciting new paths in the study of realism and writers' unending labor to represent life accurately.

Unlocking a new and overdue model for reading comic books, this unique volume explores religious interpretations of popular comic book superheroes such as the Green Lantern and the Hulk. This superhero subgenre offers a hermeneutic for those interested in integrating mutiplicity into religious practices and considerations of the afterlife.

This unique anthology presents the important historical essays on tragedy, ranging from antiquity to the present, divided into historical periods and arranged chronologically. Across its span, it traces the development of theories and philosophies of tragedy, enabling readers to consider the ways in which different varieties of environmentalist, feminist, leftist and postcolonial thought have transformed the status of tragedy, and the idea of the tragic, for recent generations of artists, critics and thinkers. Students of literature and theatre will find this collection an invaluable and accessible guide to writing from Plato and Aristotle through to Freud, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and 21st century theorists. Ideas of tragedy and the tragic have been central to the understanding of culture for the past two millennia. Writers and thinkers from Plato through to Martha Nussbaum have analyzed the genre of tragedy to probe the most fundamental of questions about ethics, pleasure and responsibility in the world. Does tragedy demand that we enjoy witnessing the pain of others? Does it suggest that suffering is inevitable? Is human sexuality tragic? Is tragedy even possible in a world of rolling news on a digitally connected planet, where atrocity and trauma from around the globe are matters of daily information? In order to illustrate the different ways that writers have approached the answers to such questions, this Reader collects together a comprehensive selection of canonical writings on tragedy from antiquity to the present day arranged in six sections, each featuring an introduction providing concise and informed historical and theoretical frameworks for the texts.

American Impersonal brings together some of the most influential scholars now working in American literature to explore the impact of one of America's leading literary critics: Sharon Cameron. It engages directly with certain arguments that Cameron has articulated throughout her career, most notably her late work on the question of impersonality. In doing so, it provides responses to questions fundamental to literary criticism, such as: the nature of personhood; the logic of subjectivity in depersonalized communities; the question of the human within the problematic of the impersonal; how impersonality relates to the "posthuman." Additionally, some essays respond to the current "aesthetic turn" in literary scholarship and engage with the lyric, currently much debated, as well as the larger questions of poetics and the logic of genre. These crucial issues are addressed from the perspective of an American literary and philosophical tradition, and progress chronologically, starting from Melville and Emerson and moving via Dickinson, Thoreau and Hawthorne to Henry James and Wallace Stevens. This historical perspective adds the appeal of revisiting the American nineteenth-century literary and philosophical tradition, and even rewriting it.

"The Promise and Premise of Creativity"?considers literature in the larger context of globalization and "the clash of cultures." Refuting the view that the study of literature is "useless," Eoyang argues that it expands three distinct intellectual skills: creative imagination, vicarious sympathy, and capacious intuition.
With the advent of the personal computer and the blurring of cultural and economic boundaries, it is the ability to imagine, to intuit, and to invent that will mark the educated student, and allow her to survive the rapid pace of change. As never before, the ability to empathize with other peoples, to understand cultures very different from one's own, is vital to success in a globalized world. In this, the very "uselessness" of literature may inure the mind to think creatively.
Engaging with both the theory and practice of literature, its past and its potential future, Eoyang claims that our sense of the world at large, of the salient similarities and differences between cultures, would be critically diminished without comparative literature.

In Franco-Maghrebi Artists of the 2000s: Transnational Narratives and Identities Ramona Mielusel offers an account of the way how young artists (writers, filmmakers, actors, singers, photographers, contemporary migrant artists) of Maghrebi origin residing in France during the last twenty years (2000-2016) contest French "national identity" in their work. Mielusel's interest lies in analyzing the impact that these "minor" artists and their chosen genres have on mainstream cultural productions. She argues that constant displacement and changes in political, social and cultural contexts have significantly transformed the dynamics that govern the relationship between the center (Metropolitan France) and the periphery (its Others). Most importantly, she seeks to position their work in the field of transnationalism, which has dominated postcolonial studies and cultural studies in the past decade.

'[W]hen they saw him walking on the sea they thought it was a ghost (phantasma), and cried out; for they all saw him, and were terrified' (Mark 6:49, RSV). There is a growing awareness among biblical scholars and others of the potential value of modern and postmodern fantasy theory for the study of biblical texts. Following theorists such as Roland Barthes, Tzvetan Todorov, and Gilles Deleuze (among others), we understand the fantastic as the deconstruction of literary realism. The fantastic arises from the text's resistance to understanding; the "meaning" of the fantastic text is not its reference to the primary world of consensus reality but rather a fundamental undecidability of reference. The fantastic is also a point at which ancient and contemporary texts (including books, movies, and TV shows) resonate with one another, sometimes in surprising ways, and this resonance plays a large part in my argument. Mark and its afterlives "translate" one another, in the sense that Walter Benjamin speaks of the tangential point at which the original text and its translation touch one another, not a transfer of understood meaning but rather a point at which what Benjamin called "pure language" becomes apparent. Mark has always been the most "difficult" of the canonical gospels, the one that requires the greatest amount of hermeneutical gymnastics from its commentators. Its beginning in media res, its disconcerting ending at 16:8, its multiple endings, the "messianic secret," Jesus's tensions with his disciples and family - these are just some of the more obvious of the and many troublesome features that distinguish Mark from the other biblical gospels. If there had not been two other gospels (Matthew and Luke) that were clearly similar to Mark but also much more attractive to Christian belief, it seems likely that Mark, like the gospels of Thomas and Peter, would not have been accepted into the canon. Reading Mark as fantasy does not "solve" any of these problems, but it does place them in a very different context, one in which they are no longer "problems," but in which there are different problems. A fantastical reading of the gospel of Mark is not the only correct understanding of this text, but rather one possibility that may have considerable appeal and value in the contemporary world. This fantastic reading is a "reading from the outside," inspired by the parable "theory" of Isaiah 6:9-10 and Mark 4:11-12: "for those outside everything is in parables; so that they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand." Reading from the outside counters a widespread belief that only those within the faith community can properly understand the scriptures. It is the "stupid" reading of those who do not share institutionalized understandings passed down through catechisms and creeds, i.e., through the dominant ideology of the churches.

Dr. Krims, a psychoanalyst for more than three decades, takes readers into the sonnets and characters of Shakespeare and unveils the Bard's talent for illustrating psychoanalytical issues. These "hidden" aspects of the characters are one reason they feel real and, thus, have such a powerful effect, explains Krims. In exploring Shakespeare's characters, readers may also learn much about their own inner selves. In fact, Krims explains in one chapter how reading Shakespeare and other works helped him resolve his own inner conflicts. Topics of focus include Prince Hal's aggression, Hotspur's fear of femininity, Hamlet's frailty, Romeo's childhood trauma and King Lear's inability to grieve. In one essay, Krims offers a mock psychoanalysis of Beatrice from Much Ado about Nothing. All of the essays look at the unconscious motivations of Shakespeare's characters, and, in doing so, both challenge and extend common understandings of his texts.

Julian Wolfreys introduces students to the central concept of transgression, showing how to interpret the concept from a number of theoretical standpoints. He demonstrates how texts from different cultural and historical periods can be read to examine the workings of "transgression" and the way in which it has changed over time.

Literary Theory and Criticism: An Introduction provides an accessible overview of major figures and movements in literary theory and criticism from antiquity to the twenty-first century. It is designed for students at the undergraduate level or for others needing a broad synthesis of the long history of literary theory. An introductory chapter provides an overview of some of the major issues within literary theory and criticism; further chapters survey theory and criticism in antiquity, the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the nineteenth century. For twentieth- and twenty-first-century theory, the discussion is subdivided into separate chapters on formalist, historicist, political, and psychoanalytic approaches.The final chapter applies a variety of theoretical concepts and approaches to two famous works of literature: William Shakespeare's Hamlet and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The new edition has been updated throughout, including expanded coverage of Marxist theory, Disability Studies, and Critical Race Theory.

Cultural Politics in the 1790s examines the relationship between sentimental literature, political activism and the public sphere at the end of the eighteenth century. Drawing on critical theorists such as Habermas, Negt and Kluge, Marcuse and Foucault, it attempts to demonstrate how major literary and political figures of the 1790s can be read in terms of the broader dynamics of modernity. Reading a diverse range of political and literary material from the period, it examines how relationships between the aesthetic and the political, the private and the public, mark the emergence and consolidation of bourgeois behavioural norms and the simultaneous marginalization of potentially more radical forms of political and cultural production.

This collection of papers by an international team of contributors seeks to examine the various ways in which ancient authors and modern readers respond to the interrelations of Greek and Latin texts. The works studied in individual chapters vary widely in genre and historical period, with Plato and Cicero taking their places alongside Homer and Catullus.

In seventeenth-century England the poet George Herbert became known as `Divine Herbert', his poetry a model for those aspiring to the status of inspired Christian poet. This book explores the relationship between the poetry of George Herbert and the concept of divine inspiration rooted in devotional texts of the time.

Combining the latest scientific and philosophical understanding of humankind's place in the world with interpretative methods derived from other politically inflected literary criticism, ecocriticism is providing new insights into literary works both ancient and modern. With case-study analyses of the tragedies, comedies, histories and late romances, this book is a wide-ranging introduction to reading Shakespeare in the light of contemporary ecocritical theory.

This highly original collection of essays contributes to a critique of the common understanding of modernity as an enlightened project that provides rational grounds for orientation in all aspects and dimensions of the world. An international team of contributors contend that the modern principles of foundation show in themselves rather how modernity is disorienting itself. The book brings together discussions on the writings of philosophers who treat more systematically the questions of foundation and orientation, such as Kant, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Pascal, and Patocka, and studies of literary works that explicitly thematize this question, such as Novalis, Hoelderlin, Beckett, Platonov, and Benjamin. This multi-disciplinary approach brings to the fore the paradox that modern figures of grounding and orientation unground and disorient and demonstrates a critical path to review current understandings of modernity and post-modernity.