This book offers a new reading of Marcell Mauss' and Lewis Hyde's theories of poetry as gift, exploring poetry exchanges within 20th and 21st century communities of poets, publishers, audiences and readers operating along a gift economy. The text considers trans-Atlantic case studies across fields of performance and ecopoetics, small press publishing and poetry institutions, with focus on Joan Retallack, Bob Holman, Anne Waldman, Bob Cobbing, and feminist performance. Elizabeth-Jane Burnett focuses on innovative poetry that resists commodification, drawing on ethnography to show parallels with gift giving tribal societies; she also considers the ethical, philosophical and psychological motivations for such exchanges with particular reference to poethics. This book will appeal to researchers in modern poetry, poetry teachers, advanced students of modern literature, and those with an interest in poetry.

Trajectories of Mysticism in Theory and Literature is a collection of essays which considers how recent critical theory contributes to debates about mystical and negative theology. This collection draws upon a wide range of material, including Biblical texts, autobiographical, confessional and fictional writing from the sixteenth century to the twentieth century, divinity in English, German, Spanish and French traditions, as well as work on God and metaphysics by Schelling, Weil, Levinas, Derrida, de Ma, Irigaray, and Cixous.

Presenting a multifaceted portrait of modernist culture in Russia, an array of distinguished scholars shows how artists and writers in the early twentieth century engaged with politics, science, and religion. At a time when many Russian social institutions looked to the past, modernist arts powerfully amplified a gamut of new ideas about individual and collective transformation. Expanding upon prior studies that focus more specifically on literary manifestations of the movement, Reframing Russian Modernism features original research that ranges broadly, from political aesthetics to Darwinism to yoga. These unique complementary perspectives counter reductionism of any kind, integrating the study of Russian modernism into the larger body of humanistic scholarship devoted to modernity.

This book challenges the focus on pictoriality as central constituent of visual culture from the perspective of literary studies, which in the wake of an 'intermedial turn' so far focused on the ways texts relate to pictures and visual media either in praesentia (e.g. word and image studies) or in absentia (e.g. ekphrasis). Instead, it emphasizes literature's participation in visual culture at large and focuses on three areas of investigation: (1) the depiction of, for instance, visual perceptions in the literary mode of description, which is paramount to formatting the mental aspect of visual culture; (2) the readerly practice of visualising situations and events of the fictional world, which mediates between those mentefacts and techniques of writing; (3) textual visibilities which are grounded in materiality. The volume explores these three areas from a systematically integrated perspective and the essays include in-depth treatments of seminal examples taken from Western literatures (primarily English and German, but also French and American literature) from early modern times to the present. This book's aim is to work out literature's active role in shaping visual culture, thus demonstrating its relevance for "image studies".

The current revival of interest in ethics in literary criticism coincides fortuitously with a revival of interest in love in philosophy. The literary return to ethics also coincides with a spate of neuroscientific discoveries about cognition and emotion. But without a philosophical grounding this new work cannot speak convincingly about literature's relationship to our ethical lives. Jean-Luc Marion's articulation of a phenomenology of love provides this philosophical grounding. The Phenomenology of Love and Reading accepts Jean-Luc Marion's argument that love matters for who we are more than anything-more than cognition and more than being itself. Cassandra Falke shows how reading can strengthen our capacity to love by giving us practice in loves habits-attention, empathy, and a willingness to be overwhelmed. Confounding our expectations, literature equips us for the confounding events of love, which, Falke suggests, are not rare and fleeting, but rather constitute the most meaningful and durable part of our everyday life.

This book examines representations of home in literary and visual cultures in the 20th and 21st centuries. The collection brings together scholars working on literature, film, and photography with the aim of showcasing new research in a burgeoning field focusing on representations of domesticity. The chapters span a diverse range of contexts from across the world and use a variety of approaches to exploring representations of home including studies of space, material culture, sexuality, gender, multiculturalism, diaspora, memory and archival practice. They include explorations of the Finnish Suburban home on film, home and the diasporic imagination in Chinese Canadian women's writing and the archiving practices and photographs used to document the homes of two gay writers from Australia and New Zealand. By bringing together this range of approaches and subjects, the book explores domestic imaginaries as part of a multi-faceted, mutable and amorphous conception of home in a modern, world context. This collection therefore seeks to further studies of home by investigating how the page, screen and photograph have constructed domestic imaginaries - experiencing, critiquing, reconfiguring and archiving home - in a global age.

This book is a close taxonomic study of the pivotal role of games in early modern drama. The presence of the game motif has often been noticed, but this study, the most comprehensive of its kind, shows how games operate in more complex ways than simple metaphor and can be syntheses of emblem and dramatic device. Drawing on seventeenth-century treatises, including Francis Willughby's Book of Games, which only became available in print in 2003, and divided into chapters on Dice, Cards, Tables (Backgammon), and Chess, the book brings back into focus the symbolism and divinatory origins of games. The work of more than ten dramatists is analysed, from the Shakespeare and Middleton canon to rarer plays such as The Spanish Curate, The Two Angry Women of Abington and The Cittie Gallant. Games and theatre share common ground in terms of performance, deceit, plotting, risk and chance, and the early modern playhouse provided apt conditions for vicarious play. From the romantic chase to the financial gamble, and in legal contest and war, the twenty-first century is still engaging the game. With its extensive appendices, the book will appeal to readers interested in period games and those teaching or studying early modern drama, including theatre producers, and awareness of the vocabulary of period games will allow further references to be understood in non-dramatic texts.

This book argues that embryology and the reproductive sciences played a key role in the rise of the Gothic novel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Diana Perez Edelman dissects Horace Walpole's use of embryological concepts in the development of his Gothic imagination and provides an overview of the conflict between preformation and epigenesis in the scientific community. The book then explores the ways in which Gothic literature can be read as epigenetic in its focus on internally sourced modes of identity, monstrosity, and endless narration. The chapters analyze Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto; Ann Radcliffe's A Sicilian Romance, The Italian, and The Mysteries of Udolpho; Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; Charles Robert Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer; and James Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner, arguing that these touchstones of the Gothic register why the Gothic emerged at that time and why it continues today: the mysteries of reproduction remain unsolved.

This important contribution to the canon debate is remarkable in examining the actual process of canon formation from threee unusual and complementary angles. The first two chapters discuss historical attitudes to canons from antiquity onwards, showing the religious, aesthetic, cultural and political interests which have shaped our modern critical canons. Each of the four succeeding chapters examines an exemplary defendant, interpreter, or critic of canons; Ernst Gomrich, Northrop Frye, Frank Kermode and Edward Said. A final chapter considers the origins and rationale of the contemporary debate, emphasising the disciplinary and aesthetic problems we must confront if our cultural institutions are to meet the challenging needs of the next century. Professor Gorak teaches at the University of Denver. His publications include God the Artist (1987), Critic of Crisis (1987)and The Alien Mind of Raymond Williams (1988)

The effort to go beyond given knowledge in different domains - artistic, scientific, political, metaphysical - is a characteristic driving force in modernism and the avant-gardes. Since the late 19th century, artists and writers have frequently investigated their medium and its limits, pursued political and religious aims, and explored hitherto unknown physical, social and conceptual spaces, often in ways that combine these forms of critical inquiry into one and provoke further theoretical and methodological innovations. The fifth volume of the EAM series casts light on the history and actuality of investigations, quests and explorations in the European avant-garde and modernism from the late 19th century to the present day. The authors seek to answer questions such as: How have modernism and the avant-garde appropriated scientific knowledge, religious dogmas and social conventions, pursuing their investigation beyond the limits of given knowledge and conceptions? How have modernism and avant-garde created new conceptual models or representations where other discourses have allegedly failed? In what ways do practises of investigation, quest or exploration shape artistic work or the formal and thematic structures of artworks?

Un)timely Crises explores how 'crisis'-as a narrative, concept, grammar, and experience-structures time and space. This collectively written volume extends Bakhtin's 'chronotope' to challenge mobilizations of crisis within neoliberal governmentality. The book explores how contemporary crises can trigger memories and traumas of earlier events as well as foster practices of resistance and alternative visions of the future. Drawing from across disciplines and geographical contexts, (Un)timely Crises reimagines the relation of 'crisis' with 'critique', proposing future trajectories for thinking and living in and through crisis.

Helene Cixous: live theory provides a clear and informative introduction to one of the most important and influential European writers working today. The book opens with an overview of the key features of Cixous' theory of "ecriture feminine" (feminine writing). The various manifestations of "ecriture feminine" are then explored in chapters on Cixous' fictional and theatrical writing, her philosophical essays, and her intensely personal approach to literary criticism. The book concludes with a new, lively and wide-ranging interview with Helene Cixous in which she discusses her influences and inspirations, and her thoughts on the nature of writing and the need for an ethical relationship with the world. Also offering a survey of the many English translations of Cixous' work, this book is an indispensable introduction to Cixous' work for students of literature, philosophy, cultural and gender studies.

Blanchot's writings on literature have imposed themselves in the canon of modern literary theory and yet have remained a mysterious presence. This is in part due to their almost hypnotic literary style, in part due to their distinctive amalgam of a number of philosophical sources (Hegel, Heidegger, Levinas, Bataille), which, although hardly unknown in the Anglophone philosophical world, have not yet made themselves fully at home in literary theory.
This book aims to make visible the coherence of Blanchot's critical project. To recognize the challenge that Blanchot represents for literary criticism, one has to see that he always has in view the self-interrogation that characterizes modern literature, both in its theory and its practice. Blanchot's essays study the forms and the paths of this research, its solutions and its impasses; and increasingly, they sketch out the philosophical and historical horizon within which its significance appears. The effect is to revise the terms in which we see the genesis of the modern literary concept, not least of the manifestations of which is literary criticism itself.

"Masters of the Drum," comprising eight essays and two interviews, examines both celebrated and insufficiently explored Caribbean, African, and African-American lit/orature that asserts the interface between the scribal and the spoken/gestural in Black word art. This triple play--engagement with the three principal regions of the Black world--reflects the author's interest in Black comparative studies, wherein the expressions and emphases of the Black Atlantic tradition (Africa and its diasporas) are deeply exposed and revealingly juxtaposed. The book's apparent eclecticism is intended to help flex the boundaries of Black literary and cultural studies in response to the dangers of a narrow construction of the newly canonical and of an overly particularist critical stance.

Every student of literature needs to understand how to use literary theory to analyze and interpret the text. In Literary Theories William Baker and Julian Wolfreys challenge the outdated notion that theory is something separable from the act of reading itself. Maintaining that the best way to learn is through practical application, the editors have assembled a volume of essays that plunges the student into the midst of a range of critical readings.

Each essay in the book explores a previously unpublished short story by Richard Jeffries, also included in the volume, from a different theoretical perspective, thereby presenting students with New Historicist, Marxist, feminist, structuralist, post- structuralist, psychoanalytic, and Derridean methods of analysis and interpretation.

Cogently argued and lucidly written, these essays offer the student reader an interactive introduction to the ways in which contemporary literary theories challenge us to rethink the acts of reading, writing, and interpretation.

Digital Milton is the first volume to investigate John Milton in terms of our digital present. It explores the digital environments Milton now inhabits as well as the diverse digital methods that inform how we read, teach, edit, and analyze his works. Some chapters use innovative techniques, such as processing metadata from vast archives of early modern prose, coding Milton's geographical references on maps, and visualizing debt networks from literature and from life. Other chapters discuss the technologies and platforms shaping how literature reaches us today, from audiobooks to eReaders, from the OED Online to Wikipedia, and from Twitter to YouTube. Digital Milton is the first say on a topic that will become ever more important to scholars, students, and teachers of early modern literature in the years to come.

There is no Shakespeare without text. Yet readers often do not realize that the words in the book they hold, like the dialogue they hear from the stage, has been revised, augmented and emended since Shakespeare's lifetime. An essential resource for the history of Shakespeare on the page, Shakespeare and Textual Theory traces the explanatory underpinnings of these changes through the centuries. After providing an introduction to early modern printing practices, Suzanne Gossett describes the original quartos and folios as well as the first collected editions. Subsequent sections summarize the work of the 'New Bibliographers' and the radical challenge to their technical analysis posed by poststructuralist theory, which undermined the presumed stability of author and text. Shakespeare and Textual Theory presents a balanced view of the current theoretical debates, which include the nature of the surviving texts we call Shakespeare's; the relationship of the author 'Shakespeare' and of authorial intentions to any of these texts; the extent and nature of Shakespeare's collaboration with others; and the best or most desirable way to present the texts - in editions or performances. The book is illustrated throughout with examples showing how theoretical decisions affect the text of Shakespeare's plays, and case studies of Hamlet and Pericles demonstrate how different theories complicate both text and meaning, whether a play survives in one version or several. The conclusion summarizes the many ways in which beliefs about Shakespeare's texts have changed over the centuries.

Continuum's Guides for the Perplexed are clear, concise and accessible introductions to thinkers, writers and subjects that students and readers can find especially challenging. Concentrating specifically on what it is that makes the subject difficult to fathom, these books explain and explore key themes and ideas, guiding the reader towards a thorough understanding of demanding material. This Guide provides an advanced introduction to literary theory from basic information and orientation for the uninformed leading on to more sophisticated readings. It engages directly with the difficulty many students find intimidating, asking 'What is "Literary Theory"?' and offering a clear, concise, accessible guide to the major theories and theorists, including: humanism; structuralism; poststructuralism; psychoanalytic approaches; feminist approaches; queer theory; ideology and discourse; new historicism; race and postcolonialism; postmodernism. The final chapter points to new directions in literary and cultural theory.

Largely forgotten over the years, the seminal work of French poet, novelist and camp survivor Jean Cayrol has experienced a revival in the French-speaking world since his death in 2005. His concept of a concentrationary art-the need for an urgent and constant aesthetic resistance to the continuing effects of the concentrationary universe-proved to be a major influence for Hannah Arendt and other writers and theorists across a number of disciplines. Concentrationary Art presents the first translation into English of Jean Cayrol's key essays on the subject, as well as the first book-length study of how we might situate and elaborate his concept of a Lazarean aesthetic in cultural theory, literature, cinema, music and contemporary art.

Roland Barthes - the author of such enduringly influential works as Mythologies and Camera Lucida - was one of the most important cultural critics of the post-war era. Since his death in 1980, new writings have continued to be discovered and published. The Afterlives of Roland Barthes is the first book to revisit and reassess Barthes' thought in light of these posthumously published writings. Covering work such as Barthes' Mourning Diary, the notes for his projected Vita Nova and many writings yet to be translated into English, Neil Badmington reveals a very different Barthes of today than the figure familiar from the writings published in his lifetime.

This book reappraises the philosophical value of short fiction by Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth Bowen, examining the stories through the lens of specific everyday objects. Looking at Woolf and armchairs, Mansfield and snack food, and Bowen and fashion accessories, it probes the aesthetic resonance between these stories' form and contents and also considers the modes of thinking they might promote. Conceiving of their short fiction as intrinsically radical and experimental even within a wider context of modernist innovation, this book shows how these important women writers brought quotidian objects to riotous life, in such a way that tasked readers with reevaluating their everyday existence. Overall, Modernist Short Fiction and Things argues that short fiction epitomises modernist aesthetics, functioning as a resonant source for investigation and complementing and expanding our understanding of modernist epistemology.

This book is about haunting in modernist literature. Offering an extended and textually-sensitive reading of modernist spectrality that has yet to be undertaken by scholars of either haunting or modernism, it provides a fresh reconceptualization of modernist haunting by synthesizing recent critical work in the fields of haunting studies, Gothic modernisms, and mourning modernisms. The chapters read the form and function of the ghostly as it appears in the work of a constellation of important modernist contributors, including T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Elizabeth Bowen, Wyndham Lewis, Richard Aldington, and Ford Madox Ford. It is of particular significance to scholars and students in a wide range of fields of study, including modernism, literary theory, and the Gothic.

This volume clarifies the meanings and applications of the concept of the transnational and identifies areas in which the concept can be particularly useful. The division of the volume into three parts reflects areas which seem particularly amenable to analysis through a transnational lens. The chapters in Part 1 present case studies in which the concept replaces or complements traditionally dominant concepts in literary studies. These chapters demonstrate, for example, why some dramatic texts and performances can better be described as transnational than as postcolonial, and how the transnational underlies and complements concepts such as world literature. Part 2 assesses the advantages and limitations of writing literary history with a transnational focus. These chapters illustrate how such a perspective loosens the epistemic stranglehold of national historiographies, but they also argue that the transnational and national agendas of literary historiography are frequently entangled. The chapters in Part 3 identify transnational genres such as the transnational historical novel, transnational migrant fiction and translinguistic theatre, and analyse the specific poetics and politics of these genres.

The twenty-first century has seen an increased awareness of the forms of environmental destruction that cannot immediately be seen, localised or, by some, even acknowledged. Ecocriticism on the Edge explores the possibility of a new mode of critical practice, one fully engaged with the destructive force of the planetary environmental crisis. Timothy Clark argues that, in literary and cultural criticism, the "Anthropocene", which names the epoch in which human impacts on the planet's ecological systems reach a dangerous limit, also represents a threshold at which modes of interpretation that once seemed sufficient or progressive become, in this new counterintuitive context, inadequate or even latently destructive. The book includes analyses of literary works, including texts by Paule Marshall, Gary Snyder, Ben Okri, Henry Lawson, Lorrie Moore and Raymond Carver.

This book not only discloses and examines different functions and concepts of authorship in fiction and theory from the 1950s and 1960s to the present but it also reveals, at least implicitly, a trajectory of some of the modes and functions of the novel as a genre in the last few decades. It argues that the explicit terms of much of the theoretical and philosophical debate surrounding the concept of authorship in the moment of High Theory in the 1980s had already been engaged, albeit often more implicitly, in literary fictions by writers themselves. This book examines the fortunes of the authorship debate and the conceptualisations and functions of authorship before, during, and after the Death of the Author came to prominence as one of the key foci for the moment of High Theory in the 1980s.