The Western, with its stoic cowboys and quickhanded gunslingers, is an instantly recognizable American genre that has achieved worldwide success. Cultures around the world have embraced but also adapted and critiqued the Western as part of their own national literatures, reinterpreting and expanding the genre in curious ways. Canadian Westerns are almost always in conversation with their American cousins, influenced by their tropes and traditions, responding to their politics, and repurposing their structures to create a national literary tradition. The American Western in Canadian Literature examines over a century of the development of the Canadian Western as it responds to the American Western, to evolving literary trends, and to regional, national, and international change. Beginning with Indigenous perspectives on the genre, it moves from early manifestations of the Western in Christian narratives of personal and national growth, and its controversial pulp-fictional popularity in the 1940s, to its postmodern and contemporary critiques, pushing the boundary of the Western to include Northerns, Northwesterns, and post-Westerns in literature, film, and wider cultural imagery. The American Western in Canadian Literature is more than a simple history. It uses genre theory to comment on historical perspectives on nation and region. It includes overviews of Indigenous and settler-colonial critiques of the Western, challenging persistent attitudes to Indigenous people and their traditional territories that are endemic to the genre. It illuminates the way that the Canadian Western enshrines, hagiographies, and ultimately desacralizes aspects of Canadian life, from car culture to extractive industries to assumptions about a Canadian moral high ground. This is a comprehensive, highly readable, and fascinating study of an underexamined genre.

The literary arts represent and provoke experiences of understanding and emotion, and this open access study examines how the practical pursuit of well-being in healthcare reveals purposes at the core of our engagements with and understanding of literature itself. During the past twenty years, much admirable work in the "health humanities" has focused upon what studies of literature contribute to the understandings and the practical work-the "worldly work"-of healthcare. Such a project aims at developing healthcare practitioners who bring greater care to those who come to them ailing or in fear or faced with terrible suffering. Literary Studies and Well-Being turns this inside out by examining the intergenerational caretaking of healthcare in a manner which allows us to comprehend the nature and discipline of literary studies in new ways. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by The University of Oklahoma.

Drawing from recent debates about the validity of regional studies and skepticism surrounding the efficacy of the concept of authenticity, Clare Chadd's Postregional Fictions focuses on questions of southern regional authenticity in fiction published by Barry Hannah from 1972 to 2001. The first monograph on the Mississippi author's work to appear since his death, this study considers the ways in which Hannah's novels and short stories challenge established conceptual understandings of the U.S. South. Hannah's writing often features elements of metafiction, through which the putative sense of ""southernness"" his stories dramatize is complicated by an intense self-reflexivity about the extent to which a sense of place has never been foundational or essential but has always been constructed and performed. Such texts locate a productive terrain between the local and the global, with particular relevance for critical apprehensions of the post-South and postsouthern literature. Offering sustained close readings of selected stories, and focusing especially on Hannah's late work, Chadd argues that his fiction reveals the region constantly shifting in a process of mythmaking, dialogue, and performance. In turn, she uses Hannah's work to suggest how notions of the ""South"" and ""southernness"" might survive the various deconstructive approaches leveled against them in recent decades of southern studies scholarship. Rather than seeing an impasse between the regional and the global, Chadd's reading of Hannah shows the two existing and flourishing in tandem. In Postregional Fictions, Chadd offers a new interpretation of Hannah based on an appreciation of the vital intersection of southern and postmodern elements in his work.

Challenging existing methodological conceptions of the analytic approach to aesthetics, Jukka Mikkonen brings together philosophy, literary studies and cognitive psychology to offer a new theory on the cognitive value of reading fiction. Philosophy, Literature and Understanding defends the epistemic significance of narratives, arguing that it should be explained in terms of understanding rather than knowledge. Mikkonen formulates understanding as a cognitive process, which he connects to narrative imagining in order to assert that narrative is a central tool for communicating understanding. Demonstrating the effects that literary works have on their readers, he examines academic critical analysis, responses of the reading public and nonfictional writings that include autobiographical testimony to their writer's influences and attitudes to life. In doing so, he provides empirical evidence of the cognitive benefits of literature and of how readers demonstrate the growth of their understanding. By drawing on the written testimony of the reader, this book is an important intervention into debates on the value of literature that incorporates understanding in new and imaginative ways.

The Philosophy of Matter is a journey in thinking through the material fate of the earth itself; its surfaces and undercurrrents, ecologies, environments and irreparable cracks. With figures such as Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Serres as philosophical guides and writings on New Materialism, Posthumanism and Affect Theory as intellectual context, Rick Dolphijn proposes a radical rethinking of some of the basic themes of philosophy: subjectivity, materiality, body (both human and otherwise) and the act of living. This rethink is a work of imagination and meditation in order to conceive of "another earth for another people". It is a homage to courageous thinking that dares to question the religious, capitalist and humanist realities of the day. A poetic philosophy of how to live in troubling times when even the earth beneath us feels unstable, Dolphijn offers a way to think about the world with depth, honesty and glimpses of hope.

Thomas Pynchon's style has dazzled and bewildered readers and critics since the 1960s, and this book employs computational methods from the digital humanities to reveal heretofore unknown stylistic trends over the course of Pynchon's career, as well as challenge critical assumptions regarding foregrounded and supposedly "Pynchonesque" stylistic features: ambiguity/vagueness, acronyms, ellipsis marks, profanity, and archaic stylistics in Mason & Dixon. As the first book-length stylistic or computational stylistic examination of Pynchon's oeuvre, Thomas Pynchon and the Digital Humanities provides a groundwork of stylistic experiments and interpretations, with over 60 graphs and tables, presented in a manner in which both technical and non-technical audiences may follow.

Featured on the 2021 Locus Recommended Reading List For over 50 years, Darko Suvin has set the agenda for science fiction studies through his innovative linking of scifi to utopian studies, formalist and leftist critical theory, and his broader engagement with what he terms "political epistemology." Disputing the Deluge joins a rapidly growing renewal of critical interest in Suvin's work on scifi and utopianism by bringing together in a single volume 24 of Suvin's most significant interventions in the field from the 21st century, with an Introduction by editor Hugh O'Connell and a new preface by the author. Beginning with writings from the early 2000s that investigate the function of literary genres and reconsider the relationship between science fiction and fantasy, the essays collected here--each a brilliant example of engaged thought--highlight the value of scifi for grappling with the key events and transformations of recent years. Suvin's interrogations show how speculative fiction has responded to 9/11, the global war on terror, the 2008 economic collapse, and the rise of conservative populism, along with contemporary critical utopian analyses of the Capitalocene, the climate crisis, COVID-19, and the decline of democracy. By bringing together Suvin's essays all in one place, this collection allows new generations of students and scholars to engage directly with his work and its continuing importance and timeliness.

This new edition of Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth begins with an historical, grounding overview that situates ecofeminist theory and activism within the larger field of ecocriticism and provides a timeline for important publications and events. Throughout the book, authors engage with intersections of gender, sexuality, gender expression, race, disability, and species to address the various ways that sexism, heteronormativity, racism, colonialism, and ableism are informed by and support animal oppression. This collection is broken down into three separate sections: -Affect includes contributions from leading theorists and activists on how our emotions and embodiment can and must inform our relationships with the more-than-human world -Context explores the complexities of appreciating difference and the possibilities of living less violently -Climate, new to the second edition, provides an overview of our climate crisis as well as the climate for critical discussion and debate about ecofeminist ideas and actions Drawing on animal studies, environmental studies, feminist/gender studies, and practical ethics, the ecofeminist contributors to this volume stress the need to move beyond binaries and attend to context over universal judgments; spotlight the importance of care as well as justice, emotion as well as reason; and work to undo the logic of domination and its material implications.

In the final decade of the eighteenth century, theatre was amongst the most important sites for redefining France's national identity. In this study, Annelle Curulla uses a range of archival material to show that, more than any other subject matter which was once forbidden from the French stage, Roman Catholic religious life provided a crucial trope for expressing theatre's patriotic mission after 1789. Even as old rules and customs fell with the walls of the Bastille, dramatic works by Gouges, Chenier, La Harpe, and others depicted the cloister as a space for reimagining forms of familial, individual, and civic belonging and exclusion. By relating the dramatic trope of religious life to shifting concepts of gender, family, religiosity, and nation, Curulla sheds light on how the process of secularization played out in the cultural space of French theatre.

Introducing readers to a new theory of 'responsible reading', this book presents a range of perspectives on the contemporary relationship between modernism and theory. Emerging from a collaborative process of comment and response, it promotes conversation among disparate views under a shared commitment to responsible reading practices. An international range of contributors question the interplay between modernism and theory today and provide new ways of understanding the relationship between the two, and the links to emerging concerns such as the Anthropocene, decolonization, the post-human, and eco-theory. Promoting responsible reading as a practice that reads generously and engages constructively, even where disagreement is inevitable, this book articulates a mode of ethical reading that is fundamental to ongoing debates about strength and weakness, paranoia and reparation, and critique and affect.

Representing a shift in Carter studies for the 21st century, this book critically explores her legacy and showcases the current state of Angela Carter scholarship. It gives new insights into Carter's pyrotechnic creativity and pays tribute to her incendiary imagination in a reappraisal of Angela Carter's work, her influences and influence. Drawing attention to the highly constructed artifice of Angela Carter's work, it brings to the fore her lesser-known collection of short stories, Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces to reposition her as more than just the author of The Bloody Chamber. On the way, it also explores the impact of her experiences living in Japan, in the light of Edmund Gordon's 2016 biography and Natsumi Ikoma's translation of Sozo Araki's Japanese memoirs of Carter.

Literature has always recorded a history of patriarchy, sexual violence, and resistance. Academics have been using literature to expose and critique this violence and domination for half a century. But the continued potency of #MeToo after its 2017 explosion adds new urgency and wider awareness about these issues, while revealing new ways in which rape culture shapes our everyday lives. This intersectional guide helps readers, students, teachers, and scholars face and challenge our culture of sexual violence by confronting it through the study of literature. #MeToo and Literary Studies gathers essays on literature from Ovid to Carmen Maria Machado, by academics working across the United States and around the world, who offer clear ways of using our reading, teaching, and critical practices to address rape culture and sexual violence. It also examines the promise and limitations of the #MeToo movement itself, speaking to the productive use of social media as well as to the voices that the movement has so far muted. In uniting diverse voices to enable the #MeToo movement to reshape literary studies, this book is also committed to the idea that the way we read and write about literature can make real change in the world.

What does it mean to consider philosophy as a species of not just literature but world literature? The authors in this collection explore philosophy through the lens of the "worlding" of literature--that is, how philosophy is connected and reconnected through global literary networks that cross borders, mix stories, and speak in translation and dialect. Historically, much of the world's most influential philosophy, from Plato's dialogues and Augustine's confessions to Nietzsche's aphorisms and Sartre's plays, was a form of literature--as well as, by extension, a form of world literature. Philosophy as World Literature offers a variety of accounts of how the worlding of literature problematizes the national categorizing of philosophy and brings new meanings and challenges to the discussion of intersections between philosophy and literature.

Postmodern realist fiction uses realism-disrupting literary techniques to make interventions into the real social conditions of our time. It seeks to capture the complex, fragmented nature of contemporary experience while addressing crucial issues like income inequality, immigration, the climate crisis, terrorism, ever-changing technologies, shifting racial, sex and gender roles, and the rise of new forms of authoritarianism. A lucid, comprehensive introduction to the genre as well as to a wide variety of voices, this book discusses more than forty writers from a diverse range of backgrounds, and over several decades, with special attention to 21st-century novels. Writers covered include: Kathy Acker, Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, Julia Alvarez, Sherman Alexie, Gloria Anzaldua, Margaret Atwood, Toni Cade Bambara, A.S. Byatt, Octavia Butler, Angela Carter, Ana Castillo, Don DeLillo, Junot Diaz, Jennifer Egan, Awaeki Emezi, Mohsin Hamid, Jessica Hagedorn, Maxine Hong Kingston, Ursula K. Le Guin, Daisy Johnson, Bharati Mukherjee, Toni Morrison, Vladimir Nabokov, Tommy Orange, Ruth Ozeki, Ishmael Reed, Eden Robinson, Salman Rushdie, Jean Rhys, Leslie Marmon Silko, Art Spiegelman, Kurt Vonnegut, and Jeannette Winterson, among others.

This volume is the first attempt to reconsider the entire corpus of an ancient canonical author through the lens of queerness broadly conceived, taking as its subject Euripides, the latest of the three great Athenian tragedians. Although Euripides' plays have long been seen as a valuable source for understanding the construction of gender and sexuality in ancient Greece, scholars of Greek tragedy have only recently begun to engage with queer theory and its ongoing developments. Queer Euripides represents a vital step in exploring the productive perspectives on classical literature afforded by the critical study of orientations, identities, affects and experiences that unsettle not only prescriptive understandings of gender and sexuality, but also normative social structures and relations more broadly. Bringing together twenty-one chapters by experts in classical studies, English literature, performance and critical theory, this carefully curated collection of incisive and provocative readings of each surviving play draws upon queer models of temporality, subjectivity, feeling, relationality and poetic form to consider "queerness" both as and beyond sexuality. Rather than adhering to a single school of thought, these close readings showcase the multiple ways in which queer theory opens up new vantage points on the politics, aesthetics and performative force of Euripidean drama. They further demonstrate how the analytical frameworks developed by queer theorists in the last thirty years deeply resonate with the ways in which Euripides' plays twist poetic form in order to challenge well-established modes of the social. By establishing how Greek tragedy can itself be a resource for theorizing queerness, the book sets the stage for a new model of engaging with ancient literature, which challenges current interpretive methods, explores experimental paradigms, and reconceptualizes the practice of reading to place it firmly at the center of the interpretive act.

Dante, the pilgrim, is the image of an author who stubbornly looks ahead, seeking and building the "Great Beyond" (Manguel). Following in his footsteps is therefore not a return to the past, going a rebours, but a commitment to the future, to exploring the potential of humanity to "transhumanise". This dynamic of self-transcendence in Dante's humanism (Ossola), which claims for European civilisation a vocation for universalism (Ferroni), is analysed in the volume at three crucial moments: Firstly, the establishment of an emancipatory relationship between author and reader (Ascoli), in which authorship is authority and not power; secondly, the conception of vision as a learning process and horizon of eschatological overcoming (Mendonca); finally, the relationship with the past, which is never purely monumental, but ethically and intertextually dynamic, in an original rewriting of the original scriptural, medieval, and classical culture (Nasti, Bolzoni, Bartolomei). A second group of contributions is dedicated to the reconstruction of Dante's presence in Portuguese literature (Almeida, Espirito Santo, Figueiredo, Marnoto, Vaz de Carvalho): they attest to the innovative impact of Dante's work even in literary traditions more distant from it.

This thoroughly updated fourth edition of Critical Theory Today offers an accessible introduction to contemporary critical theory, providing in-depth coverage of the most common approaches to literary analysis today, including: feminism; psychoanalysis; Marxism; reader-response theory; New Criticism; structuralism and semiotics; deconstruction; new historicism and cultural criticism; lesbian, gay, and queer theory; African American criticism; postcolonial criticism, and ecocriticism. This new edition features: * A brand new chapter on ecocriticism, including sections on deep ecology, eco-Marxism, ecofeminism (including radical, Marxist, and vegetarian ecofeminisms), and postcolonial ecocriticism and environmental justice * Considerable updates to the chapters on feminist theory, African American theory, postcolonial theory, and LGBTQ theories, including the terminology and theoretical concepts * An extended explanation of each theory, using examples from everyday life, popular culture, and a variety of literary texts * A list of specific questions critics ask about literary texts * An interpretation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby through the lens of each theory * A list of questions for further practice to guide readers in applying each theory to different literary works * Updated and expanded bibliographies Both engaging and rigorous, this is a "how-to" book for undergraduate and graduate students new to critical theory and for college professors who want to broaden their repertoire of critical approaches to literature.

Part literary history, part personal memoir, Alice Brittan's beautifully written The Art of Astonishment explores the rich intellectual, religious, and philosophical history of the gift and tells the interconnected story of grace: where it comes from and what it is believed to accomplish. Covering a remarkable range of materials-from The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Iliad, and the tragedies of Classical Greece, through the brothers Grimm and Montaigne, to C. S. Lewis, Toni Morrison, J. M. Coetzee, Elena Ferrante, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Jhumpa Lahiri-Brittan moves with ease from personal story to myth, to theology, to literature and analysis, examining the nature of social and communal obligation, the role of the intellectual in times of crisis, and the pleasures of reading. In the 21st century, we might imagine grace as a striking and refined quality that is pleasurable to encounter but certainly not fundamental to anyone's existence or to the beliefs and practices that hold us together or drive us apart. For millennia, though, it has been recognized as essential to the vitality of inner life, as well as to the large-scale shifts in perspective and legislation that improve the way we live as a society. Grace is also astonishing-always-as the enormously insightful readings in The Art of Astonishment show. Brittan reveals the concept's breadth as sacred and secular, ancient and recent, lived and literary. And in so doing, she shows us how the act of reading is like grace-social but personal, pleasurable and essential.