This book explores the media ecologies of literature - the ways in which a literary text is interwoven in its material, technical, performative, praxeological, affective, and discursive network and which determine how it is experienced and interpreted. Through novel approaches to the complex, contingent and interdependent environments of literature, this volume demonstrates how questions about the mediality of literature - particularly in the wake of digitization - shed a new light on our understanding of textuality, reading, platforms and reception processes. By drawing on recent developments in advanced media theory, Media Ecologies of Literature emphasizes the productivity of innovative re-conceptualizations of literature as a medium in its own right. In an intentionally wide historical scope, the essays engage with literary texts from the Romantic to the contemporary period, from Charlotte Smith and Oscar Wilde to A. L. Kennedy and Mark Z. Danielewski, from the traditionally printed novel to audiobooks and reading apps.

What stands out about racism is its ability to withstand efforts to legislate or educate it away. In The Racist Fantasy, Todd McGowan argues that its persistence is due to a massive unconscious investment in a fundamental racist fantasy. As long as this fantasy continues to underlie contemporary society, McGowan claims, racism will remain with us, no matter how strenuously we struggle to eliminate it. The racist fantasy, a fantasy in which the racial other is a figure who blocks the enjoyment of the racist, is a shared social structure. No one individual invented it, and no one individual is responsible for its perpetuation. While no one is guilty for the emergence of the racist fantasy, people are nonetheless responsible for keeping it alive and thus responsible for fighting against it. The Racist Fantasy examines how this fantasy provides the psychic basis for the racism that appears so conspicuously throughout modern history. The racist fantasy informs everything from lynching and police shootings to Hollywood blockbusters and musical tastes. This fantasy takes root under capitalism as a way of explaining the failures and disappointments that result from the relationship to the commodity. The struggle against racism involves dislodging the fantasy structure and to change the capitalist relations that require it. This is the project of this book.

The relationship between Conrad's Malay fiction and colonialism is a prominent subject of commentary now, and has been for some time. Most scholars would point to Chinua Achebe's important article "An Image of Africa" as the initiation into the interest in Conrad and colonialism, but if fact decades previously, Florence Clemens had begun this conversation in her ground-breaking commentary on Conrad's Malay fiction. At the time Florence Clemens was writing, almost nothing had been written on the Conrad's colonial world, and for many years her work thus was relatively unknown and relatively difficult to obtain. However, Clemens' work is significant, and its appearance in Brill's Conrad Studies series now makes this important study readily available to scholars.

Since its publication in 1950, Kenneth Burke's A Rhetoric of Motives has been one of the most influential texts of theory and criticism. Critics have discovered in its pages concepts that reveal new dimensions of human motivation. And yet, despite its obvious genius, critics have interpreted A Rhetoric of Motives as a collection of provocations rather than a systematic treatment of rhetoric. In this book, Kyle Jensen argues that the coherence in Burke's thought has yet to be fully appreciated. Drawing on unpublished drafts and voluminous correspondence, he reconstructs Burke's drafting and revision process for A Rhetoric of Motives as well as its recently discovered second volume, The War of Words. Jensen's extensive archival analysis reveals that Burke relied on the concept of myth to draw together the loose ends in his argument. For Burke, all general theories of rhetoric are formed and structured using mythic images and terms. By exploring what Burke added and omitted, and by putting his writing process into the context of daily life after the Second World War-including Burke's attempts to clear the weeds from his Andover farm-Jensen sheds new light on the key problems that Burke encountered and the methods he used to overcome them. Kenneth Burke's Weed Garden is essential for those who study Burke and the tradition of modern rhetoric that he helped found.

Examining the ways in which modernism is created within specific historical contexts, as well as how it redefines the concept of history itself, this book sheds new light on the historical-mindedness of modernism and the artistic avant-gardes. Cutting across Anglophone and less explored European traditions and featuring work from a variety of eminent scholars, it deals with issues as diverse as artistic medium, modernist print culture, autobiography as history writing, avant-garde experimentations and modernism's futurity. Contributors examine both literary and artistic modernism, combining theoretical overviews and archival research with case studies of Anglophone as well as European modernism, which speak to the current historicizing trend in modernist and literary studies.

The German poet and mystic Novalis once identified philosophy as a form of homesickness. More than two centuries later, as modernity's displacements continue to intensify, we feel Novalis's homesickness more than ever. Yet nowhere has a longing for home flourished more than in contemporary environmental thinking, and particularly in eco-phenomenology. If only we can reestablish our sense of material enmeshment in nature, so the logic goes, we might reverse the degradation we humans have wrought-and in saving the earth we can once again dwell in the nearness of our own being. Unsettling Nature opens with a meditation on the trouble with such ecological homecoming narratives, which bear a close resemblance to narratives of settler colonial homemaking. Taylor Eggan demonstrates that the Heideggerian strain of eco-phenomenology-along with its well-trod categories of home, dwelling, and world-produces uncanny effects in settler colonial contexts. He reads instances of nature's defamiliarization not merely as psychological phenomena but also as symptoms of the repressed consciousness of coloniality. The book at once critiques Heidegger's phenomenology and brings it forward through chapters on Willa Cather, D. H. Lawrence, Olive Schreiner, Doris Lessing, and J. M. Coetzee. Suggesting that alienation may in fact be "natural" to the human condition and hence something worth embracing instead of repressing, Unsettling Nature concludes with a speculative proposal to transform eco-phenomenology into "exo-phenomenology"-an experiential mode that engages deeply with the alterity of others and with the self as its own Other.

This co-edited volume offers new insights into the complex relations between Brussels and Vienna in the turn-of-the-century period (1880-1930). Through archival research and critical methods of cultural transfer as a network, it contributes to the study of Modernism in all its complexity. Seventeen chapters analyse the interconnections between new developments in literature (Verhaeren, Musil, Zweig), drama (Maeterlinck, Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal), visual arts (Minne, Khnopff, Masereel, Child Art), architecture (Hoffmann, Van de Velde), music (Schoenberg, Ysaye, Kreisler, Kolisch), as well as psychoanalysis (Varendonck, Anna Freud) and cafe culture. Austrian and Belgian artists played a crucial role within the complex, rich, and conflictual international networks of people, practices, institutions, and metropoles in an era of political, social and technological change and intense internationalization. Contributors: Sylvie Arlaud, Norbert Bachleitner, Anke Bosse, Megan Brandow-Faller, Alexander Carpenter, Piet Defraeye, Clement Dessy, Aniel Guxholli, Birgit Lang, Helga Mitterbauer, Chris Reyns-Chikuma, Silvia Ritz, Hubert Roland, Inga Rossi-Schrimpf, Sigurd Paul Scheichl, Guillaume Tardif, Hans Vandevoorde.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1956.

Through readings of Ishiguro's repurposing of key elements of realism and modernism; his interest in childhood imagination and sketching; interrogation of aesthetics and ethics; his fascination with architecture and the absent home; and his expressionist use of 'imaginary' space and place, Kazuo Ishiguro's Gestural Poetics examines the manner in which Ishiguro's fictions approach, but never quite reveal, the ineffable, inexpressible essence of his narrators' emotionally fraught worlds. Reformulating Martin Heidegger's suggestion that the 'essence of world can only be indicated' as 'the essence of world can only be gestured towards,' Sloane argues that while Ishiguro's novels and short stories are profoundly sensitive to the limitations of literary form, their narrators are, to varying degrees, equally keenly attuned to the failures of language itself. In order to communicate something of the emotional worlds of characters adrift in various uncertainties, while also commenting on the expressive possibilities of fiction and the mimetic arts more widely, Ishiguro appropriates a range of metaphors which enable both author and character to gesture towards the undisclosable essences of fiction and being.

Steven Cassedy takes aim at two of the most enduring myths of modern criticism: that it is secular, and that it is new and autonomous. He argues that though modern criticism is often forbiddingly scientific and technical, the modern critic remains something of a mystic. Every school of modern criticism-from structuralism to postmodern criticism-rests on a faith in an "Eden," an irreducible essence, a myth, like the common myth that there is an intrinsic distinction between "poetic" language and "ordinary" language. The modern critic attempts to abandon all mystical faith; this is the "flight from Eden." But it is always in vain. It is traditionally assumed that modern literary criticism and theory came from France, and relatively recently. In fact, according to Cassedy, the entire modern critical consciousness was already formed by the early twentieth century in the minds of writers who were primarily neither professional critics nor philosophers, but poets. Some were French (Mallarme, and Valery); others were not (Rilke, Bely, and the Russian avant-garde poet Velimir Khlebnikov). In them we find the same Edenic faith, the same effort to abandon it, and the same failure of that effort. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1990.

Notes from the Crawl Room employs the lens and methods of horror writing to critique the excesses and absurdities of philosophy. Each story reveals disastrous and de-humanising effects of philosophies that are separated from real, lived experience (e.g. the absurdity of arguing over a sentence in Kant while the world burns around us). From a Kafkaesque exploration of administrative absurdities to the horrors of discursive violence, white supremacy and the living spectres of patriarchy, A.M. Moskovitz doesn't shy away from addressing the complex aspects of our lives. In addition to offering often humourous critiques of philosophy, these works are also, somewhat ironically, pieces of philosophy themselves. Each story seeks to move a subject area forward offering the reader the capacity to think through ideas in a weirder and more open way than traditional philosophy usually allows. An antidote to philosophy that seeks to close down and shut off the imaginative potential of human thought, Notes from the Crawl Room revels in the unsettling and creative potential of stories for revealing what thinking philosophically might really mean.

This literary analysis of the representation of 'Gypsies' in juvenile literature is unique in its comparative scope, as well as in the special attention to rare pre-1850 narratives, the period in which juvenile literature developed as a specific genre. Most studies on the subject are about one national literary tradition or confined to a limited period. In this study Dutch, English, French and German texts are analysed and discussed with reference to main academic publications on the subject. Emphasis is on the rich variation in narrative presentations, rather than on an inventory of images or prejudices. An important topic is the fundamental difference between early English and German narratives. Important because of the wide dissemination of German stories.

In Conscious Theatre Practice: Yoga, Meditation, and Performance, Lou Prendergast charts a theatre research project in which the notion of Self-realisation and related contemplative practices, including Bikram Yoga and Vipassana meditation, are applied to performance. Coining the term 'Conscious Theatre Practice', Prendergast presents the scripts of three publicly presented theatrical performances, examined under the 'three C's' research model: Conscious Craft (writing, directing, performance; Conscious Casting; Conscious Collaborations. The findings of this autobiographical project fed into a working manifesto for socially engaged theatre company, Black Star Projects. Along the way, the research engages with methodological frameworks that include practice-as-research, autoethnography, phenomenology and psychophysical processes, as well immersive yoga and meditation practice; while race, class and gender inequalities underpin the themes of the productions.

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.

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.

Combining the resources of new historicism, feminism, and postmodern textual analysis, Eric Mallin reveals how contemporary pressures left their marks on three Shakespeare plays written at the end of Elizabeth's reign. Close attention to the language of Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet, and Twelfth Night reveals the ways the plays echo the events and anxieties that accompanied the beginning of the seventeenth century. Troilus reflects the rebellion of the Earl of Essex and the failure of the courtly, chivalric style. Hamlet resonates with the danger of the bubonic plague and the difficult succession history of James I. Twelfth Night is imbued with nostalgia for an earlier period of Elizabeth's rule, when her control over religious and erotic affairs seemed more secure. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1995.

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.

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.

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.