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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In 1984 Fredric Jameson wrote that "everything in our social life-from economic value and state power to practices and to the very structure of the psyche itself-can be said to have become 'cultural' in some original and yet untheorized sense." The essays in this special issue track the status of this claim some thirty years later, inquiring into the relationship of art, aesthetics, and cultural production to political economy today. At a moment when interpretation (including "ideology critique" and "symptomatic reading") has been variously supplanted by descriptivism, empiricism, and the return of metaphysics, contributors here pursue the possibilities for an engaged cultural criticism that is attentive to form while rejecting a depoliticized formalism. Spanning a wide range of cultural sites-from recent Hollywood cinema to post-broadcast television, manufactured landscape photography, contemporary West African art, and "new materialism" in philosophy-they ask what the "formal tendencies" of contemporary cultural production (including theory itself) can tell us about the cultural logic of contemporary capitalism. The collection includes a new interview with Jameson conducted by the editors. Contributors: Jennifer Bajorek, Nico Baumbach, Jonathan Beller, Alexander R. Galloway, Fredric Jameson, Sulgi Lie, Alberto Toscano, Amy Villarejo, Damon R. Young, Genevieve Yue

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.

Metaphysics of Children's Literature is the first sustained study of ways in which children's literature confronts metaphysical questions about reality and the nature of what there is in the world. In its exploration of something and nothing, this book identifies a number of metaphysical structures in texts for young people-such as the ontological exchange or nowhere in extremis-demonstrating that their entanglement with the workings of reality is unique to the conditions of children's literature. Drawing on contemporary children's literature discourse and metaphysicians from Heidegger and Levinas, to Bachelard, Sartre and Haraway, Lisa Sainsbury reveals the metaphysical groundwork of children's literature. Authors and illustrators covered include: Allan and Janet Ahlberg, Mac Barnett, Ron Brooks, Peter Brown, Lewis Carroll, Eoin Colfer, Gary Crew, Roald Dahl, Roddy Doyle, Imme Dros, Sarah Ellis, Mem Fox, Zana Fraillon, Libby Gleeson, Kenneth Grahame, Armin Greder, Sonya Hartnett, Tana Hoban, Judy Horacek, Tove Jansson, Oliver Jeffers, Jon Klassen, Elaine Konigsburg, Norman Lindsay, Geraldine McCaughrean, Robert Macfarlane, Jackie Morris, Edith Nesbit, Mary Norton, Jill Paton Walsh, Philippa Pearce, Ivan Southall, William Steig, Shaun Tan, Tarjei Vesaas, David Wiesner, Margaret Wild, Jacqueline Woodson and many others.

Vacillating between the longue duree and microhistory, between ideological critique and historical sympathy, between the contrary formalisms of close and distant reading, literary historians operate with such disparate senses of what the term "history" means that the field risks compartmentalization and estrangement. The Romantic Historicism to Come engages this uncertainty in order to construct a more robust, more capacious idea of history. Focusing attention on Romantic conceptions of history's connection to the future, The Romantic Historicism to Come examines the complications of not only Romantic historicism, but also our own contemporary critical methods: what would it mean if the causal assumptions that underpin our historical judgments do not themselves develop in a stable, progressive manner? Articulating history's minimum conditions, Jonathan Crimmins develops a theoretical apparatus that accounts for the concurrent influence of the various sociohistorical forces that pressure each moment. He provides a conception of history as open to radical change without severing its connection to causality, better addressing the problem of the future at the heart of questions about the past.

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.