Why study German literature in an age when national identity is being eroded by a cosmopolitan, multinational culture? The authors provide diverse answers but all agree that modern German literature has been generated by a culture which has undergone extraordinary historical experiences, the effects of which are still with us.

This work explores this crucial period in the development of the English novel, integrating critical theory, historical background and close reading. Divided into two major sections, the first shows how historical and contextual material is essential for developing powerful readings. Thus the first part challenges such New Critical tenets as "exit author" and the "biographical fallacy" and discusses how the author becomes a formal presence in the text.;The second section is theoretical and speaks of the transformation in the way that we read and think about authors, readers, characters and form in the light of recent theory, offering an alternative to the deconstructive and Marxist trends in literary studies.

This book examines the broad varieties of religious belief, religious practices, and the influence of religion within medieval society. Religion in the Middle Ages was not monolithic. Medieval religion and the Latin Church are not synonymous. While theology and liturgy are important, an examination of animal trials, gargoyles, last judgments, various aspects of the medieval underworld, and the quest for salvation illuminate lesser known dimensions of religion in the Middle Ages. Several themes run throughout the book including visual culture, heresy and heretics, law and legal procedure, along with sexuality and an awareness of mentalities and anxieties. Although an expanse of 800 years has passed, the remains of those other Middle Ages can be seen today, forcing us to reassess our evaluations of this alluring and often overlooked past.

Jane H. M. Taylor is one of the world's foremost scholars of rewriting or reecriture. Her focus has been on literature in medieval and Renaissance France, but rewriting, including continuation, translation, and adaptation, lies at the heart of literary traditions in all vernaculars. This book explores both the interdisciplinarity of rewriting and Taylor's remarkable contribution to its study. The rewriting and reinterpretation of narratives across chronological, social and/or linguistic boundaries represents not only a crucial feature of text transmission, but also a locus of cultural exchange. Taylor has shown that the adaptation of material to conform to the expectations, values, or literary tastes of a different audience can reveal important information regarding the acculturation and reception of medieval texts. In recent years, numerous scholars across disciplines have thus turned to this field of enquiry. This collection of studies dedicated to the rewriting of medieval French literature from the twelfth to the twenty-first centuries by Taylor's friends, colleagues, and former students offers not only a fitting tribute to Taylor's career, but also a timely consolidation of the very latest research in the field, which will be vital for all scholars of medieval rewriting. With contributions from Jessica Taylor, Keith Busby, Leah Tether, Logan E. Whalen, Mireille Seguy, Christine Ferlampin-Acher, Ad Putter, Anne Salamon, Patrick Moran, Nathalie Koble, Bart Besamusca, Frank Brandsma, Richard Trachsler, Carol J. Chase, Maria Colombo Timelli, Laura Chuhan Campbell, Joan Tasker-Grimbert, Jean-Claude Muhlethaler, Michelle Szkilnik, Thomas Hinton, Elizabeth Archibald.

The first book to put contemporary affect theory into conversation with early modern studies, this volume demonstrates how questions of affect illuminate issues of cognition, political agency, historiography, and scientific thought in early modern literature and culture. Engaging various historical and theoretical perspectives, the essays in this volume bring affect to bear on early modern representations of bodies, passions, and social relations by exploring: the role of embodiment in political subjectivity and action; the interactions of human and non-human bodies within ecological systems; and the social and physiological dynamics of theatrical experience. Examining the complexly embodied experiences of leisure, sympathy, staged violence, courtiership, envy, suicide, and many other topics, the contributors open up new ways of understanding how Renaissance writers thought about the capacities, pleasures, and vulnerabilities of the human body.

Written by Derrida scholars, philosophers, and classicists, Derrida and Antiquity analyses a dialogue with the ancient world in the work of one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century. Through an analysis of Derrida's work it explores the relationship between modern philosophy and Plato, the role ancient concepts of democracy have played in modern political debates, and the place of antiquity in contemporary discussions about Europe, as well as investigating the influence that deconstruction has had on the study of classical literature, ancient philosophy, and early religion. The volume is prefaced by a previously untranslated essay by Derrida, 'We Other Greeks'.

This open access collection offers a detailed mapping of recent Nordic literature and its different genres (fiction, poetry, and children's literature) through the perspective of spatiality. Concentrating on contemporary Nordic literature, the book presents a distinctive view on the spatial turn and widens the understanding of Nordic literature outside of canonized authors. Examining literatures by Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish authors, the chapters investigate a recurrent theme of social criticism and analyze this criticism against the welfare state and power hierarchies in spatial terms. The chapters explore various narrative worlds and spaces-from the urban to parks and forests, from textual spaces to spatial thematics, studying these spatial features in relation to the problems of late modernity.

Women's Experimental Writing considers six contemporary authors who use experimental methods and negative modes of critique in their fiction and feminism. The authors covered are Valerie Solanas, Kathy Acker, Theresa Cha, Chantel Chawaf, Jeanette Winterson, and Lynda Barry. These writers all share a commitment to combining extreme content with formally radical techniques in order to enact varieties of gender, sex, race, class and nation-based experience that, they suggest, may only be "represented" accurately through the experimental unmaking of dominant structures of rationality. Ellen Berry extends the anti-social negative critique predominant in queer studies by offering an alternative archive of feminist negative literary practices and explores the consequences of joining an anti-social critique with radical innovations in literary and cultural forms. She argues that the radical aesthetic practices the authors employ are central to the emergence of contemporary Western feminisms and in doing so rectifies a critical neglect of contemporary experimental writing by women, especially in politicized forms, within the still-emerging postmodern canon.

What is the precise relationship between the writer of a text and the reader? Contributions to reader-response theory have suggested that the reader is relatively passive. In this 1987 text, Professor Foster argues that the relationship is more complex than that: readers enter into complicity with writers and create the illusion of the writer's mastery over meaning in order to imagine themselves as masters and become writers in their own place. This dynamic model of the reading process is revealed most tellingly in 'confessional' narratives and so Professor Foster explores the complex patterns of the reader/writer symbiosis in texts by Augustine, Kierkegaard, Henry James, Hawthorne, Faulkner, and Beckett. What emerges is a fresh theory of reading literature: the engagement between writer and reader as a struggle for power in which the reader is actively complicit and self-conscious in his or her interpretations.

Confronting nationalistic and nativist interpreting practices in Persianate literary scholarship, Persian Literature as World Literature makes a case for reading these literatures as world literature-as transnational, worldly texts that expand beyond local and national penchants. Working through an idea of world literature that is both cosmopolitan and critical of any monologic view on globalization, the contributors to this volume revisit the early and contemporary circulation of Persianate literatures across neighboring and distant cultures, and seek innovative ways of developing a transnational Persian literary studies, engaging in constructive dialogues with the global forces surrounding, and shaping, Persianate societies and cultures.

Object fetishism is becoming a more and more pervasive phenomenon. Focusing on literature and the visual arts, including cinema, this book suggests a parallelism between fetishism and artistic creativity, based on a poetics of detail, which has been brilliantly exemplified by Flaubert's style. After exploring canonical accounts of fetishism (Marx, Freud, Benjamin), by combining a historicist approach with theoretical speculation, Massimo Fusillo identifies a few interpretive patterns of object fetishism, such as seduction (from Apollonius of Rhodes to Max Ophuls), memory activation (from Goethe to Louise Bourgeois and Pamuk), and the topos of the animation of the inanimate. Whereas all these patterns are characterized by a projection of emotional values onto objects, modernism highlights a more latent component of object fetishism: the fascination with the alterity of matter, variously inflected by Proust, Woolf, Joyce, Barnes, and Mann. The last turning point in Fusillo's analysis is postmodernism and its obsession with mass media icons-from DeLillo's maximalist frescos and Zadie Smith's reflections on autographs to Palahniuk's porn objects; from pop art to commodity sculpture.

Screenplay and Narrative Theory draws attention to the notion that in order to comprehend complex narrative dynamics, which are encountered in a great variety of narrative genres, forms, and formats, a more comprehensive theory of narrative is required. George Varotsis explains how a work of narrative functions synergistically and systemically, as well as elucidates the heuristic problem-solving mechanisms that are employed in various structural levels of thought processes, which allow the coherent accumulative derivative we call a story to emerge. The transition from an empirical to theoretical perspective is achieved by introducing characteristics of complex narrative systems: a network of narrative components, i.e. characters, structure, goals, motivations, theme, plot and subplots, narrative action, etc., which are arranged hierarchically over three fundamental levels of structure, i.e. deep, intermediate, and surface structure, that interact parallel to one another in non-linear ways. Varotsis tackles questions about how stories semantically emerge in the underlying dynamics that allow a work of narrative to function as a unified whole.

In the aftermath of debate about the death of literary theory, Austin E. Quigley asks whether theory has failed us or we have failed literary theory. Theory can thrive, he argues, only if we understand how it can be strategically deployed to reveal what it does not presuppose. This involves the repositioning of theoretical inquiry relative to historical and critical inquiry and the repositioning of theories relative to each other. What follows is a thought-provoking reexamination of the controversial claims of pluralism in literary studies. The book explores the related roles of literary history, criticism, and theory by tracing the fascinating history of linguistics as an intellectual problem in the twentieth century. Quigley's approach clarifies the pluralistic nature of literary inquiry, the viability and life cycles of theories, the controversial status of canonicity, and the polemical nature of the culture wars by positioning them all in the context of recurring debates about language that have their earliest exemplifications in classical times.

In Peter Handke's play Kaspar, a young man is forced to learn to speak: a process that is a form of physical torture to him. In Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, the young heroine desires to keep as silent as possible, since speech directed at her causes such pain. We are not allowed to remain silent, even when the cost of speech is torture and pain.
Silence and Subject in Modern Literature uses a wide variety of texts from forms such as the modern crime novel, via popular classics from authors such as Jane Austen, to avant-garde plays by Samuel Beckett and Handke, to study literary representations of the power relations in which we are forced to speak. Informed by critical theory by Foucault and Bakhtin among others, and touching on fields as diverse as rhetoric, feminism, and the concept of literature, Silence and Subject in Modern Literature engages closely with a central issue in modern life: spoken violence.

The middlebrow is a dominant cultural force in the twenty-first century. This book defines the new literary middlebrow through eight key features: middle class, feminized, reverential, commercial, emotional, recreational, earnest and mediated. Case studies include Oprah's Book Club, the Man Booker Prize and the Harry Potter phenomenon.

The persistence of Romantic thought and literary practice into the late twentieth century is evident in many contexts, from the philosophical and ideological abstractions of literary theory to the thematic and formal preoccupations of contemporary fiction and poetry. Though the precise meaning of the Romantic legacy is contested, it remains stubbornly difficult to move beyond. This collection of essays by prominent critics and literary theorists was first published in 1999, and explores the continuing impact of Romanticism on a variety of authors and genres, including John Barth, William Gibson, and John Ashbery, while writers from the Romantic and Victorian period include Wordsworth, Byron and Emily Bronte. Many critics have assumed that the forms and modes of feeling associated with the Romantic period continued to influence the cultural history of the the first half of the twentieth century. This was the first book to consider the mutual impact of postmodernism and Romanticism.

Through contemporary theories of cosmopolitanism and analyses of literary texts such as Heart of Darkness, Lilith's Brood, and Moby-Dick, this book explores the cosmopolitan impulses behind the literary imagination. Patell argues that cosmopolitanism regards human difference as an opportunity to be embraced rather than a problem to be solved.

This volume brings together Northrop Frye's criticism on twentieth-century literature, a body of work produced over almost sixty years. Including Frye's incisive book, T.S. Eliot, as well as his discussions of writers such as James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, and George Orwell, the volume also contains a recently discovered review of C.G. Jung's book on the synchronicity principle and a previously unpublished introduction to a twentieth-century literature anthology. Frye's insightful commentaries demonstrate definitively that he was as astute a critic of the literature of his own time as he was of the literature of earlier periods.

Glen Robert Gill's substantial introduction delineates the development of Frye's criticism on twentieth-century literature, puts it in historical and cultural context, and relates it to his overarching theory of literature. This volume in Frye's Collected Works is indispensible not only for readers of Frye's work but for all scholars and students of twentieth-century literature.

This book provides teachers and students of literature with a resource that gives them guidance to the philosophical influences on literary criticism and literary figures. Its goal is to lead teachers and students to a greater understanding of concepts with which they may have some familiarity. The writers chosen are those whose works most commonly appear in high school and college literature anthologies. The text describes major philosophical influences reflected in their writings as well as references to philosophical works that are known to have played a part in their intellectual and aesthetic development.

This volume is a source of philosophical influences in fiction, poetry, and drama. The entries on 123 writers, arranged in alphabetical order, are supplemented by a section of brief bio-bibliographical profiles of more than 75 relevant philosophers and a glossary of philosophical terms, concepts, and movements. Following each author study is a selected bibliography of suggested sources for further reading. The book ends with a list of general sources on literary theory and philosophy, stressing their interrelationships. A cross-referencing system is provided for the convenience of readers. Symbols within the entries guide the reader to entries in the philosopher section, the glossary, and to other author entries. Students and teachers of both literature and philosophy will find this work of extreme interest.

Precarious Figurations focuses on the reception of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Germany. Looking at theatrical practices and critical or scholarly discourses from the Weimar Republic to the new millennium, the book explores why the play has served simultaneously as a vehicle for the actualization of anti-Semitic tropes and as a staging ground for the critical exposure of the very logic of anti-Semitism. In particular, the study investigates how the figure of Shylock has come to be both a device in and a stumbling block for attempts to bridge the fundamental rupture in civilization brought about by the Holocaust. The careful analysis of the German reception of Merchant, and in particular of the ways of doing and reading Shylock in the context of painful German, and German-Jewish, discourses of identity and remembrance, is designed to raise fundamental questions - questions concerning not only the staging of Jewishness, the tenacity of anti-Semitism and the difficulties of Holocaust remembrance, but also the general potentials and limitations of theatrical interventions into cultural conflicts.

This book explores the idea that while we see the vampire as a hero of romance, or as a member of an oppressed minority struggling to fit in and acquire legal recognition, the vampire has in many ways changed beyond recognition over recent decades due to radically shifting formations of the sacred in contemporary culture. The figure of the vampire has captured the popular imagination to an unprecedented extent since the turn of the millennium. The philosopher Rene Girard associates the sacred with a communal violence that sacred ritual controls and contains. As traditional formations of the sacred fragment, the vampire comes to embody and enact this 'sacred violence' through complex blood bonds that relate the vampire to the human in wholly new ways in the new millennium.

When Homeric heroes think about the meaning of their actions, they expect this to take the form of kleos, 'fame', in a future song. This volume explores the consequences of this mode of thinking in the Iliad in particular, and argues that the form of kleos and the interposition of a gap of time between event and meaning produces widespread effects, not only for the thought and psyche of the heroes, but also for the nature of poetry and Homeric scholarship. Is epic time continuous, perpetuating the fame of the heroes in the flow of poetic tradition, or does a gap intervene to put into doubt the self-identity of meaning and the possibility of memory? This question connects the poetic logic of fame for the heroes and singers of epic to the implicit temporalities of Homeric studies. Alongside the analysis of literary figures from the Iliad, such as narrative, objects and similes, this volume reads modern scholarship on Homer - including oral theory, neoanalysis and traditional referentiality - as forms of reception which have produced distinct responses to the temporality of ancient epic. The participants in epic kleos - heroes, poets and scholars - encounter each other through a tradition that joins the memories and presentiments of a past that did not happen and futures that will never arrive.

In Storytelling: Critical and Creative Approaches award-winning creative artists and scholars explore the power and complexity of stories in a variety of genres and cultures. Storytelling is of crucial importance to narratives of post-coloniality, gender, history, social status and nationhood. This collection of analytical and reflective pieces demonstrates the fundamental role played by imagination in the production and contestation of culture. The writers show how personal and public truths are manufactured, modified and undone through processes of narrativization and storytelling.

Liminal Fictions in Postmodern Culture examines distinctive literary, musical, and cinematic narratives that seek to inspire critical thought and conduct through provocation. From Gogol's Dead Souls to Salinger's Franny and Zooey , Phillips argues liminal narratives offer an antidote to the modern commodification of the self.