In the Maoist period, authors and the communist literary establishment shared the belief that art could reshape reality, and was thus just as crucial to the political establishment as building new infrastructure or developing advanced weaponry. Literature the People Loves investigates the production of a literary system designed to meet the needs of a newly revolutionary society in China, decentering the Cold War understanding of communist culture. Krista Van Fleit Hang shows readers how to understand the intersection of gender, tradition, and communist ideology in essential texts. Rather than arguing for or against the literary merits of the works of the early Maoist period, the book presents a sympathetic understanding of culture from a period in China's history in which people's lives were greatly affected by political events.

A volume in Research in Queer Studies Series Editors Paul Chamness Miller and Hidehiro Endo, Akita International University The book examines the links between literature and film in Latin America by using queer theory and a series of recent cultural productions whose arguments destabilize traditional gender roles and heteronormative masculinity. For many years, the connections between a literary text and its film adaptation have been considered only from the point of view of the latter's fidelity to the written work, which many scholars imagined to be the original that filmmakers needed to respect. Within the last two decades, however, the idea of adaptation fidelity has been challenged by a number of critics who refute the existence of an original text and promote the notion of an ambiguous and complex relationship between a literary work and its film adaptation. Based on such developments and with the help of queer theory, this book questions and revises several crucial theoretical approximations that analyze the relations between the two art forms in an attempt to overcome the limitations of fidelity discourse. This is the first book-length study that seeks to examine, with the appropriate detail, the connections between film and literature in Latin America through the lenses of queer theory and by focusing on the representations of numerous practices that do not fit within the general framework of heteronormative sexuality.

This title offers a new critical approach to E.M. Forster's legacy. It examines key themes in Forster's work (homosexuality, humanism, modernism, liberalism) and their relevance to post-imperial and postcolonial novels by important contemporary writers. This is a unique and fresh addition to the changing field of postcolonial studies and offers new insight into the controversial relationship between colonial and postcolonial writing.

This book presents a theory of long humorous texts based on a revision and an upgrade of the General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH), a decade after its first proposal. The theory is informed by current research in psycholinguistics and cognitive science. It is predicated on the fact that there are humorous mechanisms in long texts that have no counterpart in jokes. The book includes a number of case studies, among them Oscar Wilde's Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Allais' story Han Rybeck. A ground-breaking discussion of the quantitative distribution of humor in select texts is presented.

Levinas and Lacan, two giants of contemporary theory, represent schools of thought that seem poles apart. In this major new work, Mari Ruti charts the ethical terrain between them. At first glance, Levinansian and Lacanian approaches may seem more or less incompatible, and in many ways they are, particularly in their understanding of the self-other relationship. For both Levinas and Lacan, the subject's relationship to the other is primary in the sense that the subject, literally, does not exist without the other, but they see the challenge of ethics quite differently: while Levinas laments our failure to adequately meet the ethical demand arising from the other, Lacan laments the consequences of our failure to adequately escape the forms this demand frequently takes. Although this book outlines the major differences between Levinas and Judith Butler on the one hand and Lacan, Slavoj Zizek, and Alain Badiou on the other, Ruti proposes that underneath these differences one can discern a shared concern with the thorny relationship between the singularity of experience and the universality of ethics. Between Levinas and Lacan is an important new book for anyone interested in contemporary theory, ethics, psychoanalysis, and feminist and queer theory.

A first of its kind, The Palgrave Handbook of Comparative North American Literature provides an overview of Comparative North American Literature, a cutting-edge discipline. Contributors make important interventions into multiculturalism in North America and into U.S.-Mexico and U.S.-Canada border literatures.

This book is an autobiographical meditation on the way in which the world's population has been transformed into a society of refugees and emigres seeking -indeed, demanding- an alternative way of political belonging. Focusing on the interregnum we have precariously occupied since the end of World War II-and especially after 9/11- it constitutes a series of genealogical chapters that trace the author's journey from his experience as a prisoner of war in Nazi Germany to the horrific fire-bombing of Dresden in February 1945. In doing so, it explores his search for an intellectual vocation adequate to the dislocating epiphany he experienced in bearing witness to these traumatising events. Having subsequently lost faith in the logic of belonging perpetuated by the nation-state, Spanos charts how he began to look in the rubble of that zero zone for an alternative way of belonging: one in which the old binary -whose imperative was based on the violence of the Friend/enemy opposition- was replaced by a paradoxical loving strife that enriched rather than negated the potential of each side. The chapters in this book trace this errant vocational itinerary, from the author's early undergraduate engagement with Kierkegaard and Heidegger to Cornel West, moving from that disclosive occasion in the zero zone to this present moment.

In this study, the author explores how Conrad, T.S. Eliot, Woolf, Joyce, Faulkner, Hemingway, Huxley and others responded to the immediate challenges of their time, to the implications of Freudian psychology, molecular theory, relativist theory, and the general weakening of religious faith. Assuming that artists and writers, in coping with those problems, would develop techniques in many ways comparable, even where there was no direct contact, he positions modernist literature within the context of contemporary painting, architecture and sculpture, thereby providing some interesting insights into the nature of the literary works themselves.

Narrative/s in Conflict presents the proceedings of an international workshop, held at the Trinity Long Room Hub Dublin in 2013, to a wider audience. This was a cross-disciplinary cooperation between the comparative research network 'Broken Narratives' (University of Vienna), the research strand 'Identities in Transformation' (Trinity College Dublin) and the Graduate Center for the Study of Culture at the University of Giessen. What has brought this informal network together is its credo that theories of narrative should be regarded as an integral part of cultural analysis. Choosing exemplary case studies from early Habsburg days up to the the wars and genocides of the 20th century and the post-9/11 'War on terror', our volume tries to analyze the relation between representation and conflict, i.e. between narrative constructions, social/historical processes, and cultural agon. Here it is crucial to state that narratives do not simply and passively 'mirror' conflicts as the conventional 'realistic' paradigm suggests; they rather provide a symbolic, sense-making matrix, and even a performative dimension. It even can be said that in many cases, narratives make conflicts.

Jacques Derrida has argued about the difference between literature and theory that despite its institutional status, part of its 'institution' is the right of literature to say anything. Literature cannot be defined as such, and as soon as one seeks to produce a reading of the literary, complications arise.
Yet despite its institutional significance, 'theory' remains something many wish would go away; and which, for others, is still not read, is misread, and remains to be read. Like literature, it remains as an enigmatic identity, resistant to definition, but subject to misperceptions and open to general statements that are more or less inaccurate.
By examining how 'theory' and 'literature' are concepts and names which touch on one other in complex ways, "Julian Wolfreys" seeks to understand their intersections and differences. Examining a wide range of authors, from Dickens to Joyce, and engaging directly with a number of major theorists, Wolfreys takes the reader on a journey through the issues and ideas involved in reading literature, in theory.

This book draws on the tools of literary analysis and cultural geography to investigate Ernest Hemingway's sophisticated construction of physical environments. In doing so, Laura Gruber Godfrey revises conventional approaches to Hemingway's literary landscapes and provides insight about his fictional characters and his readers alike.

This study should be of interest to the scholar and aficionado alike. It uncovers a thematic unity within Blake's early work: his far reaching use of humour. Although often dismissed as a product of his eccentricity, the author argues the comic was an essential key to Blake's concept of Vision. With special reference to Bakhtin's theory of the carnivalesque, this book offers new readings of many of Blake's works, demonstrating how he was influenced by contemporary theatre, verbal and visual satirists and the Shakespearean clown.

The book investigates the dispersed emergence of the new visual regime associated with nineteenth-century pre-cinematic spectacles in the literary imagination of the previous centuries. Its comparative angle ranges from the Medieval and Baroque period to the visual and stylistic experimentations of the Romantic age, in the prose of Anne Radcliffe, the experiments of Friedrich Schlegel, and in Wordsworth's Prelude. The book examines the cultural traces of the transformation of perception and representation in art, architecture, literature, and print culture, providing an indispensable background to any discussion of nineteenth-century culture at large and its striving for a figurative model of realism. Understanding the origins of nineteenth-century mimesis through an unacknowledged genealogy of visual practices helps also to redefine novel theory and points to the centrality of the new definition of 'historicism' irradiating from Jena Romanticism for the structuring of modern cultural studies.

How do we today define literary studies as an academic discipline and literature as a relevant, discrete object of study? Beyond arguments that insist upon the continued importance of literature via the broad category of culture on the one hand and nostalgic, traditionalist oppositions to materialist study of literature aimed to safeguard the autonomy of literature from the social, the economic, and the political on the other, Literary Materialisms gathers thirteen essays by established and emerging scholars that trace the medially and disciplinarily specific future of literary studies in an updated and newly historicized attention to materialism.

What should literature with political aims look like? This book traces two rival responses to this question, one prizing clarity and the other confusion, which have dominated political aesthetics since the late nineteenth century. Revisiting recurrences of the avant-garde experimentalism versus critical realism debates from the twentieth century, Geoffrey A. Baker highlights the often violent reductions at work in earlier debates. Instead of prizing one approach over the other, as many participants in those debates have done, Baker focuses on the manner in which the debate itself between these approaches continues to prove productive and enabling for politically engaged writers. This book thus offers a way beyond the simplistic polarity of realism vs. anti-realism in a study that is focused on influential strands of thought in England, France, and Germany and that covers well-known authors such as Zola, Nietzsche, Arnold, Mann, Brecht, Sartre, Adorno, Lukacs, Beauvoir, Morrison, and Coetzee.

It is one of the ironies of contemporary literary study that as it has moved toward greater interdisciplinarity it has grown sceptical of the aesthetic. This anthology reasserts the continuing relevance of the aesthetic and to reintegrate it into the widening repertoire of contemporary literary critical practices.

From its inception literary aesthetics has been engaged in the full range of debates generated by the criticism of culture. Unlike the more restricted discourse of philosophical aesthetics, it has explored the ways in which value commitments extend across disciplinary domains by reckoning with the practical concerns of art production and consumption.

The readings in this anthology reach back to classical sources of philosophical aesthetics and forward to the most current accounts of the utility/value of the literary artwork in post-modern culture. The organization of the text is designed to engage the reader in the shaping debates of literary aesthetic theory and demonstrate their continuing relevance for our understanding of the ways literature sustains and critiques culture.

In his famous classification of the sciences, Francis Bacon not only catalogued those branches of knowledge that already existed in his time, but also anticipated the new disciplines he believed would emerge in the future: the "desirable sciences." Mikhail Epstein echoes, in part, Bacon's vision and outlines the "desirable" disciplines and methodologies that may emerge in the humanities in response to the new realities of the twenty-first century. Are the humanities a purely scholarly field, or should they have some active, constructive supplement? We know that technology serves as the practical extension of the natural sciences, and politics as the extension of the social sciences. Both technology and politics are designed to transform what their respective disciplines study objectively.
The Transformative Humanities: A Manifesto addresses the question: Is there any activity in the humanities that would correspond to the transformative status of technology and politics? It argues that we need a practical branch of the humanities which functions similarly to technology and politics, but is specific to the cultural domain.

Anglophone postcolonial studies has been characterized by its secular nature. Yet as the first generation of scholars grapples with mortality, a yearning for spiritual meaning is emerging in many texts. This study synthesizes the sacred language used in these texts with critical theory in order to create a holistic frame for interpretive analysis.

The concept of the game illustrates a collectively recognized representation of existence in American literature. This investigation explores the concealment of the function of division beneath the function of communication. The philosophical cornerstones of this investigation are Marshall McLuhan, Guy Debord, and Michel Pecheux. Inspired by Henry Miller, an innovative methodology is established that focuses on patterns of experience (symbol/sign), patterns of structure (myth), and patterns of language (metaphor). The concept of the game renders an essential social relation tangible (interpellation), and it epitomizes a commitment to the restoration of American spiritual values. It is a rejection of "a mistaken idea of freedom" and an advocate of "true freedom."

The novelist and critic Christine Brooke-Rose reflects on her own fictional craft and turns her well-developed analytic abilities on other writers fictional and critical, from Hawthorne to Pound to Bloom and Derrida, in an attempt to investigate those difficult border zones between the 'invented' and the 'real'. The result is an extended meditation in a highly personal idiom, on the creative act and its relation to modern theoretical writing and thinking. Like her fiction, Professor Brooke-Rose's criticism is self-consciously experimental, trying out and discarding ideas, adopting others. Her linguistic prowess, her uncommon role as a recognised writer of fiction and theory and the relevance of her work to the feminist and other other movements, all contribute to the interest of this unusual sequence of essays.

This is an exceptionally thorough, clear, and well-structured account of an important early Chinese text that has been largely overlooked by most scholars because of doubts about its authenticity and difficulties with its textual integrity - issues now largely clarified by this study. The focus here is not only on what the 'he guan zi' says, but how things are said, and how language is used in argumentation.

Modernist Nowheres explores connections in the Anglo-American sphere between early literary modernist cultures, politics, and utopia. Foregrounding such writers as Conrad, Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis, it presents a new reading of early modernism in which utopianism plays a defining role prior to, during and immediately after the First World War.

The first book length study of this genre, Collective Identity and Cultural Resistance in Contemporary Chicana/o Autobiography facilitates new understandings of how people and cultures are displaced and reinvent themselves. Through the examination of visual arts and literature, Juan Velasco analyzes the space for self-expression that gave way to a new paradigm in contemporary Chicana/o autobiography. By bringing together self-representation with complex theoretical work around culture, ethnicity, race, gender, sex, and nationality, this work is at the crossroads of intersectional analysis and engages with scholarship on the creation of cross-border communities, the liberatory dimensions of cultural survival, and the reclaiming of new art fashioned against the mechanisms of violence that Mexican-Americans have endured.

This book explores what makes a book readable by bringing together the relevant literature and theories, and situating them within a unified account. It provides a single resource that offers a principled discussion of the issues and their applications.