"Taboo and Transgression in British Literature from the Renaissance to the Present" develops an innovative overview of the interdisciplinary theoretical approaches to the topic that have emerged in recent years. Alongside exemplary model analyses of key periods and representative primary texts, this exciting new anthology of critical essays has been specifically designed to fill a major gap in the field of literary and cultural studies. This book traces the complex dynamic and ongoing negotiation of notions of transgression and taboo as an essential, though often neglected, facet to understanding the development, production, and conception of literature from the early modern Elizabethan period through postmodern debates. The combination of a broad theoretical and historical framework covering almost fifty representative authors and oeuvres makes this essential reading for students and specialists alike in the fields of literary studies and cultural studies.

Postcolonial Literatures of Climate Change investigates the evolving nature of postcolonial literary criticism in response to global, regional, and local environmental transformations brought about by climate change. It builds upon, and extends, previous studies in postcolonial ecocriticism to demonstrate how the growing awareness of human-caused global warming has begun to permeate literary consciousness, praxis and analysis. The breadth of the volume's coverage - the diversity of its focal locations, cultures, genres and texts - serves as a salient reminder that, while climate change is global, its impacts vary, effecting peoples from place to place unequally, and often in accordance with their particular historical experience of colonialism and neo-colonialism, as well as their ongoing marginalisations. "Demonstrating the urgency of invoking novel epistemological approaches combining the scientific and the imaginative, this book is a "must read" for those concerned about the present and potential impacts of climate change on formerly colonised areas of the world. The comprehensive and illuminating Introduction offers a crucial history and current state of postcolonial ecocriticism as it has been and is addressing climate crises." - Helen Tiffin, University of Wollongong "The broad focus on the polar regions, the Pacific and the Caribbean - with added essays on environmental justice/activism in India and Egypt - opens up rich terrain for examination under the rubric of postcolonial and ecocritical analysis, not only expanding recent studies in this field but also enabling new comparisons and conceptual linkages." - Helen Gilbert, Royal Holloway, University of London "The subject is topical and vital and will become even more so as the problem of how to reconcile the demands of climate change with the effects on regions and individual nations already damaged by the economic effects of colonisation and the subsequent inequalities resulting from neo-colonialism continues to grow." - Gareth Griffiths, Em. Prof. University of Western Australia

This innovative volume draws on sociobiology to develop and apply an interdisciplinary approach to the study of literature. The resultant essays offer fresh, concerted, and challenging interpretations of canonical literary works that reconcile scientific knowledge with artistic beauty, empiricist rigor with imaginative experimentation, and unambiguous judgment with equivocal compassion. Full of scientific, historical, and philosophical analyses, Toward a Sociobiological Hermeneutic provides a significant educational resource in Darwinism and game theory and champions a sensitive engagement with great writers' contemplations of the human condition.

A critical companion to the striking variety of contemporary southern literature. Contributions by Barbara Bennett, Thomas AErvold Bjerre, Erik Bledsoe, Linda Byrd Cook, Thomas E. Dasher, Robert Donahoo, Peter Farris, Richard Gaughran, William Giraldi, Rebecca Godwin, Joan Wylie Hall, Marcus Hamilton, Gary Hawkins, David K. Jeffrey, Emily Langhorne, Shawn E. Miller, Wade Newhouse, L. Lamar Nisly, bes Stark Spangler, Joe Samuel Starnes, and Scott Hamilton Suter. Essays in Rough South, Rural South describe and discuss the work of southern writers who began their careers in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. They fall into two categories. Some, born into the working class, strove to become writers and learned without benefit of higher education, such writers as Larry Brown and William Gay. Others came from lower- or middle-class backgrounds and became writers through practice and education: Dorothy Allison, Tom Franklin, Tim Gautreaux, Clyde Edgerton, Kaye Gibbons, Silas House, Jill McCorkle, Chris Offutt, Ron Rash, Lee Smith, Brad Watson, Daniel Woodrell, and Steve Yarbrough. Their twenty-first-century colleagues are Wiley Cash, Peter Farris, Skip Horack, Michael Farris Smith, Barb Johnson, and Jesmyn Ward. In his seminal article, Erik Bledsoe distinguishes Rough South writers from such writers as William Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell. Younger writers who followed Harry Crews were born into and write about the Rough South. These writers undercut stereotypes, forcing readers to see the working poor differently. The next pieces begin with those on Crews and Cormac McCarthy, major influences on an entire generation. Later essays address members of both groups--the self-educated and the college-educated. Both groups share a clear understanding of the value of working-class southerners. Nearly all of the writers hold a reverence for the South's landscape and its inhabitants as well as an affinity for realistic depictions of setting and characters.

John Banville's Narcissistic Fictions is an exploration of Banville's novels from the point of view of various psychoanalytic understandings of the concept of narcissism. It presents this increasingly central figure in contemporary fiction as a writer for whom narcissism is both an essential truth of selfhood and a fundamental aspect of the writing of fiction. Though it deals with a number of theoretical concepts, it does so in a straightforward and highly accessible manner. The book is not simply a reading of a single, isolated aspect of Banville's work; rather, it presents narcissism as the key to understanding this writer, and as a way of bringing together the various disparate strands - thematic, stylistic and formal - of his complex and enigmatic oeuvre.

"In these essays, a range of leading scholars seek both to investigate the historical, institutional and philosophical origins of deconstruction and to think through the problem of the idea of origin itself"--Provided by publisher.

This rich and varied collection of essays by scholars and interviews with artists approaches the fraught topic of book destruction from a new angle, setting out an alternative history of the cutting, burning, pulping, defacing and tearing of books from the medieval period to our own age.

This title offers a Marxist take on a selection of artistic and cultural achievements from the rap music of Tupac Shakur to the painting of Van Gogh, from HBO's Breaking Bad to Balzac's Cousin Bette , from the magical realm of Harry Potter to the apocalyptic landscape of The Walking Dead , from The Hunger Games to Game of Thrones .

By examining theological and literary narratives through an engagement with well-known theorists of reading and religion, this collection of essays, international in perspective, brings together varied, refreshing, and provocative responses to well-established literary and critical theories.

The Culture of Boredom is a collection of essays by well-known specialists reflecting from philosophical, literary, and artistic perspectives, in which the reader will learn how different disciplines can throw light on such an appealing, challenging, yet still not fully understood, phenomenon. The goal is to clarify the background of boredom, and to explore its representation through forgotten cross-cutting narratives beyond the typical approaches, i.e. those of psychology or psychiatry. For the first time this experienced group of scholars gathers to promote a cross-border dialogue from a multidisciplinary perspective.

This is the first English translation of Il Fiore, the late-thirteenth-century narrative poem in 232 sonnets based on the Old French Roman de la Rose, and the Detto d'Amore, a free-wheeling version of many Ovidian precepts of love in 240 rhymed couplets. The elaborate allegory of the Fiore presents the complex workings of love, understood primarily as carnal passion, in the human psyche through the use of personifications of a wide array of characters who engage in various social (and bellic) interactions. There are personifications of social stereotypes and attitudes, mythological figures, abstract qualities, psychological and physical states, and personality traits. The Detto d'Amore includes features of the perennial controversy between proponents of the pleasures of erotic passion and those who counsel pursuit of the sublime joys found solely in the exercise of reason. The incomplete poem also contains a conventionalized-and idealized-description of the physical traits of the lady, as well as a portrait of the perfect courtly lover. The importance of these two works lies in part in their possible attribution to the great Florentine poet Dante Alighieri. But even if Dante is not the author, the Fiore is a valuable witness to the literary taste and cultural concerns of medieval Italy and to matters of poetic influence and reception among different literary traditions.

The December 2006 Iran Holocaust Denial Conference and the following international excoriation of it reveal a paradox of two cultural strands that are emblematic of the legacy of the twentieth century: official denial and historical amnesia on the one hand; and public, cooperative attempts at truth telling and redress on the other. "Amnesia and Redress in Contemporary American Fiction" shows how this dynamic of amnesia and truth telling shapes literary constructions of history. Focusing on works by Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Michelle Cliff, Bharati Mukherjee, and Julie Otsuka, Marni Gauthier identifies a new form of the historical novel that, arising from this distinct climate, articulates a politics of truth.

What happens when deconstruction reads politics? This collection of essays by some of Derrida's most significant readers thinks through deconstruction's relation to politics by explicating the text of Derrida in relation to political examples. Neither 'deconstruction' nor 'reading' nor 'politics' is left untouched in the encounters explored by the contributors to this volume. This book dispels any notion of the separation of deconstruction from the everyday and demonstrates the importance of deconstructive thought for the political.

This book is a study of the much debated problem of Soren Kierkegaard's "indirect communication." It approaches the problem, however, in quite a new way by applying some of the insights of recent literary theory. This study is both a contribution to literary theory, in the sense that it seeks to apply it, and a suggestion for renewal within phenomenological philosophy. A deconstructive approach to the written work is followed by a phenomenological description of the development of the lived sign. The book is an attempt to investigate a theme concerning individual rights and embodiment that descends from Kant through Edmund Husserl to Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

The "invisible hand," Adam Smith's metaphor for the morality of capitalism, is explored in this text as being far more subtle and intricate than is usually understood, with many British realist fiction writers (Austen, Dickens, Gaskell, Eliot) having absorbed his model of ironic causality in complex societies and turned it to their own purposes.

Dealing with the historical and thematic intersections of Christianity and critical theory, this collection brings together a diversity of specialist scholars in the area. Building on recent discourses in theology as well as their knowledge of hermeneutic and critical traditions, they examine major themes in contemporary critical theory.

Drawing together diverse literary, critical and theoretical texts in which the palimpsest has appeared since its inauguration by Thomas De Quincey in 1845, "Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory" provides the first ever genealogy of this metaphor. Sarah Dillon's original theorisation argues that the palimpsest has an involuted structure which illuminates and advances modern thought. While demonstrating how this structure refigures concepts such as history, subjectivity, temporality, metaphor, textuality and sexuality, Dillon returns repeatedly to the question of reading. This theorisation is interwoven with close readings of texts by D. H. Lawrence, Arthur Conan Doyle, Umberto Eco, Ian McEwan and H.D. Clearly written, and negotiating a range of critical theories and modern literary texts, it provides a reference point and critical tool for future employment of the concept of 'palimpsestuousness', and makes a significant contribution to the debate surrounding the relationship between theoretical and critical writing on literature.

The book uses cybertext theory and ludology to solve several persistent problems in the fields of literary theory, narratology, game studies, and digital media. Equally interested in what is and what could be, "Cybertext Poetics" combines ludology and cybertext theory to solve persistent problems and introduce paradigm changes in the fields of literary theory, narratology, game studies, and digital media. The book first integrates theories of print and digital literature within a more comprehensive theory capable of coming to terms with the ever-widening media varieties of literary expression, and then expands narratology far beyond its current confines resulting in multiple new possibilities for both interactive and non-interactive narratives. By focusing on a cultural mode of expression that is formally, cognitively, affectively, socially, aesthetically, ethically and rhetorically different from narratives and stories, "Cybertext Poetics" constructs a ludological basis for comparative game studies, shows the importance of game studies to the understanding of digital media, and argues for a plurality of transmedial ecologies. "International Texts in Critical Media Aesthetics" provides a platform for new scholarship in the area of electronic art and literature, to be presented from the perspective of critical aesthetics - philosophical positions dedicated to the problem of how and whether technology as a medium for art and literature simultaneously makes reference to and differs from the use of more traditional media and methods for these expressive practices.

The decade since the publication of Jean-Michel Rabate's controversial manifesto "The Future"" of Theory" saw important changes in the field. The demise of most of the visible French or German philosophers, who had produced texts that would trigger new debates, then to be processed by Theory, has led to drastic revisions and starker assessments. Globalization has been the most obvious factor to modify the selection of texts studied. During the twentieth century, Theory incorporated poetics, rhetorics, aesthetics and linguistics, while also opening itself to continental philosophy. What has changed today? The knowledge that we live in a de-centered world has destabilized the primacy granted to a purely Western canon. Moreover, much of contemporary theory remains highly allusive and this is often baffling for students. Theory keeps recycling itself, producing authentic returns of basic theses, terms and concepts. Canonical modern theorists often return to classical texts, as those of Plato, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche. And now we want to know: what is new?"Crimes of the Future "explores the past, present and potential future of Theory.

Nobel Laureate Gao Xingjian is amongst the most challenging writers of the present era. He has probed the dynamics of Chinese and European literature and developed unique strategies for the writing of seventeen plays, two novels, a collection of short stories and a collection of poems. He has also written two collections of criticism. The present collection takes the title Aesthetics and Creation from the name of the Chinese collection from which most of these essays are drawn, but it also includes some of Gao's most recent unpublished essays. This book is both indispensable and inspiring reading for intellectuals and informed readers who regard themselves as citizen of the world. For academics, researchers and students engaged in the disciplines of literature and visual art studies, world literature studies, comparative literature studies, performance studies, theatre studies, cultural studies, narrative fiction studies, and studies in the history of literature and the visual arts in modern times, this book is essential and thought-provoking reading that will have many positive outcomes.This book is in the Cambria Sinophone World Series

Controversy over gendered pronouns, for example using the generic "he," has been a staple of feminist arguments about patriarchal language over the last 30 years, and is certainly the most contested political issue in Western feminist linguistics. Most accounts do not extend beyond policy issues like the official institution of non-sexist language. In this volume, Anna Livia reveals continuities both before and after the sexist language refore movement and shows how the creative practices of pronoun use on the part of feminist writers had both aesthetic and political ends. Livia uses the term "pronoun envy" ironically to show that rather being a case of misguided envy, battles over gendered language are central to feminist concerns.
Livia examines a broad corpus of written texts in English and French, concentrating on those texts which problematize the traditional functioning of the linguistic gender system. They range from novels and prose poems to film scripts and personal testimonies, and in time from the 19th century to the present. Some withhold any indication of gender; others have non-gendered characters. Livia's goal is two-fold; to help bridge the divide between linguistic and literary analysis, and to show how careful study of the manipulation of linguistic gender in these texts informs larger concerns. This fresh and highly interdisciplinary work lies at the intersection of several vital areas, including language and gender, sociolinguistics, and feminist literary analysis.

Reconfiguring Modernism explores the relationship between modern literature and modern art. Spanning the high modernist period between the late-nineteenth century and World War 2, the cultural interrelationships between painters such as Manet, Gauguin, Cezanne, and Picasso, and writers such as James, Conrad, Eliot and Joyce are explored. The influence of African, Asian and Pacific cultures on European modernism is also examined. Schwarz considers texts - visual and written - of the modern period as a contoured textual field without absolute borders, crucial to our understanding of modernism in the last years of the twentieth century.

Mellard traces psychoanalytic literary theory and practice from Freud to Lacan to eZiezek. Through Lacanian readings of various texts, Mellard shows that in critical practice Lacanians produce a middle Lacan, between early and late."

The Genius to Improve an Invention derives its title from John Dryden's phrase for the British tendency to take up literary masterpieces from the past and "perfect" them. Distinguished literary scholar Piero Boitani adopts Dryden's notion as a framework for exploring ways in which classical and medieval texts, scenes, and themes have been rewritten by modern authors.

Boitani focuses on a concept of literary transition that takes into account both T. S. Eliot's idea of "tradition and individual talent" and Harold Bloom's "anxiety of influence." In five elegant essays he examines a wide range of authors and texts, including Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Voltaire, Goethe, Sartre, Dante, and Keats. Appearing for the first time in an English translation, The Genius to Improve an Invention will appeal to anyone interested in the Western literary tradition.

We indulge our fascination with detection in many ways, only some of which occur in the detective story. In fact, modern fiction regularly uses elements of a detective narrative to tell another story altogether, to engage characters, narrators, and readers with questions of identity, with examinations of moral and ethical reasoning, with critiques of social and political injustices, and with the metaphysics of meaning itself. Detective plots cross cultural and national boundaries and occur in different ways and different genres. Taken together, they suggest important contemporary understandings of who and what we are, how and what we aspire to become.Detecting Detection gathers writing from the UK, North and South America, Europe, and Asia to draw together instances of the detective plot in contemporary fiction. It is unique not only in addressing the theme--a recurring one in modern literature--but in tracking the interest in detectives and detection across international borders. >