Saunders analyzes the ideological uses of loss in literary, philosophical, and social texts from the late 19th and 20th centuries through the lens of women's lament traditions and includes philosophical texts by Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida; and literary works by William Faulkner, Stephane Mallarme, Dimitris Hatzis, and Tahar Ben Jelloun.

By examining the feminist interventions of contemporary women writers working in this subgenre, Johnsen advances the existing critical discussion of women's crime fiction. The writers studied here bring research expertise to bear on their chosen historical settings, creating a powerful but widely accessible statement about women in history.

Drawing on some 3,000 published interviews with contemporary authors, Authors on Writing: Metaphors and Intellectual Labor reveals new ways of conceiving of writing as intellectual labor. Authors' metaphorical stories about composing highlight not interior worlds but socially situated cultures of composing and apparatuses of authorship. Through an original method of interpreting metaphorical stories, Tomlinson argues that writing is both an individual activity and a collective practice, a solitary activity that depends upon rich, sustained, and complex social networks, institutions, and beliefs. This new book draws upon interviews with writers including: Seamus Heaney, Roald Dahl, Samuel Beckett, Bret Easton Ellis, John Fowles, Allen Ginsburg, Alice Walker and Gore Vidal.

In this volume collaborators from different universities all over the world explore a wide variety of methods for the study of literature as cultural memory. In literature, the past may be (re)constructed in various ways and in very diverse forms. This immediately raises the question as to how one can describe and inventory the various discourses and metadiscourses of historical representation. In what sense can the rhetoric of literary historiography itself contribute to literature's function as cultural memory? Which methods of analysis are most appropriate for describing specific text types or genres as cultural memory? What have been the pragmatic uses and the ethical merits of the stability and continuity that literature has often provided for European, American, Asian and African cultures? What are the dilemmas they create for our teaching at the end of the twentieth century? To all these questions, a wide range of scholars here tries to find answers. In thorough and highly original contributions, they not only address theoretical problems, but also engage themselves in practical analyses of specific works.

This book demonstrates that, rather than being an exceptional or unusual phenomenon, multilingualism is fundamental to modernist fiction. Focusing on the use of different languages by key modernist writers including D.H. Lawrence, Dorothy Richardson, Katherine Mansfield, Jean Rhys, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, Juliette Taylor-Batty examines the textual representation of interlingual encounters, the stylisation of translational discourse, the use of interlingual compositional processes, and the deliberate mixing of languages for stylistic purposes. She demonstrates that linguistic plurality is central to modernist forms of defamiliarisation, and examines the ways in which multilingual fiction of the period can be seen to reflect and challenge notions of national and linguistic 'rootedness'. This book demonstrates that much modernist fiction challenges contemporary anxieties regarding the 'artificiality' of 'cosmopolitan' forms of multilingualism, manifesting instead a fascination with processes of interlingual interference and mixing, and with subversive translational processes that fundamentally undermine traditional distinctions between original and translation, native and foreigner, mother tongue and foreign language.

Drawing on the insights offered by contemporary chaos theory, "Narrative Form and Chaos Theory" explores how models of turbulent dynamical systems in the physical world parallel structures in certain kinds of narratives. By closely looking at Laurence Sterne's "Tristram Shandy," Marcel Proust's "In Search of Lost Time," Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway," and William Faulkner's "Absalom, Absalom ," Parker demonstrates how these insights can be applied to the analysis of narrative structure and meaning. This innovative interdisciplinary work will appeal to scholars interested in narratology and in the connection between chaos theory and literature.

Killing Spanish suggests that the doubles, madwomen and other raging characters that populate the pages of contemporary U.S. Latino/a literature allegorize ambivalence about both present American identity and past Caribbean and Latin American origins. The family novels Sandn explores -- ranging from work by the Cuban American Cristina Garca to the island Puerto Rican Rosario Ferr -- uncover the split between Americanized protagonists and their families, a split usually resolved through the killing of a character representing origins. Race and class differences, and poverty, cause protagonists in work by the Nuyoricans Piri Thomas, the Dominican American Junot Daz, and others, to embrace the street as the new Latino home. If the family novels exact the death of "Spanish" in the person of a double character, the urban fiction and poetry project the "mean" street, churning with the productive and destructive energies of ambivalence, as the landscape of the fragmented U.S. Latino/a psyche.

This collection of essays is dedicated to the theory and practice of drama translation. The focus is on foreign-language plays translated into English and staged in Anglo-American theatres. In this connection, concepts like acculturation and cultural transfer,

One of the more frequently lodged, serious, and justifiable complaints about ecocritical work is that it is insufficiently theorized. "Ecocritical Theory" puts such claims decisively to rest by offering readers a comprehensive collection of sophisticated but accessible essays that productively investigate the relationship between European theory and ecocritique. With its international roster of contributors and subjects, it also militates against the parochialism of ecocritics who work within the limited canon of the American West. Bringing together approaches and orientations based on the work of European philosophers and cultural theorists, this volume is designed to open new pathways for ecocritical theory and practice in the twenty-first century.

Laments and complaints are among the most ancient poetical forms and ubiquitous in everyday speech. Understanding plaintive language, however, is often prevented by the resentment and fear it evokes. Lamenting and complaining seems pointless, irreconcilable, and destructive. Language of Ruin and Consumption examines Freud's approaches to lamenting and complaining, the heart of psychoanalytic therapy and theory, and takes them as guidelines for reading key works of the modern canon. The re-negotiation of older--ritual, dramatic, and juridical--forms in Rilke, Wittgenstein, Scholem, Benjamin, and Kafka puts plaintive language in the center of modern individuality and expounds a fundamental dimension of language neglected in theory: reciprocity is at issue in plaintive language. Language of Ruin and Consumption advocates that a fruitful reception of psychoanalysis in criticism combines the discussion of psychoanalytical concepts with an adaptation of the hermeneutical principle ignored in most philosophical approaches to language, or relegated to mere rhetoric: speech is not only by someone and on something, but also addressed to someone.

Engaged debate among feminist, political, and psychoanalytic thinkers has secured Julia Kristeva's status as one of the most formidable figures in twentieth-century critical theory. Nevertheless, her precise relevance to the study of literature - the extent to which her theory is specifically a literary theory - can be hard for new readers to fathom. This approachable volume explores Kristeva's definition of literature, her methods for analyzing it, and the theoretical ground on which those endeavors are based. Megan Becker-Leckrone argues that Kristeva's signature concepts, such as abjection and intertextuality, lose much of their force when readers extract them from the specific, complex theoretical context in which Kristeva produces them. Early chapters situate her theory in a broader conversation with Roland Barthes, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan and others around the issues of reading, textuality, and subjectivity. Subsequent chapters look at Kristeva's actual engagements with literary texts, specifically her challenging, highly performative reading of French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Celine in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection and her career-long preoccupation with James Joyce. A final chapter of the book looks at the way contemporary literary critics have marshaled her ideas in re-reading the poetry of William Wordsworth, while a helpful glossary identifies Kristeva's most pertinently "literary" theoretical concepts, by way of synopses of the texts in which she presents them.

This introductory guide to Louis Althusser provides the first major overview of his work since the publication in French of thousands of pages of essays, books, and letters unknown before 1990. Focusing on Althusser's writing on art, theater, and literature, Warren Montag traces the contradictory development of Althusser's thought from the early 60s to his autobiography, The Future Lasts Forever. Montag also explores how Althusser's reflections on reading can shed new light on well-known texts such as Heart of Darkness and Robinson Crusoe.

Charting a pervasive paradigm shift, Ashton Nichols chronicles the revolutionary turn away from the view of "Nature" as static and separate from humans as it moved towards the Romantic "nature" characterized by dynamic links among all living things. Engaging Romantic and Victorian thinkers, as well as contemporary scholarship, this book draws new conclusions about twenty-first century ideas of nature.

.

It is during the nineteenth-century, the age of machinery, that we begin to witness a sustained exploration of the literal and discursive entanglements of minds, bodies, machines. This book explores the impact of technology upon conceptions of language, consciousness, human cognition, and the boundaries between materialist and esoteric sciences.

Why do the dead return? Are the dead lost to us for ever, or do they remain part of the world of the living? This book examines these questions as they persistently emerge in areas as diverse as film, Holocaust testimony, and in the works of thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and the psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. The book suggests that it may be as difficult for the living to get rid of the dead as it is to live without them.

The book introduces the reader into the world of mental perception of literary contents. Based on the research in modern semantics, functional stylistics and cognitive phonetics, it explores the way linguistic elements of a literary work cause readers to form a single perception shape identified as a cultural, literary or social stereotype.

Via readings of novels by J.M. Coetzee, Timothy Mo and Salman Rushdie and the later poetry of W.B. Yeats, this book reveals how postcolonial writing can encourage the enlarged sense of moral and political responsibility needed to supplant ongoing forms of imperial violence with cosmopolitan institutions, relationships and ways of thinking.

Though still a relatively young field, memory studies has undergone significant transformations since it first coalesced as an area of inquiry. Increasingly, scholars understand memory to be a fluid, dynamic, unbound phenomenon-a process rather than a reified object. Embodying just such an elastic approach, this state-of-the-field collection systematically explores the transcultural, transgenerational, transmedial, and transdisciplinary dimensions of memory-four key dynamics that have sometimes been studied in isolation but never in such an integrated manner. Memory Unbound places leading researchers in conversation with emerging voices in the field to recast our understanding of memory's distinctive variability.

Apartheid and Beyond is a major contribution to the study of South African literary culture. It offers elegant readings of Coetzee, Gordimer, Fugard, Tlali, Dike, Magona, and Mda, focusing on the intimate relationship between place, subjectivity, and literary form revealed in their work. It also explores the way apartheid functioned in its day-to-day operations as a geographical system of control, exerting its power through such spatial mechanisms as residential segregation, bantustans, passes, and prisons. Though in the first instance concerned with literary texts, Apartheid and Beyond also meditates on crucial historical processes like colonial occupation, the creation of black townships, migration, forced removals, the emergence of informal settlements, the gradual integration of white cities, and efforts at land reform. Cumulatively, the six essays in this book tell the story of the transformation of apartheid's landscapes of oppression into the more ambiguous landscapes of contemporary South Africa: landscapes of tourism and leisure, of crime and privatized security, of uncontrolled urbanization and persistent poverty. Barnard's methodologically eclectic writing draws on the work of major European and U.S. theorists like Foucault, De Certeau, and Jameson, as well as important African intellectuals like Mbembe, Ramphele, and Ndebele. It also takes literary figures seriously as theorists of space in their own right. Apartheid and Beyond is both an innovative account of an important body of politically-inflected literature and an imaginative reflection on the socio-spatial aspects of the transition from apartheid to democracy.

An entrepreneur and educator highlights the surprising influence of humanities scholarship on biomedical research and civil liberties. This spirited defence urges society to support the humanities to obtain continued guidance for public policy decisions, and challenges scholars to consider how best to fulfil their role in serving the common good.

Defining narrativity as the enabling force of narrative, this is the first full-length exploration of the concept in fiction in English. It develops the notion of a "logic of narrativity," and by this means tries to contribute a new critical strategy to the field of narrative theory. The book also takes issue with a number of critical approaches that have in recent years acquired near-orthodox status in the matter of textual interpretation. Most prominent among these approaches are deconstruction and a particular form of Marxist criticism. The author's own theoretical claims are substantiated by readings of major twentieth-century novels by Conrad, Joyce, Flann O'Brien, and Arthur Koestler, and the book concludes with an analysis of an earlier narrative, Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent, which illustrates the wider premises of the theory and its applications.

In "Postmodern Humanism in Contemporary Literature and Culture," Todd F. Davis and Kenneth Womack investigate the emerging gaps between literary scholarship and the reading experience itself. For Davis and Womack, the idea of reconciling the void - the locus of our sociocultural disillusionment and despair in an increasingly uncertain world - concerns explicit artistic attempts to represent the ways in which human beings seek out meaning, hope and community in spite of the void's immutable shadow.

Marriage between older husbands and younger wives was common in nineteenth-century literature, and as Godfrey skillfully argues, provides a useful window into the dynamics of the patriarchic paradigm. Examining canonical and non-canonical texts from "Sense and Sensibility" to "Dracula," this study finds that literary January-May marriages respond to distinctively nineteenth-century anxieties regarding gender roles by deploying a surprising range of modes--parody, incest, aesthetics, horror, economics, and love. "The January-May Marriage in Nineteenth-Century British Literature" ultimately argues that age--like race, sexuality and class--is an essential component of gendered identities.

The classic serial, invented by BBC Radio Drama 60 years ago, survived and adapted itself to television, the arrival of color, and the global market in what has become a flood of classics with all channels competing for ratings and overseas sales. This book traces these developments and analzes the genre's response to social, economic, technical, and cultural changes, which have re-shaped it into the form we recognize today. The book contains considerable interview material with performers and media professionals.