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.

From William Shakespeare to Marilynne Robinson, this book examines representations of interpersonal reconciliation in works of literature, focusing on how these representations draw on the language of divine forgiveness. Christian theology sees divine forgiveness as conditional upon a sinner's remorse and self-abasement before God, but also as a form of grace - unconditional and rooted only in divine love. Van Dijkhuizen explores what happens when this paradoxical forgiveness paradigm comes to serve as a template for interpersonal reconciliation. As A Literary History of Reconciliation shows, literary writers imagine interpersonal reconciliation as being centrally about power and hierarchy, and present forgiveness without power as longed for but ever elusive. Drawing on major works of literature from the early modern era to the present day, this book explores works by John Milton, Virginia Woolf, J.M. Coetzee, Ian McEwan and others to craft a literary history that will appeal to readers interested in literature, religion and philosophy.

Jon Stratton looks at the post-Holocaust experience with emphasis on aspects of its impact on popular culture.

More than a hundred years ago, Freud made a new mythology by revising an old one: Oedipus, in Sophocles' tragedy the legendary perpetrator of shocking crimes, was an Everyman whose story of incest and parricide represented the fulfillment of universal and long forgotten childhood wishes. The Oedipus complex--child, mother, father--suited the nuclear families of the mid-twentieth century. But a century after the arrival of the psychoanalytic Oedipus, it might seem that modern lives are very much changed. Typical family formations and norms of sexual attachment are changing, while the conditions of sexual difference, both biologically and socially, have undergone far-reaching modifications. Today, it is possible to choose and live subjective stories that the first psychoanalytic patients could only dream of. Different troubles and enjoyments are speakable and unspeakable; different selves are rejected, discovered, or sought. Many kinds of hitherto unrepresented or unrepresentable identity have entered into the ordinary surrounding stories through which children and adults find their bearings in the world, while others have become obsolete. Biographical narratives that would previously have seemed unthinkable or incredible--"a likely story!"--have acquired the straightforward plausibility of a likely story.
This book takes two Freudian routes to think about some of the present entanglements of identity. First, it follows Freud in returning to Greek tragedies--Oedipus and others--which may now appear strikingly different in the light of today's issues of family and sexuality. And second, it re-examines Freud's own theories from these newer perspectives, drawing out different strands ofhis stories of how children develop and how people change (or don't). Both kinds of mythology, the classical and the theoretical, may now, in their difference, illuminate some of the forming stories of our contemporary world of serial families, multiple sexualities, and new reproductive technologies.

Describing in detail precise differences between the psychological experience of reading a novel and watching a movie, "Make Believe in Film and Fiction" shows how movies' unique magnification of movements produces stories especially potent in exposing hypocrisy, the spread of criminality in contemporary society, and the relation of private experience to the natural environment. By contrasts of novels with visual storytelling the book also displays how fiction facilitates sharing of subjective fantasies, frees the mind from limiting spatial and temporal preconceptions, and dramatizes the ethical significance of even trivial and commonplace behavior, while intensifying readers' awareness of how they think and feel.

This volume offers a new theoretical approach to cultural production inspired by the metaphor of culture as a virtual network. Following a thorough outline of this approach, the theoretical framework is elucidated in a second part through examples drawn from early modern European drama. A third and final part then presents a critical discussion of the concept of "national" culture and literature, from its first formulation by Johann Gottfried Herder to its current developments, including postcolonial studies.

The twelve essays in this book explore in depth for the first time the publishing and reading practices which were formed and changed by the First World War. Ranging from an exploration of British and Australian trench journals and the reading practices of Indian soldiers to the impact of war on the literary figures of the home front in Britain, these essays provide crucial new historical information about the production, circulation and reception of reading matter during a period of international crisis.

By remapping the configurations of mourning across modernist, postmodernist, and postcolonial literatures, psychoanalysis and deconstruction (James Joyce, Jamaica Kincaid, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Elias Khoury, Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Derrida), Signifying Loss studies not only how loss is signified but also the ethico-political significance of such signifying. First, by examining the dynamics between narrative tropes and mourning, it elaborates a poetics of narrative mourning in which prosopopoeia becomes the master trope of mourning while catachresis the master trope of melancholia and chiasmus of trauma. Second, it develops a situated and flexible theory of mourning, capable of adjusting to diverse contexts in which the ethical and political stakes of mourning are different-in short, Signifying Loss calls for the formulation of geopolitical and differential tactics of mourning and mournability rather that for a clear cut strategy of inconsolability.

This Dictionary offers points of entry into Derrida's complex and extensive works.
This Dictionary offers points of entry into Derrida's complex and extensive works.
From 'aporia' to 'yes', the Dictionary suggests ways into Derrida that show what is at stake in his work.
Demonstrates that Derrida is not just about philosophy, but also about politics and pop music.
Explains why deconstruction matters, and how Derrida can change the way you think.
The A-Z entries are framed by essays on the inherent interdisciplinarity of Derrida's work and on Derrida's relationship to a range of other thinkers.

Outlining the controversies that have surrounded the academic discipline of English Literature since its institutionalization in the late nineteenth century, this important book draws on a range of archival sources. It addresses issues that are central to the identity of academic English - how the subject came into existence, and what makes it a specialist discipline of knowledge - in a manner that illuminates many of the crises that have affected the development of modern English studies. Atherton also addresses contemporary arguments about the teaching of literary criticism, including an examination of the reforms to A-Level literature.

Adorno and Modern Theatre explores the drama of Edward Bond, David Rudkin, Howard Barker and Sarah Kane in the context of the work of leading philosopher Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969). The book engages with key principles of Adorno's aesthetic theory and cultural critique and examines their influence on a generation of seminal post-war dramatists.

This remarkable collection investigates the relations between literature and the economy in the context of the unprecedented expansion of early modern England's long distance trade. Studying a range of genres and writers, both familiar and lesser known, the essays offer a new history of globalization as a complex of unevenly developing cultural, discursive, and economic phenomena. While focusing on how long distance trade contributed to England's economic growth and cultural transformation, the collection taps into scholarly interest in race, gender, travel and exploration, domesticity, mapping, the state and emergent nationalism, and proto-colonialism in the early modern period.

In The Eagleton Reader, Stephen Regan presents a lively and judicious selection of Terry Eagleton's essays, lectures and reviews, demonstrating the breadth and incisiveness of Eagleton's critical judgements, his playful, ironic intelligence, and his provocative intervention in the cultural debates of the past thirty years. This Reader is a valuable introduction to Eagleton's stimulating and entertaining work on modernism and postmodernism, nationalism and colonialism, aesthetics and ideology, cultural politics and sexual politics. Eagleton's brilliance as a literary critic is evident in essays on William Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy, W. B. Yeats, Oscar Wilde and Milan Kundera, while his more ruminative theoretical and philosophical writings are amply demonstrated in essays on Raymond Williams, Walter Benjamin, Arthur Schopenhauer and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The Reader includes a prefatory survey of its subject's career, extensive introductions to each of the six sections of essays, and a comprehensive bibliography of writings by and about Terry Eagleton.

Literature and Photography in Transition, 1850-1915 examines how British and American writers used early photography and film as illustrations and metaphors. It concentrates on five figures in particular: Henry Mayhew, Robert Louis Stevenson, Amy Levy, William Dean Howells, and Jack London.

"Hispanic Caribbean Literature of Migration: Narratives of Displacement" is a collection of thirteen chapters that explores the literary tradition of Caribbean Latino literature written in the U.S. beginning with Jose Marti and concluding with 2008 Pulitzer Prize winning novelist, Junot Diaz. The essays in this collection reveal the multiple ways that writers of this tradition use their unique positioning as both insiders and outsiders to critique U.S. hegemonic discourses while simultaneously interrogating national discourses in their home countries. The chapters consider the way that spatial migration in literature serves as a metaphor for gender, sexuality, racial, identity, linguistic and national migrations.

Alongside the recent cultural turn in the humanities, there has been a noticeable return to ethical considerations. With regard to literature as well as other media, this has rekindled awareness of a tension, antagonism, or even disparity between ethics and aesthetics. This volume of articles takes a more systematic and cross-disciplinary approach to the widely mooted ethical turn in literature and other media than has been pursued so far. It brings together a wide range of critical perspectives from literary studies, media and cultural memory studies, and philosophy, tracing the complex and sometimes conflicting relationship between ethics and aesthetics in theoretical contexts and individual case studies as diverse as colonial architecture, nineteenth-century literary histories, and postmodern writing and art.

Covering a diverse range of figures and issues from Jonathan Swifts pornographic poetry to Oscar Wildes famous cello-shaped coat this book collapses Irish studies into the critical perspective of disability studies: linking 'Irishness' and 'disability' together allows the emergence of a new critical perspective, an Irish disability studies.

This book investigates the impact of fascism on twentieth-century British fiction. With a solid archival underpinning, Suh locates anti-fascist counter-strategies in middlebrow genres associated with women writers (domestic fiction, melodrama, country house novels, and family sagas) and makes the powerful argument that these rhetorical and narrative strategies emerge as the most durable. Presenting works by Phyllis Bottome, Nancy Mitford, Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf, and Muriel Spark, the book shifts the focus from high modernism and its heirs, widely considered the most important sites of literary conceptions of the political, to the under explored feminist anti-fascist strategies inherent to middlebrow fiction.

This study explores Hollywood's invention of Britain through the adaptation of its literature. Utilizing Derrida's Margins of Philosophy , texts by Gilles Deleuze and his work with Felix Guattari, this text identifies the future of British and Anglophone literary and cultural studies as a group of citations appropriated for American ends.

Virginia Woolf's writing is alert to the politics of space, be it urban, domestic, textual or geopolitical. This is the first book to offer an in-depth treatment of Woolf's representations of space and place. Its eleven essays contribute not only to Woolf studies but also to emergent debates concerning modernism's relations to empire and geography. They offer innovative and interdisciplinary readings on topics such as London's imperial spaces, the spatial formations created by new technology, and the gendering of space.

The final volume of Rene Wellek's monumental history of modern criticism is a comprehensive survey of the main currents of twentieth-century criticism in Western Europe. In this volume, as in the preceding books of the series, Wellek expounds and analyzes the work of the most prominent critics, offering succinct appraisals of his subjects both as individuals and as participants in the broader movements of the century. Contents I. French Criticism, 1900-1950 French "Classical" Criticism in the Twentieth Century Retrospect: Alain, Remy de Gourmont The Nouvelle Revue Francaise: Andre Gide, Jacques Riviere, Ramon Fernandez, Benjamin Cremiuex, Albert Thibaudet Marcel Proust The Catholic Renaissance: Charles Du Bos, Jacques Maritain and Henri Bremond, Paul Claudel Dada and Surrealism The Geneva School: Marcel Raymond, Albert Beguin, Georges Poulet Albert Camus Jean-Paul Sartre Paul Valery Prospect II. Italian Criticism, 1900-1950 Benedetto Croce The Followers of Croce: Luigi Russo, Francesco Flora, Mario Fubini, Attilio Momigliano The Aestheticians: Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, Alfredo Gargiulo Critics concerned with English and American literature: Cesare Pavese, Mario Praz, Emilio Cecchi Italian Marxism: Antonio Gramesci, Giacomo Debenedetti The Catholic Renaissance: Carlo Bo The Close Readers: Renato Serra, Giuseppe De Robertis, Cesare De Lollis, Eugenio Montale III. Spanish Criticism, 1900-1950 Americo Castro Miguel de Unamuno Marcelino Menendez y Pelayo and Ramon Menendez Pidal Azorin Salvador de Madariaga Jorge Guillen Damaso Alonso Jose Ortega y Gasset

Critics have argued that the field of postcolonial studies has become melancholic due to its institutionalisation in recent years. This book identifies some limits of postcolonial studies and suggests ways of coming to terms with this issue via a renewed engagement with the literary dimension in the postcolonial text.