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of the Chinese collection from which most of these essays are drawn, but it also includes some of Gao's most recent unpublished essays.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

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.

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.

This revised and expanded handbook concisely introduces narrative form to advanced students of fiction and creative writing, with refreshed references and new discussions of cognitive approaches to narrative, nonfiction, and narrative emotions.

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.

How does affective madness influence the social understanding of writers and other artists, or shape the creative act itself? In a 15-year longitudinal study at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, a study little known outside of psychiatry, 80 per cent of the writers reported either living with, or having had a lifetime incidence of, an affective disorder (depression or manic depression), as opposed to only 30 per cent of non-writer controls. Affective Disorder and the Writing Life interrogates the age-old mythos of the 'mad writer' through lived experience, literary analysis, writerly reflection, and contemporary neuroscience. These essays explore how affective disorders colour, drive and sometimes silence the writing mind a " and how affective difference has always informed the literary imagination.

Fiction writers and critics engage the aesthetic, political, philosophical, and cultural dimensions of contemporary fiction.

This book examines the phenomenon of 'the male gaze', a concept which has spread beyond academia and become a staple of cultural conversations across disciplinary boundaries. Male gazing has typically been disparaged and even stigmatized as a reflection of misogyny and an instrument of objectification, often justifiably so. But as this book argues and illustrates, male gazing can also be understood as an illuminating, intellectually engaging, aesthetically compelling, and even politically progressive practice. This study recounts how the author's own coming-of-an-age as a gazer became the basis for his long career teaching and writing about American fiction and poetry and poetry, canonical and contemporary, as well as about film, painting, TV, and rock-and-roll. It includes closely-reasoned analyses of work by James Baldwin, Rembrandt, Willa Cather, Philip Roth, Henry James, Charles Chesnutt, Bob Dylan, Robert Stone,Tim O'Brien, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, Frank O'Hara, Italo Calvino, John Schlesinger as well such cultural phenomena as the British Invasion of the 1960s, the Judgment of Paris in Greek mythology, the technology of seeing (kaleidoscopes, microscopes, telescopes) and the concept of 'objectification' itself.

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.

Cohen utilizes the interdisciplinary nature of contemporary literary and cultural studies to shed new light on the relationships between technologies and the people who used them during the early modern period.

In Writing Diaspora in the West, Peter McCarthy argues that the surveyors and theoreticians of modern human subjectivity have discovered in the margins a motherland, nourishing and nurturing them in the fantastic culture of what he terms the 'new marginalism'. This culture, McCarthy argues, is the product of a certain fantasy, the projection of a subjective homeland onto the various margins of discourse, subjectivity, history and geography that goes beyond a Left minoritarian ethos. This fantasy leads to a certain marginal affectivity, a fascination and identification with things perceived at the margins or bounds of a psychopathological homeland, especially with those who live or subsist there. McCarthy's work stands as a challenge toliberal critical orthodoxies concerning the representation of marginal experience.

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.

"T""racing the Aesthetic Principle in Conrad's Novels"sets out to revolutionize our reading of Joseph Conrad's works and challenge the critical heritage that accompanies them. Levin identifies the emergence of an aesthetic principle in Conrad's novels and theorizes that principle through the concept of 'the otherwise present, ' which Levin defines as that which provokes desire and perpetuates it by barring its appeasement. This book offers a detailed analysis of "Lord Jim," " Nostromo," " Under Western Eyes," " The Arrow of Gold "and" Suspense, "alongside a poststructuralist-inspired explication of Conrad's literary vision and its defining principle. This study is an important source for both the newcomers and the initiated to Conrad's oeuvre.

"To create today is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing."

Camus's powerful lecture, as relevant today as ever, argues against 'art for art's sake', while his Nobel Prize speech brilliantly sets out his vision of the artist's role and responsibilities.

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. >

This sophisticated book argues that human rights literature both helps the persecuted to cope with their trauma and serves as the foundation for a cosmopolitan ethos of universal civility-a culture without borders. Michael Galchinsky maintains that, no matter how many treaties there are, a rights-respecting world will not truly exist until people everywhere can imagine it. The Modes of Human Rights Literature describes four major forms of human rights literature: protest, testimony, lament, and laughter to reveal how such works give common symbolic forms to widely held sociopolitical emotions.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's conception of "the willing suspension of disbelief" marks a pivotal moment in the history of literary theory. Returning to Coleridge's thought and Shakespeare criticism to reconstruct this idea as a form of "poetic faith", Michael Tomko here lays the foundations of a new theologically oriented mode of literary criticism. Bringing Coleridge into dialogue with thinkers ranging from Augustine to Josef Pieper, contemporary critics such as Stephen Greenblatt and Terry Eagleton as well as writers like J.R.R. Tolkien and Wendell Berry, Beyond the Willing Suspension of Disbelief offers a method of reading for post-secular literary criticism that is not only historically and politically aware but also deeply engaged with aesthetic form.

An English teacher's love letter to reading and the many ways literature can make us, and our lives, better.

How can a Victorian poem help teenagers understand YouTube misogyny? Can Jane Eyre encourage us to speak out? What can Lady Macbeth teach us about empathy? Should our expectations for our future be any greater than Pip’s? And why is it so important to make space for these conversations in the first place?

In a career spanning almost three decades, English teacher Carol Atherton has taught generations of students texts that will be familiar to many of us from our own schooldays. But while the staples of exam syllabuses and reading lists remain largely unchanged, their significance – and their relevance – evolves with each class, as it encounters them for the first time.

Each chapter of Reading Lessons invites us to take a fresh look at these novels, plays and poems, revealing how they have shaped our beliefs, our values, and how we interact as a society. As she recalls her own development as a teacher, Atherton emphasizes the vital, undervalued role a teacher plays, illustrates how essential reading is for developing our empathy and makes a passionate case for the enduring power of literature.

Gold-guarding griffins, Cyclopes, killer lakes, man-eating birds, and "fire devils" from the sky-such wonders have long been dismissed as fictional. Now, thanks to the richly interdisciplinary field of geomythology, researchers are taking a second look. It turns out that these and similar tales, which originated in pre-literate societies, contain surprisingly accurate, pre-scientific intuitions about startling or catastrophic earth-based phenomena such as volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, and the unearthing of bizarre animal bones. Geomythology: How Common Stories Reflect Earth Events provides an accessible, engaging overview of this hybrid discipline. The introductory chapter surveys geomythology's remarkable history and its core concepts, while the second and third chapters analyze the geomythical resonances of universal earth tales about dragons and giants. Chapter 4 narrows the focus to regional stories and discusses the ways these and other myths have influenced legends about griffins, Cyclopes, and other iconic creatures. The final chapter considers future avenues of research in geomythology, including geohazard management, geomythology databases, geomythical "cold cases," and ways the discipline might eventually set, rather than merely support, research agendas in science. Thus, the book constitutes a valuable asset for scientists and lay readers alike, particularly in a time of growing interest in monsters, massive climate change, and natural disasters.

As the twentieth century dawned, artists and writers increasingly felt that realistic themes and realistic techniques were inadequate to address the human condition. Convinced that there was more to reality than physical appearance, they turned their gaze inward and adopted a number of unconventional approaches. Paradoxically, considering that they strove to give a more faithful impression of reality, their experiments were overwhelmingly anti-realistic. Some artists and writers, such as the cubist and the futurist poets, subverted traditional rhetorical devices. Others, like the cubist and the metaphysical artists, invented new spatio-temporal constructions. Some individuals, including the cubists and futurists, borrowed freely from other disciplines. Others, especially the dadaists and the surrealists, cultivated nonsense and illogicality. Focusing on basic principles and drawing on their personal experience, poets and painters writers began to explore subjective reality, which proved to be far more interesting than its objective counterpart. As they soon discovered, the quest for a new reality required the creation of a new language that could express that reality. Each goal was inextricably bound up with the other in a relationship that was fundamentally reciprocal. Artists and writers searched for a language that would express the complexity of the modern world while revolutionizing traditional aesthetics. Visual imagination demanded linguistic innovation and vice versa. Language and vision were entwined in a double helix like a strand of DNA. Rather than opposite sides of the same aesthetic coin, they represented complementary ways of processing experience. So important were vision and expression to the vanguard enterprise that this double quest soon became obligatory--an "avant-garde imperative." Eager to attract attention, artists and writers struggled to be on the cutting edge. Keen to impress publishers, dealers, and colleagues, they dressed original ideas in striking new clothes. The insights, impressions, and ideas generated by contemporary technological developments demanded to be expressed in a brand new language. As poets and painters strove to create such a language, however, they discovered that this activity also provided them with new insights, impressions, and ideas. By expanding the ability of language to express the tremendous complexity of modern life, they hoped to overcome this complexity by inventing new ways of thinking about the world and of interacting with it. To be sure, the search for an alternate means of expression assumed many different guises over the years. Each of the individuals examined in these pages struggled long and hard to discover a suitable vehicle for his or her voice. Each searched for a radical new art form that, in addition to expressing his or her personal vision, would transform the way we view things. Besides poets and painters, to be sure, the avant-garde included numerous people associated with other disciplines. Dancers, choreographers, musicians, composers, film makers, theater directors, scenographers, art dealers, playwrights, actors, critics, and publishers all contributed to the heady mix. While freely acknowledging their important contributions, the present study concentrates on art and literature, which, as the volume demonstrates, evolved along parallel lines. Although writers and artists mostly worked in radically different media, which partially determined what they could accomplish, they shared the same goals. In their quest for new domains to explore, they developed anti-realistic strategies that would revolutionize modern aesthetics. The Avant-Garde Imperative is an important volume for anyone interested in modern aesthetics. It will appeal not only to scholars of twentieth-century literature but also to those working in the field of modern art.

This volume undertakes a fundamental reassessment of utopianism during the modernist period. It charts the rich spectrum of literary utopian projects between 1885 and 1945, and reconstructs their cultural work by locating them in the material 'spaces' in which they originated. The book brings together work by leading academics and younger scholars.

Imagine reading a classic novel like James Joyce's "Ulysses" as though for the first time. Such an exercise, especially when informed by contemporary narrative theory, makes possible a different reading experience of the work, one with a renewed focus on plot and a surprising amount of suspense. Veteran Joyce scholar Margot Norris offers an innovative study of the processes of reading "Ulysses" as narrative and focuses on the unexplored implications, subplots, subtexts, hidden narratives, and narratology in one of the twentieth century's most influential novels. It is a striking and essential contribution to literary criticism that will change the readings and understandings of Joyce's most important work.

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.

This book is about the interaction between literary studies and the philosophy of literature. It features essays from internationally renowned and emerging philosophers and literary scholars, challenging readers to join them in taking seriously the notion of interdisciplinary study and forging forward in new and exciting directions of thought. It identifies that literary studies and the philosophy of literature address similar issues: What is literature? What is its value? Why do I care about characters? What is the role of the author in understanding a literary work? What is fiction as opposed to non-fiction? Yet, genuine, interdisciplinary interaction remains scarce. This collection seeks to overcome current obstacles and seek out new paths for exploration.

This collection emphasizes a cross-disciplinary approach to the problem of scale, with essays ranging in subject matter from literature to film, architecture, the plastic arts, philosophy, and scientific and political writing. Its contributors consider a variety of issues provoked by the sudden and pressing shifts in scale brought on by globalization and the era of the Anthropocene, including: the difficulties of defining the concept of scale; the challenges that shifts in scale pose to knowledge formation; the role of scale in mediating individual subjectivity and agency; the barriers to understanding objects existing in scalar realms different from our own; the role of scale in mediating the relationship between humans and the environment; and the nature of power, authority, and democracy at different social scales.