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.

OurCommonDwelling explores why America's first literary circle turned to nature in the 1830s and '40s. When the New England Transcendentalists spiritualized nature, they were reacting to intense class conflict in the region's industrializing cities. Their goal was to find a secular foundation for their social authority as an intellectual elite. New England Transcendentalism engages with works by William Wordsworth, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others. The works of these great authors, interpreted in historical context, show that both environmental exploitation and conscious love of nature co-evolved as part of the historical development of American capitalism.

To many, Edward Said's seminal 1978 work Orientalism is an enduring touchstone, a founding text of the field of postcolonial studies and a book that continues to influence debates in literary and cultural studies, Middle Eastern Studies, anthropology, art history, history and politics. To others, however, Orientalism has serious failings, not least in blaming the wrong people - namely, Orientalists - for the crimes of European imperialism. Debating Orientalism addresses the book's contemporary relevance without lionizing or demonizing its author. Bridging the gap between intellectual history and political engagement, the twelve contributors to this volume interrogate Orientalism's legacy with a view to moving the debate about this text beyond the manichean limitations within which it has all too often been imprisoned. Debating Orientalism seeks to consider Orientalism's implications with a little less feeling, though no less commitment to understanding the value and political effects of engaged scholarship.

"Nabokov, Rushdie, and the Transnational Imagination" argues that exiled and migrant novelists create alternate worlds which teach their readers to construct new, nation-like communities. Taking Vladimir Nabokov and Salman Rushdie as model practitioners, this book shows how such writers are remaking national literary traditions. These playful, puzzle-filled texts transcend classification as postcolonial or postmodern; instead, they help identify and create a lineage of boundary-crossing, and test how far the real world can be changed by fiction.

This volume is a selection of significant and previously unpublished essays and short stories by the influential critic of German and American literature and popular culture, James A. Snead. The volume contains innovative essays and notes about African American popular culture, literary criticism and five pieces of short fiction. Published posthumously, the volume attests to Snead's unique intellectual commitment to a critical engagement with the interconnections between European and African American cultural formations.

The Other Virgil tells the story of how a classic like the Aeneid can say different things to different people. As a school text it was generally taught to support the values and ideals of a succession of postclassical societies, but between 1500 and 1800 a number of unusually sensitive readers responded to cues in the text that call into question what the poem appears to be supporting. This book focuses on the literary works written by these readers, to show how they used the Aeneid as a model for poems that probed and challenged the dominant values of their society, just as Virgil had done centuries before. Some of these poems are not as well known today as they should be, but others, like Milton's Paradise Lost and Shakespeare's The Tempest, are; in the latter case, the poems can be understood in new ways once their relationship to the 'other Virgil' is made clear.

The central theme of this book is the relationship between the reflections about and the realization of a musical composition. In his essay "Words about Music, or Analysis versus Performance," Nicholas Cook states that words and music can never be aligned exactly with one another. He embarks on a quest for models of the relationship between analytical conception and performance that are more challenging than those in general currency. Peter Johnson's essay, "Performance and the Listening Experience: Bach's 'Erbarme dich'" shows that a performance is an element within the intentionality of the work itself. He looks for scientific methods capable of proving the artisticity of a performance. And the composer Hans Zender, in his "A Road Map for Orpheus?," states that a composer must be capable of questioning obvious basic principles (such as equal temperament) and finding creative solutions.

This is the first book to consistently read English Modernist literature as testimony to trauma of the First and Second World Wars. Focusing upon T.S. Eliot and D.H. Lawrence, it examines the impact of war upon their lives and their strategies to resist it through literary innovation.

This book considers how mysticism and negative theology can be reread in response to recent theological work on literature and culture. Essays consider the possibility that mystical and negative theologies challenge the conceptualization of identity and difference in Western theology, and some further argue that mysticism provides a radical trajectory away from the structures of knowledge and identity which prevail in Western culture.

Thirty-five years ago Roland Barthes proclaimed the death of the Author. For medievalists no death has been more timely. In medieval French literature there are no Authors, only authors - and enigmas. Is the medieval author a name or a function, an authority or an image? The way we answer questions shapes how we think about names such as Jean de Meun, Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart, Christine de Pizan, or lesser-known figures like Gerbert de Montreuil, Gautier de Coincy, Baudoin Butor, or David Aubert. The essays in this volume create a prism through which to understand medieval authorship as a process and the medieval author as an agency in the making. This book will appeal to all those who are interested in theoretical approaches to authorship and could serve as an introduction to medieval French literature for sophisticated readers. For specialists it delivers an assessment of current theoretical and methodological issues in medieval studies.

During a career that spanned sixty years, Cleanth Brooks was involved in most of the major controversies facing the humanities from the 1930s until his death in 1994. He was arguably the most important American literary critic of the mid-twentieth century. Because it is impossible to understand modern literary criticism apart from Cleanth Brooks, or Cleanth Brooks apart from modern literary criticism, Mark Royden Winchell gives us not only an account of one man's influence but also a survey of literary criticism in twentieth-century America. More than any other individual, Brooks helped steer literary study away from historical and philological scholarship by emphasizing the autonomy of the text. He applied the methods of what came to be called the New Criticism, not only to the modernist works for which these methods were created, but to the entire canon of English poetry, from John Donne to William Butler Yeats. In his many critical books, especially The Well Wrought Urn and the textbooks he edited with Robert Penn Warren and others, Brooks taught several generations of students how to read literature without prejudice or preconception.

In Modernism and Market Fantasy, Carey Mickalites explores British modernist fiction's critical designs on the changing economic culture in which it took shape. Examining work that ranges from pre-war impressionism through the late modernism of the 1930s, he shows how modernist innovation engages directly with the transitions that mark early twentieth-century capitalism. Mickalites places modernist texts in relationship to particular economic structures: an investment and finance economy that imagines endlessly inflated returns through speculative trading; the anxieties of selfhood produced by capitalist exchange and private property; advertising and fashion culture's dream worlds of perpetual self-renewal; and commercial spectacle's capacity to generate new public affects. Demonstrating that prominent modernists viewed the market as an abstract space organized around irrational fantasies and anxieties, Mickalites argues that modernism reconfigures capitalist mythologies along the fault lines of their internal contradictions in an effort to blast an increasingly reified economic culture into a new historical consciousness of itself.

Considers the Indian periodical press as a key forum for the production of nationalist rhetoric. It argues that between the 1870s and 1910, the press was the place in which the notion of 'the public' circulated and where an expansive middle class, and even larger reading audience, was persuaded into believing it had force.

With this volume, the editors Katharina Edtstadler, Sandra Folie, and Gianna Zocco propose an extension of the traditional conception of imagology as a theory and method for studying the cultural construction and literary representation of national, usually European characters. Consisting of an instructive introduction and 21 articles, the book relates this sub-field of comparative literature to contemporary political developments and enriches it with new interdisciplinary, transnational, intersectional, and intermedial perspectives. The contributions offer [1] a reconsideration and update of the field's methods, genres, and theoretical frames; [2] trans-/post-national, migratory, and marginalized perspectives beyond the European nation-state; [3] insights into geopolitical dichotomies such as Orient/Occident; [4] intersectional approaches considering the entanglements of national images with notions of age, class, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity/race; [5] investigations of the role of national images in visual narratives and music.

Classical Presences
Series Editors: Lorna Hardwick, Professor of Classical Studies, Open University, and James I. Porter, Professor of Greek, Latin, and Comparative Literature, University of Michigan
The texts, ideas, images, and material culture of ancient Greece and Rome have always been crucial to attempts to appropriate the past in order to authenticate the present. They underlie the mapping of change and the assertion and challenging of values and identities, old and new. Classical Presences brings the latest scholarship to bear on the contexts, theory, and practice of such use, and abuse, of the classical past.
Laughing with Medusa explores a series of inter-linking questions, including: Does history's self-positioning as the successor of myth result in the exclusion of alternative narratives of the past? How does feminism exclude itself from certain historical discourses? Why has psychoanalysis placed myth at the center of its explorations of the modern subject? Why are the Muses feminine? Do the categories of myth and politics intersect or are they mutually exclusive? Does feminism's recourse to myth offer a script of resistance or commit it to an ineffective utopianism? Covering a wide range of subject areas including poetry, philosophy, science, history, and psychoanalysis as well as classics, this book engages with these questions from a truly interdisciplinary perspective. It includes a specially commissioned work of fiction, "Iphigeneia's Wedding," by the poet Elizabeth Cook.

"A remarkable study. . . . The first book of its kind and essential for any future discussion of modernism and its embattled boundaries."--Francoise Meltzer, author of "Hot Property

"One of the very best books of literary criticism, literary scholarship, or literary theory I have ever read. . . . It illuminates interrelationships between historical studies and theory in any humanist discipline."--Menachim Brinker, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

"A milestone in the study of modern Jewish literature. It seriously engages and recontextualizes all the scholarship that came before, and by so doing sets it on a new course: applying a rigorous definition of modernism yet insistent upon methodological diversity; deeply grounded in Hebrew culture yet unabashedly diaspora-centered. This is not a book that readers will take lightly."--David G. Roskies, author of "Against the Apocalypse

This collection charts the origins and consequences of the literature/philosophy dialogue, providing an overview of the field as well as discussing new developments in literary and philosophical scholarship. The collection is divided into four main parts: introductory perspectives; an overview of the key schools of thought; a discussion of debates between literature and philosophy; and an engagement with specific texts.

Since the 1990 publication of Gender Trouble, Judith Butler has had a profound influence on how we understand gender and sexuality, corporeal politics, and political action both within and outside the academy. This collection, which considers not only Gender Trouble but also Bodies That Matter, Excitable Speech, and The Psychic Life of Power, attests to the enormous impact Butler's work has had across disciplines. In analyzing Butler's theories, the contributors demonstrate their relevance to a wide range of topics and fields, including activism, archaeology, film, literature, pedagogy, and theory. Included is a two-part interview with Judith Butler herself, in which she responds to questions about queer theory, the relationship between her work and that of other gender theorists, and the political impact of her ideas. In addition to the editors, contributors include Edwina Barvosa-Carter, Robert Alan Brookey, Kirsten Campbell, Angela Failler, Belinda Johnston, Rosemary A. Joyce, Vicki Kirby, Diane Helene Miller, Mena Mitrano, Elizabeth M. Perry, Frederick S. Roden, and Natalie Wilson.

Analyzing real, speculative, and imaginary schemes of migration to and from Britain, "Romantic Migrations" addresses three interrelated movements: between France and Britain after the French Revolution, between Britain and North America after the American Revolution, and between West Africa and Britain after English slavery was outlawed. At this time and within these spaces, radical changes destabilized Britons' sense of individual, local, and national selfhood. Wiley ably illuminates how the British literature of migration registered the destabilizations and negotiated new possibilities for international, transnational, or global selves in a new and still-changing world.

A wide-ranging reading of Freud's work, this book focuses on Freud's scientifically discredited ideas about inherited memory in relation both to poststructuralist debates about mourning, and to certain uncanny figurative traits in his writing. "Freud's Memory" argues for an enriched understanding of the strangenesses in Freud rather than any denunciation of psychoanalysis as a bogus explanatory method.

A nuanced reframing of the dual importance of reading and observation for early modern naturalists. Historians of science traditionally argue that the sciences were born in early modern Europe during the so-called scientific revolution. At the heart of this narrative lays a supposed shift from the knowledge of books to the knowledge of things. The attitude of the new-style intellectual broke with the text-based practices of erudition and instead cultivated the new empiricism of observation and experiment. Instead of blindly trusting the authority of ancient sources such as Pliny and Aristotle, practitioners of the new experimental philosophy insisted upon experiential proof. In A Centaur in London, Fabian Kraemer calls a key tenet of this master narrative into question-that the rise of empiricism entailed a decrease in the importance of reading practices. Kraemer shows instead that the early practices of textual erudition and observational empiricism were by no means so remote from one another as the traditional narrative would suggest. Kraemer argues that reading books and reading the book of nature had a great deal in common-indeed, that reading texts was its own kind of observation. Especially in the case of rare and unusual phenomena like monsters, naturalists were dependent on the written reports of others who had experienced the good luck to be at the right place at the right time. The connections between compiling examples from texts and from observation were especially close in such cases. A Centaur in London combines the history of scholarly reading with the history of scientific observation to argue for the sustained importance of both throughout the Renaissance and provides a nuanced, textured portrait of early modern naturalists at work.

The product of a unique collaboration between a literary critic (Van Delden) and a political scientist (Grenier), this book looks at the relationship between literature and politics in Latin America, a region where these two domains exist in closer proximity than perhaps anywhere else in the Western world. The apparently seamless blending of literature and politics is reflected in the explicitly political content of much of the continent's writing, as well as in the highly visible political roles played by many Latin American intellectuals.

Yet the authors of this book argue that the relationship between the two realms is much more complex and fraught with tension than is nowadays recognized. In examining these tensions, and in revealing the diverse ways in which literature and politics intersect in the Latin American cultural tradition, Gunshots at the Fiesta offers a lively challenge to the current tendency--especially strong in the U.S. academy--to read Latin American literature through a narrowly political prism.

The authors argue that one can only understand the nature of the dialogue between literature and politics if one begins by recognizing the different logics that operate in these different domains. Using this idea of the different logics of politics and literature as a guiding thread, Van Delden and Grenier offer bold new readings of major authors such as Jose Marti, Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa, as well as compelling interpretations of works by less-frequently-discussed figures such as Claribel Alegria, Marisol Martin del Campo and Victor Hugo Rascon Banda."

"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.