These are pathbreaking works which draws out Goethe's pivotal influence on the development of Western society. "Goethe's Modernisms" demonstrates Goethe's pivotal influence on the development of Western society. It also reveals him to be one of modernity's profoundest critics. His influence has not only shaped aesthetic issues, but a myriad of cultural and intellectual ones as well. By studying his works, we can thus gain insights into the foundational principles of modern society and its shortcomings. Tantillo explores Goethe's role within the culture wars that have been with us for some time, his role as a both a progenitor and a critic of modernity, and suggests how we might rethink aspects of our current policies, whether educational or fiscal. Each chapter presents an interpretation of literary texts and then demonstrates their relationship to a contemporary issue: the ascendancy of science and technology and their close connection to new economic theories (Faust); the cultural success of religious evangelicalism and its consequences (The Sorrows of Young Werther); and, the ramifications of progressive, student-centered education (the Wilhelm Meisternovels). Each chapter further places these issues within the context of conservative and liberal philosophies.

What exactly is 'modernism'? And how has the critical definition of the word changed? Exploring shifting understandings of modernism from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day, this is a concise critical history of modernist criticism. Taking an accessible chronological approach, Modernism: Evolution of An Idea covers such topics as: *Early debates, from Calinescu's Five Faces of Modernity to The New Age magazine and writer-critics such as T.S. Eliot and Cyril Connolly *New Criticism and the forming of the modernist canon *The rise of Theory - from Derrida and Houston Baker to the Frankfurt School *New modernist studies and contemporary approaches: from international modernisms to engagements with race, sexuality and gender With annotated guides to further reading throughout and a companion website with additional resources, this is an essential survey for students and scholars working in modernist studies at all levels.

Lists and catalogues have been en vogue in philosophy, cultural, media and literary studies for more than a decade. These explorations of enumerative modes, however, have not yet had the impact on classical scholarship that they deserve. While they routinely take (a limited set of) ancient models as their starting point, there is no comparably comprehensive study that focuses on antiquity; conversely, studies on lists and catalogues in Classics remain largely limited to individual texts, and - with some notable exceptions - offer little in terms of explicit theorising. The present volume is an attempt to close this gap and foster the dialogue between the recent theoretical re-appraisal of enumerative modes and scholarship on ancient cultures. The 16 contributions to the volume juxtapose literary forms of enumeration with an abundance of ancient non-, sub- or para-literary practices of listing and cataloguing. In their different approaches to this vast and heterogenous corpus, they offer a sense of the hermeneutic, epistemic and methodological challenges with which the study of enumeration is faced, and elucidate how pragmatics, materiality, performativity and aesthetics are mediated in lists and catalogues.

Psychoanalytic theory has been the critical instrument of choice for colonial critics. This book examines why critics who are otherwise suspicious of Western forms of knowledge are drawn to psychoanalytic theories, and whether it is possible to use such theories without reproducing the colonial discourse that also structures psychoanalytic thought.

Gerhard Richter examines, in the work of Walter Benjamin, one of the central problems of modernity: the question of how to receive an intellectual inheritance. Covering aspects of Benjamin's complex relationship to the legacies of such writers as Kant, Nietzsche, Kafka, Heidegger, and Derrida, each chapter attends to a key concern in Benjamin's writing, while reflecting on the challenges that this issue presents for the question of inheritability and transmissibility. Both reading Benjamin and watching himself reading Benjamin, Richter participates in the act of inheriting while also inquiring into the conditions of possibility for inheriting Benjamin's corpus today.

The Poetics of Psychoanalysis: In the Wake of Klein explores the literary aspects of the twentieth-century psychoanalytic tradition that has come to be known as British Object Relations psychoanalysis. Focusing on Melanie Klein's legacy to psychoanalysis between the 1930s and 1970s, it deals with major figures such as Riviere, Isaacs, Winnicott, Milner, and Bion, as well as Klein's contemporary, Ella Sharpe. Mary Jacobus breaks new ground by giving a central place to the literary and aesthetic concerns of the British Object Relations tradition. Paying close attention to writing that is often side-lined by literary critics and theorists, she makes fruitful connections with particular works of literature and art, along with pressing contemporary issues. The three sections focus on the transitions, mediations, and transformations that took place in British Object Relations psychoanalysis as Klein's ideas were developed and transformed. Situating Kleinian thought in relation to later developments and differences, while making it accessible to non-psychoanalytic readers, The Poetics of Psychoanalysis argues against the separation of British and continental traditions and for the continuing links between psychoanalysis and aesthetics. Rather than applying psychoanalytic ideas to literature and aesthetics, the book traces the British Object Relations tradition as a form of proto-modernist discourse in its own right. Linked by a common thread of ideas and structured to reflect a roughly chronological trajectory, individual chapters can also be read as free-standing critical essays. Aimed at literary readers, this book will also be of interest to psychoanalytic practitioners and cultural theorists.

How do people understand metaphorical language? How do metaphors affect the way people experience their social interactions? Do people always interpret metaphors? Does a metaphor necessarily have the same meaning to different people? Can a commonplace metaphor affect the way people think even if they don't interpret it? Why does it matter how people interpret metaphors? In this book, Ritchie proposes an original communication-based theory of metaphor that answers these and other questions about metaphors and metaphorical language.

Davis challenges the dominant accounts of the Elizabethan literary system, revealing the competing commercial, intellectual, political, and personal interests that swirled around the printing of The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia, Astrophel and Stella, and The Defence of Poesie. He also produces lively, accessible, significant new readings of arguably the most influential secular literary work of the Elizabethan age: the 1598 folio Arcadia, comprising all these works. Finally, by applying Jerome J.McGann's revisionary textual theories, Davis generates an original narrative literary history of Sidney's works and many of the most important printing enterprises of 1590s London.

Through a broad-ranging survey of the allegory, utopia, the historical novel and the epic in post-colonial literature, Jean-Pierre Durix proposes a critical reassessment of the theory of genres. He argues that in the new literatures, which are often rooted in hybrid aesthetics, the often decried mimesis must be viewed from a completely different angle. Analyzing texts by Gabriel García Márquez, Salman Rushdie, Alejo Carpentier, Wilson Harris and Edouard Glissant, he pleads for the redefinition of "magic realism" if the term is to retain generic relevance.

This carefully curated collection consists of 16 chapters by leading Polish and world literature scholars from the United States, Canada, Italy, and, of course, Poland. An historical approach gives readers a panoramic view of Polish authors and their explicit or implicit contributions to world literature. Indeed, the volume shows how Polish authors, from Jan Kochanowski in the 16th century to the 2018 Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk, have engaged with their foreign counterparts and other traditions, active participants in the global literary network and the conversations of their day. The volume features views of Polish literature and culture within theories of world literature and literary systems, with a particular attention paid to the resurgence of the idea of the physical book as a cultural artifact. This perspective is especially important since so much of today's global literary output stems from Anglophone perceptions of what constitutes literary quality and tastes. The collection also sheds light on specific issues pertaining to Poland, such as the idea of Polishness, and global phenomena, including social and economic advancement as well as ecological degradation. Some of the authors discussed, like the Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz or the 1980 Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz, were renowned far beyond the borders of their country, while others, like the contemporary travel writer and novelist Andrzej Stasiuk, embrace regionalism, seeing as they do in their immediate surroundings a synecdoche of the world at large. Nevertheless, the picture of Polish literature and Polish authors that emerges from these articles is that of a diverse, cosmopolitan cohort engaged in a mutually rewarding relationship with what the late French critic Pascale Casanova has called "the world republic of letters."

This collection reveals the variety of literary forms and visual media through which travel records were conveyed in the long nineteenth century, bringing together a group of leading researchers from a range of disciplines to explore the relationship between travel writing, visual representation and formal innovation.

Who do you think you are? In Subjectivity, Ruth Robbins explores some of the responses to this fundamental question. In readings of a number of autobiographical texts from the last three centuries, Robbins offers an approachable account of formations of the self which demonstrates that both psychology and material conditions - often in tension with one another - are the building blocks of modern notions of selfhood. Key texts studied include: - William Wordsworth's Prelude - Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater - James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - Oscar Wilde's De Profundis - Jung Chang's Wild Swans Robbins also argues that our subjectivity, far from being the secure possession of the individual, is potentially fragile and contingent. She shows that the versions of subjectivity authorized by the dominant culture are full of gaps and blindspots that undo any notion of universal human nature: subjectivity is culturally and historically specific - we are, in part, what the culture in which we live permits us to be. Concise and easy-to-follow, this introduction to the concept of subjectivity, and the theories surrounding it, shows that, in spite of the insecurity of selfhood, there is still much to be gained from the textual encounter with other selves. It is essential reading for all those studying 'autobiography' or 'autobiographical writing'.

This book argues that journalism is a more recent invention than most authors have acknowledged so far. The profession of the journalist and the journalistic discourse are the products of the emergence, during the second half of the 19th century, of a specialized field of discursive production, the journalistic field. The book analyzes the emergence of journalism and examines the development of discursive norms, practices and strategies which are characteristic of this discourse.

For the last twenty-five years, "Language, Discourse, Society" has been the most intellectually challenging series in English. Its titles range across the disciplines from linguistics to biology, from literary criticism to law, combining vigorous scholarship and theoretical analysis at the service of a broad political engagement. This anniversary reader brings together a fascinating group of thinkers from both sides of the Atlantic with an introductory overview from the editors which considers the development of theory and scholarship over the past two decades.

Literary Territories introduces readers to a wide range of literature from 200-900 CE in which geography is a defining principle of literary art. From accounts of Holy Land pilgrimage, to Roman mapmaking, to the systematization of Ptolemy's scientific works, Literary Territories argues that forms of literature that were conceived and produced in very different environments and for different purposes in Late Antiquity nevertheless shared an aesthetic sensibility which treated the classical "inhabited world," the oikoumene, as a literary metaphor for the collection and organization of knowledge. This type of "cartographical thinking" stresses the world of knowledge that is encapsulated in the literary archive. The archival aesthetic coincided with an explosion of late antique travel and Christian pilgrimage which in itself suggests important unifying themes between visual and textual conceptions of space. Indeed, by the end of Late Antiquity the geographical mode appears in nearly every type of writing in multiple Christian languages (Greek, Latin, Syriac, Armenian, and others). The diffusion of cartographical thinking throughout the real-world oikoumene, now the Christian Roman Empire, was a fundamental intellectual trajectory of Late Antiquity.

This volume explores African American historical fiction written by women in the last four decades of the twentieth century. Comprehensive in scope, this book refers to over thirty authors whose work has contributed to the tradition, from Margaret Walker to Sherley Anne Williams to Toni Morrison. Ana Nunes's approach to the text emphasizes the narrative and thematic achievements of individual novels against the backdrop of the main trends and developments of the contemporary African American historical novel.

Written in hypertext and read from a computer, hypertext novels exist as a collection of textual fragments, which must be pieced together by the reader. "The Possible Worlds of Hypertext Fiction" offers a new critical theory tailored specifically for this burgeoning genre, providing a much needed body of criticism in a key area of new media fiction.

Much of the widespread interest in the Bloomsbury Group over the past quarter-century has been biographical, yet without the Group's works there would be little interest in their lives. The studies in literary and intellectual history and collected in this volume are chiefly concerned with these works. Subjects covered in the eight essays include an analysis of the philosophical assumption of Virginia Woolf's fiction, an assessment of J M Keyne's account of D H Lawrence's reactions to Cambridge, discussions of the literary backgrounds of E M Forster's Aspects of the Novel and Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own , a consideration of the Woolfs' work as printers and publishers, and a history of Ludwig Wittgenstein's relations with the Bloomsbury Group.

This book is an assessment of narrative technique in contemporary British fiction, focusing on the experimental use of the demotic voice (regional or national dialects). The book examines the work of James Kelman, Graham Swift, Will Self and Martin Amis, amongst many others, from a practical as well as theoretical perspective.

If the tragic interpretation of experience is still so current, despite its disastrous ethical consequences, it is because it shapes our subjectivity. Instead of contradicting the ideals of autonomy and freedom, a modern subjectivity based on self-victimization in effect enables them. By embracing subjection to an alienating other (the Law, Power) the autonomous subject protects its sameness from the disruption of real people. "Seductions of Fate" stages a dialogue between this tragic agent of political emancipation and the unconditional ethical demands it seeks to evade.

This collection examines ways in which modern literature responds to the body-at-war, examining the effects of violent conflict on the body in its literal and representative forms. Spanning literature from World War I to the present day, it includes essays on pacifist theatre, torture, fascist fantasies, and uniforms and masculinity.

Clarkson pays sustained attention to the dynamic interaction between Coetzees fiction and his critical writing, exploring the Nobel prize-winner's participation in, and contribution to, contemporary literary-philosophical debates. The book engages with the most recent literary and philosophical responses to Coetzees work.

Combining sustained empirical analysis of reading group conversations with four case studies of classic and contemporary novels: Things Fall Apart, White Teeth, Brick Lane and Small Island, this book pursues what can be gained through a comparative approach to reading and readerships.

Time-Bound Words argues that changes in English society and the English language are woven together, often in surprising ways, and investigates this claim by following eleven words from Chaucer's time to Shakespeare's. Middle English words like corage, estat, thrift , and virtu come to serve the logic of new social discourses by 1611. Language from Chaucer, Wyclif, More, Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson and others is examined both as current and emerging usage, and as verbal play that accomplishes cultural work.