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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Time, Literature and Cartography after the Spatial Turn argues that the spatial turn in literary studies has the unexplored potential to reinvigorate the ways in which we understand time in literature. Drawing on new readings of time in a range of literary narratives, including Vladimir Nabokov's Ada and James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Adam Barrows explores literature's ability to cartographically represent the dense and tangled rhythmic processes that constitute lived spaces. Applying the insights of ecological resilience studies, as well as Henri Lefebvre's late work on rhythm to literary representations of time, this book offers a sustained examination of literature's "chronometric imaginary": its capacity to map the temporal relationships between the human and the non-human, the local and the global.

Lively, original and highly readable, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory is the essential guide to literary studies. Starting at 'The Beginning' and concluding with 'The End', chapters range from the familiar, such as 'Character', 'Narrative' and 'The Author', to the more unusual, such as 'Secrets', 'Pleasure' and 'Ghosts'. Now in its sixth edition, Bennett and Royle's classic textbook successfully illuminates complex ideas by engaging directly with literary works, so that a reading of Jane Eyre opens up ways of thinking about racial difference, for example, while Chaucer, Raymond Chandler and Monty Python are all invoked in a discussion of literature and laughter. The sixth edition has been revised and updated throughout. In addition, four new chapters - 'Literature', 'Loss', 'Human' and 'Migrant' - engage with exciting recent developments in literary studies. As well as fully up-to-date further reading sections at the end of each chapter, the book contains a comprehensive bibliography and an invaluable glossary of key literary terms. A breath of fresh air in a field that can often seem dry and dauntingly theoretical, this book will open the reader's eyes to the exhilarating possibilities of reading and studying literature.

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.

Victorian Literary Cultures: Studies in Textual Subversion provides readers with close textual analyses regarding the role of subversive acts or tendencies in Victorian literature. By drawing clear cultural contexts for the works under review-including such canonical texts as Dracula, Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, and stories featuring Sherlock Holmes-the critics in this anthology offer groundbreaking studies of subversion as a literary motif. For some late nineteenth-century British novelists, subversion was a central aspect of their writerly existence. Although-or perhaps because-most Victorian authors composed their works for a general and mixed audience, many writers employed strategies designed to subvert genteel expectations. In addition to using coded and oblique subject matter, such figures also hid their transgressive material "in plain sight." While some writers sought to critique, and even destabilize, their society, others juxtaposed subversive themes and aesthetics negatively with communal norms in hopes of quashing progressive agendas.

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.

The first in-depth study of Dickens's creative engagement with popular science and medicine, this book brings to light the scientific entertainments, shows and institutions, and the material and print cultures that revolutionized the ways in which Victorian audiences encountered childhood. It explores Dickens's literary and journalistic writings, his private interests and public causes across the span of his long career. In doing so, it offers a new way of understanding Dickens's preoccupation with childhood by showing how his fascination with novel scientific ideas about childhood and with new practices of scientific inquiry shaped the development of his narrative techniques and aesthetic imagination.
Drawing on fascinating archival material, this book reconstructs Dickens's experience of mesmerist trials and hospital ward tours, anatomical museums and popular scientific performances. It provides new readings of some of Dickens's most famous works, including Oliver Twist, Dombey and Son and Our Mutual Friend, as well as of lesser-known texts. Dickens's child characters were a source of inspiration to many medical writers, institutions and journalists, and the book also traces how these groups appropriated Dickensian characters and motifs in order to debate and bolster the authority of new scientific ideas.

"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.

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.

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.

'Reading by Numbers: Recalibrating the Literary Field' proposes and demonstrates a new digital approach to literary history. Drawing on bibliographical information on the Australian novel in the AustLit database, the book addresses debates and issues in literary studies through a method that combines book history's pragmatic approach to literary data with the digital humanities' idea of computer modelling as an experimental and iterative practice. As well as showcasing this method, the case studies in 'Reading by Numbers' provide a revised history of the Australian novel, focusing on the nineteenth century and the decades since the end of the Second World War, and engaging with a range of themes including literary and cultural value, authorship, gender, genre and the transnational circulation of fiction. The book's findings challenge established arguments in Australian literary studies, book history, feminism and gender studies, while presenting innovative ways of understanding literature, publishing, authorship and reading, and the relationships between them. More broadly, by demonstrating critical ways in which the growing number of digital archives in the humanities can be mined, modelled and visualised, 'Reading by Numbers' offers new directions and scope for digital humanities research.

When Frantz Fanon's critiques of racism, sexism, colonialism, capitalism, and humanism are brought into the ever-widening orbit of Africana critical theory something unprecedented in the annals of Africana intellectual history happens: five distinct forms of Fanonism emerge. Forms of Fanonism: Frantz Fanon's Critical Theory and the Dialectics of Decolonization is discursively distinguished from other engagements of Fanon's thought and texts insofar as it is the first study to consciously examine his contributions to Africana Studies and critical theory or, rather, the Africana tradition of critical theory. Forms of Fanonism identifies and intensely analyzes Fanon's contributions to the deconstruction and reconstruction of Africana Studies, radical politics, and critical social theory. In highlighting his unique "solutions" to the "problems" of racism, sexism, colonialism, capitalism, and humanism, five distinct forms of Fanonism materialize. These five forms of Fanonism allow contemporary critical theorists to innovatively explore the ways in which his thought and texts can be dialectically put to use in relieving the wretched experience of this generation's wretched of the earth. Critics can also apply these forms to deconstruct and reconstruct Africana Studies, radical politics, and critical social theory using their anti-imperialist interests. Throughout Forms of Fanonism, Reiland Rabaka critically dialogues with Fanon, incessantly asking his corpus critical questions and seeking from it crucial answers. This book, in short, solemnly keeps with Fanon's own predilection for connecting critical theory to revolutionary praxis by utilizing his thought and texts as paradigms and points of departure to deepen and develop the Africana tradition of critical theory.

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 is about food, eating, and appetite in the nineteenth-century British novel. While much novel criticism has focused on the marriage plot, this book revises the history and theory of the novel, uncovering the "food plot" against which the marriage plot and modern subjectivity take shape. With the emergence of Malthusian population theory and its unsettling links between sexuality and the food supply, the British novel became animated by the tension between the marriage plot and the food plot. Charting the shifting relationship between these plots, from Jane Austen's polite meals to Bram Stoker's bloodthirsty vampires, this book sheds new light on some of the best-know works of nineteenth-century literature and pushes forward understandings of narrative, literary character, biopolitics, and the novel as a form. From Austen to Zombies, Michael Parrish Lee explores how the food plot conflicts with the marriage plot in nineteenth-century literature and beyond, and how appetite keeps rising up against taste and intellect. Lee's book will be of interest to Victorianists, genre theorists, Food Studies, and theorists of bare life and biopolitics. - Regenia Gagnier, Professor of English, University of Exeter In The Food Plot Michael Lee engages recent and classic scholarship and brings fresh and provocative readings to well worked literary critical ground. Drawing upon narrative theory, character study, theories of sexuality, and political economy, Professor Lee develops a refreshing and satisfyingly deep new reading of canonical novels as he develops the concept of the food plot. The Food Plot should be of interest to specialists in the novel and food studies, as well as students and general readers. - Professor April Bullock, California State University, Fullerton, USA

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.

This edited collection analyses the reception of a selection of key thinkers, and the dissemination of paradigms, theories and controversies across the social sciences and humanities since 1945. It draws on data collected from textbooks, curricula, interviews, archives, and references in scientific journals, from a broad range of countries and disciplines to provide an international and comparative perspective that will shed fresh light on the circulation of ideas in the social and human sciences. The contributions cover high-profile disputes on methodology, epistemology, and research practices, and the international reception of theorists that have abiding and interdisciplinary relevance, such as: Antonio Gramsci, Hannah Arendt, Karl Polanyi, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak. This important work will be a valuable resource to scholars of the history of ideas and the philosophy of the social sciences; in addition to researchers in the fields of social, cultural and literary theory.

Using the aesthetic and political concerns of Parry's oeuvre as a touchstone, this book explores new directions for postcolonial studies, Marxist literary criticism, and world literature in the contemporary moment, seeking to re-imagine the field, and alongside it, new possibilities for left critique. It is the first volume of essays focusing on the field-defining intellectual legacy of the literary scholar Benita Parry. As a leading critic of the post-structuralist turn within postcolonial studies, Parry has not only brought Marxism and postcolonial theory into a productive, albeit tense, dialogue, but has reinvigorated the field by bringing critical questions of resistance and struggle to bear on aesthetic forms. The book's aim is two-fold: first, to evaluate Parry's formative influence within postcolonial studies and its interface with Marxist literary criticism, and second, to explore new terrains of scholarship opened up by Parry's work. It provides a critical overview of Parry's key interventions, such as her contributions to colonial discourse theory; her debate with Spivak on subaltern consciousness and representation; her critique of post-apartheid reconciliation and neoliberalism in South Africa; her materialist critique of writers such as Kipling, Conrad, and Salih; her work on liberation theory, resistance, and radical agency; as well as more recent work on the aesthetics of "peripheral modernity." The volume contains cutting-edge work on peripheral aesthetics, the world-literary system, critiques of global capitalism and capitalist modernity, and the resurgence of Marxism, communism, and liberation theory by a range of established and new scholars who represent a dissident and new school of thought within postcolonial studies more generally. It concludes with the first-ever detailed interview with Benita Parry about her activism, political commitments, and her life and work as a scholar.

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.

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.

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.