An interdisciplinary study of Victorian women of faith as portrayed in the fiction and non-fiction of the period. The book explores how novelists, biographers and other writers depicted religious women, with special reference to the influence of the ideal of the "Angel in the House" as embodied in Coventry Patmores's poem of that name. Among those whose worked is explored are George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Christina Rossetti, George Moore and Anne Brontë, as well as hymnwriters, missionary biographers, non-conformists obituarists and artists of the Aesthetic Movement.

Twentieth Century Literary Criticism is a major anthology of key representative works by fifty leading modern literary critics writing before the structuralist revolution. It is a companion volume to Modern Criticism and Theory (Longman 1988), also edited by David Lodge, which anthologises contemporary criticism as it has developed through structuralism and post-structuralist theory. Together these volumes provide the most comprehensive survey available of traditional and radical literary theory in action. The critics collected together in this volume have been drawn from England, America and Europe, and each essay has been prefaced by an editor's introduction which suggests the historical and methodological significance of the piece and gives bibliographical and biographical information. This writers collected are: M. H. Abrams, W. B. Yeats, Sigmund Freud,Henry James, Ezra Pound, T. S Eliot, Virginia Woolf, T.E. Hulme, I. A. Richards, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, William Empson, G. Wilson Hight, C. G. Jung, Maud Bodkin, Christopher Caudwell, L. C. Knights, John Crowe Ransom, Edmund Wilson, Paul Valery, D. W. Harding, Lionel Trilling, Cleanth Brooks, Yvor Wiinters, Erich Auerbach, W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, George Orwell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Mark Schorer, Francis Fergusson, Northrop Frye, C. S. Lewis, Leslie Fielder, Alain Robbe-Grillet, George Lukacs, Richard Hoggart, Walter J. Ong, Norman O. Brown, Ian Watt, Claude Levi-Strauss, Rene Welleck, Wayne Booth, Raymond Williams, R. S. Crane, Marshall McLuhan, George Steiner, Susan Sontag, W. H. Auden, Frank Kermode.

Adorno's aesthetics are one of the most important philosophical analyses of the 20th century, but their development remains unclear. Adorno, Aesthetics, Dissonance is the first book to provide a detailed study of how Adorno's thinking of aesthetics developed and to show the different dimensions that came together to make it uniquely powerful. Principal among these dimensions are his intense interest in music and his historical and materialist approach. In addition, by studying how Adorno's aesthetics arose through interactions with different thinkers, particularly Kracauer, Horkheimer, and Schoenberg, it becomes clear that his thought changes in its relation to dialectics. As a result, Adorno's thinking comes to broaden the understanding of aesthetics to include the sphere of sensuality, and in doing so transforms both aesthetics and dialectics through a notion of dissonance, which in turn has substantial implications for the relation of his thinking to praxis.

Restoring the Human Context to Literary and Performance Studies argues that much of contemporary literary theory is still predicated, at least implicitly, on outdated linguistic and psychological models such as post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, and behaviorism, which significantly contradict current dominant scientific views. By contrast, this monograph promotes an alternative paradigm for literary studies, namely Contextualism, and in so doing highlights the similarities and differences among the sometimes-conflicting contemporary cognitive approaches to literature and performance, arguing not in favor of one over the other but for Contextualism as their common ground.

This book presents an intellectual history and theoretical exploration of black humanism since the civil rights era. Humanism is a human-centered approach to life that considers human beings to be responsible for the world and its course of history. Both the heavily theistic climate in the United States as well as the dominance of the Black Church are responsible for black humanism’s existence in virtual oblivion. For those who believe the world to be one without supernatural interventions, human action matters greatly and is the only possible mode for change. Humanists are thus committed to promoting the public good through human effort rather than through faith. Black humanism originates from the lived experiences of African Americans in a white hegemonic society. Viewed from this perspective, black humanist cultural expressions are a continuous push to imagine and make room for alternative life options in a racist society.  Alexandra Hartmann counters religion’s hegemonic grasp and uncovers black humanism as a small yet significant tradition in recent African American culture and cultural politics by studying its impact on African American literature and the ensuing anti-racist potentials. The book demonstrates that black humanism regards subjectivity as embodied and is thus a worldview that is characterized by a fragile hope regarding the possibility of progress – racial and otherwise – in the country.

This book argues that philosophical pessimism can offer vital impulses for contemporary cultural studies. Pessimist thought offers ways to interrogate notions of temporality, progress and futurity. When the horizon of future expectation is increasingly shaped by the prospect of apocalypse and extinction, an exploration of pessimist thought can help to make sense of an increasingly complex and uncertain world by affirming rather than suppressing the worst. This book argues that a cultural logic of the worst is at work in a substantial section of contemporary philosophical thought and cultural representations. Spectres of pessimism can be found in contemporary ecocritical thought, antinatalist philosophies, political thought, and cultural theory, as well as in literature, film, and popular music. In its unsettling of temporality, this new pessimism shares sensibilities with the field of hauntology. Both deconstruct linear narratives of time that adhere to a stable sequence of past, present and future. Mark Schmitt therefore couples pessimism and hauntology to explore the spectres of pessimism in a range of theories and narratives-from ecocriticism, antinatalism and queer theory to utopianism, from afropessimism to the fiction of Hari Kunzru and Thomas Ligotti to the films of Camille Griffin, Gaspar Noe, Denis Villeneuve and Lars von Trier.

Literary Representations of Precarious Work, 1840 to the Present sheds new light on literary representations of precarious labor from 1840 until the present. With contributions by experts in American, British, French, German and Swedish culture, this book examines how literature has shaped the understanding of socio-economic precarity, a concept that is mostly used to describe living and working conditions in our contemporary neoliberal and platform economy. This volume shows that authors tried to develop new poetic tools and literary techniques to translate the experience of social regression and insecurity to readers. While some authors critically engage with normative models of work by zooming in on the physical and affective backlash of being a precarious worker, others even find inspiration in their own situations as writers trying to survive. Furthermore, this volume shows that precarity is not an exclusively contemporary phenomenon and that literature has always been a central medium to (critically) register forms of social insecurity. By retrieving parts of that archive, this volume paves the way to a historically nuanced view on contemporary regimes of precarious work.

This book argues that Ann Leckie's novel Ancillary Justice offers a devastating rebuke to the political, social, cultural, and economic injustices of American imperialism in the post 9/11 era. Following an introductory overview, the study offers four chapters that examine key themes central to the novel: gender, imperial economics, race, and revolutionary agency. Ancillary Justice's exploration of these four themes, and the way it reveals how these issues are all fundamentally entangled with the problem of contemporary imperial power, warrants its status as a canonical work of science fiction for the twenty-first century. The book concludes with a brief interview with Leckie herself touching on each of the topics examined during the preceding chapters.

Understanding Merleau-Ponty, Understanding Modernism brings into dialogue Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology with modernist art, literature, music, film and neurophysiological discoveries, opening up the complexities of the philosopher's phenomenology of perception to a broader audience across the arts. An important resource for anyone interested in the links between modernism and philosophy, Understanding Merleau-Ponty, Understanding Modernism offers close readings of Merleau-Ponty's key texts, explores modernist works in light of his thought, and provides an extended glossary of Merleau-Ponty's central terms and concepts.

Life Writing in the Posthuman Anthropocene is a timely collection of insightful contributions that negotiate how the genre of life writing, traditionally tied to the human perspective and thus anthropocentric qua definition, can provide adequate perspectives for an age of ecological disasters and global climate change. The volume's eight chapters illustrate the aptness of life writing and life writing studies to critically reevaluate the role of "the human" vis-a-vis non-human others while remaining mindful of persisting inequalities between humans regarding who causes and who suffers damage in the Anthropocene age. The authors in this collection not only expand the toolbox of life writing studies by engaging with critical insights from the fields of posthumanism and ecocriticism, but, in turn, also enrich those fields by offering unique approaches to contemplate the responsibility of humans for as well as their relational existence in the posthuman Anthropocene.

This volume offers original essays exploring what 'fictive narrative philosophy' might mean in the research and teaching of philosophy. The first part of the book presents theoretical essays that examine Boylan's recent books: Teaching Ethics with Three Philosophical Novels and Fictive Narrative Philosophy: How Literature can Act as Philosophy. The second and third part offer essays on how Boylan executes his theory in the practice within his novels from his two series De Anima and Arche. The book clearly shows the unique aspects of the fictive narrative philosophy approach. First, it makes story-telling accessible to wide audiences. Second, story-telling techniques invoke devices that can set out complicated existential problems to the reader that offer an additional approach to thorny problems through the presentation of lived experience. Third, the discussion of these devices is a way to explore philosophical problems in a way that many can profit from. The book concludes with an essay in which Boylan responds to the critical challenges set out in Part One and the practical criticism set out in Parts Two and Three. Boylan addresses the key claims made by his objectors and defends his position. He engages with the authors in the way his theory is matched against his actual novels. This is useful reading for both philosophers and professors of literature teaching introductory as well as upper-level courses in the fields of philosophy, literature and criticism.

What is it that makes language powerful? This book uses the psychoanalytic concepts of narcissism and libidinal investment to explain how rhetoric compels us and how it can effect change. Synthesizing the ideas of theorists as diverse as Aristotle and Althusser, Kohut and Derrida, Alcorn explores the relationships between language and subjectivity. The works of Joseph Conrad, James Baldwin, William Faulkner, Arthur Miller, D. H. Lawrence, Ben Jonson, George Orwell, and others are the basis of this thoughtful analysis of the rhetorical resources of literary language. Using Freudian, post-Freudian, and Lacanian theory, Alcorn Investigates the power by means of which literary texts are able to fashion new and distinctly rhetorical experiences for readers. He shows how the production of literary texts begins and ends with narcissistic self-love, and also shows how the reader's interest in these texts is directed by libidinal investment. Psychoanalysts, psychologists, and lovers of literature will enjoy Alcorn's diverse and far-reaching insights into classic and contemporary writers and thinkers.

This book contains a classic guide to historical study of early modern Chinese fiction from the late Qing Dynasty till early republican China. It does not merely study the new fiction writing in China, which was strongly influenced by the western fiction, but also draws a comparison between classical Chinese fiction and the early modern Chinese fiction. This book is an excellent reference in the study of early modern Chinese literature since it conveys a point of view to the readers with abundant and solid historical materials. At the heart of the book, it is the matter of a specific value in trans-cultural studies between the western world and China.

This edited collection explores the work of highly awarded and twice American Poet Laureate W. S. Merwin. Spanning Merwin's early career, his mid-career success, his Hawaiian epic, his eco-poetry, his lesser-known later poetry and the influence of Buddhism on his work, the volume offers new perspectives on Merwin as a major poet. Exploring his works across the twentieth and twenty-first century, this collection presents Merwin as a necessary and contemporary poet. It emphasizes contemporary readings of Merwin as an environmental advocate, showing how his poetry seeks to help each reader re-establish an intimate relationship with the natural world. It also highlights how Merwin's work presents our place in history as a pivotal moment of transition into a new era of international cooperation. This volume both celebrates his life and writing and takes scholarship on his work forward into the new century.

This book rethinks the concept of community taking Jean-Luc Nancy's influential essay "La communaute desoeuvree" as its starting point, tracing subsequent scholarship on community and adding new insights on avant-garde aesthetics and politics. Extensively exploring the communitarian dimension of avant-garde aesthetics and politics (focusing on artistic groups, intellectual circles and theoretical collectives), the author aims to bring literature and art into a philosophical examination of the paradoxical and complex idea of community.

It is commonplace to regard many great works of literature-poems, dramas, works of fiction-as in some sense philosophical, yet ever since Plato, there has been a tension between the kind of abstract theorizing that goes on in philosophy and the focus on concrete particulars that occurs in poetry and fiction. Beyond Words: Philosophy, Fiction, and the Unsayable elaborates on and addresses this Platonic tension, asking in what sense, if any, literature in the form of poetry, drama, short stories, and novels can contribute significantly to our philosophical understanding. Timothy Cleveland suggests there is something in certain poems, novels, and stories that makes them especially, perhaps even best, suited to expanding our awareness and understanding into the nature of things otherwise unsayable and unconceived. Such literary works do philosophy, showing us something that a theoretical-scientific or philosophical-discourse cannot literally say.

Fictional character is an ontologically ambivalent category - at once a formal construct and a quasi-person - which lies at the heart of the life of textual fictions of all kinds. Character and Person explores that ambivalence by investigating not only the kinds of thing that character is but how it works to engage readers and the range of typologies through which it has been constructed in very different periods, media, and genres. John Frow seeks to explore the ways in which character is person-like, and through that the question of what it means to be a social person. His focus is thus on the interaction between its two major categories, and its method involves a constant play back and forth between them: from philosophical theories of face to an account of the mask in the New Comedy; from an exploration of medieval beliefs about the body's existence in the afterlife to a reading of Dante's Purgatorio; from the history of humoral medicine to the figure of the melancholic in Jacobean drama; and from Proust and Pessoa to cognitive science. What develops from this methodological commitment to fusing the categories of character and person is an extended analysis of the schemata that underpin each of them in their distinct but mutually constitutive spheres of operation

Disciplines from literary studies to environmentalism have recently undergone a spectacular reorientation that has refocused entire fields, methodologies, and vocabularies on the world and its sister terms such as globe, planet, and earth. The Bloomsbury Handbook of World Theory examines what "world" means and what it accomplishes in different zones of academic study. The contributors raise questions such as: What happens when "world" is appended to a particular form of humanistic or scientific inquiry? How exactly does "worlding" bear on the theoretical operating system and the history of that field? What is the theory or theoretical model that allows "world" to function in a meaningful way in coordination with that knowledge domain? With contributions from 38 leading theorists from a vast range of fields, including queer studies, religion, and pop culture, this is the first large reference work to consider the profound effect, both within and outside the academy, of the worlding of discourse in the 21st century.

Figuring Animals is a collection of fifteen essays concerning the representation of animals in literature, the visual arts, philosophy, and cultural practice. At the turn of the new century, it is helpful to reconsider our inherited understandings of the species, some of which are still useful to us. It is also important to look ahead to new understandings and new dialogue, which may contribute to the survival of us all. The contributors to this volume participate in this dialogue in a variety of ways--through personal experience, natural history, cultural studies, philosophical inquiry, art history, literary analysis, film studies, and theoretical imagining, and through a combination of these trains of thought. The essays expose weaknesses in western epistemological frames of reference that for centuries have limited our views and, thus, our experiences of animal being, including our own.

This book outlines the evolution of our political nature over two million years and explores many of the rituals, plays, films, and other performances that gave voice and legitimacy to various political regimes in our species' history. Our genetic and cultural evolution during the Pleistocene Epoch bestowed a wide range of predispositions on our species that continue to shape the politics we support and the performances we enjoy. The book's case studies range from an initiation ritual in the Mbendjela tribe in the Congo to a 1947 drama by Bertolt Brecht and include a popular puppet play in Tokugawa Japan. A final section examines the gradual disintegration of social cohesion underlying the rise of polarized politics in the USA after 1965, as such films as The Godfather, Independence Day, The Dark Knight Rises, and Joker accelerated the nation's slide toward authoritarian Trumpism.

Craziness and Carnival in Neo-Noir Chinese Cinema offers an in-depth discussion of the "stone phenomenon" in Chinese film production and cinematic discourses triggered by the extraordinary success of the 2006 low-budget film, Crazy Stone. Surveying the nuanced implications of the film noir genre, Harry Kuoshu argues that global neo noir maintains a mediascape of references, borrowings, and re-workings and explores various social and cultural issues that constitute this Chinese episode of neo noir. Combining literary explorations of carnival, postmodernism, and post-socialism, Kuoshu advocates for neo noir as a cultural phenomenon that connects filmmakers, film critics, and film audiences rather than an industrial genre.

Locating science fiction as its own distinct and increasingly important narrative form, this book explores how the genre challenges pervasive perceptions of society as presented in the conventional modern novel. Inspired by, and building upon, Georg Lukacs's criticism of the orthodox novel for its depiction of life as alienating and disjointed, Milner, Murphy and Roberts posit that science fiction steps beyond this contemporary form to be a more constructive literature, better able to conceive of society as complete, integrated and well-rounded. Taking stock of three kinds of science fiction which lie outside the scope of the modern novel - theological or ontological science fiction, the science fiction of future history and epic science fiction - this book demonstrates science fiction's unique capacity to encapsulate the whole world, persons and events, things and objects in a glance, and address the motive behind the wish for a meaningful totality. With reference to a vast array of works by authors such as Michel Houellebecq, Elias Canetti, Isaac Asimov, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, Marge Piercy, Iain M. Banks, Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. Le Guin, William Gibson, Dirk C. Fleck, Philip K. Dick, George Orwell and Kazuo Ishiguro, this book offers a compelling argument for rethinking the position and potential of the science fiction novel and to challenge the way we perceive our culture.

The recent rise of 'new nature writing' has renewed the question of how a landscape can be written. This book intervenes in this debate by proposing innovative methodologies for writing place that recognize and make use of the contradictions, fractures and coincidences found in a modern landscape. In doing so, it develops original readings of modernist artists and writers who were associated with the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset, including Vanessa Bell, Paul Nash, Eric Benfield and Mary Butts. Their work is set alongside embodied practices of leisure and labour such as sea bathing, beachcombing, quarrying, tourism and scientific fieldwork, as well as the material and geological features of the environment with which such activities are allied. By showing the Isle of Purbeck to be a site where versions of modernity were actively generated and contested, the book contributes to a reassessment of the significance of rural locations for English modernism.

This book explores how Jacques Lacan has influenced Black Studies from the 1950s to the present day, and in turn how a Black Studies framework challenges the topographies of Lacanianism in its understanding of race. David Marriott examines how a contemporary Black Studies perspective might respond to the psychoanalysis of race by taking advantage of the recent revitalization of Lacanianism in its speculative, metaphysical form. While the philosophical side of the debate makes a plea for a new universalism, this book proposes a Lacanian reassessment of the notion of race, a notion distinct from culture, language, religion, and identity. It argues that it is possible to re-establish the theoretical relation between capitalism, anti-blackness, and colonialism, by reassessing the links between Lacanian psychoanalysis and three main domains of black inquiry: mastery, knowledge, and embodiment. The book offers a strikingly original rereading of the place of Lacan in both Fanon Studies and Afro-pessimism. It will appeal to students and scholars of Black Studies, Cultural Studies, Critical Theory and Philosophy.