The Iliad and Beowulf provide rich sources of historical information. The novels of Henry Fielding and Henry James may be instructive in the art of moral living. Some go further and argue that Emile Zola and Harriet Beecher Stowe played a part in ameliorating the lives of those existing in harsh circumstances. However, as Derek Attridge argues in this outstanding and acclaimed book, none of these capacities is distinctive of literature. What is the singularity of literature? Do the terms "literature" and "the literary" refer to actual entities found in cultures at certain times, or are they merely expressions characteristic of such cultures? Attridge argues that this resistance to definition and reduction is not a dead end, but a crucial starting point from which to explore anew the power and practices of Western art. Derek Attridge provides a rich new vocabulary for literature, rethinking such terms as "invention," "singularity," "otherness," "alterity," "performance" and "form." He returns literature to the realm of ethics, and argues for the ethical importance of literature, demonstrating how a new understanding of the literary might be put to work in a "responsible," creative mode of reading. The Singularity of Literature is not only a major contribution to the theory of literature, but also a celebration of the extraordinary pleasure of the literary, for reader, writer, student or critic. This Routledge Classics edition includes a new preface by the author.

Written not so long after "Tolkien mania" first gripped the United States in the 1960s, Ursula K. Le Guin's novel A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) has long been recognized as a classic of the fantasy genre, and the series of Earthsea books that followed on it over the next several decades earned its author both considerable sales and critical accolades. This new introduction to the text will closely contextualize the original novel in relation to its heady decade of composition and publication - a momentous time for genre publishing - and also survey the half century and more of scholarship on Earthsea, which has shifted in direction and emphasis many times over the decades, just as surely as Le Guin frequently adjusted her own sails when composing later works set in the fantasy world. Above all, this book positions A Wizard of Earthsea as perhaps an "old text" that nevertheless belongs in a "new canon," a key novel in the author's career and the genre in which it participates, and one that at once looks back to Tolkien and his own antecedents in masculinist early fantasy; looks forward to Le Guin's own continuing feminist and progressive education; and anticipates and indeed helped to shape young adult literature in its contemporary form.

This volume offers detailed accounts of the cults of individual writers and a comparative perspective on the spread of centenary fever across Europe. It offers a fascinating insight into the interaction between literature and cultural memory, and the entanglement between local, national and European identities at the highpoint of nation-building.

Samuel Beckett and Catastrophe is a groundbreaking collection of original essays that explore the relation between Samuel Beckett and catastrophe in terms of war, the Holocaust, nuclear disasters and ecological crisis. Responding to the post-catastrophic situations in the twentieth century, Beckett created characters who often seem to have been through an unknown catastrophe. Although the importance of catastrophe in Beckett has been noted sporadically, there has been no substantial attempt to discuss his aesthetics and work in relation to it. This collection will therefore serve as the first sustained study to explore the theme of catastrophe in Beckett and will be a highly significant contribution to Beckett studies.

Narratives of Mediterranean Space: Literature and Art across Land and Sea presents a comparative analysis of contemporary literary and visual narratives of movement and migration produced in Italian, Arabic and French. It analyzes how these works create a dialogue across the Mediterranean Sea. By paying attention to the multiple ways in which the Mediterranean is being narrated by contemporary writers and artists, Silvia Caserta aims to propose a reconceptualization of the Mediterranean as a polyphonic space of movement and resistance. The Mediterranean space that emerges from this study is a space that, by virtue of the instability and porosity of its geographical and cultural borders, is able to overcome normative dichotomies between north and south, east and west, local and global. This book proposes the Mediterranean is a fruitful area from which to investigate the wider contradictions of the contemporary global world while avoiding the traps of "Mediterraneanism". For this reason, the book highlights the contradictions and dissonances that emerge from reading Mediterranean works, opening up multiple perspectives on the Sea and on the different lands that surround it.

"The Literature Workbook" is a practical introductory textbook for literary studies, which can be used either for independent study or as part of a class. Laying the foundation for the further study of literature, "The Literature Workbook" introduces the beginning student to the essential analytic and interpretative skills that are needed for literary appreciation and evaluation. It also equips the teacher with practical tools and materials for use in seminars or when assigning written assessments and projects. Arranged according to genre and chronology, the chapters acquaint the reader with a range of key figures in English literature and encourages the reader to think about them in their historical and cultural contexts. Adopting a user-friendly case-study approach each chapter contains exercises and activities, discussion hints, project work and suggestions for further reading. The workbook also includes a glossary and a subject and name index.

Author Biography:
Clara Calvo is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Murcia, Spain. Her publications include Power Relations and Fool-Master Discourse in Shakespeare, and she is a regular contributor to The Year's Work in English Studies.
Jean Jacques Weber is Professor of English at University Centre Luxembourg. His publications include Critical Analysis of Fiction, Twentieth-Century Fiction (co-edited, Routledge 1995) and The Stylistics Reader (co-edited for Routledge 1996).

"Shakespeare and Masculinity in Southern Fiction "advances the idea that" "American, Southern, white, planter class authors have appropriated models and modes of masculinity from William Shakespeare. Keener traces the history of this appropriation and its attendant masculinities from authors as early as William Gilmore Simms, through Thomas Nelson Page and Thomas Dixon, to William Faulkner. This project distinctively ignores artificial divisions of literary studies, circumventing place and time in search of meaning. The work's inter-textual and inter-cultural approach affords a unique perspective on how masculinity is defined, modified by cultural circumstances, and expressed in succeeding literature. This far-reaching book bridges Shakespearean, American Southern, cultural materialist, and gender studies; offering a critical reappraisal. ""

This book focuses on health humanities in application. The field reflects many intellectual interests and practical applications, serving researchers, educators, students, health care practitioners, and community members wherever health and wellness and the humanities intersect. How we implement health humanities forms the core approach, and perspectives are global, including North America, Africa, Europe, and India. Emphasizing key developments in health humanities, the book's chapters examine applications, including reproductive health policy and arts-based research methods, black feminist approaches to health humanities pedagogy, artistic expressions of lived experience of the coronavirus, narratives of repair and re-articulation and creativity, cultural competency in physician-patient communication through dance, embodied dance practice as knowing and healing, interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity, eye tracking, ableism and disability, rethinking expertise in disability justice, disability and the Global South, coronavirus and Indian politics, visual storytelling in graphic medicine, and medical progress and racism in graphic fiction.

This scholarly study presents a new political Wordsworth: an artist interested in "autonomous" poetry's redistribution of affect. No slave of Whig ideology, Wordsworth explores emotion for its generation of human experience and meaning. He renders poetry a critical instrument that, through acute feeling, can evaluate public and private life.

Russian-American poet Joseph Brodsky is one of the most celebrated poets of our time, preoccupied with the the nature and destiny of poetry in our era. This volume analyzes Brodsky's career in terms of key elegies and investigates the critical role of elegiac thinking in postmodernist poetics. In his elegies for poetic ancestors, family, friends, and the self, Brodsky demonstrates a concern for a paradox that is at the heart of modern elegiac poetry: attempting to find a basis for consolation in the face of death, but at length being compelled to discard traditional consolations, such as religion or art. The only source of relief is language itself, which Brodsky saw as both the origin and the final repository of values and truths.

The first comprehensive critical history of 'SF' for thirty years, The History of Science Fiction traces the origin and development of science fiction from Ancient Greece, via its rebirth in the Seventeenth-century, up to the present day. It covers both literary SF and cinema/TV. The author is both an academic literary critic and an acclaimed creative writer of science fiction. Written in lively, accessible prose, this study is specifically designed to bridge the worlds of academic criticism and the SF fandom, and will be lively reading for anyone interested in SF.

In this book, ten leading commentators explore the interfaces between art and aesthetics in dialogue with a philosophical text (Theodor Adorno's draft introduction to "Aesthetic Theory"), a piece of literary writing (Franz Kafka's "A Report to an Academy"), and a major contemporary painting (Gerhard Richter's "Betty," 1988).

How can we develop a cultural theory starting with the basic insight that human beings are "storytelling animals"? Within literary studies, narratology is a highly developed field. However, literary historians have not paid much attention to the large and small stories abounding in everyday discourse, guiding all kinds of social activity, and providing common ground for whole societies-but also fueling controversies and hostilities. Moreover, "narrative" is not only a scholarly category but has come into use in many fields of social activity as a tool for cultural self-fashioning. This book is based on the assumption that to a large extent, social dynamics is modeled in an aesthetic manner via narratives. It explores the narrative organization of cultural spaces and time-frames, the mythological shaping of communities and adversaries, and the co-production of narratives and institutions aimed at stabilizing social life. In this framework, the epistemological problem looms large of how an instrument as unreliable as narrative can participate in the creation of a social consensus regarding truth. This problem endows the general topics explored in this book with a particularly contemporary dimension.

Shakespeare wrote for a theater in which the audience was understood to be, and at times invited to be, active and participatory. How have Shakespeare's audiences, from the sixteenth century to the present, responded to that invitation? In what ways have consumers across different cultural contexts, periods, and platforms engaged with the performance of Shakespeare's plays? What are some of the different approaches taken by scholars today in thinking about the role of Shakespeare's audiences and their relationship to performance? The chapters in this collection use a variety of methods and approaches to explore the global history of audience experience of Shakespearean performance in theater, film, radio, and digital media. The approaches that these contributors take look at Shakespeare's audiences through a variety of lenses, including theater history, dramaturgy, film studies, fan studies, popular culture, and performance. Together, they provide both close studies of particular moments in the history of Shakespeare's audiences and a broader understanding of the various, often complex, connections between and among those audiences across the long history of Shakespearean performance.

Mushroom Clouds: Ecocritical Approaches to Militarization and the Environment in East Asia examines the growing significance of the eco-implications of the increasing militarism of East Asia. As a transcultural image and metaphor, mushroom clouds signify anthropogenic violence and destruction, as exemplified by wars and nuclear bombings. Immediately evoking memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the mushroom clouds metaphor has deep roots and implications in East Asia, and this volume explores these roots and implications from the perspectives of a variety of scholars and artists from different parts of East Asia. The chapters that comprise Mushroom Clouds respond to the increasingly dangerous developments in the world that led up to and have occurred since the 2016 presidential election of Donald Trump, developments that threaten the stability of the region and the world. In the wake of the 70th anniversary of the division of Korea, increasing attention has been focused on the legacy of the Cold War, on the one hand, and on the continuing militarization of East Asia, on the other. After the nuclear bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, after the truce across the 38th parallel, after the shelling of Kinmen and Matsu, East Asia became (and remains) one of the most densely militarized regions in the world. Under the shadow of war, however, the concern about environmental impacts has been growing, not only in social discourse but also in literature and the visual arts. The first of its kind, Mushroom Clouds gathers ecocritics from East Asia to examine issues such as militarization, militarized islands, military tourism, military villages, post-war environments, nuclear accidents, and the demilitarized sone (DMZ) wildlife, among others, in East Asia.

By reading key Carter texts alongside their Decadent intertexts, Tonkin interrogates the claim that Carter was in thrall to a fetishistic aesthetic antithetical to her feminism. Through historical contextualization of the woman-as-doll, muse and femme fatale, Tonkin tests Carter's own description of her fiction as a form of literary criticism.

Brings together philosophy, psychoanalysis and religious elements. Examines current 'crisis' in mental health and social stability. Unique in its contradictory orientation towards Christianity. Zizek, Baudrillard, Levinas and Steiner are strong influences on the author. Likely to appeal to academic followers of Jordan Peterson.

"Language Through Literature" provides a definitive introduction to the English language through the medium of English literature. Through the use of illustrations from poetry, prose and drama, this book offers a lively guide to important concepts and techniques in English language study.
Among the many topics covered in the book are the form and meaning of words, the structure of narrative discourses and the organization of dialogue and conversation. Each chapter explores a specific aspect of the modern English language using a combination of exposition and practical activities. Each chapter also provides points for further discussion and includes project work for use individually, or as part of a group.
Readers will find the author's selection and presentation of topics helpful, as Paul Simpson progressively widens the scope of topics from single words to the structure of whole conversations. "Language Through Literature" is designed for the non-specialist who is new to the study of the English language and will be particularly relevant to anyone interested in the in the relationship between the English language and English literature.

Energy, Ecocriticism, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Novel Ecologies draws on energy concepts to revisit some of our favorite books-Mansfield Park, Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, and The War of the Worlds-and the ways these shape our sense of ourselves as ecological beings. Barri J. Gold regards the laws of thermodynamics not solely as a set of physical principles, but also as a cultural and conceptual form that we can use to reimagine our historically vexed relationship to the natural world. Beginning with an examination of the parallel inceptions of energy and ecology in the mid-nineteenth century, this book considers the question of how we may better read and interpret our world, developing a recipe for experimental reading and insisting upon the importance of literary studies in a world driving to ecological catastrophe.

This book offers a selection of papers on Russian literature, of the Soviet period, presented at the IVth World Congress for Soviet and East European studies in 1990. The papers range from studies of the experimental prose and drama of the 1920s and early 1930s to examinations of the cruel realism of some young writers of the Gorbachev era, and of the way that Stalin and Stalinism are now being represented in Russian literature in the age of glasnost, with art spurring historians out to seek answers to questions about Russia's recent past.

This book explores the media ecologies of literature - the ways in which a literary text is interwoven in its material, technical, performative, praxeological, affective, and discursive network and which determine how it is experienced and interpreted. Through novel approaches to the complex, contingent and interdependent environments of literature, this volume demonstrates how questions about the mediality of literature - particularly in the wake of digitization - shed a new light on our understanding of textuality, reading, platforms and reception processes. By drawing on recent developments in advanced media theory, Media Ecologies of Literature emphasizes the productivity of innovative re-conceptualizations of literature as a medium in its own right. In an intentionally wide historical scope, the essays engage with literary texts from the Romantic to the contemporary period, from Charlotte Smith and Oscar Wilde to A. L. Kennedy and Mark Z. Danielewski, from the traditionally printed novel to audiobooks and reading apps.

Problematic assumptions which see humans as special and easily defined as standing apart from animals, plants, and microbiota, both consciously and unconsciously underpin scientific investigation, arts practice, curation, education, and research across the social sciences and humanities. This is the case particularly in those traditions emerging from European and Enlightenment philosophies. Posthumanism disrupts these traditional humanist outlooks and interrogates their profound shaping of how we see ourselves, our place in the world, and our role in its protection. In Posthumanism in Practice, artists, researchers, educators, and curators set out how they have developed and responded to posthumanist ideas across their work in the arts, sciences, and humanities, and provide examples and insights to support the exploration of posthumanism in how we can think, create, and live. In capturing these ideas, Posthumanism in Practice shows how posthumanist thought can move beyond theory, inform action, and produce new artefacts, effects, and methods that are more relevant and more useful for the incoming realities for all life in the 21st century.

This book provides a semiotic analysis of 'scenes', powerful vehicles for introducing new ideas, perspectives and behaviours, as a concept. In particular, it examines the types of scene that exist; explores their effectiveness in spreading new ideas; and considers their vital role in introducing originality and difference in modern society.

Winner of the 2019 Robert S. Liebert Award (established jointly by the Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine and the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research) In the final years of the 19th century, Sigmund Freud began to construct evidence for the workings of an "unconscious." On Dangerous Ground offers an innovative assessment of the complex role that his encounters with visual cultures-architecture, objects from earlier cultural epochs ("antiquities"), paintings, and illustrated books-played in that process. Diane O'Donoghue introduces, often using unpublished archival sources, the ways in which material phenomena profoundly informed Freud's decisions about what would, and would not, constitute the workings of an inner life. By returning to view content that Freud treated as forgettable, as distinct from repressed, O'Donoghue shows us a realm of experiences that Freud wished to remove from psychical meaning. These erasures form an amnesic core within Freud's psychoanalytic project, an absence that includes difficult aspects of his life narrative, beginning with the dislocations of his early childhood that he declared "not worth remembering." What is made visible here is far from the inconsequential surface of experience; rather, we are shown a dangerous ground that exceeds the limits of what Freud wished to include within his early model of mind. In Freud's relation to visual cultures we find clues to what he attempted, in crafting his unconscious, to remove from sight.