The twelve essays by Kendall Walton in this volume address a broad range of theoretical issues concerning the arts. Many of them apply to the arts generally-to literature, theater, film, music, and the visual arts-but several focus primarily on pictorial representation or photography. In "'How Marvelous!': Toward a Theory of Aesthetic Value" Walton introduces an innovative account of aesthetic value, and in this and other essays he explores relations between aesthetic value and values of other kinds, especially moral values. Two of the essays take on what has come to be called imaginative resistance-a cluster of puzzles that arise when works of fiction ask us to imagine or to accept as true in a fiction moral propositions that we find reprehensible in real life. "Transparent Pictures," Walton's classic and controversial account of what is special about photographic pictures, is included, along with a new essay on a curious but rarely noticed feature of photographs and other still pictures-the fact that a depiction of a momentary state of an object in motion allows viewers to observe that state, in imagination, for an extended period of time. Two older essays round out the collection-another classic, "Categories of Art," and a less well known essay, "Style and the Products and Processes of Art," which examines the role of appreciators' impressions of how a work of art came about, in understanding and appreciation. None of the reprinted essays is abridged, and new postscripts have been added to several of them.

The essays in this collection explore new directions in autobiography studies. Examining a wide range of texts, from narratives of suicide survivors, cross-dressers, and people with HIV/AIDS to self-representations in the visual arts, the collection demonstrates how writers have used the postmodern experience fragmentation to forge new kinds of identities.

Postmodern selves, the essayists argue, are relational selves, constructed from the acute need to find identity through collaboration with others. Postmodern autobiography emerges as a search, amid shocks to the stable self, for wider patterns of significance. Of interest to researchers and scholars in autobiography, world literature, and psychology.

Contemporary reception study has developed a diversity of approaches and methods, including the institutional, textual, historical, authorial, and reader-response, which, to a greater or lesser extent, acknowledge the various ways in which readers have found texts - literature, television shows, movies, and newspapers - meaningful. This collection emphasizes that new diversity, examining movies, newspapers, fans, television shows, and traditional American as well as modern Hispanic, Black, and Women's literature. The essays on literature include James Machor on Melville's short fiction, Kenneth Roemer on Edward Bellamy's utopian work Looking Backward, Amy Blair on the popularity of Sinclair Lewis's Main Street, Marcial Gonzalez on Danny Santiago and his Hispanic novel Famous All Over Town, and Leonard Diepeveen on modernist fiction and criticism. The theoretical essays on reader-oriented criticism include Patsy Schweickart on interpretation and the ethics of care and Jack Bratich on active audiences. Media versions of response criticism include Andrea Press and Camille Johnson's ethnographic analysis of fans of the Oprah Winfrey Show, Janet Staiger on Robert Aldrich's film version of Mickey Spillane's Kiss Me Deadly, and Rhiannon Bury on the fans of the HBO television show Six Feet Under. History-of-the-book versions include Barbara Hochman on the popularity of the 1890s editions of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Ellen Garvey on nineteenth-century scrapbooks of newspaper, and David Nord on early twentieth-century newspapers' relations to audience charges of bias and unfairness. Poststructuralist studies include Philip Goldstein on Richard Wright's Native Son, Steve Mailloux on Reading Lolita in Tehran, and Tony Bennett on the cultural analyses of Pierre Bourdieu. The collection concludes with essays by Janice Radway on the limits of these methods and on the possibility of new forms of sociological and anthropological reception study and by Toby Miller on the "reception deception" in relation to the worldwide distribution and reception of movies and television shows.

In this work, the author contends that we should create a comparative framework for the study of imaginary worlds in the social sciences. Making use of extended examples from both science fiction and fantasy fiction, as well as the living movement of steampunk, the reader is invited to an argument about how best to define imaginary worlds and approach them as social locations for qualitative research. It is suggested in this volume that increasing economic and existential forms of alienation fuel the contemporary surge of participation in imaginary worlds (from gaming worlds to young adult novels) and impel a search for more humane forms of social and cultural organization. Suggestions are made about the usefulness of imaginary worlds to social scientists as places for both testing out theoretical formulations and as tools for teaching in our classrooms.

This book participates in the ongoing debate about the alleged "death of theory" and the current post-theoretical condition, arguing that the "finitude" of theoretical projects does not mean "end", but rather contingency and transformation of thinking, beyond irreconcilable doctrines. Contributors from different cultural and scholarly backgrounds and based in three different continents propose new areas of investigation and interpretive possibilities, reopening dialogues with past and present discourses from a plurality of perspectives and locations. After a first section that reassesses the status and scopes of critique, theory, and literature, the book foregrounds new or neglected critical vocabulary, literary paradigms, and narrative patterns to reread texts at the intersection with other branches of the humanities-history, philosophy, religion, and pedagogy. It then explores geopolitical, cultural, and epistemological domains that have been historically and ideologically overdetermined (such as postsocialist, postcolonial, and cosmopolitan spaces), recodifying them as unstable sites of both conflicts and convergences. By acknowledging the spatio-temporal and cultural delimitations of any intellectual practice, the book creates awareness of our own partiality and incompleteness, but treats boundaries as zones of contact, exchange, and conceptual mobility that promote crossings and connections.

Haunted Selves, Haunting Places in English Literature and Culture offers a series of readings of poetry, the novel and other forms of art and cultural expression, to explore the relationship between subject and landscape, self and place. Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach grounded in close reading, the text places Jacques Derrida's work on spectrality in dialogue with particular aspects of phenomenology. The volume explores writing and culture from the 1880s to the present day, proceeding through four sections examining related questions of identity, memory, the landscape, and our modern relationship to the past. Julian Wolfreys presents a theoretically informed understanding of the efficacy of literature and culture in connecting us to the past in an affective and engaged manner.

Charting shared advances across the emerging fields of medical humanities and health humanities, this book engages with the question of how biomedical knowledge is constructed, negotiated, and circulated as a cultural practice. The volume is composed of a series of pathbreaking inter-disciplinary essays that bring sociocultural habits of mind and modes of thought to the study of medicine, health and patients. These juxtapositions create new forms of knowledge, while emphasizing the vulnerability of human bodies, anti-essentialist approaches to biology, a sensitivity to language and rhetoric, and an attention to social justice. These essays dissect the ways that cultural practices define the limits of health and the body: from the body's place and trajectory in the world to how bodies relate to one another, from questions about ageing and sex to what counts as health and illness. Considering how these and other concepts are shaped by a negotiation between medico-scientific knowledge and ways of knowing derived from other domains, this book provides important new insights into how biomedical frameworks become settled forms for broader cultural understanding.

Focusing mainly upon language, communication, textuality, etc., as is overwhelmingly today's fashion, we miss the very raison d'etre of literature and language itself. Moving a step further in our investigation of the anthropologico-ontopoietic sources of the life-significance of literature by unravelling the function of imaginatio creatrix in man's self interpretation-in-existence, this collection seeks to bring forth the royal role of allegory in the fostering of culture. A conjoint work of human elemental passions and of the human spirit, allegory mediates between lofty ideals of the highest human strivings and the pedestrian realm of facts. Interpretative or theoretical studies encompass allegory -- mediaeval, modern and post-modern -- in various literatures. Among the authors are: Tymieniecka, Kronegger, Jorge Garcia Gomez, V. Osadnik, H. Hellerstein, H. Rudnick, R. Kiefer, V. Fichera, K. Haney, Ch. Raffini, J. Williamson, B. Ross and Sitansu Ray. "

Originally published in 1986, this is a powerful and original book. It offers textual interpretation of Conrad's major work and articulates the subtlety and richness of his treatment of social-political institutions and of the forces that complicate and distort private and public life. Suresh Raval argues that the social-personal relations in Conrad's fiction cannot be conceived apart from their existence in the political life of a community; but at the same time they cannot be accommodated institutionally. The author's concern is with the problematic status of the self under various perspectives: experience and understanding (Heart of Darkness), an ethical ideal (Lord Jim), history (Nostromo), ideology (The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes), scepticism (Victory). What the self is remains ambiguous and elusive. Conrad's fiction is concerned with exhibiting the failure of language, but always as a result of an immense effort of language itself. As language undoes itself in the act of seeking utterance, so Conrad's fictional mode - romance - turns into the opposite of itself as it unfolds. Raval demonstrates that incompatible alternatives - intention and action, thought and experience, the individual and the social, the logical and the contingent - are entangled with each other, and how this entanglement works in the fiction. Raval's exploration of Conrad's scepticism shows why Conrad cannot be characterized as a political conservative or radical without distorting the complexity and seriousness of his reflection on society. For his scepticism is the product not just of intelligence but of intelligence conscious of its limitations, and is thus able to make a devastating critique of the nihilism sometimes attributed to Conrad by critics. Only those who think that morality has to have a secure single foundation if it is to be real are pushed into regarding Conrad's scepticism as a form of nihilism. Professor Raval's important study brings philosophical and literary interests to bear on Conrad's major fiction and illuminates those aspects of his art which have puzzled and fascinated his readers. It will be deservedly valued by those studying and teaching modern literature.

This book presents a critical history of the intersections between American environmental literature and ecological restoration policy and practice. Through a storying-restorying-restoring framework, this book explores how entanglements between writers and places have produced literary interventions in restoration politics. The book considers the ways literary landscapes are politicized by writers themselves, and by conservationists, activists, policymakers, and others, in defense of U.S. public lands and the idea of wilderness. The book profiles five environmental writers and examines how their writings on nature, wildness, wilderness, conservation, preservation, and restoration have variously inspired and been translated into ecological restoration programs and campaigns by environmental organizations. The featured authors are Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) at Walden Pond, John Muir (1838-1914) in Yosemite National Park, Aldo Leopold (1887-1948) at his family's Wisconsin sand farm, Marjory Stoneman Douglas (1890-1998) in the Everglades, and Edward Abbey (1927-1989) in Glen Canyon. This book combines environmental history, literature, biography, philosophy, and politics in a commentary on considering (and developing) environmental literature's place in conversations on restoration ecology, ecological restoration, and rewilding.

This book sets out to investigate how contemporary African diasporic women writers respond to the imbalances, pressures and crises of twenty-first-century globalization by querying the boundaries between two separate conceptual domains: love and space. The study breaks new ground by systematically bringing together critical love studies with research into the cultures of migration, diaspora and refuge. Examining a notable tendency among current black feminist writers, poets and performers to insist on the affective dimension of world-making, the book ponders strategies of reconfiguring postcolonial discourses. Indeed, the analyses of literary works and intermedia performances by Chimamanda Adichie, Zadie Smith, Helen Oyeyemi, Shailja Patel and Warsan Shire reveal an urge of moving beyond a familiar insistence on processes of alienation or rupture and towards a new, reparative emphasis on connection and intimacy - to imagine possible inhabitable worlds.

Transoceanic Perspectives in Amitav Ghosh's Ibis Trilogy studies Ghosh's Sea of Poppies (2008), River of Smoke (2011) and Flood of Fire (2015) in relation to maritime criticism. Juan-Jose Martin-Gonzalez draws upon the intersections between maritime criticism and postcolonial thought to provide, via an analysis of the Ibis trilogy, alternative insights into nationalism(s), cosmopolitanism and globalization. He shows that the Victorian age in its transoceanic dimension can be read as an era of proto-globalization that facilitates a materialist critique of the inequities of contemporary global neo-liberalism. The book argues that in order to maintain its critical sharpness, postcolonialism must re-direct its focus towards today's most obvious legacy of nineteenth-century imperialism: capitalist globalization. Tracing the migrating characters who engage in transoceanic crossings through Victorian sea lanes in the Ibis trilogy, Martin-Gonzalez explores how these dispossessed collectives made sense of their identities in the Victorian waterworlds and illustrates the political possibilities provided by the sea crossing and its fluid boundaries.

Time, the City, and the Literary Imagination explores the relationship between the constructions and representations of the relationship between time and the city in literature published between the late eighteenth century and the present. This collection offers a new way of reading the literary city by tracing the ways in which the relationship between time and urban space can shape literary narratives and forms. The essays consider the representation of a range of literary cities from across the world and consider how an understanding of time, and time passing, can impact on our understanding of the primary texts. Literature necessarily deals with time, both as a function of storytelling and as an experience of reading. In this volume, the contributions demonstrate how literature about cities brings to the forefront the relationship between individual and communal experience and time.

Shakespeare and Adaptation Theory reconsiders, after 20 years of intense critical and creative activity, the theory and practice of adapting Shakespeare to different genres and media. Organized around clusters of key metaphors, the book explicates the principal theories informing the field of Shakespearean adaptation and surveys the growing field of case studies by Shakespeare scholars. Each chapter also looks anew at a specific Shakespeare play from the perspective of a prevailing set of theories and metaphors. Having identified the key critics responsible for developing these metaphors and for framing the discussion in this way, Iyengar moves on to analyze afresh the implications of these critical frames for adaptation studies as a whole and for particular Shakespeare plays. Focusing each chapter around a different play, the book contrasts comic, tragic, and tragicomic modes in Shakespeare's oeuvre and within the major genres of adaptation (e.g., film, stage-production, novel and digital media). Each chapter seasons its theoretical discussions with a lively sprinkling of allusions to Shakespeare - ranging from TikTok to tissue-boxes, from folios and fine arts to fan work. To conclude each chapter, the author provides a case-study of three or four significant and interesting adaptations from different genres or media. A glossary of terms compiled by Philip Gilreath and the author completes the book.

While historiography is dominated by attempts that try to standardize and de-individualize the behavior of animals, history proves to be littered with records of the exceptional lives of unusual animals. This book introduces animal biography as an approach to the re-framing of animals as both objects of knowledge as well as subjects of individual lives. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective and bringing together scholars from, among others, literary, historical and cultural studies, the texts collected in this volume seek to refine animal biography as a research method and framework to studying, capturing, representing and acknowledging animal others as individuals. From Heini Hediger's biting monitor, Hachiko and Murr to celluloid ape Caesar and the mourning of Topsy's gruesome death, the authors discuss how animal biographies are discovered and explored through connections with humans that can be traced in archives, ethological fieldwork and novels, and probe the means of constructing animal biographies from taxidermy to film, literature and social media. Thus, they invite deeper conversations with socio-political and cultural contexts that allow animal biographies to provide narratives that reach beyond individual life stories, while experimenting with particular forms of animal biographies that might trigger animal activism and concerns for animal well-being, spur historical interest and enrich the literary imagination.

Critical theory and dystopia offers a uniquely rich study of dystopian fiction, drawing on the insights of critical theory. Asking what ideological work these dark imaginings perform, the book reconstructs the historical emergence, consolidation and transformation of the genre across the twentieth century and into our own, ranging from Yevgeny Zamayatin's We (1924) and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) to Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange (1963) and Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games series (2000s and 2010s). In doing so, it reveals the political logics opened up or neutered by the successive moments of this dystopian history. -- .

With Reading Alcoholisms, Jane Lilienfeld has produced a ground-breaking cross-disciplinary study using the social, psychological, and scientific literature on alcoholism and family alcoholism to examine the novels of Hardy, Joyce, and Woolf. Each of these authors was directly affected by the alcoholism of a family member or mentor, and Lilienfeld shows how the effects of alcoholism organized their texts: through the portrayal of a protagonist in The Mayor of Casterbridge, through the denial of parental alcoholism and its silent presence in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and through codependent reactive patterns of Mrs. and Mr. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse. With the remarkable empathy Lilienfeld has for human dimensions of alcoholism, she demonstrates that "the narrative strategies in each of these novels at times mimic the behaviors and feeling states often arising from alcoholism." Without an understanding of the multidimensional nature of alcoholism and the transmission of its effects across generations, any analysis of the work of these three literary giants is incomplete.

This is the first book dedicated to literary and cultural scholars' engagement with mobilities scholarship. As such, the volume both advances new theoretical approaches to the study of culture and furthers the recent "humanities turn" in mobilities studies. The book's scholarship is deeply informed by cultural geography's vision of a mobilised reconceptualisation of space and place, but also by the contribution of literary scholars in articulating questions of travel, technologies of transport, (post)colonialism and migration through a close engagement with textual materials. A comprehensive introduction maps pre-histories and emerging directions of this exciting interdisciplinary endeavor while taking up the theoretical and methodological challenges of the burgeoning subfield. Contributions range across geographical and disciplinary boundaries to address questions of embodied subjectivities, mobility and the nation, geopolitics of migration, and mobilities futures.

This book presents a skeptical eliminativist philosophy of race and the theory of racelessness, a methodological and pedagogical framework for analyzing "race" and racism. It explores the history of skeptical eliminativism and constructionist eliminativism within the history of African American philosophy and literary studies and its consistent connection with movements for civil rights. Sheena M. Mason considers how current anti-racist efforts reflect naturalist conservationist and constructionist reconstructionist philosophies of race that prevent more people from fully confronting the problem of racism, not race, thereby enabling racism to persist. She then offers a three-part solution for how scholars and people aspiring toward anti-racism can avoid unintentionally upholding racism, using literary studies as a case study to show how "race" often translates into racism itself. The theory of racelessness helps more people undo racism by undoing the belief in "race."

Navigating Urban Soundscapes: Dublin and Los Angeles in Fiction offers an innovative analytical framework to explore sound in different media and across two distinct urban soundscapes. Studying a wide range of novels, films, and radio dramas, using Dublin and Los Angeles as case studies, Annika Eisenberg asks how sounds are aestheticised to signify urban space in fiction, and how sounds allow such fictional urban spaces to be navigated, both by auscultators, the characters listening within a work of fiction, and by auditeurs, the implied audience of a fictional work. Eisenberg argues that the concept of "urban sound" is a cultural and aesthetic construct, and in doing so, she shows why aesthetics needs to be front and center in sound studies.

Who is the proper occupant of the nursery? The obvious answer is the child, and not an archive, a seductive troll-princess, or poor fosterlings. Nevertheless, characters in Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder, and Little Eyolf intend to host these improper occupants in their children's rooms. Dr. Gunn calls these dramas 'the empty nursery plays' because they all describe rooms intended for offspring, as well as characters' plans for refilling that space. One might expect nurseries to provide an ideal setting for a realist playwright to dramatize contemporary problems. Rather than mattering to Ibsen in terms of naturalist detail or explicit social critique, however, they are reserved for the maintenance of characters' fears and expectations concerning the future. Empty Nurseries, Queer Occupants intervenes in scholarly debates in child studies by arguing that the empty bourgeois nursery is a better symbol for innocence than the child. Here, 'emptiness' refers to the common construction of the child as blank and latent. In Ibsen, the child is also doomed or deceased, and thus essentially absent, but nurseries persist as spaces of memorialization and potential alike. Nurseries also gesture toward the domains of childhood and women's labor, from birth to domestic service. 'Bourgeois nursery' points to the classed construction of innocence and to the more materialist aspects of this book, which inform our understanding of domesticity and family in the West and uncover a set of reproductive connotations broader than 'the innocent child' can convey.

Animal Visions considers how literature responds to the harms of anthropocentricism, working with Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights (1847) and various adaptations of this canonistic novel to show how posthumanist dream writing unsettles the privileging of the human species over other species. Two feminist and post-Freudian responses, Kathy Acker's poem "Obsession" (1992) and Anne Carson's "The Glass Essay" (1997) most strongly extend Bronte's dream writing in this direction. Building on the trope of a ludic Cathy ghost who refuses the containment of logic and reason, these and other adaptations offer the gift of a radical peri-hysteria. This emotional excess is most clearly seen in Kate Bush's music video "Wuthering Heights" (1978) and Peter Kosminsky's film Wuthering Heights (1992). Such disturbances make space for a moor love that is particularly evident in Jane Urquhart's novel Changing Heaven (1989) and, to a lesser extent Sylvia Plath's poem, "Wuthering Heights" (1961). Bronte's Wuthering Heights and its most productive afterings make space for co-affective relations between humans and other animal beings. Andrea Arnold's film Wuthering Heights (2011) and Luis Bunuel's Abismos de Pasion (1954) also highlight the rupturing split gaze of non-acting animals in their films. In all of these works depictions of intra-active and entangled responses between animals show the potential for dynamic and generative multispecies relations, where the human is one animal amongst the kin of the world.

This collection, written by leading Lacanian psychoanalytic theorists and practitioners, is a unique exploration of the novel aspects of perversion from the perspective of cruelty-a psychoanalytic study that has never been sufficiently undertaken in an English-speaking world. Instead of reducing the notion of perversion to cultural representations, a historical discourse or a clinical diagnosis, the authors in this collection draw on Freud, Kant, Hegel, Marquis de Sade, Derrida, Deleuze and Zizek to untie the knot of "psychic cruelty" intrinsic to perversion and therefore "de-sexualize" perverted acts. They do so by theorizing perversion in psychoanalytic concepts of the Oedipus complex, the-Name-of-the-Father and jouissance, and furthermore in the perspective of the clinics of neurosis and psychosis, in dialogue with a clinical praxis, philosophy and literature.