The centuries just after the Norman Conquest are the forgotten period of English literary history. In fact, the years 1066-1300 witnessed an unparalleled ingenuity in the creation of written forms, for this was a time when almost every writer was unaware of the existence of other English writing. In a series of detailed readings of the more important early Middle English works, Cannon shows how the many and varied texts of the period laid the foundations for the project of English literature. This richness is given credit for the first time in these readings by means of an innovative theory of literary form that accepts every written shape as itself a unique contribution to the history of ideas. This theory also suggests that the impoverished understanding of literature we now commonly employ is itself a legacy of this early period, an attribute of the single form we have learned to call 'romance'. A number of reading methods have lately taught us to be more generous in our understandings of what literature might be, but this book shows us that the very variety we now strive to embrace anew actually formed the grounds of English literature-a richness we only lost when we forgot how to recognize it.

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.

Literary and Cultural Production, World-Ecology, and the Global Food System marks a significant intervention into the field of literary food studies. Drawing on new work in world literature, cultural studies, and environmental studies, the essays gathered here explore how literary and cultural texts have represented and responded to the global food system from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Covering topics such as the impact of colonial monocultures and industrial agriculture, enclosure and the loss of the commons, the meatification of diets, the toxification of landscapes, and the consequences of climate breakdown, the volume ranges across the globe, from Thailand to Brazil, Cyprus to the Caribbean. Whether it is anxieties over imported meat in late Victorian Britain, labour struggles on Guatemalan banana plantations, or food dependency in Puerto Rico, the contributors to this volume show how fiction, poetry, drama, film, and music have critically explored and contributed to food cultures worldwide.

Emily Dickinson's Poetic Art is both an exciting work of literary criticism on a central figure in American literature as well as an invitation for students and researchers to engage with cognitive literary studies. Emily Dickinson’s poetry can be challenging and difficult. It paradoxically gives readers a feeling of closeness and intimacy while being puzzling and obscure. Critical interpretations of Dickinson's poems tend to focus on what they mean rather than on what kind of experience they create. A cognitive approach to literary criticism, based on recent cognitive research, helps readers experience and understand the hows and whys of what a poem is saying and doing. These include cognitive linguistic analysis, versification, prosody, cognitive metaphor, schema, blending, and iconicity, all of which explain the sensory, motor, and emotive processes that motivate Dickinson’s conceptualizations. By experiencing Dickinson’s poetry from a cognitive perspective, readers are able to better understand why we feel so close to the poet and why her poetry endures. Emily Dickinson's Poetic Art: A Cognitive Reading is an important contribution to the study of a major American poet as well as to the vibrant field of cognitive literary studies.

William Empson was one the most important poet-critics of the twentieth century, and his work continues to influence and inspire writers from many divergent critical traditions. Following on recent scholarly developments, this timely collection of essays provides a fully-rounded examination of Empson's life, work, inheritance, and influence.
This is the first volume of critical essays on Empson to be published in over a decade, and the first to consider the full range of his work, studying his poetry alongside his criticism in order to reassess the scale of his achievement. It also includes the first publication of a substantial interview with Empson in 1970, in which he looks back over his career and discusses the composition and reception of his work. The collection examines Empson's oeuvre from a variety of angles - aesthetic, philosophical, psychological, linguistic, scientific, socio-political, religious, and sexual - and features work from an outstanding line-up of emerging and established scholars.
Some Versions of Empson demonstrates the poet-critic's continuing importance for literary and cultural criticism, and sets the agenda for studies of his work in the twenty-first century

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.

1) This book presents a comprehensive account of the eminent Bengali writer and activist, the Ramon Magsaysay Awardee Mahasweta Devi's oeuvre in its full range and versatility. 2) It draws attention to Devi's role as a woman writer with a difference and her image outside Bengal. 3) This book will be of interest to departments of South Asian Literature and Cultural studies across UK.

• Covers all the essentials students need when starting out on a literary studies degree – ideal for first year, introductory courses • A comprehensive glossary (with terms in bold) and clear text mean it is accessible to beginners as well as non-native English readers • Sections on researching and writing papers and citation information mean students will refer to the book throughout their studies – it has a long life • New edition is in a larger format and contains 20 new illustrations, making the book more user-friendly for students and helping to enhance their understanding through images

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.

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.

This book pursues the specific case of Italian travel narratives in the Far East, through a focus on the experience of Japan in works by writers who visited the Land of the Rising Sun beginning in the Meiji period (1868-1912) and during the concomitant opening of Japan's relations with the West. Drawing from the fields of Postcolonial and Transnational Studies, analysis of these texts explores one central question: what does it mean to imagine Japanese culture as contributing to Italian culture? Each author shares in common an attempt to disrupt ideas about dichotomies and unbalanced power relationships between East and West. Proposing the notion of 'relational Orientalism,' this book suggests that Italian travelogues to Japan, in many cases, pursued the goal of building imaginary transnational communities, predicated on commonalities and integration, by claiming what they perceived as 'Oriental' as their own. In contrast with a long history of Western representations of Japan as inferior and irrational, Searching for Japan identifies a positive overarching attitude toward the Far East country in modern Italian culture. Expanding the horizon of Italian transnational networks, normally situated within the Southern European region, this book reinstates the existence of an alternative Euro-Asian axis, operating across Italian history.

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. "

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.

Do the artist's intentions have anything to do with the making and appreciation of works of art? In Art and Intention Paisley Livingston develops a broad and balanced perspective on perennial disputes between intentionalists and anti-intentionalists in philosophical aesthetics and critical theory. He surveys and assesses a wide range of rival assumptions about the nature of intentions and the status of intentionalist psychology. With detailed reference to examples from diverse media, art forms, and traditions, he demonstrates that insights into the multiple functions of intentions have important implications for our understanding of artistic creation and authorship, the ontology of art, conceptions of texts, works, and versions, basic issues pertaining to the nature of fiction and fictional truth, and the theory of art interpretation and appreciation. Livingston argues that neither the inspirationist nor rationalistic conceptions can capture the blending of deliberate and intentional, spontaneous and unintentional processes in the creation of art. Texts, works, and artistic structures and performances cannot be adequately individuated in the absence of a recognition of the relevant makers intentions. The distinction between complete and incomplete works receives an action-theoretic analysis that makes possible an elucidation of several different senses of 'fragment' in critical discourse. Livingston develops an account of authorship, contending that the recognition of intentions is in fact crucial to our understanding of diverse forms of collective art-making. An artist's short-term intentions and long-term plans and policies interact in complex ways in the emergence of an artistic oeuvre, and our uptake of such attitudes makes an important difference to our appreciation of the relations between items belonging to a single life-work. The intentionalism Livingston advocates is, however, a partial one, and accomodates a number of important anti-intentionalist contentions. Intentions are fallible, and works of art, like other artefacts, can be put to a bewildering diversity of uses. Yet some important aspects of art's meaning and value are linked to the artists aims and activities.

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.

What happens when fashionable forms of unserious speech prove to be contagious, when they adulterate and weaken communicative spheres that rely on honesty, trust, and sincerity? Demonstrating how the tension between irony and avowal constitutes a central conflict in Fontane's works, this book argues that his best-known society novels play out a struggle between the incompatible demands of these two modes of speaking. Read in this light, the novels identify an irreconcilable discrepancy between word and deed as both the root of emotional discord and the proximate cause of historical and political upheaval. Given the alarm since 2016 over unreliability, falsehood, and indifference to truth, it is now easier to perceive in Fontane's novels a profound concern about language that is not sincere and not meant to be taken literally. For Fontane, irony exemplifies a discrepancy between language and meaning, a loosening of the ethical bond between words and the things to which they refer. His novels investigate the extent to which human relationships can continue to function in the face of pervasive irony and the erosion of language's credibility. Although Fontane is widely regarded as an ironic writer, Tucker's analyses reveal a critical distance between his works and the prospect of irony as a dominant idiom. Revisiting Fontane's novels in a post-truth age brings the conflict between irony and avowal into sharper relief and makes legible the stakes and contours of our own post-truth condition.

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."

This study, first published in 1945, gives a precise description of the unfolding of a great poet's craftsmanship and suggests alignments of the technical progression with the changes of the mind. Metrical analysis is given in order to throw light on Keats' general stylistic development using the simplest terminology and in a traditional manner. Earlier English prosodic writings are referred to throughout in order to place the style and development in the context of the period. Arranged chronologically, each chapter looks at a particular work or group of works drawing together evidence about Keats' poetic direction. This classic work from a well-known Keats scholar is an important enlightening contribution within the extensive study of Keats' poetry and letters.

This book examines Donald M. Allen's crucially influential poetry anthology The New American Poetry, 1945-1960 from the perspectives of American Cold War nationalism and literary transnationalism, considering how the anthology expresses and challenges Cold War norms, claiming post-war Anglophone poetic innovation for the United States and reflecting the conservative American society of the 1950s. Examining the crossroads of politics, social life, and literature during the Cold War, this book puts Allen's anthology into its historical context and reveals how the editor was influenced by the volatile climate of nationalism and politics that pervaded every aspect of American life during the Cold War. Reconsidering the dramatic influence that Allen's anthology has had on the way we think about and anthologize American poetry, and recontextualizing The New American Poetry as a document of the Cold War, this study not only helps us come to a more accurate understanding of how the anthology came into being, but also encourages new ways of thinking about all of Anglophone poetry, from the twentieth century and today.

Representations of violence surround us in everyday life - in news reports, films and novels - inviting interpretation and raising questions about the ethics of viewing or reading about harm done to others. How can we understand the processes of meaning-making involved in interpreting violent events and experiences? And can these acts of interpretation themselves be violent by reproducing the violence that they represent? This book examines the ethics of engaging with violent stories from a broad hermeneutic perspective. It offers multidisciplinary perspectives on the sense-making involved in interpreting violence in its various forms, from blatant physical violence to less visible forms that may inhere in words or in the social and political order of our societies. By focusing on different ways of narrating violence and on the cultural and paradigmatic forms that govern such narrations, Interpreting Violence explores the ethical potential of literature, art and philosophy to expose mechanisms of violence while also recognizing their implication in structures that contribute to or benefit from practices of violence

This book expands upon a range of economic insights within the overall context of critical theory, particularly with respect to the question of socioeconomic inequalities, and presents an explanation of how critical theory provides a number of interesting perspectives for economists. Economic agents, deliberately imprisoned in their instrumental rationality as a means to survive under competitive relationships, are microscopic constituents of systemic forces which exist beyond their will. Despite the subjective rationality of such agents in terms of formally-logical consistency and transitivity, aggregate market distributional mechanisms also display non-rational patterns. The crucial aspect of the dynamics of this system consists of the paralysing effect of the high level of socioeconomic inequality, which is driven by a permanent struggle for self-preservation under competitive rules; it is a reminiscence of natural, uncivilised relationships that constituted the reproduction process of the whole. These reified agents thus become instruments of their socially constructed powers on the one hand, and objects of their existential conditionality on the other. Hence, the dialectical approach adopted by the author aims to uncover the way in which structurally-genetic market forces govern individual behaviour, as well as how individual behaviour shapes these structurally-genetic forces, which, together, form the transcending principles of unequal distribution. This book will be of particular interest to scholars of the political economy, philosophy and the methodology of the social sciences, especially those concerned with inequality issues. This book includes a preface written by Professor Martin Jay.

This international collection focuses on the phallic character of classic and contemporary literary and visual cultures and their invasive nature. The phallic eye is analyzed as a spectacle of the obscene, the scene and the sin, a visualization of guilty pleasures and outrageous lusts that evoke anxiety, guilt, satisfaction, intimacy and intimidation. The phallic eye is a powerful and useful metaphor for a radical investigation of the interrelations between spectatorship, authorship, dominance, Mulvey's theorization of voyeurism/exhibitionism/Looked-at-ness, and surveillance of human desires and visual pleasures. This volume suggests a broad perspective on the phallus as passionate, dynamic and energetic force, which is more than the consuming, predatory eye of the beholder who yearns for sensational spectacles. The chapters focus on thrillers, horror cinema, pornography, sexual art and photography, erotic literature, female and male body politics, queer pleasures, gender/cross-gender/transgenderism, CCTV and phallic ethnicities.

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.