This book brings together a number of John Schad's very best uncollected essays, interleaved with a selection of autobiographical poems and a striking new work that brings together both critical and creative modes of writing. Turns thus plots the intriguing trajectory of Schad's very distinctive work over the last twenty years -- a trajectory that moves from a series of essays that juggle Christian, Marxist and Derridean intuitions, through a radically literary engagement with Deconstruction, to a daringly critical-creative mode of writing. In this exciting new field, as in the more established world of literature and religion, Schad is an idiosyncratic and sometimes audacious pioneer. The book is to be published simultaneously in hardback and paperback to accommodate adoption on critical-creative courses at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

Someone called Jacques Derrida, someone called him on the phone, someone who was dead -- this was August 22nd 1979. A mystery, he thought; but it is a mystery that began more than ten years earlier, in 1968, when Derrida, a philosopher, visits Oxford and there, before the very eyes of the Philosophy Sub-Faculty, he dies, several times. Murder, he thought. And so I shall investigate, and begin with a sign that the philosopher says he left within a book from the thirteenth century, a strange fortune-telling book that he had found in the oldest part of Oxford's Bodleian Library. In the book are a host of cryptic questions, but the philosopher directs us to one in particular, a peculiar question about a boy, and the question is this: Does the boy live? The philosopher will not, though, give the answer; he requires, instead, that we go to Oxford to open the book for ourselves.

Someone called Jacques Derrida, someone called him on the phone, someone who was dead -- this was August 22nd 1979. A mystery, he thought; but it is a mystery that began more than ten years earlier, in 1968, when Derrida, a philosopher, visits Oxford and there, before the very eyes of the Philosophy Sub-Faculty, he dies, several times. Murder, he thought. And so I shall investigate, and begin with a sign that the philosopher says he left within a book from the thirteenth century, a strange fortune-telling book that he had found in the oldest part of Oxford's Bodleian Library. In the book are a host of cryptic questions, but the philosopher directs us to one in particular, a peculiar question about a boy, and the question is this: Does the boy live? The philosopher will not, though, give the answer; he requires, instead, that we go to Oxford to open the book for ourselves.

This title was first published in 2001. A volume of essays on the Pauline, ecclesiastical body of Christ -the church. It is, of course, not possible to separate completely one body of Christ from another, and the essays do not make the attempt. The dark, institutional history of the church is a running theme, a running sore, throughout the volume; in that sense the essays respond to Michel Foucault's insistence that we should be mindful of the institutions that surreptitiously inform our discourse and culture. The essays deal with the myriad of ways in which the church is named, spoken and, above all, written in the age of secularization. In this sense, the contributors are simply exploring the relationship between the church and modern writing.

This title was first published in 2001. A volume of essays on the Pauline, ecclesiastical body of Christ -the church. It is, of course, not possible to separate completely one body of Christ from another, and the essays do not make the attempt. The dark, institutional history of the church is a running theme, a running sore, throughout the volume; in that sense the essays respond to Michel Foucault's insistence that we should be mindful of the institutions that surreptitiously inform our discourse and culture. The essays deal with the myriad of ways in which the church is named, spoken and, above all, written in the age of secularization. In this sense, the contributors are simply exploring the relationship between the church and modern writing.

This book brings together a number of John Schad's very best uncollected essays, interleaved with a selection of autobiographical poems and a striking new work that brings together both critical and creative modes of writing. Turns thus plots the intriguing trajectory of Schad's very distinctive work over the last twenty years -- a trajectory that moves from a series of essays that juggle Christian, Marxist and Derridean intuitions, through a radically literary engagement with Deconstruction, to a daringly critical-creative mode of writing. In this exciting new field, as in the more established world of literature and religion, Schad is an idiosyncratic and sometimes audacious pioneer. The book is to be published simultaneously in hardback and paperback to accommodate adoption on critical-creative courses at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

A Laodicean draws deeply on Hardy's personal experience: his early life as an architect, his frustration in love and his ambivalence about theology and the modern age. The daughter of a wealthy railway magnate, Paula Power inherits De Stancy Castle, an ancient castle in need of modernization. She commissions George Somerset, a young architect, to undertake the work. Somerset falls in love with Paula but she, the Laodicean of the title, is torn between his admiration and that of Captain De Stancy, whose old-world romanticism contrasts with Somerset's forward-looking outlook. Paula's vacillation, however, is not only romantic. Her ambiguity regarding religion, politics and social progress is a reflection of the author's own. This new Penguin Classics edition of Hardy's text contains an introduction and notes that illuminate and clarify these themes and draws parallels between the text and the author's life and views.

This fully-annotated documentary novel explores the life and thought of Walter Benjamin, imaginatively examining its implications in the political context of a post-War London estate. A startling critical-creative examination of one of the 20th Century's leading thinkers, "The Late Walter Benjamin" is a documentary novel that juxtaposes the life and death of Walter Benjamin with the days, hours and minutes of a working-class council estate on the edge of London in post-war Austerity England. The novel centres on one particular tenant who claims to be Walter Benjamin, and only ever uses words written by Benjamin, apparently oblivious that the real Benjamin committed suicide 20 years earlier whilst fleeing the Nazis. Initially set in the sixties, the text slips back to the early years of the estate and to Benjamin's last days, as he moves across Europe seeking ever-more desperately to escape the Third Reich. Through this fictional narrative, John Schad explores not only the emergence of Benjamin's thinking from a politicised Jewish theology forced to confront the rise of Nazism but also the implications of his utopian Marxism, forged in exile, for the very different context of a displaced working class community in post-war Britain. This series aims to showcase new work at the forefront of religion and literature through short studies written by leading and rising scholars in the field. Books will pursue a variety of theoretical approaches as they engage with writing from different religious and literary traditions. Collectively, the series will offer a timely critical intervention to the interdisciplinary crossover between religion and literature, speaking to wider contemporary interests and mapping out new directions for the field in the early twenty-first century.

This fully-annotated documentary novel explores the life and thought of Walter Benjamin, imaginatively examining its implications in the political context of a post-War London estate. A startling critical-creative examination of one of the 20th Century's leading thinkers, "The Late Walter Benjamin" is a documentary novel that juxtaposes the life and death of Walter Benjamin with the days, hours and minutes of a working-class council estate on the edge of London in post-war Austerity England. The novel centres on one particular tenant who claims to be Walter Benjamin, and only ever uses words written by Benjamin, apparently oblivious that the real Benjamin committed suicide 20 years earlier whilst fleeing the Nazis. Initially set in the sixties, the text slips back to the early years of the estate and to Benjamin's last days, as he moves across Europe seeking ever-more desperately to escape the Third Reich. Through this fictional narrative, John Schad explores not only the emergence of Benjamin's thinking from a politicised Jewish theology forced to confront the rise of Nazism but also the implications of his utopian Marxism, forged in exile, for the very different context of a displaced working class community in post-war Britain. This series aims to showcase new work at the forefront of religion and literature through short studies written by leading and rising scholars in the field. Books will pursue a variety of theoretical approaches as they engage with writing from different religious and literary traditions. Collectively, the series will offer a timely critical intervention to the interdisciplinary crossover between religion and literature, speaking to wider contemporary interests and mapping out new directions for the field in the early twenty-first century.

Within the work of both Jacques Derrida and Walter Benjamin there is a buried theatricality, a theatre to-come. And in the last fifteen years there has been a growing awareness of this theatricality. To date, though, there has not been a published stage play about either Derrida or Benjamin Cue Derrida| Benjamin, a volume that brings together two tragi-comic plays which mirror each other in a host of ways - above all, in the way that the central philosophical figure is displaced, or not quite where or when we would expect to find them. In Derrida's case, it is Oxford in 1968; in Benjamin's case, it is somewhere (or nowhere) near London in 1948. These, then, are plays in which the philosopher is exiled, or elsewhere - not quite himself. This a volume for anyone with an eye or ear for where theatre or performance meets philosophy - students, scholars, readers, actors.

Within the work of both Jacques Derrida and Walter Benjamin there is a buried theatricality, a theatre to-come. And in the last fifteen years there has been a growing awareness of this theatricality. To date, though, there has not been a published stage play about either Derrida or Benjamin Cue Derrida| Benjamin, a volume that brings together two tragi-comic plays which mirror each other in a host of ways - above all, in the way that the central philosophical figure is displaced, or not quite where or when we would expect to find them. In Derrida's case, it is Oxford in 1968; in Benjamin's case, it is somewhere (or nowhere) near London in 1948. These, then, are plays in which the philosopher is exiled, or elsewhere - not quite himself. This a volume for anyone with an eye or ear for where theatre or performance meets philosophy - students, scholars, readers, actors.

'Each century', wrote Charles Dickens ' is] more amazed by the century following it than by all the centuries before'. "Victorians in Theory" explores the startling conceit that nineteenth-century poetry is amazed by twentieth-century literary theory. In a daring and exciting departure from critical convention, Schad re-reads poststructuralist theory through Victorian poetry. Each chapter pairs a poet with a theorist: Robert Browning meets Jacques Derrida; Christina Rossetti encounters Luce Irigaray; Matthew Arnold is after Michel Foucault; Gerald Manley Hopkins dreams with Jacques Lacan; and Elizabeth Barrett Browning haunts Helene Cixous. Reading both across and between these writers, Schad opens up a radically intertextual space; he wanders, in Matthew Arnold's words, 'between two worlds'. Across this no-man's land appear a host of unlikely spectres, among them T. S. Eliot, Martin Luther, Friedrich Nietzsche, Lewis Carroll's Alice, Walter Benjamin's 'angel of history', and the woman taken in adultery. This groundbreaking book will fascinate anyone interested in the Victorians or theory; at once rigorous and readable, it will appeal to both the scholar and the student.

Is there life after theory? If the death of the Author has now been followed by the death of the Theorist, what's left? Indeed, who's left? To explore such riddles, this volume brings together interviews with four theorists who are left, each a major figure in their own right: Jacques Derrida, Frank Kermode, Toril Moi and Christopher Norris. Framed and introduced by Michael Payne and John Schad, the interviews pursue a whole range of topics, both familiar and unfamiliar. Among other things, Derrida, Kermode, Moi and Norris discuss being an outsider, taking responsibility, valuing books, getting angry, doing science, listening to music, remembering Empson, rereading de Beauvoir, being Jewish, asking forgiveness, smoking in libraries, befriending the dead, committing bigamy, forgetting to forget, thinking, not thinking, believing and being mad. These four key thinkers explore why there is life after theory. But not as we know it.

Is there life after theory? If the death of the Author has now been followed by the death of the Theorist, what's left? Indeed, who's left? To explore such riddles, "Life.After.Theory" brings together new interviews with four theorists who are left, each a major figure in their own right: Jacques Derrida, Frank Kermode, Toril Moi and Christopher Norris. Framed and introduced by Michael Payne and John Schad, the interviews pursue a whole range of topics, both familiar and unfamiliar. Among other things, Derrida, Kermode, Moi and Norris discuss being an outsider, taking responsibility, valuing books, getting angry, doing science, listening to music, remembering Empson, re-reading de Beauvoir, being Jewish, asking forgiveness, smoking in libraries, befriending the dead, committing bigamy, forgetting to forget, thinking, not thinking, believing, and being mad. These four key thinkers explore why there is life after theory, but not as we know it.