A Quest for Remembrance: The Underworld in Classical and Modern literature brings together a range of arguments exploring connections between the descent into the underworld, also known as katabasis, and various forms of memory. Its chapters investigate the uses of the descent topos both in antiquity and in the reception of classical literature in the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. In the process, the volume explores how the hero's quest into the underworld engages with the theme of recovering memories from the past. At the same time, we aim to foreground how the narrative format itself is concerned with forms of commemoration ranging from trans-cultural memory, remembering the literary and intellectual canon, to commemorating important historical events that might otherwise be forgotten. Through highlighting this duality this collection aims to introduce the descent narrative as its own literary genre, a 'memorious genre' related to but distinct from the quest narrative.

Highly recommended by Choice

While crossover books such as Rowling's Harry Potter series have enjoyed enormous sales and media attention, critical analysis of crossover fiction has not kept pace with the growing popularity of this new category of writing and reading. Falconer remedies this lack with close readings of six major British works of crossover fiction, and a wide-ranging analysis of the social and cultural implications of the global crossover phenomenon. A uniquely in-depth study of the crossover novel, Falconer engages with a ground-breaking range of sources, from primary texts, to child and adult reader responses, to cultural and critical theory.

Essays considering the representation and perception of hell in a variety of texts. Narratives of a descent to the underworld, of the sights to be seen and the punishments meted out there, have kept a hold on the popular imagination for millennia. The legacy from doctrinal warnings and the deep-set literary markers that identify a place of suffering and alienation continue to stimulate creative exchange and critical thinking. Such work takes risks: it braves the dark and questions the past. The contributions in this volume reflect on the exigency of hell in the stories that we tell. They consider the transfer and repurposing of motifs across genres and generational divides, and acknowledge the sustained immediacy of physical and psychological landscapes of hell. The essays span a wide chronological range and apply various contemporary critical approaches, including cognitive science, performance studies and narratology. This cross-period analysis is complemented by interviews with three creative practitioners: Jeya Ayadurai, director of "Hell's Museum" in Singapore, the actor Lisa Dwan, who is acclaimed for her dramatisation of Samuel Beckett's late works, and the writer David Almond. From ancient myth and early English sermons to mid-twentieth-century surrealism and current responses to terrorist activities and environmental damage, the literature of hell engages with issues of immediate relevance and asks its audiences to reflect on their cultural history, the meaning of social justice and the nature of embodied existence.

The first book-length study of Heaney's dialogue with Virgil, one of Seamus Heaney's major literary exemplars Offers a close reading of Heaney's engagement in Virgil, with particular focus on the latter part of his career, from the mid-1980s onward Explores Heaney's dialogue with Virgil in relation to his reading of other writers, ancient, medieval and modern Considers the full corpus of Heaney's writing including translations, original poems, prose writing and radio interviews This book demonstrates the ways in which Virgil's are poems that Heaney 'lived with long and dreamily', especially the descent into the underworld in Aeneid VI. It shows that in his original English poems as well as his translations from Latin, Heaney conjures and transforms familiar Virgilian motifs. The rhythm, pace and musicality of Virgil's hexameters can be heard in Heaney's pastoral eclogues and sonnet sequences. And Virgil's life and times, as well as his poetry, contribute to the shaping of Heaney's prose poetics. In dialogue with Virgil, as well as other classical and modern poets, Heaney develops his notion of the redress of poetry: the counterbalance that poetry can offer against historical tragedy, suffering and loss. The book explores Heaney's intensely productive, thirty-year dialogue with Virgil, beginning with his translation of 'The Golden Bough' in the 1980s and extending through several major volumes, including Seeing Things, The Midnight Verdict, Electric Light, District and Circle, The Riverbank Field, Human Chain, and the posthumously published translation of Aeneid Book VI.

Highly recommended by Choice

While crossover books such as Rowling's Harry Potter series have enjoyed enormous sales and media attention, critical analysis of crossover fiction has not kept pace with the growing popularity of this new category of writing and reading. Falconer remedies this lack with close readings of six major British works of crossover fiction, and a wide-ranging analysis of the social and cultural implications of the global crossover phenomenon. A uniquely in-depth study of the crossover novel, Falconer engages with a ground-breaking range of sources, from primary texts, to child and adult reader responses, to cultural and critical theory.

A Quest for Remembrance: The Underworld in Classical and Modern literature brings together a range of arguments exploring connections between the descent into the underworld, also known as katabasis, and various forms of memory. Its chapters investigate the uses of the descent topos both in antiquity and in the reception of classical literature in the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. In the process, the volume explores how the hero's quest into the underworld engages with the theme of recovering memories from the past. At the same time, we aim to foreground how the narrative format itself is concerned with forms of commemoration ranging from trans-cultural memory, remembering the literary and intellectual canon, to commemorating important historical events that might otherwise be forgotten. Through highlighting this duality this collection aims to introduce the descent narrative as its own literary genre, a 'memorious genre' related to but distinct from the quest narrative.

The first book-length study of Heaney's dialogue with Virgil, one of Seamus Heaney's major literary exemplars.

These 16 newly commissioned critical essays and 7 previously unpublished poems by leading poets make up the first full-length study of Kathleen Jamie's writing.

So far, in the West, the dissemination of Bakhtinian thought has proceeded with little or no awareness of contemporary approaches to Bakhtin in his homeland. This collection offers unprecedented access to leading Russian research in juxtaposition with important Western scholarship on Bakhtin. Taking its cue from Bakhtin as founder of dialogical criticism, Face to Face aims to stimulate dialogue across disciplines and national boundaries.>

This is the first monograph-length study of the importance of Orpheus in Milton's conception of himself as an agonistic poet. It is one of the first monographs on Milton to make sustained use of Bakhtinian theory, specifically its concepts of author, hero and answerability. Without excluding a range of important classical sources, such as Statius's Birthday Ode to Lucan, this study argues-singularly in recent criticism-for the significant influence of Virgil. In Milton's writing (from prose to poetry), Orpheus functions as one of a number of heroes (masks, personae) by whom Milton creates an identity for himself as author. Orpheus in particular offers Milton a model (reflection) of the poet who fails, and yet turns that failure into a sign of his own identity as the faithful singer, the civilizer of men.>

What does it mean when people use the word 'Hell' to convey the horror of an actual, personal or historical experience? Now available in paperback, this book explores the idea that modern, Western secular cultures have retained a belief in the concept of Hell as an event or experience of endless or unjust suffering. In the contemporary period, the descent to Hell has come to represent the means of recovering - or discovering - selfhood. In exploring these ideas, this book discusses descent journeys in Holocaust testimony and fiction, memoirs of mental illness, and feminist, postmodern and postcolonial narratives written after 1945. A wide range of texts are discussed, including writing by Primo Levi, W.G. Sebald, Anne Michaels, Alasdair Gray, and Salman Rushdie, and films such as Coppola's Apocalypse Now and the Matrix trilogy. Drawing on theoretical writing by Bakhtin, Levinas, Derrida, Judith Butler, David Harvey and Paul Ricoeur, the book addresses such broader theoretical issues as: narration and identity; the ethics of the subject; trauma and memory; descent as sexual or political dissent; the interrelation of realism and fantasy; and Occidentalism and Orientalism. Key Features *Defines and discusses what constitutes Hell in contemporary secular Western cultures *Relates ideas from psychoanalysis to literary traditions ranging from Virgil and Dante to the present *Explores the concept of Hell in relation to crises in Western thought and identity. e.g. distortions of global capitalism, mental illness, war trauma and incarceration *Explains the significance of this narrative tradition of a 'descent to hell' in the immediate political context of 9/11 and its aftermath