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The Plague Years collects scholarly and essayistic reflections on
literary, visual, and sonic representations of the COVID-19 and
other pandemics. These are placed alongside poetry and short
fiction written in the first two years of quarantine or isolation.
This range expresses the intellectual and imaginative struggle and
ingenuity entailed in coming to terms with the rampant spread of
disease and its emotional, cultural, and political consequences.
The contributions are from diverse contexts: Africa (from Egypt to
South Africa), China, Japan, the US, and Scandinavia. They consider
some of the array of contemporary engagements: poems translated
from Mandarin about the traumas of the frontline, Chinese
calligraphic poetry printed on cartons of PPE, comments on the
literary history of representing epidemics and pandemics, political
analyses of the post-truth present, and the role of life-writing
and gaming in an interrupted world. Given the generative and
creative obliquity of many of its parts, this collection shifts how
one thinks about the diseased present and the archival pasts on
which it draws. The chapters in this book were originally published
as a special issue of English Studies in Africa.
The world keeps turning to apocalypticism. Time is imagined as
proceeding ineluctably to a catastrophic, perhaps revelatory
conclusion. Even when evacuated of distinctly religious content, a
broadly ecclesial structure persists in conceptions of our
precarious life and our collective journey to an inevitable
fate-the extinction of the human species. It is commonly believed
that we are propelled along this course by human turpitude, myopia,
hubris or ignorance, and by the irreparable damage we have wrought
to the world we inhabit. Yet, this apprehension is insidious. Such
teleological convictions and crises-laden narratives lead us to
undervalue contingent, hesitant and provisional forms of experience
and knowledge. The essays comprising this volume concern a range of
writers' engagements with apocalyptic reasoning. Extending from a
reading of Percy Bysshe Shelley's 'Triumph of Life' to critiques of
contemporary American novels, they examine the ways in which 'end
times' reasoning can inhibit imaginative reflection, blunt
political advocacy or - more positively - provide a repertoire for
the critique of complacency. By gathering essays concerning a wide
range of periods and literary dispositions, this volume makes an
important contribution to thinking about apocalypticism in
literature but also as a social and political discourse. This book
was originally published as a special issue of Studia
Neophilologica.
Shipwreck Narratives: Out of Our Depth studies both the
representation of shipwreck and the ways in which shipwrecks are
used in creative, philosophical, and political works. The first
part of the book examines historical shipwreck narratives published
over a period of two centuries and their legacies. Michael
Titlestad points to a range of narrative conventions, literary
tropes and questions concerning representation and its limits in
narratives about these historic shipwrecks. The second part engages
novels, poems, films, artwork, and musical composition that grapple
with shipwreck. Collectively the chapters suggest the spectacular
productivity of shipwreck narrative; the multiple ways in which its
concerns and logic have inspired anxious creativity in the last
century. Titlestad recognizes in weaving in his personal experience
that shipwreck-the destruction of form and the advent of
disorder-could be seen not only as a corollary for his own
neurological disorder, but also an abiding principle in tropology.
This book describes how shipwreck has figured in texts (from
historical narratives to fiction, film and music) as an analogue
for emotional, psychological, and physical fragmentation.
The world keeps turning to apocalypticism. Time is imagined as
proceeding ineluctably to a catastrophic, perhaps revelatory
conclusion. Even when evacuated of distinctly religious content, a
broadly ecclesial structure persists in conceptions of our
precarious life and our collective journey to an inevitable
fate-the extinction of the human species. It is commonly believed
that we are propelled along this course by human turpitude, myopia,
hubris or ignorance, and by the irreparable damage we have wrought
to the world we inhabit. Yet, this apprehension is insidious. Such
teleological convictions and crises-laden narratives lead us to
undervalue contingent, hesitant and provisional forms of experience
and knowledge. The essays comprising this volume concern a range of
writers' engagements with apocalyptic reasoning. Extending from a
reading of Percy Bysshe Shelley's 'Triumph of Life' to critiques of
contemporary American novels, they examine the ways in which 'end
times' reasoning can inhibit imaginative reflection, blunt
political advocacy or - more positively - provide a repertoire for
the critique of complacency. By gathering essays concerning a wide
range of periods and literary dispositions, this volume makes an
important contribution to thinking about apocalypticism in
literature but also as a social and political discourse. This book
was originally published as a special issue of Studia
Neophilologica.
Shipwreck Narratives: Out of Our Depth studies both the
representation of shipwreck and the ways in which shipwrecks are
used in creative, philosophical, and political works. The first
part of the book examines historical shipwreck narratives published
over a period of two centuries and their legacies. Michael
Titlestad points to a range of narrative conventions, literary
tropes and questions concerning representation and its limits in
narratives about these historic shipwrecks. The second part engages
novels, poems, films, artwork, and musical composition that grapple
with shipwreck. Collectively the chapters suggest the spectacular
productivity of shipwreck narrative; the multiple ways in which its
concerns and logic have inspired anxious creativity in the last
century. Titlestad recognizes in weaving in his personal experience
that shipwreck-the destruction of form and the advent of
disorder-could be seen not only as a corollary for his own
neurological disorder, but also an abiding principle in tropology.
This book describes how shipwreck has figured in texts (from
historical narratives to fiction, film and music) as an analogue
for emotional, psychological, and physical fragmentation.
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