In such novels as Hotel World and the Whitbread Prize winning The Accidental, Ali Smith has established herself as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary fiction. Covering her complete oeuvre, from the short stories to her most recent novel There but for the, this is the first comprehensive critical guide to Smith's work. Bringing together leading scholars, Ali Smith: Contemporary Critical Perspectives covers such topics as: * Language, truth and reality * Spectral presences and the uncanny * Gender and sexuality * Cosmopolitanism * Smith's place in the contemporary canon Including a new interview with the author, a chronology of her life and authoritative guides to further reading, this is an essential guide for anyone interested in the best of contemporary fiction.

This interdisciplinary volume focuses on critical and theoretical responses to the apocalypse, reflecting on its past tradition, pervasive present and future legacy. It offers a dynamic combination of theoretical speculation, textual analysis and historicisation, exploring four crucial areas of investigation: theory, space, time, and language. Authors examine how apocalyptic discourses have had an impact on how we read the world's globalised space, the traumatic burden of history, and the mutual relationship between language and eschatological belief. The apocalypse is generally understood as a complex and often paradoxical paradigm of contemporary culture. This book offers a new, post-millennial perspective that perceives 'the end' as immanent rather than imminent, and develops existing theoretical tendencies that approach apocalyptic fictions as fantastic displacements of contemporary social, cultural and political anxieties. It points to the many ways in which the apocalypse is spatialised and mapped across urban, virtual, and global spaces.This collection explores the widespread appeal of the apocalypse as one of the most pervasive preoccupations in the history of Western culture, and one that has served as a template to construct different sets of cultural anxieties throughout history.

Written from various critical standpoints by international scholars, Scottish Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion interrogates the ways in which the concepts of the Gothic and Scotland have intersected and been manipulated from the mideighteenth century to the present day. This interdisciplinary collection will be the first ever published study to investigate the multifarious strands of Gothic in Scottish fiction, poetry, theatre and film. Its contributors -- all specialists in their field -- combine an attention to socio-historical and cultural contexts with a rigorous close reading of works, both classic and lesser known, produced between the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries.

Interrogates the Gothic in relation to Scotland, 'Scottishness', British Gothic, cultural and national boundaries, and issues of identity Written from various critical standpoints by internationally renowned scholars, Scottish Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion interrogates the ways in which the concepts of the Gothic and Scotland have intersected and been manipulated from the mid-eighteenth century to the present day. This interdisciplinary collection is the first ever published study to investigate the multifarious strands of Gothic in Scottish fiction, poetry, theatre and film. Its contributors -- all specialists in their fields -- combine an attention to socio-historical and cultural contexts with a rigorous close reading of works, both classic and lesser known, produced between the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries. Key Features Offers the first critical collection devoted to the topic of the Scottish Gothic as it is manifested across centuries Re-ignites ongoing debates about the relationship between Scotland and the Gothic, Scotland and Romanticism, Scotland and the Enlightenment, and the role of the Gothic in relation to national identity issues Considers issues of religion, politics, history, and culture/cultural identity in Scottish Gothic texts across centuries against the backdrop of the Act of Union and the process of devolution/independence Presents fresh readings of established, overlooked, and recent Scottish Gothic works across a variety of cultural and literary forms

This interdisciplinary collection of essays focuses on critical and theoretical responses to the apocalypse of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century cultural production. Examining the ways in which apocalyptic discourses have had an impact on how we read the world's globalised space, the traumatic burden of history, and the mutual relationship between language and eschatological belief, fifteen original essays by a group of internationally established and emerging critics reflect on the apocalypse, its past tradition, pervasive present and future legacy. The collection seeks to offer a new reading of the apocalypse, understood as a complex - and, frequently, paradoxical - paradigm of (contemporary) Western culture. The majority of published collections on the subject have been published prior to the year 2000 and, in their majority of cases, locate the apocalypse in the future and envision it as something imminent. This collection offers a post-millennial perspective that perceives "the end" as immanent and, simultaneously, rooted in the past tradition.

Since Ursula Andress's white-bikini debut in Dr No, 'Bond Girls' have been simultaneously celebrated as fashion icons and dismissed as 'eye-candy'. But the visual glamour of the women of James Bond reveals more than the sexual objectification of female beauty. Through the original joint perspectives of body and fashion, this exciting study throws a new, subversive light on Bond Girls. Like Coco Chanel, fashion's 'eternal' mademoiselle, these 'Girls' are synonymous with an unconventional and dynamic femininity that does not play by the rules and refuses to sit still; far from being the passive objects of the male gaze, Bond Girls' active bodies instead disrupt the stable frame of Bond's voyeurism. Starting off with an original re-assessment of the cultural roots of Bond's postwar masculinity, the book argues that Bond Girls emerge from masculine anxieties about the rise of female emancipation after the Second World War and persistent in the present day. Displaying parallels with the politics of race and colonialism, such tensions appear through sartorial practices as diverse as exoticism, power dressing and fetish wear, which reveal complex and often contradictory ideas about the patriarchal and imperial ideologies associated with Bond. Attention to costume, film and gender theory makes Bond Girls: Body, Gender and Fashion essential reading for students and scholars of fashion, media and cultural studies, and for anyone with an interest in Bond.

In such novels as Hotel World and the Whitbread Prize winning The Accidental, Ali Smith has established herself as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary fiction. Covering her complete oeuvre, from the short stories to her most recent novel There but for the, this is the first comprehensive critical guide to Smith's work. Bringing together leading scholars, Ali Smith: Contemporary Critical Perspectives covers such topics as: * Language, truth and reality * Spectral presences and the uncanny * Gender and sexuality * Cosmopolitanism * Smith's place in the contemporary canon Including a new interview with the author, a chronology of her life and authoritative guides to further reading, this is an essential guide for anyone interested in the best of contemporary fiction.