Being serious demands serious kinds of work. In Styles of Seriousness, Steven Connor reflects on the surprisingly various ways in which a sense of the serious is made and maintained, revealing that while seriousness is the most powerful feeling, it is also the most poignantly indeterminate, perhaps because of the impossibility of being completely serious. In colloquy with philosophers such as Aristotle, Nietzsche, James, Sartre, Austin, Agamben and Sloterdijk, and writers like Shakespeare, Byron, Auden and Orwell, Connor considers the linguistic and ritual behaviors associated with different modes of seriousness: importance; intention, or ways of really "meaning things;" sincerity; solemnity; urgency; regret; warning; and ordeal. The central claim of the book is human beings are capable of taking things seriously in a way that nonhuman animals are not, for the unexpected reason that human beings are so much more versatile than most animals at not being completely serious. One always, in fact, has a choice about whether or not to take seriously something that is supposed to be so. As a consequence, seriousness depends on different kinds of formalization or stylized practice. Styles of seriousness matter, Connor shows, because human beings are incapable of simply and spontaneously existing. Being a human means having to take seriously one's style of being.

Being serious demands serious kinds of work. In Styles of Seriousness, Steven Connor reflects on the surprisingly various ways in which a sense of the serious is made and maintained, revealing that while seriousness is the most powerful feeling, it is also the most poignantly indeterminate, perhaps because of the impossibility of being completely serious. In colloquy with philosophers such as Aristotle, Nietzsche, James, Sartre, Austin, Agamben and Sloterdijk, and writers like Shakespeare, Byron, Auden and Orwell, Connor considers the linguistic and ritual behaviors associated with different modes of seriousness: importance; intention, or ways of really "meaning things;" sincerity; solemnity; urgency; regret; warning; and ordeal. The central claim of the book is human beings are capable of taking things seriously in a way that nonhuman animals are not, for the unexpected reason that human beings are so much more versatile than most animals at not being completely serious. One always, in fact, has a choice about whether or not to take seriously something that is supposed to be so. As a consequence, seriousness depends on different kinds of formalization or stylized practice. Styles of seriousness matter, Connor shows, because human beings are incapable of simply and spontaneously existing. Being a human means having to take seriously one's style of being.

Dickens is second only to Shakespeare in the range and intensity of critical discussion which his work has provoked. His writing is central to literature and culture across the English-speaking world. In this important new anthology, Steven Connor gathers together representative examples of the range of new critical approaches to Dickens over the last two decades.

Dickens is second only to Shakespeare in the range and intensity of critical discussion which his work has provoked. His writing is central to literature and culture across the English-speaking world. In this important new anthology, Steven Connor gathers together representative examples of the range of new critical approaches to Dickens over the last two decades.

Steven Connor provides in-depth analyses of the novel and its relationship with its own form, with contemporary culture and with history. He incorporates an extensive and varied range of writers in his discussions such as
* George Orwell
* William Golding
* Angela Carter
* Doris Lessing * Timothy Mo
* Hanif Kureishi
* Marina Warner
* Maggie Gee
Written by a foremost scholar of contemporary culture and theory, The English Novel in History, 1950 to the Present offers not only a survey but also a historical and cultural context to British literature produced in the second half of this century.

Steven Connor provides in-depth analyses of the novel and its relationship with its own form, with contemporary culture and with history. He incorporates an extensive and varied range of writers in his discussions such as
* George Orwell
* William Golding
* Angela Carter
* Doris Lessing * Timothy Mo
* Hanif Kureishi
* Marina Warner
* Maggie Gee
Written by a foremost scholar of contemporary culture and theory, The English Novel in History, 1950 to the Present offers not only a survey but also a historical and cultural context to British literature produced in the second half of this century.

Steven Connor, one of the most influential critics of twentieth-century literature and culture working today, has spent much of his career writing and thinking about Samuel Beckett. This book presents Connor's finest published work on Beckett alongside fresh essays that explore how Beckett has shaped major themes in modernism and twentieth-century literature. Through discussions of sport, nausea, slowness, flies, the radio switch, tape, religion and academic life, Connor shows how Beckett's writing is characteristic of a distinctively mundane or worldly modernism, arguing that it is well-attuned to our current concern with the stressed relations between the human and natural worlds. Through Connor's analysis, Beckett's prose, poetry and dramatic works animate a modernism profoundly concerned with life, worldly existence and the idea of the world as such. Lucid, provocative, wide-ranging, and richly informed by critical and cultural theory, this new book from Steven Connor is required reading for anyone teaching or studying Beckett, modernism and twentieth-century literary studies.

The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism offers a comprehensive introduction to postmodernism. The Companion examines the different aspects of postmodernist thought and culture that have had a significant impact on contemporary cultural production and thinking. Topics discussed by experts in the field include postmodernism's relation to modernity, and its significance and relevance to literature, film, law, philosophy, architecture, religion and modern cultural studies. The volume also includes a useful guide to further reading and a chronology. This is an essential aid for students and teachers from a range of disciplines interested in postmodernism in all its incarnations. Accessible and comprehensive, this Companion addresses the many issues surrounding this elusive, enigmatic and often controversial topic.

In a world that promotes assertion, agency, and empowerment, this book challenges us to revalue a range of actions and attitudes that have come to be disregarded or dismissed as merely passive. Mercy, resignation, politeness, restraint, gratitude, abstinence, losing well, apologizing, taking care: today, such behaviors are associated with negativity or lack. But the capacity to give way is better understood as positive action, at once intricate and demanding. Moving from intra-human common courtesies, to human-animal relations, to the global civility of human-inhuman ecological awareness, the book's argument unfolds on progressively larger scales. In reminding us of the existential threat our drives pose to our own survival, Steven Connor does not merely champion a family of behaviors; he shows that we are more adept practitioners of them than we realize. At a time when it is on the wane, Giving Way offers a powerful defense of civility, the versatile human capacity to deflect aggression into sociability and to exercise power over power itself.

In a world that promotes assertion, agency, and empowerment, this book challenges us to revalue a range of actions and attitudes that have come to be disregarded or dismissed as merely passive. Mercy, resignation, politeness, restraint, gratitude, abstinence, losing well, apologizing, taking care: today, such behaviors are associated with negativity or lack. But the capacity to give way is better understood as positive action, at once intricate and demanding. Moving from intra-human common courtesies, to human-animal relations, to the global civility of human-inhuman ecological awareness, the book's argument unfolds on progressively larger scales. In reminding us of the existential threat our drives pose to our own survival, Steven Connor does not merely champion a family of behaviors; he shows that we are more adept practitioners of them than we realize. At a time when it is on the wane, Giving Way offers a powerful defense of civility, the versatile human capacity to deflect aggression into sociability and to exercise power over power itself.

The works of James Joyce have long been regarded as central to European modernism. It is also clear what a continuing provocation and source of renewal Joyce’s works are for contemporary cultural theory, especially feminism, post modernism and postcolonialism. This new edition of Steven Connor’s book is an animated, accessible critique to the whole range of Joyce’s work, from Dubliners through to Finnegans Wake. It contains a revised bibliography and critical evaluation, taking account of the ever-rowing corpus of literary criticism of Joyce and his work. Steven Connor is a foremost scholar of modern literature, and his book traces the leading concerns of Joyce’s work with language, sexual and cultural identity, and the transforming experiences of modernity, and considers the relations between Joyce and postmodernity.

Dumbstruck - A Cultural History of Ventriloquism centres on the evolution of ventriloquism from demonic phenomenon to popular entertainment in order to analyse the shifting cultural values attached to the natural and disembodied voice. It moves from late classical accounts of oracles through theological disputes about the nature of magical voices, medieval mysticism, early modern possession cases, philosophical debates about ventriloquism in the Enlightenment, the rise of ventriloquism as popular entertainment and the appearance of the dummy in the nineteenth century to discussions of twentieth-century technology and occult belief. The book is at the intersection of cultural history, literary theory, and aesthetics.

The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism offers a comprehensive introduction to postmodernism. The Companion examines the different aspects of postmodernist thought and culture that have had a significant impact on contemporary cultural production and thinking. Topics discussed by experts in the field include postmodernism's relation to modernity, and its significance and relevance to literature, film, law, philosophy, architecture, religion and modern cultural studies. The volume also includes a useful guide to further reading and a chronology. This is an essential aid for students and teachers from a range of disciplines interested in postmodernism in all its incarnations. Accessible and comprehensive, this Companion addresses the many issues surrounding this elusive, enigmatic and often controversial topic.

Dreamwork is a book about the ideas, dreams, dreads and ideals we have regarding work. Its central argument is that, although we depend on the idea of work for our identity as humans, we feel we must disguise from ourselves the fact that we do not know what work is. There is no example of work that nobody might under some circumstances do for fun. All work is imaginary – which is not to say that it is simply illusory, but rather that, in order to count as work, it must be imagined to be work; so that a large part of what we mean by working is this work of imagining. Work is therefore essentially mystical – just the opposite of what it is taken to be. Dreamwork looks in turn at worries about whether or not work is hard; the importance of places of work; the meanings of hobbies, holidays and sabbaths; and the history of dreams of redeeming work.

In this issue of Neuroimaging Clinics, Guest Editor Stephen Connor brings considerable expertise to the topic of skull base neuroimaging. Top experts in the field cover key topics such as imaging of acute and chronic skull base infection, trigeminal neuralgia and facial pain, jugular paragangliomas and other petrous apex lesions, acquired skull base CSF leaks, and more. Provides in-depth, clinical reviews on skull base neuroimaging, providing actionable insights for clinical practice. Presents the latest information on this timely, focused topic under the leadership of experienced editors in the field; Authors synthesize and distill the latest research and practice guidelines to create these timely topic-based reviews. Contains 14 relevant, practice-oriented topics including A guide to open skull base and image guided skull base surgery for the radiologist; Anterior and central skull base tumours; Patterns of perineural skull base tumour extension from extracranial tumours; New and advanced MRI diagnostic imaging techniques in the evaluation of cranial nerves and the skull base; and more.

Many human beings have considered the powers and the limits of human knowledge, but few have wondered about the power that the idea of knowledge has over us. Steven Connor's The Madness of Knowledge is the first book to investigate this emotional inner life of knowledge--the lusts, fantasies, dreams, and fears that the idea of knowing provokes. There are in-depth discussions of the imperious will to know, of Freud's epistemophilia (or love of knowledge), and the curiously insistent links between madness, magical thinking, and the desire for knowledge. Connor also probes secrets and revelations, quarreling and the history of quizzes and "general knowledge," charlatanry and pretension, both the violent disdain and the sanctification of the stupid, as well as the emotional investment in the spaces and places of knowledge, from the study to the library. In an age of artificial intelligence, alternative facts, and mistrust of truth, The Madness of Knowledge offers an opulent, enlarging, and sometimes unnerving psychopathology of intellectual life.

Skin, Steven Connor argues, has never been more visible. "The Book of Skin explores the multiple functions of the skin in the cultures of the West. In this vividly illustrated book, Connor draws on evidence from a variety of sources including literary and other forms of public and private writing, especially medical texts, as well as painting, photography, and film, folklore and popular song. Because of its newfound visibility, skin has never been at once so manifest and so in jeopardy as it is today. This dilemma becomes evident, in Connor's view, if we examine how skin is displayed and manipulated as a site of inscription. In order to trace our culture's anxious concerns with the materiality and mortality of skin, Connor's analysis ranges from the human body itself to photography, from Medieval leprosy, Renaissance flaying, and eternal syphilis to cosmetics, plastic surgery, and skin cancers. Connor examines the chromatics of skin color and pigmentation, blushing, suntanning, paleness, darkening, tattooing, cutting, the Turin Shroud, the Mummy, and the Invisible Man. He also offers engaging explanations for why particular colors are ascribed to feelings and conditions such as green for envy, purple for rage, and yellow for cowardice. Connor's insights into the obvious and yet unfamiliar terrain of the skin and its place in Western culture ameliorates the intensities and attenuations of touch in cultural history. "The Book of Skin bears out James Joyce's claim that "modern man has an epidermis rather than a soul."

Steven Connor, one of the most influential critics of twentieth-century literature and culture working today, has spent much of his career writing and thinking about Samuel Beckett. This book presents Connor's finest published work on Beckett alongside fresh essays that explore how Beckett has shaped major themes in modernism and twentieth-century literature. Through discussions of sport, nausea, slowness, flies, the radio switch, tape, religion and academic life, Connor shows how Beckett's writing is characteristic of a distinctively mundane or worldly modernism, arguing that it is well-attuned to our current concern with the stressed relations between the human and natural worlds. Through Connor's analysis, Beckett's prose, poetry and dramatic works animate a modernism profoundly concerned with life, worldly existence and the idea of the world as such. Lucid, provocative, wide-ranging, and richly informed by critical and cultural theory, this new book from Steven Connor is required reading for anyone teaching or studying Beckett, modernism and twentieth-century literary studies.