The first comprehensive study of the works of William Hope Hodgson, one of the true innovators of Weird fiction, this book examines the Weird novels and stories upon which his posthumous reputation rests, his non-fantastic writing, identifiable literary influences, and the historical contexts in which he wrote. Focusing extensively upon major works such as The House on the Borderland (1908) and The Night Land (1912), Timothy S. Murphy surveys topics including Hodgson’s experiments with code switching and linguistic experimentation; his depictions of racial and ethnic differences and gender and sexuality; the function of space and place in his writing; the adaptation of his shipboard experiences; and his use of abyssal time. With special attention paid to his paradoxical nihilist humanism, this book explores what made Hodgson a respected precursor to later innovators such as H. P. Lovecraft and C.L. Moore, and what makes him an important ancestor to 21st-century writers such as China Miéville, Greg Bear, and Charlie Jane Anders. Demonstrating how his work is both of his time and ‘untimely’, Murphy recovers Hodgson as the most significant figure to precede the fantastically popular but deeply controversial Lovecraft, as well as a figure whose work challenges what has thus far been accepted about the genre and the interpretive perspectives from which we view it.

In Subversive Spinoza, Antonio Negri spells out the philosophical credo that inspired his radical renewal of Marxism and his compelling analysis of the modern state and the global economy by means of an inspiring reading of the challenging metaphysics of the seventeenth-century Dutch-Jewish philosopher Spinoza. For Negri, Spinoza's philosophy has never been more relevant than it is today to debates over individuality and community, democracy and resistance, and modernity and postmodernity. This collection of essays extends, clarifies and revises the argument of Negri's influential 1981 book 'The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza's Metaphysics and Politics' and links it directly to his recent work on constituent power, time and empire. -- .

The spectacular success of Empire has brought Negri's writing to a new, wider audience. This book reveals the variety and complexity of Negri's thought and its unique relevance to modern politics. Outstanding contributors include Pierre Macherey, Daniel Bensaïd, Alex Callinicos and Judith Revel. Negri is one of the most sophisticated analysts of modern political philosophy. His work is both difficult and exhilarating, engaging as it does with Marx, Spinoza, Deleuze, Guattari, Tronti and others. This book is ideal for readers who want to get to grips with Negri's key themes. It makes a great introduction to his work for students of political philosophy, as well as providing a comprehensive critical approach for Negri enthusiasts. This book is the sequel to The Philosophy of Antonio Negri, Volume One: Resistance in Practice (Pluto, 2005) but can be read entirely independently.

This collection of specially commissioned essays is the first of its kind in English on the work of Antonio Negri, the Italian philosopher and political theorist. The spectacular success of Empire, Negri's collaboration with Michael Hardt, has brought Negri's writing to a new, wider audience. A substantial body of his writing is now available to an English-speaking readership. Outstanding contributors--including Michael Hardt, Sergio Bologna, Kathi Weeks and Nick Dyer-Witheford--reveal the variety and complexity of Negri's thought and explores its unique relevance to modern politics. Negri is one of the most sophisticated analyists of modern political philosophy. Philosophers and critics alike find his work both difficult and exhilarating, engaging as it does with Marx, Spinoza, Deleuze, Guattari, Tronti and others. This book is ideal for readers who want to get to grips with Negri's key themes, in particular his theories on labour, capital, power, the state and revolution. It makes a great introduction to his work for students of political philosophy, as well as providing a comprehensive critical approach for Negri enthusiasts.

With "Trilogy of Resistance," the political philosopher Antonio Negri extends his intervention in contemporary politics and culture into a new medium: drama. The three plays collected for the first time in this volume dramatize the central concepts of the innovative and influential thought he has articulated in his best-selling books "Empire" and "Multitude," coauthored with Michael Hardt.
In the tradition of Bertolt Brecht and Heiner Muller, Negri's political dramas are designed to provoke debate around the fundamental questions they raise about resistance, violence, and tyranny. In "Swarm," the protagonist searches for an effective mode of activism; with the help of a Greek-style chorus, she tries on different roles, from the suicide bomber and party apparatchik to the multitude. "The Bent Man," set in fascist Italy, focuses on a woodcutter who resists fascism by bending himself in two and using his own now-twisted body as a weapon against war. In "Cithaeron," perhaps the most audacious of the three plays, Negri reworks Euripides's "Bacchae" to explore the circumstances that would compel a diverse and creative community to withdraw from both the despotic government that constrains it and the traditional family relationships that reinforce that despotism.
First published in France in 2009 and featuring an introduction by Negri, "Trilogy of Resistance" provides a direct and passionate distillation of Negri's concepts and offers insights into one of the most important projects in political philosophy currently under way, as well as a timely reminder of the power of theater to effectively dramatize complex and challenging ideas.

William S. Burroughs is one of the twentieth century's most visible, controversial, and baffling literary figures. In the first comprehensive study of the writer, Timothy S. Murphy places Burroughs in the company of the most significant intellectual minds of our time. In doing so, he gives us an immensely readable and convincing account of a man whose achievements continue to have a major influence on American art and culture. Murphy draws on the work of such philosophers as Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Theodor Adorno, and Jean-Paul Sartre, and also investigates the historical contexts from which Burroughs' writings arose. From the paranoid isolationism of the Cold War through the countercultural activism of the sixties to the resurgence of corporate and state control in the eighties, Burroughs' novels, films, and music hold a mirror to the American psyche. Murphy coins the term 'amodernism' as a way to describe Burroughs' contested relationship to the canon while acknowledging the writer's explicit desire for a destruction of such systems of classification. Despite the popular mythology that surrounds Burroughs, his work has been largely excluded from the academy of American letters. Finally here is a book that presents a solid portrait of a major artistic innovator, a writer who combines aesthetics and politics and who can perform as anthropologist, social goad, or media icon, all with consummate skill.