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. -- .

Long before Antonio Negri became famous around the world for his groundbreaking volume Empire, he was infamous across Europe for the incendiary writings contained in this book. Books for Burning consists of five pamphlets that Negri wrote between 1971 and 1977, which attempt to identify and draw lessons from new conditions of class struggle that emerged in the course of the 1970s. Conceived as organizational hypotheses intended for debate among the members of the political movements Workers' Power (Potere operaio) and Organized Autonomy (Autonomia organizzata), these texts were later misread and misrepresented by the Italian state in its attempt to frame Negri as responsible for the assassination of former Italian president Aldo Moro, as the leader of the Red Brigades, and as the mastermind of an armed insurrection against the state. In the more than twenty-five years since their first publication, these texts have lost none of their originality, relevance or power to shock. In a new preface, Negri demonstrates how his controversial work on empire, biopolitics and immaterial labor developed out of concepts and strategies first outlined in this book, and an editorial introduction analyzes the role these texts played in Negri's trial and in the criminalization of the Italian radical workers' movement.

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.