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Research on the relationship between the apocalyptic tradition and the literary imagination has typically espoused a temporal approach which in…
one way or another revolves around the order of events that precedes the end of history and the ensuing establishment of a new world. This study, by contrast, explores the spatial dimensions of apocalypse, more precisely the way in which the settings of the Book of Revelation are taken up by contemporary American writers and related to more general but also more contested concerns of territorial integrity and national identity. Influenced by Lefebvre’s theories, the study understands territory not simply as the container of certain structures and practices but also as the result of them, just as bird song is not framed by but rather constructive of territorial borders. It is the equivalent of such ‘songs’ that this book seeks to listen in on, i.e. the apocalyptic narratives that have been passed on through the centuries to define and sustain territory on a local, regional, and national level, and the way in which seven novels by Rick Moody, Toni Morrison, Jesmyn Ward, Cormac McCarthy, and Michael Chabon respond to them.Shakespeare and Sexuality in the Comedy of Morecambe & Wise (Palgrave Studies in Comedy)
By Stephen Hamrick. 2020
Contextualizing the duo’s work within British comedy, Shakespeare criticism, the history of sexuality, and their own historical moment, this book…
offers the first sustained analysis of the 20th Century’s most successful double-act. Over the course of a forty-four-year career (1940-1984), Eric Morecambe & Ernie Wise appropriated snippets of verse, scenes, and other elements from seventeen of Shakespeare’s plays more than one-hundred-and-fifty times. Fashioning a kinder, more inclusive world, they deployed a vast array of elements connected to Shakespeare, his life, and institutions. Rejecting claims that they offer only nostalgic escapism, Hamrick analyses their work within contemporary contexts, including their engagement with many forms and genres, including Variety, the heritage industry, journalism, and more. ‘The Boys’ deploy Shakespeare to work through issues of class, sexuality, and violence. Lesbianism, drag, gay marriage, and a queer aesthetics emerge, helping to normalize homosexuality and complicate masculinity in the ‘permissive’ 1960s.Too Much: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today
By Rachel Vorona Cote. 2020
Lacing cultural criticism, Victorian literature, and storytelling together, "TOO MUCH spills over: with intellect, with sparkling prose, and with the…
brainy arguments of Vorona Cote, who posits that women are all, in some way or another, still susceptible to being called too much." (Esmé Weijun Wang)A weeping woman is a monster. So too is a fat woman, a horny woman, a woman shrieking with laughter. Women who are one or more of these things have heard, or perhaps simply intuited, that we are repugnantly excessive, that we have taken illicit liberties to feel or fuck or eat with abandon. After bellowing like a barn animal in orgasm, hoovering a plate of mashed potatoes, or spraying out spit in the heat of expostulation, we've flinched-ugh, that was so gross. I am so gross. On rare occasions, we might revel in our excess--belting out anthems with our friends over karaoke, perhaps--but in the company of less sympathetic souls, our uncertainty always returns. A woman who is Too Much is a woman who reacts to the world with ardent intensity is a woman familiar to lashes of shame and disapproval, from within as well as without. Written in the tradition of Shrill, Dead Girls, Sex Object and other frank books about the female gaze, TOO MUCH encourages women to reconsider the beauty of their excesses-emotional, physical, and spiritual. Rachel Vorona Cote braids cultural criticism, theory, and storytelling together in her exploration of how culture grinds away our bodies, souls, and sexualities, forcing us into smaller lives than we desire. An erstwhile Victorian scholar, she sees many parallels between that era's fixation on women's "hysterical" behavior and our modern policing of the same; in the space of her writing, you're as likely to encounter Jane Eyre and Lizzie Bennet as you are Britney Spears and Lana Del Rey. This book will tell the story of how women, from then and now, have learned to draw power from their reservoirs of feeling, all that makes us "Too Much."These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments In The Making Of Emily Dickinson
By Martha Ackmann. 2020
An engaging, intimate portrait of Emily Dickinson, one of America’s greatest and most-mythologized poets, that sheds new light on her…
groundbreaking poetry. On August 3, 1845, young Emily Dickinson declared, “All things are ready” and with this resolute statement, her life as a poet began. Despite spending her days almost entirely “at home” (the occupation listed on her death certificate), Dickinson’s interior world was extraordinary. She loved passionately, was hesitant about publication, embraced seclusion, and created 1,789 poems that she tucked into a dresser drawer. In These Fevered Days, Martha Ackmann unravels the mysteries of Dickinson’s life through ten decisive episodes that distill her evolution as a poet. Ackmann follows Dickinson through her religious crisis while a student at Mount Holyoke, which prefigured her lifelong ambivalence toward organized religion and her deep, private spirituality. We see the poet through her exhilarating frenzy of composition, through which we come to understand her fiercely self-critical eye and her relationship with sister-in-law and first reader, Susan Dickinson. Contrary to her reputation as a recluse, Dickinson makes the startling decision to ask a famous editor for advice, writes anguished letters to an unidentified “Master,” and keeps up a lifelong friendship with writer Helen Hunt Jackson. At the peak of her literary productivity, she is seized with despair in confronting possible blindness. Utilizing thousands of archival letters and poems as well as never-before-seen photos, These Fevered Days constructs a remarkable map of Emily Dickinson’s inner life. Together, these ten days provide new insights into her wildly original poetry and render a concise and vivid portrait of American literature’s most enigmatic figure.The American Midwest in Film and Literature: Nostalgia, Violence, and Regionalism
By Adam R. Ochonicky. 2019
How do works from film and literature—Sister Carrie, Native Son, Meet Me in St. Louis, Halloween, and A History of…
Violence, for example—imagine, reify, and reproduce Midwestern identity? And what are the repercussions of such regional narratives and images circulating in American culture? In The American Midwest in Film and Literature: Nostalgia, Violence, and Regionalism, Adam R. Ochonicky provides a critical overview of the evolution, contestation, and fragmentation of the Midwest's symbolic and often contradictory meanings. Using the frontier writings of Frederick Jackson Turner as a starting point, this book establishes a succession of Midwestern filmic and literary texts stretching from the late-19th century through the beginning of the 21st century and argues that the manifold properties of nostalgia have continually transformed popular understandings and ideological uses of the Midwest's place-identity. Ochonicky identifies three primary modes of nostalgia at play across a set of textual objects: the projection of nostalgia onto physical landscapes and into the cultural sphere (nostalgic spatiality); nostalgia as a cultural force that regulates behaviors, identities, and appearances (nostalgic violence); and the progressive potential of nostalgia to generate an acknowledgment and possible rectification of ways in which the flawed past negatively affects the present (nostalgic atonement). While developing these new conceptions of nostalgia, Ochonicky reveals how an under-examined area of regional study has received critical attention throughout the histories of American film and literature, as well as in related materials and discourses. From the closing of the Western frontier to the polarized political and cultural climate of the 21st century, this book demonstrates how film and literature have been and continue to be vital forums for illuminating the complex interplay of regionalism and nostalgia.This volume presents the first collection of essays dedicated to the science fiction of microbiologist Joan Slonczewski. Posthuman Biopolitics consolidates…
the scholarly literature on Slonczewski’s fiction and demonstrates fruitful lines of engagement for the critical, cultural, and theoretical treatment of her characters, plots, and storyworlds. Her novels treat feminism in relation to scientific practice, resistance to domination, pacifism versus militarism, the extension of human rights to nonhuman and posthuman actors, biopolitics and posthuman ethics, and symbiosis and communication across planetary scales. Posthuman Biopolitics explores the breadth and depth of Joan Slonczewski’s vision, uncovering the reflective ethical practice that informs her science fiction.UK Feminist Cartoons and Comics: A Critical Survey (Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels)
By Nicola Streeten. 2020
This book demonstrates that since the 1970s, British feminist cartoons and comics have played an important part in the Women’s…
Movement in Britain. A key component of this has been humour. This aspect of feminist history in Britain has not previously been documented. The book questions why and how British feminists have used humour in comics form to present serious political messages. It also interrogates what the implications have been for the development of feminist cartoons and for the popularisation of feminism in Britain. The work responds to recent North American feminist comics scholarship that concentrates on North American autobiographical comics of trauma by women. This book highlights the relevance of humour and provides a comparative British perspective. The time frame is 1970 to 2019, chosen as representative of a significant historical period for the development of feminist cartoon and comics activity and of feminist theory and practice. Research methods include archival data collection, complemented by interviews with selected cartoonists. Visual and textual analysis of specific examples draws on literature from humour theory, comics studies and feminist theory. Examples are also considered as responses to the economic, social and political contexts in which they were produced.This book explores the representation of fatherhood in contemporary North American autobiographical comics that depict paternal conduct from the post-war…
period up to the present. It offers equal space to autobiographical comics penned by daughters who represent their fathers’ complicated and often disappointing behavior, and to works by male cartoonists who depict and usually celebrate their own experiences as fathers. This book asks questions about how the desire to forgive or be forgiven can compromise the authors’ ethics or dictate style, considers the ownership of life stories whose subjects cannot or do not agree to be represented, and investigates the pervasive and complicated effects of dominant masculinities. By close reading these cartoonists’ complex strategies of (self-)representation, this volume also places photography and archival work alongside the problematic legacy of self-deprecation carried on from underground comics, and shows how the vocabulary of graphic narration can work with other media and at the intersection of various genres and modes to produce a valuable scrutiny of contemporary norms of fatherhood.Pound, Frost, Moore, and Poetic Precision: Science in Modernist American Poetry
By Barry Ahearn. 2020
Pound, Frost, Moore and Poetic Precision: Science in American Modernist Poetry examines three major poets in light of the demand that…
poetry aspire to scientific precision. The critical insistence that poetry be precise affected every one of these poets, and looking at how they responded to this insistence offers a new perspective on their achievements and, by extension, twentieth-century poetry in general. Ezra Pound sought to associate poetry with the precision of modern science, technology and mathematics as a way to eliminate or reduce error. Robert Frost, however, welcomed imprecision as a fundamental aspect of existence that the poet could use. Marianne Moore appreciated the value of both precision and imprecision, especially with respect to her religious perspective on human and natural phenomena. By analyzing these particular poets’ reaction to the value placed on precision, Barry Ahearn explores how that emphasis influenced the broader culture, literary culture and twentieth-century Modernist American poetry.This book looks to the rich and varied Islamic tradition for insights into what it means to be human and,…
by implication, what this can tell us about the future human. The transhumanist movement, in its more radical expression, sees Homo sapiens as the cousin, perhaps the poorer cousin, of a new Humanity 2.0: ‘Man’ is replaced by ‘Superman’. The contribution that Islam can make to this movement concerns the central question of what this ‘Superman’ – or ‘Supermuslim’ – would actually entail. To look at what Islam can contribute we need not restrict ourselves to the Qur’an and the legal tradition, but also reach out to its philosophical and literary corpus. Roy Jackson focuses on such contributions from Muslim philosophy, science, and literature to see how Islam can confront and respond to the challenges raised by the growing movement of transhumanism.Deconstructing the Enlightenment in Spanish America: Margins of Modernity
By Adam Sharman. 2020
This book is about Enlightenment culture in Spanish America before Independence—in short, there where, according to Hegel, one would least…
expect to find it. It explores the Enlightenment in texts from five cultural fields: science, history, the periodical press, law, and literature. Texts include the journals of the geodesic expedition to Quito, philosophical histories of the Americas, a year’s work from the Mercurio Peruano, the writings of Mariano Moreno, and Lizardi’s El periquillo sarniento. Each chapter takes one field, one body of writing, and one key question: Is modern science universal? Can one disavow the discourse of progress? What is a “Catholic” Enlightenment? Are Enlightenment reason and sovereignty monological? Must the individual be the normative subject of modernity? The book’s premise is that the above texts not only speak to the contradictions of a doubtless marginalised colonial American Ilustración but illuminate the constitutive aporias of the so-called modern project itself. Drawing on the work of Derrida, but also on both historical and philosophical accounts of the various Enlightenments, this incisive book will be of interest to students of Spanish America and scholars in the fields of postcolonialism and the Enlightenment.New York: A Literary History (Routledge Studies In First World War History Ser.)
By Ross Wilson. 2014
New York City's streets, parks, museums, architecture, and its people appear in an array of literary works published from New…
York's earliest settlement to the present day. The exploration of the city as both a symbol and as a reality has formed the basis of New York's literature. Using the themes of adaptation, innovation, identity, and hope, this history explores novels, poetry, periodicals, and newspapers to examine how New York's literature can be understood through the notion of movement. From the periodicals of the nineteenth century, the Arabic writers of the city in the early twentieth century, the literature of homelessness, childhood, and the spaces of tragedy and resilience within the metropolis, this diverse assessment opens up new areas of research within urban literature. It provides an innovative examination of how writing has shaped the lives of New Yorkers and how writing about the city has shaped the modern world.Jane Austen and Altruism (Routledge Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature)
By Magdalen Ki. 2020
Jane Austen and Altruism identifies a compelling theme, namely, the view that Jane Austen propounds a rigorous, boundary-sensitive model of…
altruism that counters the human propensity to selfishness and promotes the culture of cooperation. In her days, altruism was commonly known as "benevolence", "charity," or "philanthropy", and these concepts overlap with Auguste Comte’s later definition of altruism as "otherism". This volume argues that Austen’s thinking co-opts the evolutionary idea that altruism is seldom truly pure, egoism cannot be eradicated, and boundless group altruism is not sustainable. However, given that she comes from a naval and clergy family, she witnesses the power of wartime patriotism, the Evangelical revival, the Regency culture of politeness, and the sentimental novels. In her novels, she locates human relationships along an altruism continuum that ranges from enlightened selfishness to pathological altruism. Unconditional love is hard to find, but empathy, kin altruism, reciprocal exchange, and group altruism are key to the formation of self-identity, family, community and the nation state.A Companion to Plautus (Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World)
By Dorota Dutsch, George Fredric Franko. 2020
An important addition to contemporary scholarship on Plautus and Plautine comedy, provides new essays and fresh insights from leading scholars …
A Companion to Plautus is a collection of original essays on the celebrated Old Latin period playwright. A brilliant comic poet, Plautus moved beyond writing Latin versions of Greek plays to create a uniquely Roman cultural experience worthy of contemporary scholarship. Contributions by a team of international scholars explore the theatrical background of Roman comedy, the theory and practice of Plautus’ dramatic composition, the relation of Plautus’ works to Roman social history, and his influence on later dramatists through the centuries. Responding to renewed modern interest in Plautine studies, the Companion reassesses Plautus’ works—plays that are meant to be viewed and experienced—to reveal new meaning and contemporary relevance. Chapters organized thematically offer multiple perspectives on individual plays and enable readers to gain a deeper understanding of Plautus’ reflection of, and influence on Roman society. Topics include metatheater and improvisation in Plautus, the textual tradition of Plautus, trends in Plautus Translation, and modern reception in theater and movies. Exploring the place of Plautus and Plautine comedy in the Western comic tradition, the Companion: Addresses the most recent trends in the study of Roman comedy Features discussions on religion, imperialism, slavery, war, class, gender, and sexuality in Plautus’ work Highlights recent scholarship on representation of socially vulnerable characters Discusses Plautus’ work in relation to Roman stages, actors, audience, and culture Examines the plot construction, characterization, and comic techniques in Plautus’ scripts Part of the acclaimed Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World series, A Companion to Plautus is an important resource for scholars, instructors, and students of both ancient and modern drama, comparative literature, classics, and history, particularly Roman history.Literature in our Lives: Talking About Texts from Shakespeare to Philip Pullman
By Richard Jacobs. 2020
This book recreates in written form seventeen of the most popular, frankly personal and engaging lectures on literature given by…
the award-winning teacher Richard Jacobs, who has been working with students for over forty years. This is a book written for students, whether starting their studies or more experienced, and also for all lovers of literature. At its heart is the conviction that reading, thinking about, and writing or talking about literature involves us all personally: texts talk to us intimately and urgently, inviting us to talk back, intervening in and changing our lives. These lectures discuss, in an open but richly informed way, a wide range of texts that are regularly studied and enjoyed. They model what it means to be excited about reading and studying literature, and how the study of literature can be life-changing - perhaps even with the effect of changing the lives of readers of this eloquent and remarkable book.The Literary History of the Igbo Novel: African Literature in African Languages (Routledge African Studies)
By Ernest N. Emenyonu. 2020
This book looks at the trends in the development of the Igbo novel from its antecedents in oral performance, through…
the emergence of the first published novel, Omenuko, in 1933 by Pita Nwana, to the contemporary Igbo novel. Defining "Igbo literature" as literature in Igbo language, and "Igbo novel" as a novel written in Igbo language, the author argues that oral and written literature in African indigenous languages hold an important foundational position in the history of African literature. Focusing on the contributions of Igbo writers to the development of African literature in African languages, the book examines the evolution, themes, and distinctive features of the Igbo novel, the historical circumstances of the rise of the African novel in the pre-colonial, era and their impact on the contemporary Igbo novel. This book will be of interest to scholars of African literature, literary history, and Igbo studies.The Visceral Logics of Decolonization
By Neetu Khanna. 2020
In The Visceral Logics of Decolonization Neetu Khanna rethinks the project of decolonization by exploring a knotted set of relations…
between embodied experience and political feeling that she conceptualizes as the visceral. Khanna focuses on the work of the Progressive Writers' Association (PWA)—a Marxist anticolonial literary group active in India between the 1930s and 1950s—to show how anticolonial literature is a staging ground for exploring racialized emotion and revolutionary feeling. Among others, Khanna examines novels by Mulk Raj Anand, Ahmed Ali, and Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, as well as the feminist writing of Rashid Jahan and Ismat Chughtai, who each center the somatic life of the body as a fundamental site of colonial subjugation. In this way, decolonial action comes not solely from mental transformation, but from a reconstitution of the sensorial nodes of the body. The visceral, Khanna contends, therefore becomes a critical dimension of Marxist theories of revolutionary consciousness. In tracing the contours of the visceral's role in decolonial literature and politics, Khanna bridges affect and postcolonial theory in new and provocative ways.Urban Horror: Neoliberal Post-Socialism and the Limits of Visibility (Sinotheory)
By Erin Y. Huang. 2020
In Urban Horror Erin Y. Huang theorizes the economic, cultural, and political conditions of neoliberal post-socialist China. Drawing on Marxist…
phenomenology, geography, and aesthetics from Engels and Merleau-Ponty to Lefebvre and Rancière, Huang traces the emergence and mediation of what she calls urban horror—a sociopolitical public affect that exceeds comprehension and provides the grounds for possible future revolutionary dissent. She shows how documentaries, blockbuster feature films, and video art from China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan made between the 1990s and the present rehearse and communicate urban horror. In these films urban horror circulates through myriad urban spaces characterized by the creation of speculative crises, shifting temporalities, and dystopic environments inhospitable to the human body. The cinematic image and the aesthetics of urban horror in neoliberal post-socialist China lay the groundwork for the future to such an extent, Huang contends, that the seeds of dissent at the heart of urban horror make it possible to imagine new forms of resistance.The ‘memsahibs’ of the British Raj in India are well-known figures today, frequently depicted in fiction, TV and film. In…
recent years, they have also become the focus of extensive scholarship. Less familiar to both academics and the general public, however, are the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century precursors to the memsahibs of the Victorian and Edwardian era. Yet British women also visited and resided in India in this earlier period, witnessing first-hand the tumultuous, expansionist decades in which the East India Company established British control over the subcontinent. Some of these travellers produced highly regarded accounts of their experiences, thereby inaugurating a rich tradition of women’s travel writing about India. In the process, they not only reported events and developments in the subcontinent, they also contributed to them, helping to shape opinion and policy on issues such as colonial rule, religion, and social reform. This new set in the Chawton House Library Women’s Travel Writing series assembles seven of these accounts, six by British authors (Jemima Kindersley, Maria Graham, Eliza Fay, Ann Deane, Julia Maitland and Mary Sherwood) and one by an American (Harriet Newell). Their narratives – here reproduced for the first time in reset scholarly editions – were published between 1777 and 1854, and recount journeys undertaken in India, or periods of residence there, between the 1760s and the 1830s. Collectively they showcase the range of women’s interests and activities in India, and also the variety of narrative forms, voices and personae available to them as travel writers. Some stand squarely in the tradition of Enlightenment ethnography; others show the growing influence of Evangelical beliefs. But all disrupt any lingering stereotypes about women’s passivity, reticence and lack of public agency in this period, when colonial women were not yet as sequestered and debarred from cross-cultural contact as they would later be during the Raj. Their narratives are consequently a useful resource to students and researchers across multiple fields and disciplines, including women’s writing, travel writing, colonial and postcolonial studies, the history of women’s educational and missionary work, and Romantic-era and nineteenth-century literature. This volume includes 2 texts, Jemima Kindersley, Letters from the Island of Teneriffe, Brazil, the Cape of Good Hope, and the East Indies (1777) and Maria Graham, Journal of a Residence in India (1812).Decadent Orientalisms: The Decay of Colonial Modernity
By David Fieni. 2020
Decadent Orientalisms presents a sustained critique of the ways Orientalism and decadence have formed a joint discursive mode of the…
imperial imagination. Attentive to historical and literary configurations of language, race, religion, and power, Fieni shows the importance of understanding Western discourses of Eastern decline and obsolescence together with Arab and Islamic responses in which the language of decadence returns as a characteristic of the West.Taking seriously Edward Said’s claim that Orientalism is a “style of having power,” Fieni works historically through the aesthetic and ideological effects of Orientalist style, showing how it is at once comparative, descriptive, and performative. Orientalism, the book argues, relies upon decadence as the figure through which its positivist scientific claims become redistributed as speech acts—“truths” that establish dominance. Rather than attending to Orientalism as a repertoire of clichés and stereotypes, Decadent Orientalisms considers the systemic epistemological consequences of the diffuse, yet coherent network of institutions that have constituted Orientalism’s power.