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Tells the story of the struggle to imagine new forms of justice after Nuremberg Returning to the work of Hannah Arendt as a theoretical starting point, Lyndsey Stonebridge traces a critical aesthetics of judgement in postwar writers and intellectuals, including Rebecca West, Elizabeth Bowen, Muriel Spark and Iris Murdoch. Writing in the false dawn of a new era of international justice and human rights, these complicated women intellectuals were drawn to the law because of its promise of justice...

How can we use art to reconstruct ourselves and the material world? Is every individual an art object? Is the material world an art text? This book answers these questions by examining modernist literature, especially James Joyce and W.B. Yeats, in the context of anarchist intellectual thought and Georges Sorel's theory of social myth.

This book charts Fitzgerald's use of racial stereotypes to encode the dual nature of his literary ambition: his desire to be on the one hand a popular American entertainer, and on the other to make his mark in an elite, international literary field.

First published in 1933, this study, which underwent revision in the 1960s, is a comprehensive survey of the verse of English nineteenth-century poets whose work appeared after 1860. A special feature is the full and critical treatment of minor writers. In no other book is their work so carefully evaluated. There is a full account of the minor Pre-Raphaelites, of James Thomson, the poet of The City of Dreadful Night, of Henley, Stevenson and George MacDonald. John Davidson is the subject of a lo...

Through meaningful examples, Betty Carter's Love Honor and Negotiate demonstrates how to tailor marriages to fit the pressures of the real world. Family therapist Betty Carter's cutting-edge, common-sense approach to helping marriages flourish is based on the premise that couples today want to be equals, but the realities of the workplace force them into traditional roles, especially after they have children.

Why do contemporary writers use myths from ancient Greece and Rome, Pharaonic Egypt, the Viking north, Africa’s west coast, and Hebrew and Christian traditions? What do these stories from premodern cultures have to offer us? The Metamorphoses of Myth in Fiction since 1960 examines how myth has shaped writings by Kathy Acker, Margaret Atwood, William S. Burroughs, A. S. Byatt, Neil Gaiman, Norman Mailer, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Jeanette Winterson, and others, and contrasts...

Violence from Slavery to #BlackLivesMatter brings together perspectives on violence and its representation in African American history from slavery to the present moment. Contributors explore how violence, signifying both an instrument of the white majority's power and a modality of black resistance, has been understood and articulated in primary materials that range from slave narrative through "lynching plays" and Richard Wright's fiction to contemporary activist poetry, and from photography o...

Postmodern Metanarratives investigates the relationship between cinema and literature by analyzing the film Blade Runner as a postmodern work that constitutes a landmark of cyberpunk narrative and establishes a link between tradition and the (post)modern.

Challenging readers to rethink what they read and why, the author questions the aesthetic assumptions that have led to the devaluing of fan fiction-a genre criticized as tasteless and derivative-and other ""guilty pleasure"" reading (and writing) including romance and fantasy. The complicated relationship between ""fanfic"" and intellectual property is discussed in light of the millennia-old tradition of derivative literature, before modern copyright law established originality as the hallmark o...

This study addresses the question of artistic identity and the myth of the artist as it has been shaped by the artists themselves. While the term artist is to be understood in a broad sense, the focus of this study is the literature of the Romantic tradition. Identity is largely perceived as a construct, and a central hypothesis of this book concerns its aesthetic value and the ways it creates dominant narratives of self-perception that produce powerful myths. The construction of the artist’s i...

This collection establishes the term 'medical paratexts' as a useful addition to medical humanities, book history, and literary studies research. As a relatively new field of study, little critical attention has been paid to medical paratexts. We understand paratext as the apparatus of graphic communication: title pages, prefaces, illustrations, marginalia, and publishing details which act as mediators between text and reader. Discussing the development of medical paratexts across scribal, print...

Phillis Wheatley, the African-born slave poet, is considered by many to be a pioneer of Anglo-American poetics. This study argues how in her 1773 POEMS, Wheatley uses John Milton's poetry to develop an idealistic vision of an emerging Anglo-American republic comprised of Britons, Africans, Native Americans, and women.

Frances Burney and Narrative Prior to Ideology works between Burney's Journals and Letters and her fiction more thoroughly than any study of her in the past twenty-five years. By doing so, it offers significant reinterpretations of Burney's four novels: Evelina, Cecilia, Camilla, and The Wanderer. It describes Burney's eluding the major modern-isms through which critics have tried to read her: Feminism (with its "gendering" of beauty and reversal of gender roles); Capitalism and its Marxist crit...

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 no...

The 'rise of the middle class' in the eighteenth century has long been taken to usher in a prosaic age synonymous with the death of tragedy, an age in which the sheer ordinariness of bourgeois life was both antithetical and inured to the tragic. But the period's literature tells a very different story. Re-assembling a body of print and performance concerned with the misfortunes of the middling sort, The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy argues that these works imagined a particularly modern so...

This five-volume series, British Women’s Writing From Brontë to Bloomsbury, 1840-1940, historically contextualizes and traces developments in women’s fiction from 1840 to 1940. Critically assessing both canonical and lesser-known British women’s writing decade by decade, it redefines the landscape of women’s authorship across a century of dynamic social and cultural change. With each of its volumes devoted to two decades, the series is wide in scope but historically sharply defined. Volume 1: 1...