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Exploring how the Bloomsbury Group's cutting-edge thinkers-Virginia Woolf, Sigmund Freud, and E. M. Forster-understood the intimacy of friends, lovers, spouses, and families as historically unfolding phenomena, this book offers a compelling account of modernism's legacies in contemporary fiction and demonstrates the myriad ways in which intimacy was a guiding and persistent idea explored by writers across the 20th-century and up to the present day. Often modernists have been celebrated for the...

The works of African American authors and artists are too often interpreted through the lens of authenticity. They are scrutinized for “positive” or “negative” representations of Black people and Black culture or are assumed to communicate some truth about Black identity or the “Black experience.” However, many contemporary Black artists are creating works that cannot be slotted into such categories. Their art resists interpretation in terms of conventional racial discourse; instead, they embrac...

Within the hypermediated age where knowledge production is decentered and horizontal, the experience of lived time has become a concordance of temporalities. The literary imagination, which was emblematic of modernity and thoroughly connected to the book as a support structure, has now become integrated within a much vaster regime of publication. Thought concerning the world is from now on a thought concerning a plurality of worlds. By way of six guiding threads (exposition, media, controversy,...

Everywhere today, we are urged to “connect.” Literary critics celebrate a new “honesty” in contemporary fiction or call for a return to “realism.” Yet such rhetoric is strikingly reminiscent of earlier theorizations. Two of the most famous injunctions of twentieth-century writing—E. M. Forster’s “Only connect . . .” and Fredric Jameson’s “Always historicize!”—helped establish connection as the purpose of the novel and its reconstruction as the task of criticism. But what if connection was not th...

An Art of Desire. Reading Paul Auster the first book-length study solely devoted to the novels of Paul Auster. From the vantage-point of poststructuralist theory, especially Lacanian psychoanalysis and Derridean deconstruction, this book explores the relation of Auster's novels City of Glass, In the Country of Last Things, Moon Palace, and The Music of Chance to the rewriting and deconstruction of genre conventions; their connections to concepts such as catastrophe theory, the sublime, Freud's n...

Framing Gotham City as a microcosm of a modern-day metropolis, Gotham City Living posits this fictional setting as a hyper-aware archetype, demonstrative of the social, political and cultural tensions felt throughout urban America. Looking at the comics, graphic novels, films and television shows that form the Batman universe, this book demonstrates how the various creators of Gotham City have imagined a geography for the condition of America, the cast of characters acting as catalysts for a rev...

Writing is, and always will be, an act defined by failure. The best plan is to just get used to it. Failure is a topic discussed in every creative writing department in the world, but this is the book every beginning writer should have on their shelf to prepare them-which is to say, to console them in their misery. Less a guide to writing and more a guide to how to simply keep on going, On Failure: The Peculiar Perseverance Required to Endure the Life of a Writer describes the defining role pl...

With great care and critical insight, Lynda K. Bundtzen examines Plath's original typescript for "Ariel" and compares it to the version that was published by her estranged husband, Ted Hughes.

Locating Classed Subjectivities explores representations of social class in British fiction through the lens of spatial theory and analysis. By analyzing a range of class-conscious texts from the nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first centuries, the collection provides an overview of the way British writers mobilized spatial aesthetics as a means to comment on the intricacies of social class. In doing so, the collection delineates aesthetic strategies of representation in British writing, tra...

In this convincing and provocative study, Rebecca Suter aims to complicate our understanding of world literature by examining the creative and critical deployment of cultural stereotypes in the early novels of Kazuo Ishiguro. "World literature" has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years: Aamir Mufti called it the result of "one-world thinking," the legacy of an imperial system of cultural mapping from a unified perspective. Suter views Ishiguro's fiction as an important alternative to th...

As the world has been reshaped since the 1970s by neoliberalism and globalization, increasing financial abstraction has presented a new political urgency for contemporary writers. Globalized finance, the return to Gilded Age levels of inequality, and the emergence of new technologies pose a similar challenge to the one faced by American social realists a century ago: making the virtualization of capitalism legible within the conventions of the realist novel. In The Financial Imaginary, Alison Sh...

This volume investigates the reception of a small historical fact with wide-ranging social, cultural and imaginative consequences. Inspired by Leif Eiriksson's visit to Vinland in about the year 1000, novels, poetry, history, politics, arts and crafts, comics, films and video games have all come to reflect rising interest in the medieval Norse and their North American presence. Uniquely in reception studies, From Iceland to the Americas approaches this dynamic between Nordic history and its rece...

This is the first full-length book on the work of 'global Igbo' writer Chris Abani. The volume dedicates a chapter to each of Abani's fiction books, the two novellas Becoming Abigail (2006) and Song for Night (2007), the three novels GraceLand (2004), The Virgin of Flames (2007), and The Secret History of Las Vegas (2014), which are read against the grain of Abani's most important essays and poetical production. By combining close readings and more theoretical reflections, this volume provides...

The Rise of the Cyberzines concludes Mike Ashley's five-volume series, which has tracked the evolution of the science-fiction magazine from its earliest days in the 1920s to its current explosion via the internet. This series has traced the ways in which the science-fiction magazine has reacted to the times and often led the way in breaking down barriers, for example in encouraging a greater contribution by women writers and stimulating science fiction globally. Magazines have continued to build...

Being Poland offers a unique analysis of the cultural developments that took place in Poland after World War One, a period marked by Poland's return to independence. Conceived to address the lack of critical scholarship on Poland's cultural restoration, Being Poland illuminates the continuities, paradoxes, and contradictions of Poland's modern and contemporary cultural practices, and challenges the narrative typically prescribed to Polish literature and film. Reflecting the radical changes, ri...

Tim Conley's Useless Joyce provocatively analyses Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake and takes the reader on a journey exploring the perennial question of the usefulness of literature and art. Conley argues that the works of James Joyce, often thought difficult and far from practical, are in fact polymorphous meditations on this question. Examinations of traditional textual functions such as quoting, editing, translating, and annotating texts are set against the ways in which texts may be assign...