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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...

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.

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...

Ezra Pound's unfinished long poem The Cantos is regarded as a seminal work of modernist poetry - many critics, however, have sought to read the work as set apart from the author's politics. Reading the poetry alongside correspondence and unpublished archival writings, Ezra Pound's Washington Cantos and the Struggle for Light is an important new work on a poet who stands at the heart of 20th-century modernism. Building on his previous book John Kasper and Ezra Pound (Bloomsbury, 2015), Alec Marsh...

Seit ihrer Renaissance in den 1990er Jahren ist die Popliteratur im Feuilleton und in den Universitäten sehr präsent. Der Band beschreibt die amerikanische Beat- und Underground-Szene sowie die Pop-Art- und Popmusik-Debatten und zeigt, wie sich diese Einflüsse in den 1960er Jahren insbesondere durch die Vermittlung von Rolf Dieter Brinkmann auf die deutschsprachige Literatur auswirkten. Umfangreiche Kapitel erläutern die Poptheorie und die Poetik der Popliteratur. Es folgen Einzelkapitel zum Wer...

Returning to revolution’s original meaning of ‘cycle’, Contemporary Revolutions explores how 21st-century writers, artists, and performers re-engage the arts of the past to reimagine a present and future encompassing revolutionary commitments to justice and freedom. Dealing with histories of colonialism, slavery, genocide, civil war, and gender and class inequities, essays examine literature and arts of Africa, Europe, the Middle East, the Pacific Islands, and the United States. The broad rang...

First published in 1971, this book examines the literary style of Naturalism. After introducing the reader to the term itself, including its history and its relationship to Realism, it goes on to trace the origins of the Naturalist movement as well as particular groups which adhered to Naturalism and the theories they espoused. It also provides a summary of the key Naturalist literary works and concludes which a brief reflection on the movement as a whole. This book will be of interest to those...

The career of Ezra Pound has come to represent the political tendencies which, it has been claimed, are inherent to modernist aesthetics. But the political impulses of the modernists cannot be adequately represented by Pound's extreme positions; Pound's own political activities and commitments, in fact, do not adequately articulate the contradictory attitudes and beliefs that made them possible. By contrasting Pound's politics to the political values and beliefs of Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukof...

While books such as Belle de Jour's The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl and Catherine Millet's The Sexual Life of Catherine M. captured the imagination of the reading public and marked the contemporary erotic memoir as a publishing phenomenon, the genre has received comparatively scarce scholarly attention. Through examining the cultural dominance of the figure of the 'phallic girl' (or 'ladette') in the early 21st century, this pioneering study explores the conflict that arises when t...

This book studies the plays by Alan Ayckbourn and includes a biography, a survey of the plays and detailed analysis of the most significant plays, along with discussion, where relevant, of their political, social, historical and theatrical context.

Jungian Metaphor in Modernist Literature argues for the centrality of Carl Jung's theory of individuation and alchemy in modernist poetics. Through analysis of the uses of a mythic method in modernist literary works, the book develops a related alchemical model which serves to expand understanding of modernist uses of language. The book is an innovative exploration of modernist literary creativity under a Jungian lens, spanning both the literary and scholarly Jungian field. The literary works...

Szefel investigates the use of poetry in addressing political reform at the turn of the twentieth century. It charts the work of poets and editors - many of whom were women and minorities - who created a network of organizations to nurture writers who addressed the problems wrought by Progressive-era capitalism.

This book is a study of literary concern with ontology throughout the twentieth century. It consists of ten essays, each of which focuses on one or various writers' absorption with the nature of man and his 'being in this world.' The volume discusses Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, Thomas Stearns Eliot, Milan Kundera, Eugene Ionesco, Albert Camus, Marguerite Duras, Toni Morrison and Nathalie Sarraute as reflecting ontological concerns These writers, although not subscribing to the S...

Henry James was fascinated by clothing and dress. This book examines, for the first time, the role of dress in reinforcing thematic and symbolic patterns in James's fictional world. Hughes traces a development from the significance of dress in discussion of 'the American Girl' in the early works, through dress as an indicator of social position, to the emergence of the more unstable and threatening aspects of dress, which culminate in the strange case of the coat of changing colours in The Sense...

The first book-length treatment of James Joyce's work through the lens of Friedrich Nietzsche's thought, Slote argues that the range of styles Joyce deploys has an ethical dimension. This intersection raises questions of epistemology, aesthetics, and the construction of the 'Modern' and will appeal to literary and philosophy scholars.

This book discovers in the imaginative life of the Shavian "oeuvre" a mythology of self, of which the political and social themes are aspects. Understanding "the sublime" as the modes of self-transcedence sought by an authorial will and "comic" as the resistances to these, Gordon shows how their interaction creates characteristic dramatic effects. In his style of analysis, genres like romance and comedy become psychological acts as well as conventional forms. In a theoretical first chapter, the...

This collection examines the intersection of historical recollection, strategies of representation, and reading practices in historical fiction from the eighteenth century to today. In shifting focus to the agency of the reader and taking a long historical view, the collection brings a new perspective to the field of historical representation.

A Sunday Times / Mail on Sunday Book of the YearAs a poet, visual artist and essayist, David Jones is one of the great Modernists. The variety of his gifts reminds us of Blake - though he is a better poet and a greater all-round artist. Jones was an extraordinary engraver, painter and creator of painted inscriptions, but he also belongs in the first rank of twentieth-century poets.Though he was admired by some of the finest cultural figures of the twentieth century, David Jones is not known or c...

First published in 1990. Balzac, Zola and Faulkner all drew upon the principles of evolutionary theory to represent man's place in nature and his struggle for survival in their major series La Comedie humaine, Rougon-Macquart and the Yoknapatawpha fiction. This book focuses on the 'first' novels in each author's series (La Pere Goriot, La Fortune des Rougon and Flags in the Dust) and considers how each novel relates to its series and derives a definition of the naturalistic roman-fleuve. To desc...