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This book offers a major intervention into contemporary theoretical debates about crime fiction. Academic studies in the genre have historically been encumbered by a set of restrictive preconceptions, largely drawn from attitudes to popular fiction: that the genre does not warrant detailed critical analysis; that genre norms and conventions matter more than textual individuality; and that comparative or transnational perspectives are secondary to the study of the core British-American canon. This study challenges the distinction between literary and popular fiction and proposes that crime fiction, far from being static and staid, must be seen as a genre constantly violating its own boundaries. Centred on three axes of mobility, the essays present new, mobile reading practices that realize the genre’s full textual complexity, without being limited by the authoritative self-interpretations that crime narratives tend to provide. The book demonstrates how we can venture beyond the restrictive notions of ‘genre’, ‘formula’, ‘popular’ or ‘lowbrow’ to develop instead a concept of genre that acknowledges its mobility. Finally, it establishes a global and transnational perspective that challenges the centrality of the British-American tradition and recognizes that the global history of crime fiction is characterized, not by the existence of parallel, national traditions, but rather by processes of appropriation and transculturation.

Didactics and the Modern Robinsonade examines modern and contemporary Robinsonade texts written for young readers, looking specifically at the ways in which later adaptations of the Robinson Crusoe story subvert both traditional narrative structures and particular ideological codes within the genre. This collection redresses both the gender and geopolitical biases that have characterised most writings within the Robinsonade genre since its inception, and includes chapters on little-known works of fiction by female authors, as well as works from outside the mainstream of Anglo-American culture.

Situated at the intersection of affect studies, ecocriticism, aesthetics, and Romantic studies, this book presents a genealogy of love in Romantic-era poetry, science, and philosophy. While feeling and emotion have been traditional mainstays of Romantic literature, the concept of love is under-studied and under-appreciated, often neglected or dismissed as idealized, illusory, or overly sentimental. However, Seth Reno shows that a particular conception of intellectual love is interwoven with the major literary, scientific, and philosophical discourses of the period. Romantic-era writers conceived of love as integral to broader debates about the nature of life, the biology of the human body, the sociology of human relationships, the philosophy of nature, and the disclosure of being. Amorous Aesthetics traces the development of intellectual love from its first major expression in Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics,through its adoption and adaptation in eighteenth-century moral and natural philosophy, to its emergence as a Romantic tradition in the work of six major poets. From William Wordsworth and John Clare’s love of nature, to Percy Shelley’s radical politics of love, to the more sceptical stances of Felicia Hemans, Alfred Tennyson, and Matthew Arnold, this book shows intellectual love to be a pillar of Romanticism.

Investigations of male potency and the ‘ability to perform’ have long been mainstays of social, political and artistic discourse and have provoked spirited and partisan declarations about what it is to be a man. This interdisciplinary collection considers the tensions that have developed between the historical privilege often ascribed to the male and the vulnerability to which his body is prone. Using a variety of historical and literary approaches, the essays in this work consider the critical ways in which medicine’s interactions with literature reveal vital clues about the ways sex, gender and identity are constructed through treatments of a range of pathologies, including deformity, venereal disease, injury, nervousness and sexual difference. The relationships between male medicine and ideals of potency and masculinity are searchingly explored through a range of sources, including African American slave fictions, southern gothic, early modern poetry, Victorian literature and the modern novel.

The book examines, from the perspective of feminist disability theories, the concepts and role of women in selected Spanish discourses and literary texts from the late fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. It explores a wide range of Spanish medical, regulatory and moral discourses in order to show how these inherit, reproduce and propagate an amalgam of Western traditional concepts of the female embodiment. The book also examines concrete representations of deviant female characters, with a focus in the figure of the syphilitic prostitute and the physically decayed aged women, in a variety of literary texts such Celestina, Lozana andaluza and selected works by Cervantes and Quevedo. The analysis of the personal testimony of Teresa de Avila, a nun suffering neurological disorders, complements the discussion of early modern women’s disability. By expanding the meanings of present materiality/social construction disability theories, the book concludes that femininity, bodily afflictions, and mental instability characterize the new literary heroes in paradoxical contrast with the Spanish apex of imperial power. The broken female bodies of pre-industrial Spanish literature reveal the cracks in the foundational principles of established masculine truths such as physical and moral integrity and religious and ethnic intolerance.

The legacy of the Second World War remains unsettled; no consensus has been achieved about its meaning and its lasting impact. This is pre-eminently the case in France, where the experience of defeat and occupation created the grounds for a deeply ambiguous mixture of resistance and collaboration, pride and humiliation, heroism and abjection, which writers and politicians have been trying to disentangle ever since. This book develops a theoretical approach which draws on trauma studies and hermeneutics; and it then focuses on some of the intellectuals who lived through the war and on how their experience and troubled memories of it continue to echo through their later writing, even and especially when it is not the explicit topic. This was an astonishing generation of writers who would go on to play a pivotal role on a global scale in post-war aesthetic and philosophical endeavours. The book proposes close readings of works by some of the most brilliant amongst them: Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Charlotte Delbo, Paul Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas, Louis Althusser, Jorge Semprun, Elie Wiesel, and Sarah Kofman.

'Biopunk Dystopias' contends that we find ourselves at a historical nexus, defined by the rise of biology as the driving force of scientific progress, a strongly grown mainstream attention given to genetic engineering in the wake of the Human Genome Project (1990-2003), the changing sociological view of a liquid modern society, and shifting discourses on the posthuman, including a critical posthumanism that decenters the privileged subject of humanism. The book argues that this historical nexus produces a specific cultural formation in the form of "biopunk", a subgenre evolved from the cyberpunk of the 1980s. The analysis deals with dystopian science fiction artifacts of different media from the year 2000 onwards that project a posthuman intervention into contemporary socio-political discourse based in liquid modernity in the cultural formation of biopunk. Biopunk makes use of current posthumanist conceptions in order to criticize contemporary reality as already dystopian, warning that a future will only get worse, and that society needs to reverse its path, or else destroy all life on this planet. As Rosi Braidotti argues, "there is a posthuman agreement that contemporary science and biotechnologies affect the very fibre and structure of the living and have altered dramatically our understanding of what counts as the basic frame of reference for the human today" (40). The proposed book analyzes this alteration as directors, creators, authors, and artists from the field of science fiction extrapolate it from current trends.

For at least fifteen years, any keen observer of European society has been aware that antisemitism is no longer a matter of racial theory, nationalism, or exclusion of the “other.” While in the past antisemites saw Jews as all too modern “rootless cosmopolitans” today's European antisemitism construes them as obsolete precisely because they are attached to their roots, their land, their community, their origin. The Jews are now perceived as a reactionary force that hinders the progress of humankind toward multiculturalism, understood as the peaceful, infinitely enriching coexistence of ethnicities, races, religions, and cultures within the same territory. The antisemite of yore viewed the Jews as an inferior race; today he views them as racist. By looking back to the emergence of a postwar theoretical discourse on trauma, memory, victims, suffering, the Holocaust and the Jews, Is Theory Good for the Jews? explores how “French thought” is implicated in intellectual, literary and ideological components of the global and local upsurge of antisemitism. The author probes the legacy of Heidegger in France and exposes the shortcomings of radical social critique and postcolonial theory confronted to the challenge of Islamic terrorism and Jew hatred. This book is the first effort to analyze French responses that have regrettably played their part in generating the new antisemitism.

Touchstones examines the ways in which John McGahern became a writer through reading. This reading was both extensive and intensive, and tended towards immersion in the classics. New insights are provided into McGahern’s use of writers as diverse as Dante Alighieri, William Blake, Stendhal, Albert Camus, W. B. Yeats and several others. Evidence for these claims is found both through close reading of McGahern’s published texts as well as via unprecedented sleuthing in his extensive archive of papers held at the National University of Ireland, Galway. The ultimate intention of this book is to draw attention to the very literary and writerly nature of McGahern as an artist, and to place him, not just as a great Irish writer, but as part of a long and venerable European tradition.