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Sex, Sea, and Self excavates forgotten voices and their layered discourses to underscore the complexity of identity politics in the French Caribbean between 1924 and 1948. This study looks at a time of chaotic transition and renewed conflict to transform our understanding of Francophone literary canons. An emphasis on women’s experiences and feminine authorship, for instance, insists on the significance of theoretical contributions by French Antillean women intellectuals to the domain of Caribbean critical theory. However, this study also offers original approaches to works by male authors of African descent. Putting in contrast Suzanne Lacascade’s, the Nardal sisters’, Mayotte Capécia’s, Jenny Alpha’s, Sully Lara’s, and Raphaël Tardon’s visions of Black humanism, history, knowledge construction, and selfhood reveals their conflicted rhetorics and performance, the ambivalent, slippery, and contradictory beliefs at the heart of their texts. These writers at times both reject and reproduce the metropolitan or white Creole exotic colonial mythology of Creole women and sexual stereotypes for their own political, cultural, and personal ends. Teasing out the politics of eroticism and the rhetoric of victimization in the expression of nation-building exposes the epistemic complicity between Black and white, colonial, and postcolonial discourses. Indeed, the social fabric of the twentieth century owes much to that of the nineteenth century, into which white Creole ideology and colonial discourse were woven. Sex, Sea, and Self (re)calibrates the canon of French Caribbean literature underpinning Caribbean critical theory, colonial history, and literary aesthetics, which allows for the exploration of novel paradigms of selfhood.

Throughout history, most people have encountered the language of sailors in ports. Such language, including nautical terminology, occupational lore, and the coterie speech that bound crews together, was a product of isolated shipborne communities at sea, but it was when sailors entered the liminal space of the port that the general public heard their speech. The language of sailors was often greeted with contempt and fear. The Boston Recorder warned in 1823 that when sailors are ashore, “Children can with difficulty enter the streets at all, without hearing the very dialect of hell.” Despite such condemnation, it was in the spoken world of sailor talk that Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, and Jack London first became storytellers. They were all seafarers who transcribed their experiences at sea into stories, first told orally and then transformed into the written word. With their storytelling, they crossed the liminal space of the port and emerged as the great artists that they are. This book defines sailor talk, explores its inextricability from the labor of mariners, and investigates the orality of the shipboard world in which sailors worked. It then concentrates on the complex, multitudinous, and intertwining use of sailor talk in the works of Melville, Conrad, and London.

Post-Millennial Palestine: Literature, Memory, Resistance confronts how Palestinians have recently felt obliged to re-think memory and resistance in response to dynamic political and regional changes in the twenty-first century; prolonged spatial and temporal dispossession; and the continued deterioration of the peace process. Insofar as the articulation of memory in (post)colonial contexts can be viewed as an integral component of a continuing anti-colonial struggle for self-determination, in tracing the dynamics of conveying the memory of ongoing, chronic trauma, this collection negotiates the urgency for Palestinians to reclaim and retain their heritage in a continually unstable and fretful present. The collection offers a distinctive contribution to the field of existing scholarship on Palestine, charting new ways of thinking about the critical paradigms of memory and resistance as they are produced and represented in literary works published within the post-millennial period. Reflecting on the potential for the Palestinian narrative to recreate reality in ways that both document it and resist its brutality, the critical essays in this collection show how Palestinian writers in the twenty-first century critically and creatively consider the possible future(s) of their nation.

Lewis Grassic Gibbon galvanized the Scottish literary scene in 1932 with Sunset Song, the first novel of the epic trilogy A Scots Quair, that drew vividly upon his deprived upbringing on a small croft in Aberdeenshire to capture the zeitgeist of the early twentieth century. Yet his literary legacy extends significantly beyond his breakout book. The seventeen volumes that he amassed in his short life, under his own name of James Leslie Mitchell as well as his Scots pseudonym, demonstrate his versatility, as historian, essayist, biographer and fiction writer. His corpus pays testimony to his core principles, rooted in his rural upbringing: his restless humanitarianism and his deep veneration for the natural world. Set against an informed conspectus of Mitchell’s life and times and incorporating substantive new source material, this study provides a comprehensive and searching analysis of the canon of a combative writer whose fame in recent years – as cultural nationalist, left-wing libertarian, proto-feminist, neo-romantic visionary and trailblazing modernist – has carried far beyond his native land. In tune with the intellectual climate of the inter-war years, Gibbon emerges as a passionate advocate of revolutionary political activism; in addition, as a profound believer in the overarching primacy of nature, he is represented as a supreme practitioner in the field of ecofiction. Coupled with his modernist experimentation with language and narrative, this firmly establishes him amongst the foremost fiction writers of the twentieth century – uniquely, a figure whose achievement has consistently won both critical and popular acclaim.

Modern Writers, Transnational Literatures offers a fresh critical perspective on the work of Rabindranath Tagore and W. B. Yeats from the beginning of the twentieth century, the point at which their international collaborations most significantly influence the cross-border lives of their literature. This book foregrounds the Yeats-Tagore relationship, Yeats’s complex engagement with South Asia, the fraught beginning to Tagore’s international fame and the value of reading his English translations as independent products on the global stage. Exploring the thematic parallels and generic innovations in the two authors’ works allows us to recognize the significant moments of tension, intersections, and divergence in their oeuvres. Engaging with their works across genres, with particular attention to the socio-cultural and political backgrounds of the time, this comparative study examines the transnational lives of the texts and provides a timely perspective on how aesthetic and cultural dialogues carry national conversations across borders and into the present day.

Michel Serres and Luc Ferry represent the two opposing views of ecology in contemporary French philosophy. Serres calls for a “natural contract” that would ensure a symbiotic relationship between humans and nature. Ferry rejects Serres’s ecocentric world view, embracing instead modernist humanism that places humans squarely in the center of the world. Part 1 of Ecocritics and Ecoskeptics presents three contemporary novels that depict the world as both a beautiful and fragile place, in danger of being destroyed—as Serres fears—by human technological progress. Part 2 studies two novels that address the animal question. What is the difference between humans and animals? Are humans animals, or have they been torn away from their animality? Can humans justify their inhumane treatment of animals? Part 3 analyzes two novelists, both avowed humanists who—one through humor and the other through humanitarianism—explore potential undesirable effects of environmentalism. The conclusion states that “environmentalism is a humanism.” Traditional humanism must yield to an ecological humanism that gives dignity and respect to both humans and the earth, acknowledging the unbreakable bond between human and humus.

Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles is the first book to examine the history of representations of the automobile and of marginalized transportation technologies such as the bicycle throughout the history of American science fiction. With chapters ranging from ones on the early science fiction of the pulp magazine era of the 1920s and 1930s, on up to chapters on the postcyberpunk of the 1990s and more recent science fiction media of the 2000s such as web television, zines, and comics, this book argues that science fiction by and large perceives the car as anything but a marvelous invention of modernity. Rather, the genre often scorns and ridicules the automobile and instead frequently promotes more sustainable, more benign, more restrained technologies of movement such as the bicycle.

This groundbreaking study explores the literary afterlives of Ireland’s most enigmatic, shape-shifting and controversial son: Roger Casement. A seminal human rights activist, a key figure in the struggle for Irish independence, a traitor to British imperialism and an enthusiastic recorder of a sexual life lived in the shadows, Casement has endured as a symbol of ambivalence and multiplicity. Casement can be found in the most curious of places: from the imperial horrors of Heart of Darkness (1899) to the gay club culture of 1980s London in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library (1998); from George Bernard Shaw’s play Saint Joan (1923) to a love affair between spies in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day (1948); from the post-Easter Rising elegies of Eva Gore-Booth and Alice Milligan to the beguiling, opaque poetry of Medbh McGuckian. Drawing upon a variety of literary and cultural texts, alongside significant archival research, this book establishes dialogues between modernist and contemporary works to argue that Casement’s ghost animates issues of historical pertinence and pressing contemporary relevance. It positions Casement as a vital and fascinating figure in the compromised and contradictory terrain of Anglo-Irish history.

Despite the occasional upsurge of climate change scepticism among Anglophone conservative politicians and journalists, there is still a near consensus among climate scientists that current levels of atmospheric greenhouse gas are sufficient to alter global weather patterns to disastrous effect. The resultant climate crisis is simultaneously both a natural and a socio-cultural phenomenon and in this book Milner and Burgmann argue that science fiction occupies a critical location within this nature/culture nexus. Science Fiction and Climate Change takes as its subject matter what Daniel Bloom famously dubbed ‘cli-fi’. It does not, however, attempt to impose a prescriptively environmentalist aesthetic on this sub-genre. Rather, it seeks to explain how a genre defined in relation to science finds itself obliged to produce fictional responses to the problems actually thrown up by contemporary scientific research. Milner and Burgmann adopt a historically and geographically comparatist framework, analysing print and audio-visual texts drawn from a number of different contexts, especially Australia, Britain, Canada, China, Finland, France, Germany, Japan and the United States. Inspired by Raymond Williams’s cultural materialism, Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of culture and Franco Moretti’s version of world systems theory, the book builds on Milner’s own Locating Science Fiction to produce a powerfully persuasive study in the sociology of literature.

What is a hangover? How does it feel to suffer from one? What can hangovers tell us about the way attitudes to alcohol have developed over time? Why have hangovers been neglected in our critical discussions of alcohol and intoxication in the humanities? This first scholarly study of the hangover in literature and culture sets out to answer each of these questions by exploring the representation of ‘the morning after’ in a wide variety of texts ranging from the Renaissance to the present day. The book argues that literature reveals hangovers are a cluster of physical symptoms, but also a complex interplay of sensations and emotions. It discloses the way that the hangover can be used to provide socio-cultural commentary, to impose value systems on drinkers and to control alcohol use. It demonstrates that the generic aspects of hangovers – nausea and headache, guilt and shame – are interpreted differently in different periods. The book demonstrates that, just as much as drunkenness or intoxication, the hangover has a cultural history that can be told through textual analysis.