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Abdelkébir Khatibi: Postcolonialism, Transnationalism, and Culture in the Maghreb and Beyond

Jane Hiddleston and Khalid Lyamlahy (eds)

Abdelkébir Khatibi (1938–2009) is one of the greatest Moroccan thinkers, and one of the most important theorists of both postcolonialism and Islamic culture of the late twentieth and early ... More

Abdelkébir Khatibi (1938–2009) is one of the greatest Moroccan thinkers, and one of the most important theorists of both postcolonialism and Islamic culture of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This book introduces his works to Anglophone readers, tracing his development from the early work on sociology in Morocco to his literary and aesthetic works championing transnationalism and multilingualism. The essays here both offer close analyses of Khatibi’s engagements with a range of issues, from Moroccan politics to Arabic calligraphy and from decolonisation to interculturality, and highlights the important contribution of his thinking to the development of Western postcolonial and modern theory. The book acknowledges the legacy of one of the greatest African thinkers of the last century, and addresses the lack of attention to his work in the field of postcolonial studies. More than a writer, a sociologist or a thinker, Khatibi was a leading figure and an eclectic intellectual whose erudite works can still inform and enrich current reflections on the future of postcolonialism and the development of intercultural and transnational studies. The book also includes translated excerpts from Khatibi’s works, thus offering a multilingual perspective on his writing.Less

Absent the Archive: Cultural Traces of a Massacre in Paris, 17 October 1961

Lia Brozgal

Cultural Traces of a Massacre in Paris: The October 17, 1961 Anarchive is the first cultural history devoted to literary and visual representations of the police massacre of peaceful Algerian ... More

Cultural Traces of a Massacre in Paris: The October 17, 1961 Anarchive is the first cultural history devoted to literary and visual representations of the police massacre of peaceful Algerian protesters. Covered up by the state and hidden from history, the events of October 17 have nonetheless never been fully erased. Indeed, as early as 1962, stories about the massacre began to find their way their way into novels, poetry, songs, film, visual art, and performance. This book is about these stories, the way they have been told, and their function as both documentary and aesthetic objects. Identified here for the first time as a corpus—an anarchive—the works in question produce knowledge about October 17 by narrativizing and contextualizing the massacre, registering its existence, its scale, and its erasure, while also providing access to the subjective experiences of violence and trauma. Cultural Traces of a Massacre is invested in exploring how literature and culture may “do history” differently by complicating it, whether by functioning as first responders and persistent witnesses; reverberating against reality but also speculating on what might have been; activating networks of signs and meaning; or by showing us things that otherwise cannot be seen. This book provokes important questions about the aesthetic, ethical, and political stakes of representation.Less

The Alvarez Generation: Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Peter Porter

William Wootten

This book is the biography of a taste in poetry and its consequences. During the 1950s and 1960s, a generation of poets appeared who would eschew the restrained manner of Movement poets such as ... More

This book is the biography of a taste in poetry and its consequences. During the 1950s and 1960s, a generation of poets appeared who would eschew the restrained manner of Movement poets such as Philip Larkin, a generation who would, in the words of the introduction to A. Alvarez's classic anthology The New Poetry, take poetry ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’. This was the generation of Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Peter Porter. This book explores what these five poets shared in common, their connections, critical reception, rivalries, and differences, and locates what was new and valuable in their work. The book presents an important re-evaluation of a time when contemporary poetry and its criticism had a cultural weight it has now lost and when a ‘new seriousness’ was to become closely linked to questions of violence, psychic unbalance and, most controversially of all, suicide.Less

British Women's Writing, 1930 to 1960: Between the Waves

Sue Kennedy and Jane Thomas (eds)

British Women Writers 1930 – 1960: Between the Waves contributes to the vital recuperative work on mid-twentieth century writing by and for women. Fourteen original essays from leading academics and ... More

British Women Writers 1930 – 1960: Between the Waves contributes to the vital recuperative work on mid-twentieth century writing by and for women. Fourteen original essays from leading academics and emerging critical voices shed new light on writers commonly dismissed as middlebrow in their concerns and conservative in their styles and politics. The essays showcase the stylistic, cultural and political vitality of the fiction, non-fiction, drama, poetry and journalism of a selection authors including Vera Brittain, Storm Jameson, Nancy Mitford, Phyllis Shand Allfrey, Rumer Godden, Attia Hosain, Doris Lessing, Kamala Markandaya, Susan Ertz, Marghanita Laski, Elizabeth Bowen, Edith Pargeter, Eileen Bigland, Nancy Spain, Vera Laughton Matthews, Pamela Hansford Johnson, Dorothy Whipple, Elizabeth Taylor, Daphne du Maurier, Barbara Comyns, Shelagh Delaney, Stevie Smith and Penelope Mortimer. The neologism ‘interfeminism’, coined to partner Kristin Bluemel’s ‘intermodernism’, locates this group chronologically and ideologically between two ‘waves’ of feminism, whilst forging connections between the political and cultural monoliths which have traditionally overshadowed its members. Drawing attention to the strengths of this ‘out-of-category’ writing, the volume also highlights how intersecting discourses of gender, class and society in the inter- and post- bellum anticipate the bold reassessments of female subjectivity that characterize second and third wave feminism. Exploration of popular women’s magazines of the period, and new archival material, add an innovative dimension to this study of the literature of a volatile and transformative period of British social and cultural history.Less

Comedy and Crisis: Pieter Langendijk, the Dutch, and the Speculative Bubbles of 1720

Joyce Goggin and Frans De Bruyn

Comedy and Crisis features the first ever scholarly English translation of two plays by the eighteenth-century Dutch playwright Pieter Langendijk: Quincampoix, or the Wind Traders [Quincampoix of de ... More

Comedy and Crisis features the first ever scholarly English translation of two plays by the eighteenth-century Dutch playwright Pieter Langendijk: Quincampoix, or the Wind Traders [Quincampoix of de Windhandelaars], and Harlequin Stock-Jobber [Arlequin Actionist]. Both plays were occasioned by the financial speculation in England, France, and the Netherlands in 1719-20. In the Netherlands the speculative activity was referred to as a windhandel or wind trade. The first play is a full-length satirical comedy, and the second is a short, comic harlequinade; both were performed in Amsterdam in the fall of 1720, as the speculative bubble in the Netherlands was bursting. Comedy and Crisis also contains a translation of the extensive apparatus (introduction and notes) prepared by the scholar C.H.P. Meijer for his 1892 edition of these plays. The current editors have updated the footnotes and added six new critical essays by contemporary literary and historical scholars that contextualize the two plays historically and culturally. The book includes an extensive bibliography and index. The materials assembled in Comedy and Crisis are a rich resource for cultural, historical, and literary students of the history of finance and of eighteenth-century studies.Less

The Culture of War: Literature of the Siege of Paris 1870-1871

Colin Foss

The Culture of War explores the unexpected flourishing of literature both high and low during the Siege of Paris at the end of the Franco-Prussian War, 1870-1871. When Prussian forces completely ... More

The Culture of War explores the unexpected flourishing of literature both high and low during the Siege of Paris at the end of the Franco-Prussian War, 1870-1871. When Prussian forces completely blockaded Paris, isolating the city from the outside world, Parisians turned to literature to resist the enemy, to fill the idle hours under siege, and to articulate their place in history. This cultural boom was a conscious effort on the part of literary institutions like newspapers, publishers, and theaters to ensure the viability of their industries during a period of political uncertainty. To do so, many publishers, editors, and directors sought legitimacy through populism, promoting literature written by anonymous and unknown authors or that spoke to populist ideas. A study of national tragedy on a local scale, The Culture of War goes beyond traditional narratives of communal or individual psychology, and studies institutional responses to financial and political instability, viewing literature as a product of economic and political forces.Less

Ecocritics and Ecoskeptics: A Humanist Reading of Recent French Ecofiction

Jonathan F. Krell

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 ... More

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.Less

Lewis Grassic Gibbon

William K. Malcolm

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 ... More

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.Less

Modernist Objects: Literature, Art, Culture

Noëlle Cuny and Xavier Kalck (eds)

Modernist Objects is a unique mix of cultural studies, literature, and visual arts applied to the discrete materiality of objects. It places objects, how they emerge or withdraw, how they fashion us, ... More

Modernist Objects is a unique mix of cultural studies, literature, and visual arts applied to the discrete materiality of objects. It places objects, how they emerge or withdraw, how they fashion us, and what status they hold, at the heart of what constitutes modernism. Three processes are consistently to be observed in modernist object experiments: objecting to realism, fashioning the human, and performing the ornamental. The cumbersome bourgeois semiotics of material possessions was itself taken on by writers as diverse as Beckett or Djuna Barnes as a material to be chipped away at, given new life or hollowed out. Writers and creators embraced the object in a way that culminated in such intimate extensions of the mind and body as constructivist clothing, literary magazines, musical instruments, and restorative sculptures. The most skin-deep artifice is shown here to have epoch-changing potentialities. Can a lost brooch define the feminine through an aesthetics of absence? Can the ever-accelerating succession of hats on the head of a lonely alien in Paris,or of manufactured appliances on the dress of a German baroness, loosen the maddening grip of consumer society? Can the bourgeoisie be placed in a position to camp gender (Boscagli) through the use of Japanese lacquer on the outer surfaces of a recliner? This book is characterized by attentiveness to works hitherto considered as minor alongside canonical ones, a careful reclaiming of women’s writing and fine art, and a methodological habitof extending transnational probes outside the realm of the English language.Less

Nancy Cunard: Perfect Stranger

Jane Marcus

Jean Mills (ed.)

In the wake of inadequate histories of radical writing and activism, Nancy Cunard: Perfect Stranger rejects stereotypes of Cunard as spoiled heiress and “sexually dangerous New Woman,” offering ... More

In the wake of inadequate histories of radical writing and activism, Nancy Cunard: Perfect Stranger rejects stereotypes of Cunard as spoiled heiress and “sexually dangerous New Woman,” offering instead a bold, unapologetic, evidence-based portrait of a woman and her significant contributions to twenty-first-century considerations of gender, race, and class. This full length critical study by the late, path-breaking feminist scholar, Jane Marcus, rereads Cunard’s identity as a poet, an anthologist, a journalist, and political activist against racism and fascism.Less

Poetry & Listening: The Noise of Lyric

Zoë Skoulding

Listening has always mattered in poetry, but how does poetry change when listening has been transformed? In Poetry and Listening: The Noise of Lyric, the field of sound studies, which has ... More

Listening has always mattered in poetry, but how does poetry change when listening has been transformed? In Poetry and Listening: The Noise of Lyric, the field of sound studies, which has revolutionised research in contemporary music, is brought into dialogue with new lyric criticism. Examining poetry as mediated by performance, technology and translation, this book discovers how contemporary poetry has been re-energised by the influence of recorded sound and influenced by the creative methods that emerged with it. It offers an exploration of contemporary poetry’s acoustic contexts, moving beyond traditional analysis of poetic form to consider the social, political and ecological dimensions of a poem's sounds and silences. Through detailed discussion of innovative English-language poetry from the UK and USA, including works by Denise Riley, Sean Bonney, Caroline Bergvall, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Carol Watts, Claudia Rankine, Vahni Capildeo, Tom Raworth, Emma Bennett, Jonathan Skinner, Holly Pester, Tracie Morris, Hannah Silva, Rhys Trimble, Peter Hughes, Jeff Hilson and Tim Atkins, it argues for the centrality of listening to a form of composition in which language not only represents sonic experience but is part of it. With reference to Jean-Luc Nancy’s distinction between hearing and listening, alongside other key theorists of sound and noise, it shows how poetry offers insights into sensory perception, and how it charts acoustic relationships between language and the environment.Less

Poetry & Money: A Speculation

Peter Robinson

Poetry & Money: A Speculation is a study of relationships between poets, poetry, and money from Chaucer to contemporary times. It begins by showing how trust is essential to the creation of value in ... More

Poetry & Money: A Speculation is a study of relationships between poets, poetry, and money from Chaucer to contemporary times. It begins by showing how trust is essential to the creation of value in human exchange, and how money can, depending on conditions, both enable and disable such trustfully collaborative generations of value. Drawing upon a vast range of poetry for its exemplifications, the book includes studies of poetic hardship, religious verse and debt redeeming, the South Sea Bubble and the financial revolution, debates upon metallic and paper currency in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as modernist struggles with the gold standard, depression, inflation, and the realised groundlessness of exchange value. With its practitioner’s attention to the minutiae of poetic technique, it considers analogies between words and coins, and between poetic rhythm and the circulation of currencies in an economy. Through its close readings of poems over many centuries directly or indirectly engaged with money, it proposes ways in which, while we cannot escape monetary economies, we can resist, to some extent, being ensnared and diminished by them – through a fresh understanding of values money may serve to enable, ones which are nevertheless beyond price.Less

Republican Citizens, Precarious Subjects: Representations of Work in Post-Fordist France

Jeremy F. Lane

Over recent decades concerns at the increased scarcity and precarity of salaried employment have dominated political struggles, theoretical debates and cultural representations in France. This study ... More

Over recent decades concerns at the increased scarcity and precarity of salaried employment have dominated political struggles, theoretical debates and cultural representations in France. This study argues that such concerns are evidence of a profound shift in the French economy and labour market. In its first, theoretical part, the study engages with work in political economy and sociology, sketching a new interpretative framework, the better to understand the nature and implications of this profound shift. This shift has challenged certain fundamental French republican values, opening up a rift between the precarious forms of subjectivity characteristic of post-Fordist labour and older notions of republican citizenship. In its second part, the study finds symptoms of this rift in a range of cinematic and literary representations of the contemporary workplace, as these depict the dilemmas faced, the trajectories followed, and the geographical regions inhabited by French workers of different ages, sexes, classes, and ethnicities.Less

The Sensuous Pedagogies of Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence

Benjamin D. Hagen

Though the differences in style and politics between Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) and D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930) are many, they both had formative experiences as teachers. Between 1905 and 1907, Woolf ... More

Though the differences in style and politics between Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) and D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930) are many, they both had formative experiences as teachers. Between 1905 and 1907, Woolf taught history and composition courses at Morley College while Lawrence spent nearly a decade in the field of elementary education between 1902 and 1912. This study reframes Woolf’s and Lawrence’s later experiments in fiction, memoir, and literary criticism as the works of former teachers who remain deeply preoccupied with pedagogy. Across their respective writing careers, moreover, they conceptualize problems of teaching and learning as problems of sensation, emotion, or intensity. The “sensuous pedagogies” Woolf and Lawrence depict and enact are not limited to classroom spaces or strategies; rather, they pertain to non-institutional relationships, developmental narratives, spaces, and needs. Friendships and other intimate relationships in Lawrence’s fiction, for instance, often take on a pedagogical shape or texture (one person playing the student; the other, the teacher) while Woolf’s literary criticism models a novel approach to taste-training that prioritizes the individual freedom of common readers who must learn to attend to books that give them pleasure. Sensuous Pedagogies also reads Lawrence’s literary criticism as reparative, Woolf’s fiction as sustained feminist pedagogy, and their respective theories of life and love as fundamentally entangled with pedagogical concerns.Less

'The Excursion' and Wordsworth's Iconography

Brandon C. Yen

This book considers William Wordsworth’s use of iconography in his long poem The Excursion (1814). Through this iconographical approach, it steers a middle course between The Excursion’s two very ... More

This book considers William Wordsworth’s use of iconography in his long poem The Excursion (1814). Through this iconographical approach, it steers a middle course between The Excursion’s two very different interpretative traditions, the one focusing upon the poem’s abstraction, the other upon its touristic realism. The author explores Wordsworth’s iconography in The Excursion by tracing cultural and political allusions and correspondences in an abundance of post-1789 and earlier verbal and pictorial sources, as well as in Wordsworth’s own prose and poetry, especially The Prelude. Particular attention is paid to the complex ways in which The Excursion’s iconographical images contribute to – and also impose limitations upon – the overarching preoccupations of Wordsworth’s writings: the themes of paradise lost and paradise regained in the post-revolutionary context. This study thus revises New Historicist accounts of Wordsworth’s evasion of history by investigating the capacity of apparently ‘collateral’ images to respond to weighty arguments. In elucidating this vital aspect of Wordsworth’s poetic method, it reveals the visual etymologies – together with the nuances and rhetorical capacities – of five categories of images: envisioning, rooting, dwelling, flowing, and reflecting.Less

Virginia Woolf, Europe, and Peace: Vol. 2 Aesthetics and Theory

Peter Adkins and Derek Ryan (eds)

From the “prying,” “insidious” “fingers of the European War” that Septimus Warren Smith would never be free of in Mrs Dalloway to the call to “think peace into existence” during the Blitz in ... More

From the “prying,” “insidious” “fingers of the European War” that Septimus Warren Smith would never be free of in Mrs Dalloway to the call to “think peace into existence” during the Blitz in “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid,” questions of war and peace pervade the writings of Virginia Woolf. This volume asks how Woolf conceptualised peace by exploring the various experimental forms she created in response to war and violence. Comprised of fifteen chapters by an international array of leading and emerging scholars, this book both draws out theoretical dimensions of Woolf’s modernist aesthetic and draws on various critical frameworks for reading her work, in order to deepen our understanding of her writing about the politics of war, ethics, feminism, class, animality, and European culture. The chapters collected here look at how we might re-read Woolf and her contemporaries in the light of new theoretical and aesthetical innovations, such as peace studies, post-critique, queer theory, and animal studies. It also asks how we might historicise these frameworks through Woolf’s own engagement with the First and Second World Wars, while also bringing her writings on peace into dialogue with those of others in the Bloomsbury Group. In doing so, this volume reassesses the role of Europe and peace in Woolf’s work and opens up new ways of reading her oeuvre.Less

Writing the Survivor: The Rape Novel in Late Twentieth-Century American Fiction

Robin E. Field

Writing the Survivor: The Rape Novel in Late Twentieth-Century American Fiction identifies a new genre of American fiction, the rape novel, that recenters narratives of sexual violence on the ... More

Writing the Survivor: The Rape Novel in Late Twentieth-Century American Fiction identifies a new genre of American fiction, the rape novel, that recenters narratives of sexual violence on the survivors of violence and abuse, rather than the perpetrators. The rape novel arose during the women’s liberation movement as women writers collectively challenged the traditional erasure of female subjectivity and agency found in earlier representations of sexual violence in American fiction. The rape novel not only foregrounds survivors and their stories in a textual centering that affirms their dignity and self-worth, but also develops new narratological strategies for portraying violent, disturbing subject matter. In bringing together many key women’s texts of the last decades of the 20th century, the rape novel demonstrates the centrality of sexual assault to women’s fiction of this era. The rape novels of the 21st century continue the political activism inherent in the genre—educating readers, offering community to survivors, and encouraging social activism—as the stories of male survivors are increasingly told. A radical reconsideration of late twentieth-century American novels, Writing the Survivor underscores the importance of women’s activism upon the novel’s form and content and reveals the portrayal of rape as rape to be an interethnic imperative.Less