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This volume is a new collection of scholarly essays on the US science fiction and fantasy writer Lois McMaster Bujold. The collection argues for the significant contributions Bujold’s works make to feminist and queer thought, disability studies, and fan studies. In addition, it suggests the importance of Bujold to contemporary American literature. The volume continues the establishment of Bujold as an important author of contemporary science fiction and fantasy. It argues that her corpus spans the distance between two full arcs of US feminism and has anticipated or responded to several of its current concerns in ways that invite or even require theoretical exploration. As well as papers on earlier work in the main series (the Vorkosigan Saga and the ‘Worlds of the Five Gods’ novels The Curse of Chalion and Paladin of Souls), the collection also presents work on recent publications such as The Sharing Knife sequence; the ‘Penric and Desdemona’ novellas; and the recent Vorkosigan Saga novel Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen. The collection deepens feminist research in Bujold studies by incorporating queer and disability studies perspectives; and includes historiographic retracing of scholarship on Bujold’s work.

This exploration of the Italian background of The Cantos provides indispensable keys to an understanding of a major American epic. Bacigalupo follows Pound’s steps through Italian cities and landscapes, his contacts with writers from Dante to his contemporaries, his own writings in (and translations from) Italian, and his final introspective years between Rapallo and Venice—all of which is considered for the light it casts on his work. A new approach to Pound’s difficult poetry is thus offered, as well as the fascinating, dramatic and entertaining story of an American writer’s life-long concern with his adoptive country. An appendix offers a detailed chronology of Pound’s relation with and reception in Italy.

The Fire that Breaks traces Gerard Manley Hopkins’s continuing and pervasive influence among writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Not only do the essays explore responses to Hopkins by individual writers—including, among others, Virginia Woolf, Ivor Gurney, T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill, Derek Walcott, Denise Levertov, John Berryman, Charles Wright, Maurice Manning, and Ron Hansen—but they also examine Hopkins’s substantial influence among Caribbean poets, Appalachian writers, modern novelists, and contemporary poets whose work lies at the intersection of ecopoetry and theology. Combining essays by the world’s leading Hopkins scholars with essays by scholars from diverse fields, the collection examines both known and unexpected affinities. The Fire that Breaks is a persistent testimony to the lasting, continuing impact of Hopkins on poetry in English.

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.

Gendered Ecologies: New Materialist Interpretations of Women Writers in the Long Nineteenth Century is comprised of a diverse collection of essays featuring analyses of literary women writers, ecofeminism, feminist ecocriticism, and the value of the interrelationships that exist among human, nonhuman, and nonliving entities as part of the environs. The book presents a case for the often-disregarded literary women writers of the long nineteenth century, who were active contributors to the discourse of natural history—the diachronic study of participants as part of a vibrant community interconnected by matter. While they were not natural philosophers as in the cases of Sir Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, and Michael Faraday among others, these women writers did engage in acute observations of materiality in space (e.g., subjects, objects, and abjects), reasoned about their findings, and encoded their discoveries of nature in their literary and artistic productions. The collection includes discussions of the works of influential literary women from the long nineteenth century—Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Caroline Norton, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, Margaret Fuller, Susan Fenimore Cooper, Celia Thaxter, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Francis Wright, and Lydia Maria Child—whose multi-directional observations of animate and inanimate objects in the natural domain are based on self-made discoveries while interacting with the environs.

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.

Henry Crabb Robinson (1775–1867) earned his place in literary history as a perceptive diarist from 1811 onwards. Drawing substantially on hitherto unpublished manuscript sources, Henry Crabb Robinson: Romantic Comparatist, 1790–1811 discusses his formal and informal engagement with a wide variety of English and European Romantic literature prior to this point. Robinson thus emerges as a pioneering literary critic whose unique philosophical erudition underpinned his activity as a cross-cultural disseminator of literature during the early Romantic period. A Dissenter barred from the English universities, he educated himself thoroughly during his teenage years, and began to publish in radical journals. Godwin’s philosophy subsequently inspired Robinson’s first theory of literature. When in Germany from 1800–05, Robinson became the leading British scholar of Kant’s critical philosophy, which informed his discussions of Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, August Wilhelm Schlegel, and other German literature. After his return to London, Robinson aided Hazlitt’s understanding of Kant and early career as a writer; this also laid the foundation for Robinson’s lifelong critical admiration of Hazlitt’s works. Robinson’s distinctive comparative criticism further enabled him to draw compelling parallels between Wordsworth, Blake, and Herder, and to discern ‘moral excellence’ in Christian Leberecht Heyne’s Amathonte. This excellence also prompted Robinson’s transmission of Friedrich Schlegel and Jean Paul to England in 1811, as well as a profound exchange of ideas with Coleridge. Robinson’s ingenious adaptation of Kantian aesthetic autonomy into a revolutionary theory of literature’s moral relevance, Philipp Hunnekuhl finds, anticipated the current ‘ethical turn’ in literary studies.

This book examines the representation of Wales and ‘Welshness’ in texts by French (including Breton) and German-speaking travellers from 1780 to the present day, focusing on key points in the period of Welsh modernisation from the Industrial Revolution to the post-devolution era. Since the emergence of the travel narrative as a popular source of information and entertainment in the mid-18^th century, writing about Wales has often been embedded and hidden in accounts of travel to ‘England’. This book seeks to redefine perceptions of Wales by problematizing the notion of ‘invisibility’ often ascribed to the Welsh context and by broadening perspectives outwards to encompass European perceptions. Works uncovered for the first time include travelogues, private correspondences, travel diaries, articles and blogs which have Wales or Welsh culture as their focus. The ‘travellers’ analysed in this volume ‘travellers’ feature those travelling for the purpose of leisure, scholarship or commerce as well as exiles and refugees. By focusing on Wales, a minoritized nation at the geographical periphery of Europe, the authors are able to problematize notions of hegemony and identity within the genre, relating to both the places encountered (the ‘travellee’ culture) and the places of origin (the travellers’ cultures). This book thereby makes an original contribution to studies in travel writing and provides an important case study of a culture often minoritized in the field, but that nevertheless provides a telling illustration of the dynamics of intercultural relations and representation.

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.

Material Transgressions reveals how Romantic-era authors think outside of historical and theoretical ideologies that reiterate notions of sexed bodies, embodied subjectivities, isolated things, or stable texts. Essays examine how these writers rethink materiality, especially the subject-object relationship, in order to challenge the tenets of Enlightenment and the culture of sensibility that privileged the hegemony of the speaking and feeling lyric subject and to undo supposedly invariable matter, and representations of it, that limited their writing, agency, knowledge, and even being. In this volume, the idea of transgression serves as a flexible and capacious discursive and material movement that braids together fluid forms of affect, embodiment, and textuality. They offer alternative understandings of materiality that move beyond concepts that fix gendered bodies and intellectual capacities, whether human or textual, idea or thing. They enact processes—assemblages, ghost dances, pack mentality, reiterative writing, shapeshifting, multi-voiced choric oralities—that redefine restrictive structures in order to craft alternative modes of being in the world that can help us to reimagine materiality both in the Romantic period and now. Such dynamism not only reveals a new materialist imaginary for Romanticism but also unveils textualities, affects, figurations, and linguistic movements that alter new materialism’s often strictly ontological approach.

Poetry is an ancient verbal art, which has its roots in the oral epics and fragments that survive from classical times. Dictionaries of English, by contrast, are a comparatively recent phenomenon, beginning with the ‘hard words’ that Robert Cawdrey gathered in A Table Alphabeticall in 1604 and extending to the present edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, with its ongoing revisions. This innovative collection of essays is the first volume to explore the ways in which dictionaries have stimulated the imaginations of modern and contemporary poets from Britain, Ireland, and America, while also considering how poetry has itself been a rich source of material for lexicographers. As well as gauging the influence of major dictionaries like the OED, the essays single out encounters with more specialised works and broach uses of words that are not typically included in dictionaries. In doing so, the contributors not only cast familiar questions of ambiguity and etymology in a fresh light, but they also reveal a number of surprising and energising points of contact, from Hugh MacDiarmid’s rediscovery of Scots to Tina Darragh’s visual appropriations of dictionary pages. As such, Poetry & the Dictionary will prove an indispensable volume for all readers – academic or not – who find themselves fascinated by the language’s many involutions.

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.

This book pursues the specific case of Italian travel narratives in the Far East, through a focus on the experience of Japan in works by writers who visited the Land of the Rising Sun beginning in the Meiji period (1868-1912) and during the concomitant opening of Japan’s relations with the West. Drawing from the fields of Postcolonial and Transnational Studies, analysis of these texts explores one central question: what does it mean to imagine Japanese culture as contributing to Italian culture? Each author shares in common an attempt to disrupt ideas about dichotomies and unbalanced power relationships between East and West. Proposing the notion of ‘relational Orientalism,’ this book suggests that Italian travelogues to Japan, in many cases, pursued the goal of building imaginary transnational communities, predicated on commonalities and integration, by claiming what they perceived as ‘Oriental’ as their own. In contrast with a long history of Western representations of Japan as inferior and irrational, Searching for Japan identifies a positive overarching attitude toward the Far East country in modern Italian culture. Expanding the horizon of Italian transnational networks, normally situated within the Southern European region, this book reinstates the existence of an alternative Euro-Asian axis, operating across Italian history.

“Singing the Law” is about the legal lives and afterlives of oral cultures in East Africa, particularly as they appear within the pages of written literatures during the colonial and postcolonial periods. In examining these cultures, I begin with an analysis of the cultural narratives of time and modernity that formed the foundations of British colonial law. Recognizing the contradictory nature of these narratives (i.e., they both promote and retreat from the Euro-centric ideal of temporal progress) enables us to make sense of the many representations of and experiments with non-linear, open-ended, and otherwise experimental temporalities that we find in works of East African literature that take colonial law as a subject or point of critique. Many of these works, furthermore, consciously appropriate orature as an expressive form with legal authority. This affords them the capacity to challenge the narrative foundations of colonial law and its postcolonial residues and offer alternative models of temporality and modernity that give rise, in turn, to alternative forms of legality. East Africa’s “oral jurisprudence” ultimately has implications not only for our understanding of law and literature in colonial and postcolonial contexts, but more broadly for our understanding of how the global south has shaped modern law as we know and experience it today.

This is the first book-length study of Forster’s posthumously published novel. Nine essays focus exclusively on Maurice and its dynamic afterlives in literature, film and new media during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Begun in 1913 and revised over almost 50 years, Maurice became a defining text in Forster’s work and a canonical example of queer fiction. Yet the critical tendency to read Maurice primarily as a ‘revelation’ of Forster’s homosexuality has obscured important biographical, political and aesthetic contexts for this novel. This collection places Maurice among early twentieth-century debates about politics, philosophy, religion, gender, Aestheticism and allegory. Essays explore how the novel interacts with literary predecessors and contemporaries including John Bunyan, Oscar Wilde, Havelock Ellis and Edward Carpenter, and how it was shaped by personal relationships such as Forster’s friendship with Florence Barger. They close-read the textual variants of Forster’s manuscripts and examine the novel’s genesis and revisions. They consider the volatility of its reception, analysing how it galvanizes subsequent generations of writers and artists including Christopher Isherwood, Alan Hollinghurst, Damon Galgut, James Ivory, and twenty-first-century online fanfiction writers. What emerges from the volume is the complexity of the novel, as a text and as a cultural phenomenon.

Virginia Woolf, Europe, and Peace: Transnational Circulations enlarges our understanding of Virginia Woolf’s pacifist ideology and aesthetic response to the World Wars by re-examining her writings and cultural contexts transnationally and comparatively through the complex interplay between modernism, politics, and aesthetics. The “transnational” paradigm that undergirds this collection revolves around the idea of transnational cultural communities of writers, artists, and musicians worldwide who were intellectually involved in the war effort through the forging of pacifist cultural networks that arose as a form of resistance to war, militarism, and the rise of fascism. The book also offers philosophical approaches to notions of transnational pacifism, anti-war ethics, and decolonization. Presenting the perspectives of a range of significant scholars and critics, the chapters in this volume engage with mobile and circulatory pacifisms, highlighting the intersections of modernist inquiries across the arts (art, music, literature, and performance) and transnational critical spaces (Asia, Europe, and the Americas) to show how the convergence of different cultural and linguistic horizons can significantly expand and enrich our understanding of Woolf’s modernist legacy.

This book explores William Wordsworth’s pervasive influence on the tourist landscapes of the Lake District throughout the age of transport revolutions, popular tourism, and the Great 1914-18 War. It reveals how Wordsworth’s response to railways was not a straightforward matter of opposition and protest; his ideas were taken up by advocates and opponents of railways, and through their controversies had a surprising impact on the earliest motorists as they sought a language to describe the liberty and independence of their new mode of travel. Once the age of motoring was underway, the outbreak of the First World War encouraged British people to connect Wordsworth’s patriotic passion with his wish to protect the Lake District as a national heritage—a transition that would have momentous effects in the interwar period when the popularisation of motoring paradoxically brought a vogue for open-air activities and a renewal of Romantic pedestrianism. With the arrival of global tourism, preservation of the cultural landscape of the Lake District became an urgent national and international concern. By revealing how Romantic ideas of nature, travel, liberty and self-reliance were re-interpreted and utilized in discourses on landscape, transport, accessibility, preservation, war and cultural heritage, this book portrays multiple Wordsworthian legacies in modern ways of perceiving and valuing the nature and culture of the Lake District.