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This is the first book-length study of the relationship between science fiction, the techno-scientific policies of independent India, and the global non-aligned movement that emerged as a response to Cold War and decolonization. Today, science-fiction writers are often used as government advisors on techno-scientific and defence policies. Such relationships between literature, policy and geo-politics have a long and complex history. Glimpses of this history can be seen in the case of the first generation of post-colonial Indian science fiction writers and their critical entanglements with both techno-scientific policies and the strategy of international non-alignment pursued by India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. This investigation reveals the surprisingly long and relatively unknown life of Indian science fiction, as well as the genre’s capacity to imagine alternative pathways to techno-scientific and geo-political developments that dominate our lives today.

The post-war British artist Keith Vaughan (1912-77) painted male figures, whether alone or in groups, as a life-long enquiry into identity, sensuality, and the sanctity of the body. Yet Vaughan was not only a supremely accomplished painter; he was an impassioned, eloquent writer. Commenced in the summer of 1939 as war across Europe seemed inevitable, Vaughan’s journal was a space in which he could articulate ideas about politics, art, love and sex during a period of great political and personal upheaval. Image of a Man is the first book to provide a comprehensive critical reading of Vaughan’s extraordinary journal, which spans thirty-eight years and sixty-one volumes to form a major literary work and a fascinating document of changing times. From close textual analysis of the original manuscripts, this book uncovers the attitudes and arguments that shaped and reshaped Vaughan’s identity as a man and as an artist. It reveals a continual process of self-construction through journal-writing, undertaken to navigate the difficulties of conscientious objection, the complications of desire as a gay man, and the challenges of making meaningful art. By focussing on Vaughan’s journal-writing in the context of its many influences and its centrality to his art practice, Image of a Man offers not only a compelling new critical biography of a significant yet underappreciated artist, but also a sustained argument on the constructed nature of the ‘artist’ persona in early and mid-twentieth-century culture – and the opportunities afforded by life-writing, specifically journal and diary forms, to make such constructions possible.

The poet John Keats trained as a surgeon at Guy’s Hospital, London while simultaneously making his way as a poet. This book focuses attention on an important but hitherto neglected manuscript: the notebook Keats maintained during this time, with the premise that in Keats’ medical Notebook exists a manuscript revealing both the true depth of the poet’s medical knowledge and the significant influence this exercised on his poetry. Reconstructing the lively medical world that played a formative role in Keats’ intellectual and imaginative development, this book explores the intriguing connections between Keats’ medical knowledge and his greatest poetry. It reveals that Keats’ two careers proved mutually enabling and enriching, with their co-existence contributing greatly to his success in both. Opening with a fully annotated edition of Keats’ medical Notebook newly transcribed from the manuscript, the book offers chapters on the provenance of Keats’ medical Notebook; the ‘hospital poems’ he wrote at Guy’s; the medical milieu of Keats’ daily life; his methods of working as revealed by his medical Notebook and other archival sources; and the medical contexts that informed his composition of Endymion and his 1820 volume, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems. It shows how the visceral knowledge of human life that Keats gained at Guy’s Hospital transformed him into the ‘mighty poet of the human heart’, with new research recovering the many ways in which Keats’ creativity found expression in both his careers.

Eating and drinking are essential to survival. Yet for human animals, they are ambivalent, proliferating with ideological, historical and psychological leftovers. This study reveals and mobilizes the provisional meanings, repressed experiences and unacknowledged tensions bound up with representations of food, drink and their consumption. It creates a flexible critical framework by bringing together an unexploited convergence of post-war French thinkers who use – or whose thought is legible through – figures of eating and drinking, including Barthes, Bataille, Beauvoir, Bourdieu, Certeau, Cixous, Derrida, Fischler, Giard, Kristeva, Lacan, Lefebvre, Lévi-Strauss, Mayol and Sartre. New combinations emerge for elucidating the intersecting effects of: incorporation; constructs of class, gender and racial difference; bad faith; distinction; secondary ideological signifying systems; provisional meanings bound up with linguistic traces; economies of excess; everyday ‘making-do’; the ethics of consuming the other; the return of the repressed; lack; abjection; notions of ‘eating on the sly’, ‘mother’s milk’, the ‘omnivore’s paradox’ and ‘gastro-anomie’. Possibilities for re-thinking with eating and drinking are further exemplified in cases studies of novels in which – often beyond authorial intentions – food and drink are structurally important and interpretatively plural: Robbe-Grillet’s Les Gommes/The Erasers (1953); Ernaux’s Les Armoires vides/Cleaned Out (1974); Darrieussecq’s Truismes/Pig Tales (1996); and Houellebecq’sLa Carte et le territoire/The Map and the Territory (2010). New understandings of post-war French cultural production are revealed. But above all, the analyses demonstrate the potential – across genres, periods and places – for literary, comparative, cultural, film, gender and food studies of re-thinking with eating and drinking.

Anita Brookner was a best-selling women’s writer, Booker Prize winner and an historian of French Romantic art. However she is best known for writing boring, outdated books about lonely, single women. This book offers a queer rereading of Brookner by demonstrating the performative Romanticism of her novels to narrate multiple historical forms of homoerotic desire. It draws on diverse nineteenth-century intertexts from Charles Baudelaire to Henry James, Renée Vivien to Freud to establish a cross-historical and temporal methodology that emphasises figures of anachronism, the lesbian, the backwards turn and the woman writer. Delineating sets of narrative behaviours, tropes and rhetorical devices between Brookner’s Romantic predecessors and her own novels, the book produces a cast of Romantic personae comprising the military man, analysand, queer, aesthete, dandy, flâneur, degenerate and storyteller as hermeneutic figures for rereading Brookner. It then stages the performance of these personae along the specified narrative forms and back through six Brookner novels to reveal queer stories about their characters and plotlines. This new interpretation offers ways to think about Brookner’s contemporary female heroines as hybrid variations of (generally male) nineteenth-century artist archetypes. As a result it simultaneously critiques the heterosexual and temporal misreading that has characterised Brookner’s early reception.

Psychology and Science Fiction goes beyond such incidental observations and engagements to offer an in-depth exploration of science fiction literature’s varied use of psychological discourses, beginning at the birth of modern psychology in the late nineteenth century, and concluding with the ascendance of neuroscience in the late twentieth century. Rather than dwelling on psychoanalytic readings, this literary investigation combines with history of psychology to offer attentive textual readings that explore five key psychological schools: evolutionary psychology, psychoanalysis, behaviourism, existential-humanism, and cognitivism. The varied functions of psychological discourses in science fiction are explored, whether to popularise and prophesy, to imagine utopia or dystopia, to estrange our everyday reality, to comment on science fiction itself, or to abet (or resist) the spread of psychological wisdom. Psychology and Science Fiction also considers how psychology itself has made use of science fiction in order to teach, to secure legitimacy as a discipline, and to comment on the present.

This volume examines how, why and with what success smaller European literatures – written in less well-known languages from less familiar traditions – endeavour through translation to reach international readers. It argues that prevailing nation- and world-centred theoretical approaches have failed to provide an adequate understanding of the international circulation of these literatures, and instead advocates and models a comparative, interdisciplinary approach that consistently tests theory against concrete experience and practice, and combines literary, historiographical and translation methodologies to produce a far more precise analysis of the strategies, motivations, obstacles and patterns that emerge as these literatures strive to be heard. Through case studies drawn from over thirteen national contexts from Scandinavia and the Low Countries to the Mediterranean and Central and Eastern Europe, the volume analyses how the international perceptions of these literatures are disadvantaged and distorted in theory, reception and industry practice, evaluates successes and failures as these literatures, through state and third-sector intervention and individual innovation, attempt to overcome their marginalization, and charts how the mould of our perception of these literatures might be broken.

The chapters in this book respond to important questions about the formal properties of French literary texts and the agency of form. A central feature of twentieth- and twenty-first century French and Francophone writing has been the exploration of how cultural forms (literary, philosophical and visual) create distinctive semiotic environments and at the same time engage with external realities. The aim of this volume is to explore how the formal properties of a range of texts inflect our reading of them and, through that exploration, to renew the engagement with form that has been a key feature of French cultural production and of analysis in French studies.