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Tilottama Rajan illuminates a crisis of representation within romanticism, evident in the proliferation of stylistically and structurally unsettled literary texts that resist interpretation in terms of a unified meaning. The Supplement of Reading investigates the role of the reader both in romantic literary texts and in the hermeneutic theory that has responded to and generated such texts. Rajan considers how selected works by Coleridge, Wordsworth, Blake, Shelley, Godwin, and Wollstonecraft explore the problem of understanding in relation to interpretive difference, including the differences produced by gender, class, and history.

For over 50 years, Darko Suvin has set the agenda for science fiction studies through his innovative linking of scifi to utopian studies, formalist and leftist critical theory, and his broader engagement with what he terms \"political epistemology.\" Disputing the Deluge joins a rapidly growing renewal of critical interest in Suvin’s work on scifi and utopianism by bringing together in a single volume 24 of Suvin’s most significant interventions in the field from the 21st century, with an Introduction by editor Hugh O’Connell and a new preface by the author. Beginning with writings from the early 2000s that investigate the function of literary genres and reconsider the relationship between science fiction and fantasy, the essays collected here—each a brilliant example of engaged thought—highlight the value of scifi for grappling with the key events and transformations of recent years. Suvin’s interrogations show how speculative fiction has responded to 9/11, the global war on terror, the 2008 economic collapse, and the rise of conservative populism, along with contemporary critical utopian analyses of the Capitalocene, the climate crisis, COVID-19, and the decline of democracy. By bringing together Suvin’s essays all in one place, this collection allows new generations of students and scholars to engage directly with his work and its continuing importance and timeliness.

Through an investigation of the body and its oppression by the church, the medical profession and the state, this book reveals the actual horrors lying beneath fictional horror in settings as diverse as the monastic community, slave plantation, operating theatre, Jewish ghetto and battlefield trench. The book provides original readings of canonical Gothic literary and film texts including The Castle of Otranto, The Monk, Frankenstein, Dracula and Nosferatu. This collection of fictionalised dangerous bodies is traced back to the effects of the English Reformation, Spanish Inquisition, French Revolution, Caribbean slavery, Victorian medical malpractice, European anti-Semitism and finally warfare, ranging from the Crimean up to the Vietnam War. The endangered or dangerous body lies at the centre of the clash between victim and persecutor and has generated tales of terror and narratives of horror, which function to either salve, purge or dangerously perpetuate such oppositions. This ground-breaking book will be of interest to academics and students of Gothic studies, gender and film studies and especially to readers interested in the relationship between history and literature.

Now available in paperback, Decadent daughters and monstrous mothers interrogates the vexed question of Angela Carter’s feminist politics through the dusty lens of European Gothic. It illuminates her ambivalent relation to some of her most contentious European literary forebears, reveals her rich knowledge of French literature and offers fresh insights into her literary practices afforded by newly available archival material. This book analyses Carter’s textual engagements with a dirty lineage of European Gothic that can be mapped from the Marquis de Sade’s obsession with desecration and defilement, through Baudelaire’s perverse decompositions of the muse and decadent imaginings of infernal femininity, to surrealism’s violent dreams of abjection. It argues that Carter’s most troublesome engagements with her European Gothic forefathers are unexpectedly those which are most vital to a consideration of her feminist politics.

This book provides an historical account of the publication and reception of South Asian Anglophone writing from the 1930s to the present, based on original archival research drawn from a range of publishing houses. This comparison of succeeding generations of writers who emigrated to, or were born in, Britain examines how the experience of migrancy, the attitudes towards migrant writers in the literary marketplace, and the critical reception of them, changed significantly throughout the 20th century. The book shows how the aesthetic, cultural, and political context changed significantly for each generation, producing radically different kinds of writing and transforming the role of the post-colonial writer of South Asian origin. The extensive use of original materials from publishers' archives shows how shifting political, academic, and commercial agendas in Britain and North America influenced the selection, content, presentation, and consumption of many of these texts. The differences between writers of different generations can thus in part be understood in terms of the different demands of their publishers and expectations of readers in each decade. Writers from different generations are paired accordingly in each chapter: Nirad Chaudhuri (1897–1999) with Tambimuttu (1915–83); Ambalavener Sivanandan (born 1923) with Kamala Markandaya (born 1924); Salman Rushdie (born 1947) with Farrukh Dhondy (born 1944); and Hanif Kureishi (born 1954) with Meera Syal (born 1963). Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand, Attia Hosain, V. S. Naipaul, and Aubrey Menen are also discussed.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. In the last decade there has been a proliferation of landscape writing in Britain and Ireland, often referred to as ‘The New Nature Writing’. Rooted in the work of an older generation of environment-focused authors and activists, this new form is both stylistically innovative and mindful of ecology and conservation practice. The New Nature Writing: Rethinking the Literature of Place connects these two generations to show that the contemporary energy around the cultures of landscape and place is the outcome of a long-standing relationship between environmentalism and the arts. Drawing on original interviews with authors, archival research, and scholarly work in the fields of literary geographies, ecocriticism and archipelagic criticism, the book covers the work of such writers as Robert Macfarlane, Richard Mabey, Tim Robinson and Alice Oswald. Examining the ways in which these authors have engaged with a wide range of different environments, from the edgelands to island spaces, Jos Smith reveals how they recreate a resourceful and dynamic sense of localism in rebellion against the homogenising growth of “clone town Britain.”

‘“Originality” is only plagiarizing from a great many’, remarked Rupert Brooke, stealing the line from Voltaire. Questions of originality and accusations of plagiarism, are as old as literature, but different literary cultures have interpreted the relationship between originality and plagiarism in startlingly dissimilar ways. This book investigates and documents the drastic reappraisal of literary originality and plagiarism which occurred over the course of the 19th century: from the heroic visions of original authorship that characterised the 1820s and 1830s, through to the stickle-brick creativity of Oscar Wilde and Lionel Johnson at the century's end. It reveals how ideas of originality and plagiarism were not only a theoretical concern of Victorian commentators on literature, but also provided many important Victorian writers — Eliot, Dickens, Reade, Pater, Wilde, and Lionel Johnson among them — with a creative resource. Moving between numerous different fields of thought and knowledge — literary criticism, the history of science, manuscript culture, anthropology — this book shows that the ideas of originality and plagiarism were the subjects of 19th-century literature, as well as what it was subject to.

Monstrous media/spectral subjects explores the intersection of monsters, ghosts, representation and technology in Gothic texts from the nineteenth century to the present. It argues that emerging media technologies from the phantasmagoria and magic lantern to the hand-held video camera and the personal computer both shape Gothic subjects and in turn become Gothicised. In a collection of essays that ranges from the Victorian fiction of Wilkie Collins, Bram Stoker and Richard Marsh to the music of Tom Waits, world horror cinema and the TV series Doctor Who, this book finds fresh and innovative contexts for the study of Gothic. Combining essays by well-established and emerging scholars, it should appeal to academics and students researching both Gothic literature and culture and the cultural impact of new technologies.

This visual celebration of the world's most celebrated thinkers tells the fascinating stories of their lives and pioneering ideas.Writers Who Changed History places well-known writers in their historical and cultural context, showing you how they came to influence literature as we know it today. This illustrated guide is ideal for those interested in literature, writing, poems and novels or who want to broaden their general understanding of literature and writers' lives.Inside this book on writers, you'll find: -An overview of the lives and works of around 100 of the world's most important novelists, poets, and playwrights - from the Middle Ages to the present-Eight pages of brand-new content with 12 new entries, including Charles Waddell Chesnutt and Zora Neale Hurston-Portraits of each writer alongside photographs of their homes and studies, original manuscripts, notebooks, letters, first editionsIn this literature guide, each writer is introduced with a realistic portrait and biographical entries that trace the friendships, loves, and rivalries that inspired and influenced their work, revealing insights into the larger-than-life characters, plots, and evocative settings they created. Entries explore each individual's key ideas and working methods and set their ideas in context, conveying a powerful sense of the place and the period of history in which they lived. Writers Who Changed History provides revealing insights into what drove each individual to develop new ways of understanding the world.

When the mind turns more than one would wish towards questions of - as W.G. Sebald puts it - the \"natural history of destruction\", comparative consideration by artists and interdisciplinary scholars is directed to the interstices between images, novel, essay, (auto)biography, memorial and travelogue. Artists have been among Sebald's most prolific interpreters - as they are among the more fearless and holistic researchers on questions concerning what it means never to be able to fix an identity, to tell a migrant's story, or to know where a historical trauma ends. Sebald has - as this book attests - also given artists and scholars a means to write with images, to embrace ambiguity, and to turn to today's migrants with empathy and responsibility; as well as to let academic research, creation and institutional engagement blend into or substantially inform one another in order to account for and enable such necessary work in the most diverse contexts.