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In this work of impressive scholarship, Sheldon Pollock explores the remarkable rise and fall of Sanskrit, India's ancient language, as a vehicle of poetry and polity. He traces the two great moments of its transformation: the first around the beginning of the Common Era, when Sanskrit, long a sacred language, was reinvented as a code for literary and political expression, the start of an amazing career that saw Sanskrit literary culture spread from Afghanistan to Java. The second moment occurred around the beginning of the second millennium, when local speech forms challenged and eventually replaced Sanskrit in both the literary and political arenas. Drawing striking parallels, chronologically as well as structurally, with the rise of Latin literature and the Roman empire, and with the new vernacular literatures and nation-states of late-medieval Europe, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men asks whether these very different histories challenge current theories of culture and power and suggest new possibilities for practice.

Studies of Victorian governance have been profoundly influenced by Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault's groundbreaking genealogy of modern power. Yet, according to Lauren Goodlad, Foucault's analysis is better suited to the history of the Continent than to nineteenth-century Britain, with its decentralized, voluntarist institutional culture and passionate disdain for state interference. Focusing on a wide range of Victorian writing—from literary figures such as Charles Dickens, George Gissing, Harriet Martineau, J. S. Mill, Anthony Trollope, and H. G. Wells to prominent social reformers such as Edwin Chadwick, Thomas Chalmers, Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, and Beatrice Webb—Goodlad shows that Foucault's later essays on liberalism and \"governmentality\" provide better critical tools for understanding the nineteenth-century British state. Victorian Literature and the Victorian State delves into contemporary debates over sanitary, education, and civil service reform, the Poor Laws, and the century-long attempt to substitute organized charity for state services. Goodlad's readings elucidate the distinctive quandary of Victorian Britain and, indeed, any modern society conceived in liberal terms: the elusive quest for a \"pastoral\" agency that is rational, all-embracing, and effective but also anti-bureaucratic, personalized, and liberatory. In this study, impressively grounded in literary criticism, social history, and political theory, Goodlad offers a timely post-Foucauldian account of Victorian governance that speaks to the resurgent neoliberalism of our own day.

Suellen Diaconoff situates French-language texts from Moroccan women writers in a discourse of social justice and reform, arguing that they contribute to the emerging national debate on democracy and help to create new public spaces of discourse and participation.

A visible presence for some two decades, electronic literature has already produced many works that deserve the rigorous scrutiny critics have long practiced with print literature. Only now, however, with Electronic Literature by N. Katherine Hayles, do we have the first systematic survey of the field and an analysis of its importance, breadth, and wide-ranging implications for literary study. Hayles’s book is designed to help electronic literature move into the classroom. Her systematic survey of the field addresses its major genres, the challenges it poses to traditional literary theory, and the complex and compelling issues at stake. She develops a theoretical framework for understanding how electronic literature both draws on the print tradition and requires new reading and interpretive strategies. Grounding her approach in the evolutionary dynamic between humans and technology, Hayles argues that neither the body nor the machine should be given absolute theoretical priority. Rather, she focuses on the interconnections between embodied writers and users and the intelligent machines that perform electronic texts. Through close readings of important works, Hayles demonstrates that a new mode of narration is emerging that differs significantly from previous models. Key to her argument is the observation that almost all contemporary literature has its genesis as electronic files, so that print becomes a specific mode for electronic text rather than an entirely different medium. Hayles illustrates the implications of this condition with three contemporary novels that bear the mark of the digital.

This book describes a major literary culture caught in the act of becoming minor. In 1939, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary, \"Civilisation has shrunk.\" Her words captured not only the onset of World War II, but also a longer-term reversal of national fortune. The first comprehensive account of modernism and imperialism in England,A Shrinking Islandtracks the joint eclipse of modernist aesthetics and British power from the literary experiments of the 1930s through the rise of cultural studies in the 1950s. Jed Esty explores the effects of declining empire on modernist form--and on the very meaning of Englishness. He ranges from canonical figures (T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf) to influential midcentury intellectuals (J. M. Keynes and J.R.R. Tolkien), from cultural studies pioneers (Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson) to postwar migrant writers (George Lamming and Doris Lessing). Focusing on writing that converts the potential energy of the contracting British state into the language of insular integrity, he argues that an anthropological ethos of cultural holism came home to roost in late-imperial England. Esty's interpretation challenges popular myths about the death of English literature. It portrays the survivors of the modernist generation not as aesthetic dinosaurs, but as participants in the transition from empire to welfare state, from metropolitan art to national culture. Mixing literary criticism with postcolonial theory, his account of London modernism's end-stages and after-lives provides a fresh take on major works while redrawing the lines between modernism and postmodernism.

After the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccination has become synonymous with an opaque biopower that legislates compulsory immunization at a distance. Contemporary illness narratives have become outlets for distrust, misinformation, reckless denialism, and selfish noncompliance. In The Smallpox Report , Fuson Wang rewinds this contemporary impasse between physician and patient back to the Romantic-era origins of vaccination. The book offers a literary-historical account of smallpox vaccination, contending that the disease’s eventual eradication in 1980 was as much a triumph of the literary imagination as it was an achievement of medical Enlightenment science. Wang traces our modern pandemic-era crisis of vaccine hesitancy back to Edward Jenner’s publication of his treatise on vaccination in 1798, the first rumblings of an anti-vaccination movement, and vaccination’s formative literary history that included authors such as William Wordsworth, William Blake, John Keats, Mary Shelley, and Arthur Conan Doyle. The book concludes with a re-examination of the current deeply contentious public discourse about vaccines that has arisen in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. By recovering the surprisingly literary genres of Romantic-era medical writing, The Smallpox Report models a new literary historical perspective on our own crises of vaccine refusal.

Utopian Generationsdevelops a powerful interpretive matrix for understanding world literature--one that renders modernism and postcolonial African literature comprehensible in a single framework, within which neither will ever look the same. African literature has commonly been seen as representationally naïve vis-à-vis modernism, and canonical modernism as reactionary vis-à-vis postcolonial literature. What brings these two bodies of work together, argues Nicholas Brown, is their disposition toward Utopia or \"the horizon of a radical reconfiguration of social relations.\" Grounded in a profound rethinking of the Hegelian Marxist tradition, this fluently written book takes as its point of departure the partial displacement during the twentieth century of capitalism's \"internal limit\" (classically conceived as the conflict between labor and capital) onto ageographicdivision of labor and wealth. Dispensing with whole genres of commonplace contemporary pieties, Brown examines works from both sides of this division to create a dialectical mapping of different modes of Utopian aesthetic practice. The theory of world literature developed in the introduction grounds the subtle and powerful readings at the heart of the book--focusing on works by James Joyce, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Ford Madox Ford, Chinua Achebe, Wyndham Lewis, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and Pepetela. A final chapter, arguing that this literary dialectic has reached a point of exhaustion, suggests that a radically reconceived notion of musical practice may be required to discern the Utopian desire immanent in the products of contemporary culture.

Sam Durrant’s powerfully original book compares the ways in which the novels of J. M. Coetzee, Wilson Harris, and Toni Morrison memorialize the traumatic histories of racial oppression that continue to haunt our postcolonial era. The works examined bear witness to the colonization of the New World, U.S. slavery, and South African apartheid, histories founded on a violent denial of the humanity of the other that had traumatic consequences for both perpetrators and victims. Working at the borders of psychoanalysis and deconstruction, and drawing inspiration from recent work on the Holocaust, Durrant rethinks Freud’s opposition between mourning and melancholia at the level of the collective and rearticulates the postcolonial project as an inconsolable labor of remembrance.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Canada witnessed an explosion in the production of literary works by Aboriginal writers, a development that some critics have called the Native Renaissance. InBefore the Country, Stephanie McKenzie explores the extent to which this growing body of literature influenced non-Native Canadian writers and has been fundamental in shaping our search for a national mythology. In the context of Northrop Frye's theories of myth, and in light of the attempts of social critics and early anthologists to define Canada and Canadian literature, McKenzie discusses the ways in which our decidedly fractured sense of literary nationalism has set indigenous culture apart from the mainstream. She examines anew the aesthetics of Native Literature and, in a style that is creative as much as it is scholarly, McKenzie incorporates the principles of storytelling into the unfolding of her argument. This strategy not only enlivens her narrative, but also underscores the need for new theoretical strategies in the criticism of Aboriginal literatures.Before the Countryinvites us to engage in one such endeavour.

This powerful selection of essays proposes practices of reading and criticism to make the field of postcolonial studies more fully attentive to historical circumstances and socio-material conditions. Benita Parry points to 'directions and dead ends' in the discipline she has helped to shape, with a first series of essays vigorously challenging colonial discourse theory and postcolonialism as we have known them. She then turns to literature with a series of detailed readings that not only demonstrate her theoretical position at work, but also give new dimensions to widely studied texts by Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells and E. M. Forster. Parry argues throughout that the material impulses of colonialism, its appropriation of physical resources, exploitation of human labour and institutional repression have too long been allowed to recede from view. Benita Parry is Honorary Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick.