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\"Widely heard and read throughout the middle ages, romance literature has persisted for centuries and has lately re-emerged in the form of speculative fiction, inviting readers to step out of the actual world and experience the intriguing pleasure of possibility. Medieval Romance is the first study to focus on the deep philosophical underpinnings of the genre's fictional worlds. James F. Knapp and Peggy A. Knapp uniquely utilize Leibniz's \"possible worlds\" theory, Kant's aesthetic reflections, and Gadamer's writings on the apprehension of language over time, to bring the romance genre into critical dialogue with fundamental questions of philosophical aesthetics, modal logic, and the hermeneutics of literary transmission. The authors' compelling and illuminating analysis of six instances of medieval secular writing, including that of Marie de France, the Gawain-poet, and Chaucer demonstrates how the extravagantly imagined worlds of romance invite reflection about the nature of the real. These stories, which have delighted readers for hundreds of years, do so because the impossible fictions of one era prefigure desired realities for later generations.\"-- Provided by publisher.

Ruth Perry describes the transformation of the English family as a function of several major social changes taking place in the eighteenth century including the development of a market economy and waged labor, enclosure and the redistribution of land, urbanization, the 'rise' of the middle class, and the development of print culture. In particular, Perry traces the shift from a kinship orientation based on blood relations to a kinship axis constituted by conjugal ties as it is revealed in popular literature of the second half of the eighteenth century. Perry focuses particularly on the effect these changes had on women's position in families. She uses social history, literary analysis and anthropological kinship theory to examine texts by Samuel Richardson, Charlotte Lennox, Henry MacKenzie, Frances Burney, Jane Austen, and many others. This important study by a leading eighteenth-century scholar will be of interest to social and literary historians.

\"Rather than reading small-town representations within works as portraits of a provincial past, this book claims that they are best understood as projections emerging from an urban present. As Ontario urbanized over the past century, small towns became a popular literary trope, and Ryan Porter argues that literary small-town Ontario functioned, and functions still, as not only a refraction but also as an exploration of the province's dominant urban modernity. Utilizing theories from heritage scholars, who view popularly understood pasts as conforming to the zeitgeist of the present, You Can't Get There from Here argues that the literary small-town Ontario past is malleable, consisting of attempts to come to terms with the present in which the narrators find themselves. The book focuses on four key Ontario authors-- Stephen Leacock, Robertson Davies, Alice Munro, and Jane Urquhart--as well as many secondary authors, and links the readings to much broader trends in actual Ontario towns and in popular culture.\"-- Provided by publisher.

The classical Bildungsroman charted an idealized path of human development-the harmonization of individual desires with societal norms in the formation of a well-rounded, liberal subject. But what happens when this Enlightenment blueprint for self-cultivation runs up against the particularities of a colonial society riven by nationalism, revolution, and uneven modernization? The Irish Bildungsroman provides the first comprehensive study of how this quintessentially bourgeois and European genre was transformed and reinvented by Irish writers from the Act of Union to the present day. Through incisive readings of over two centuries of Irish novels, the volume's contributors illuminate the diverse narrative strategies Irish authors have employed to depict personal formation within a colonial/postcolonial nation fractured by religion, class, gender, and ethnic divisions. Carefully periodized into three major sections, the book maps the evolution of the Irish Bildungsroman across key historical junctures: the rise of cultural nationalism in the nineteenth century, the revolutionary period and emergence of the postcolonial state in the early twentieth century, and more recent waves of globalization and the reconfiguration of Irish identity. From Maria Edgeworth's post-Union novels to Sally Rooney's millennial fictions, The Irish Bildungsroman excavates a rich vein of self-reflexive writing that creatively reworked this genre to expose the fault lines of liberal humanism and imagine new modes of selfhood.

\"Something extraordinary happened to the UK literary scene in the 1980s. In the space of eight years, a generation of young British writers took the literary novel into new realms of setting, subject matter and style, challenging - and almost eclipsing - the Establishment writers of the 1950s. It began with two names - Martin Amis and Ian McEwan - and became a flood: Julian Barnes, William Boyd, Graham Swift, Salman Rushdie, Jeanette Winterson and Pat Barker among them. The rise of the newcomers coincided with astonishing changes in the way books were published - and the ways in which readers bought them and interacted with their authors. Suddenly, authors of serious fiction were like rock stars, fashionable, sexy creatures, shrewdly marketed and feted in public...Through this exciting, hectic period, the journalist and author John Walsh played many parts: literary editor, reviewer, interviewer, prize judge and TV pundit. He met and interviewed numerous literary stars, attended the best launch parties and digested all the gossip and scandal of the time. In Circus of Dreams he reports on what he found, first with wide-eyed delight and then with a keen eye on what drove this glorious era. The result is a unique hybrid of personal memoir, oral history, literary investigation and elegy for a golden age.\" -- Provided by publisher.

This book offers readings of five of the most interesting and original voices to have emerged in Britain since the millennium as they tackle the challenges of portraying the new century. Through close readings of the work of Ali Smith, Andrew O'Hagan, Tom McCarthy, Sarah Hall and Jon McGregor, Daniel Lea opens a window onto the formal and thematic concerns that characterise a literary landscape troubled by both familiar and unfamiliar predicaments. These include questions about the meaning of humanness in an age of digital intercourse; about the need for a return to authenticity in the wake of postmodernism; and about the dislocation of self from the other under neoliberal individualism. By relating its readings of these authors to the wider shifts in contemporary literary criticism, this book offers in-depth analysis of important landmarks of recent fiction and an introduction to the challenges of understanding the literature of our time.

Founded on a deep disagreement with current criticism of the novel, this book challenges a longstanding consensus that the nineteenth-century novel indelibly registers bourgeois ideology and morality, assuming the novel’s default position is conservative and hegemonic. Systematically under-reading democratic imaginations, this critique emerges alike from Marxists, from readers of nineteenth-century liberalism, and from critics making claims for the working-class novel. To undo such readings the book addresses some classic nineteenth-century political texts—by John Stuart Mill, de Tocqueville, and Hegel. But its core is a new poetics of the novel based on four claims: that the novel is an open Inquiry, a lived interrogation, on analogy with the form of earlier philosophical inquiries, not a predetermined political document; that radical thinking requires radical formal experiment, creating generic disruption and putting the so-called realist text and its values under pressure; that the poetics of social and phenomenological space reveals the dispossessed subject, not the bildung of success or overcoming; that the presence of the aesthetic and artworks in the novel is a constant source of social questioning. Illegitimacy, with its challenge to social norms, is a test case, from Scott and Jane Austen to George Eliot and George Moore, the growing point of democratic imagination.

Anxieties about embodiment and posthumanism have always found an outlet in the science fiction of the day. In Bodies of Tomorrow , Sherryl Vint argues for a new model of an ethical and embodied posthuman subject through close readings of the works of Gwyneth Jones, Octavia Butler, Iain M. Banks, William Gibson, and other science fiction authors. Vint’s discussion is firmly contextualized by discussions of contemporary technoscience, specifically genetics and information technology, and the implications of this technology for the way we consider human subjectivity. Engaging with theorists such as Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Anne Balsamo, N. Katherine Hayles, and Douglas Kellner, Bodies of Tomorrow argues for the importance of challenging visions of humanity in the future that overlook our responsibility as embodied beings connected to a material world. If we are to understand the post-human subject, then we must acknowledge our embodied connection to the world around us and the value of our multiple subjective responses to it. Vint’s study thus encourages a move from the common liberal humanist approach to posthuman theory toward what she calls ‘embodied posthumanism.’ This timely work of science fiction criticism will prove fascinating to cultural theorists, philosophers, and literary scholars alike, as well as anyone concerned with the ethics of posthumanism.

The allure of Mexico in modern English fiction is a compelling and underexplored subject, particularly in the works of D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and Malcolm Lowry. These authors, drawn to Mexico's mystique, crafted major novels that explore the country's unique cultural, social, and political landscape. Infernal Paradise examines how Mexico influenced their artistic visions and how their experiences in the country shaped significant literary works, such as The Plumed Serpent, Eyeless in Gaza, The Power and the Glory, and Under the Volcano. By delving into both the travel writings and novels of these authors, the analysis seeks to understand the dual processes of encountering Mexico firsthand and transforming those encounters into fiction. The book is structured to first contextualize the writers' fascination with Mexico, focusing on the country's dramatic landscapes, revolutionary ideals, and the enigmatic presence of its indigenous culture. The travel writings of Lawrence, Huxley, Greene, Waugh, and Lowry offer a bridge between their immediate experiences and the novels that followed, reflecting the initial reactions that evolved into deeper insights. The writers' personal motives for visiting Mexico--ranging from Lawrence's utopian dreams to Greene and Waugh's concern for the Catholic Church's plight under socialist policies--shaped their perceptions and creative responses. Through a detailed exploration of these travel accounts and the major novels, this book illuminates how Mexico became both an infernal and paradisiacal setting in the English literary imagination, a paradox that continues to resonate in these works. An appendix further enriches the discussion by examining Ralph Bates's The Fields of Paradise, adding another dimension to the \"infernal paradise\" theme in English fiction about Mexico. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1978. Many titles in the Voices Revived program are also newly available as ebooks, offered at a discounted price to support wider access to scholarly work.

This Companion offers a compelling engagement with British fiction from the end of the Second World War to the present day. Since 1945, British literature has served to mirror profound social, geopolitical and environmental change. Written by a host of leading scholars, this volume explores the myriad cultural movements and literary genres that have affected the development of postwar British fiction, showing how writers have given voice to matters of racial, regional and sexual identity. Covering subjects from immigration and ecology to science and globalism, this Companion draws on the latest critical innovations to provide insights into the traditions shaping the literary landscape of modern Britain, thus making it an essential resource for students and specialists alike.