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This book develops a theory of aesthetic fiction's impact on social identities. Throughout five case studies, the author develops the argument that social identities are nurtured by and may even emerge through the conflict between different aesthetic expressions. As it creates affective structures, narrative fiction enables the development and formation of political and cultural identities. This work is part of a field of research that deals with the aesthetics of the everyday and the idea of social aesthetics. It argues for a central role for the arts in the creation and formation of modern society. Social identities emerge in response to aesthetic-sensual patterns of perception.Focusing on five West German public debates in the years 1950 to 1990, this work sheds light upon the transformation of social reality through the discursive adaption of art.

William Cobbett, the Press and Rural England offers a thorough re-appraisal of William Cobbett (1763-1835), situating his journalism and rural radicalism in relation to contemporary political debates.

The last two decades have witnessed a profound change in the way we receive the literary texts of early modern England. One could call this a move from'text'to'culture'. Put briefly, earlier critics tended to focus on literary texts, strictly conceived: plays, poems, prose fictions, essays. Since the mid-1980s, however, it has been just as likely for critics to speak of the'culture'of early modern England, even when they do so in conjunction with analysis of literary texts. This'cultural turn'has clearly enriched the way in which we read the texts of early modern England, but the interdisciplinary practices involved have frequently led critics to make claims about materials - and about the'culture'these materials appear to embody - that exceed those materials'representativeness. Shakespeare and the Question of Culture addresses the central issue of'culture'in early modern studies through both literary history and disciplinary critique. Douglas Bruster argues that the'culture'literary critiques investigate through the works of Shakespeare and other writers is largely a literary culture, and he examines what this necessary limitation of the scope of'cultural studies'means for the discipline of early modern studies.

The Irish Novel at the End of the Twentieth Century: Gender, Bodies and Power interprets a wide variety of the most interesting Irish novels of the last ten years of the century from a perspective that focuses on the regulated sexual and constructed gendered body. The demarcating line of identity-the perennial Irish problem-can be gauged at the basic level of sexual and gender identity in contrast to or in alliance with political, social, religious or cultural norms. All mechanisms that have gone into controlling the body-gender regulation, violence, desire, religious taboos-can all be reinterpreted through the body in motion.

Ann Kelly's provocative book breaks the mold of Swift studies. Twentieth century Swift scholars have tended to assess Jonathan Swift as a pillar of the eighteenth-century'republic of letter', a conservative, even reactionary voice upholding classical values against the welling tide of popularization in literature. Kelly looks at Swift instead as a practical exponent of the popular and impressario of the literary image. She argues that Swift turned his back on the elite to write for a popular audience, and that he annexed scandals to his fictionalized print alter ego, creating a continual demand for works by or about this self-mythologized figure. A fascinating look at print culture, the commodification of the author, and the history of popular culture, this book should provoke lots of discussion.

This stimulating and comprehensive study of Will Self's work spans his entire career and offers insightful readings of all his fictional and non-fictional work up to and including his Booker prize nominated novel Umbrella.

George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics celebrates the lives, literature, and politics of a group of four'radical eccentrics'- the Tory anarchist poet Stevie Smith, the Marxist Indian nationalist Mulk Raj Anand, and the glamour-girl-turned-socialist Inez Holden - who formed a friendly circle around the famously radical and eccentric George Orwell. Demonstrating that Smith, Anand, and Holden matter for literary history just as they mattered for Orwell, George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics gives name and shape to a neglected movement within interwar and wartime English writing. It focuses on the lives and texts of Smith, Anand, and Holden in order to argue that these three writers throw into question limiting assumptions about art and politics-about standard relations between literary form and sex, gender, race, class, and empire-in ways that their group's most influential radical, Orwell, cannot. Embarking upon a kind of biographical-political-cultural-literary criticism, this book brings the radical eccentrics'vital, potentially transformative conversation to the attention of scholars of English literature for the first time, suggesting fascinating new approaches to the study of literary London during the thirties and forties.

This multidisciplinary study focuses on the creative state as the nucleus of the work of numerous poets, artists, and philosophers from twentieth-century Spain. Beginning with cognitive science, Gala explores the mental processes and structures that underline creative thinking, for poets like José María Hinojosa, Clara Janés, and Jorge Guillén.

This collection explores how new directions in feminist literary study might be informed by the work of the past. It offers a snapshot view of new feminist research in the field today and traces the influence of the substantial feminist inheritance in English Studies through six distinct, individual pieces of rigorous and innovative new work.

Drawing from classical myth, the history of philosophy, literature, film, music, and painting, Workman connects the artistic claims of Chaucer and tests them against similar gestures in the history of philosophy and literature. What results is a radical retake on Chaucer as a philosopher and poet, upending any preconceived views.

Modernist Mythopoeia argues that the experimental modernist form of mythopoeia was directed towards expressing a range of metaphysical perspectives that fall between material secularism and dogmatic religion. The book is a timely addition to the'post-secular'debate as well as to the'return of religion'in modernist studies.

Shakespearean Echoes assembles a global cast of established and emerging scholars to explore new connections between Shakespeare and contemporary culture, reflecting the complexities and conflicts of Shakespeare's current international afterlife.

This book traces how iconic writers - including Arthur Conan Doyle, J.M. Barrie, Rudyard Kipling, Virginia Woolf, Wilfred Owen, and Aldous Huxley - shaped their response to the loss of loved ones in the First World War through their embrace of mysticism.

This book examines the connections evident between the simultaneous emergence of British modernism and middlebrow literary culture from 1880 to the 1930s. The essays illustrate the mutual influences of modernist and middlebrow authors, critics, publishers and magazines.

This book is about how France's two major documentary authors of the nineteenth century – Gustave Flaubert and Émile Zola – incorporate medical knowledge about the body into their works, and in so doing exploit its metaphorical potential of the body to engage in critical reflection about the accumulation and reconfiguration of knowledge.

Romanticism and the Museum argues that museums were integral to Britain's understanding of itself as a nation in the wake of the French Revolution. It features Wordsworth, Scott, Edgeworth, and literary periodicals featuring Byron and Horace Smith.

Literature after Postmodernism explores the use of literary fantastic storylines in contemporary novels which begin to think beyond postmodernism. They develop an aesthetic perspective that aims at creation and communication instead of subversion and can thus be considered no longer deconstructive but reconstructive.

Providing imaginatively contextualized close readings, this study focuses on three key eighteenth-century writers - Haywood, Hill and Fowke. Wilputte traces the development of the passionate language of these writers whose lives, writing careers, and interests intersected from 1720 to 1724 in the'Hillarian'coterie.

The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory explores the philosophical and historical underpinnings of the postwar crisis and return of storytelling and shows their relevance for the ongoing debate on the significance of narrative for human existence.

This is the first book-length study of early modern English approaches to Medea, the classical witch and infanticide who exercised a powerful sway over literary and cultural imagination in the period 1558-1688. It encompasses poetry, prose and drama, and translation, tragedy, comedy and political writing.

Looking at writers such as Will Self, Hani Kureishi, JG Ballard, and Iain Sinclair, Kim Duff's new book examines contemporary British literature and its depiction of the city after the time of Thatcher and mass privatization. This lively study is an important and engaging work for students and scholars alike.

Dylan Thomas: A Literary Life offers an account of the poet's life, along with a critical reading of his work, that is designed to close what has been called'the yawning gap'between Dylan Thomas's popular and critical reputations.

Compromise and Resistance in Postcolonial Writing offers a new critical approach to E. M. Forster's legacy. It examines key themes in Forster's work (homosexuality, humanism, modernism, liberalism) and their relevance to post-imperial and postcolonial novels by important contemporary writers.

This is the first scholarly study devoted to Shakespeare's girl characters and conceptions of girlhood. It charts the development of Shakespeare's treatment of the girl as a dramatic and literary figure, and explores the impact of Shakespeare's girl characters on the history of early modern girls as performers, patrons, and authors.

Literature and Encyclopedism in Enlightenment Britain tells the story of long-term aspirations to comprehend, record, and disseminate complete knowledge of the world. It draws on a wide range of literary and non-literary works from the early modern era and British Enlightenment.

Contemporary Fictions of Multiculturalism analyses novels of the late 20th and early 21st centuries that explore ethnic and cultural diversity in London. It contributes to key, ongoing debates in literary and cultural studies and, in particular, to debates over the status and relevance of multiculturalism today.

This book explores modalities and cultural interventions of translation in the early modern period, focusing on the shared parameters of these two translation cultures. Translation emerges as a powerful tool for thinking about community and citizenship, literary tradition and the classical past, certitude and doubt, language and the imagination.

Idleness, Indolence and Leisure in English Literature is the first study to provide transhistorical perspectives and cutting-edge critical analyses of debates concerning idleness in English literature. The topicality of the subject is emphasized by two pieces of sociological analysis.

This book argues that the term'Romanticism'should be more culturally-inclusive, recognizing the importance of scientific and medical ideas that helped shape some of the key concepts of the period, such as natural rights, the creative imagination and the sublime.

Focusing on British novels about the Muslim immigrant experience published after 9/11; this book examines the promise as well as the limits of'British Muslim'identity as a viable form of self-representation, and the challenges - particularly for women - of reconciling non-Western religious identity with the secular policies of Western states.

Using a cognitive approach to literature, this book uncovers representations of self-consciousness in selected modern British novels, exposing it as complicating character development. Miller provides new readings of works by Conrad, Joyce, and D.H. Lawrence to demonstrate the emergence of a self who feels split from the world.

This book explores the way older women are represented in society. Through close readings of novels by major 20th century novelists, compared with the more dominant representations of female ageing to be found in popular culture it suggests that they offer a feminist understanding of the'invisible'woman sometimes lacking in feminism itself.

This book offers new perspectives on the concept of habit in the nineteenth-century novel, delineating the complex, changing significance of the term and exploring the ways in which its meanings play out in a range of narratives, from Dickens to James.

Writing Early Modern London explores how urban community in London was experienced, imagined and translated into textual form. Ranging from previously unstudied manuscripts to major works by Middleton, Stow and Whitney, it examines how memory became a key cultural battleground as rites of community were appropriated in creative ways.

By situating a range of contemporary literary texts against the backdrop of the legacies of a vast rural network of empire, this book collectively critiques not only the rural heritage industry of the 1980s in Britain but also the effect of neocolonial globalisation on postcolonial rural spaces.

Despite dying in relative obscurity, Jane Austen has become a global force as different readers across time, space and media have responded to her work. This volume examines the ways in which her novels affect individual psychologies and how Janeites experience her work, from visiting her home to public re-enactments to films based on her writings.

This book examines the impact of the new liberalism on English literary discourse from the fin-de-siècle to World War One. It maps out an extensive network of journalists, men of letters and political theorists, showing how their shared political and literary vocabularies offer new readings of liberalism's relation to an emerging modernist culture.

Between 1870 and 1910 male authors were actively engaged with imagining new possibilities for women, at the same time as the central female figure continued to function as a troubling and unreachable object of aesthetic desire. This book examines these inscrutable female characters who were the ground on which fiction reinvented itself as Art.

Analysing texts by Sterne, Smollett, Brooke, and Mackenzie, this book offers a new perspective on a question that literary criticism has struggled with for years: why are many sentimental novels of the 1700s so pervasively and playfully self-conscious, and why is this self-consciousness so often directed toward the materiality of the printed word?

Moving through the elegiac ruins of the Berlin Wall and the Yugoslav disintegration, Writing Postcommunism explores literary evocations of the pervasive disappointment and mourning that have marked the postcommunist twilight.

This book is an exploration of the phenomenon of horror from an unusual angle. Focusing on reading specific examples of literature from Romanticism to Modernism, the study brings together the phenomenon of horror with the topical concepts of experience and intermediality and highlights the complex relations they present.

The Landscapes of the Sublime examines the place of the'natural sublime'in the cultural history of the eighteenth century and Romantic period. Drawing on a range of scholarship and historical sources, it offers a fresh perspective on the different species of the'natural sublime'encountered by British and European travellers and explorers.

By 1840, the epistolary novel was dead. Letters in Victorian fiction, however, were unmistakably alive. Postal Plots explores how Victorian postal reforms unleashed a new and sometimes unruly population into the Victorian literary marketplace where they threatened the definition and development of the Victorian literary professional.

This Palgrave Pivot volume explores an exciting range of powerful novels and memoirs from Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Syria that reveal political geographies of injustice and popular discontent thus'anticipating'or imaginatively envisioning as well as participating in some of the major current upheavals in their particular national contexts.

In its exploration of legal issues presented in novels of the Brontë sisters, this book represents a significant and original contribution to the study, not just of the Brontës and the mid-nineteenth century'woman's novel', but also the situation of women in nineteenth century English law and the debates which moved around its prospective reform.

The literary'middle ground', once dismissed by academia as insignificant, is the site of powerful anxieties about cultural authority that continue to this day. In short, the middlebrow matters. These essays examine the prejudices and aspirations at work in the'battle of the brows', and show that cultural value is always relative and situational.

This fascinating interdisciplinary study examines the relationship between literary interest in visionary kinds of experience and medical ideas about hallucination and the nerves in the first half of the nineteenth century, focusing on canonical Romantic authors, the work of women writers influenced by Romanticism, and visual culture.

Examining the work of three authors: Richardson, Haywood and Burney, and their representation of domestic space, this book argues that to make such spaces accessible to modern readers they need to have information of the real domestic. By recreating specifics of these spaces this book innervates the fictional domestic interior for modern readers.

Modernist Nowheres explores connections in the Anglo-American sphere between early literary modernist cultures, politics, and utopia. Foregrounding such writers as Conrad, Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis, it presents a new reading of early modernism in which utopianism plays a defining role prior to, during and immediately after the First World War.

This lively study provides an account of the'fall and rise'of the English nation within the British discipline of English Literature between the late eighteenth century and the present day, offering a reconceptualisation of the relationship between English Literature and the formation of English cultural identity.