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This book examines the idea of the self in Anglophone literatures from British colonies in Africa and the subcontinent, and in the context of intercultural encounter, literary hybridity and globalization. The project examines texts by eight authors across the colonial, postwar and post-9/11 eras – Olaudah Equiano, Sake Dean Mahomet, Henry Callaway, R.C. Temple, Amos Tutuola, G.V. Desani, Tsitsi Dangarembga and Aravind Adiga – in order to map different strategies of selfhood across four fields of literature: autobiographical life writing, folk anthology, postwar fabulism, and contemporary realism. Drawing on historical analysis, psychological inquiry, comparative linguistics, postcolonial criticism and social theory, this book responds to a renewed emphasis on the narrative strategies and creative choices involved in a literary construction of the self. Threaded through this investigation is an analysis of the effects of globalization, or the intensification of intercultural and dialogic complexity over time.

Constitutions of Self in Contemporary Irish Poetry explores the figure of the lyrical self in the work of six contemporary Irish poets: Paul Muldoon, Vona Groarke, Sinéad Morrissey, Caitríona O'Reilly, Alan Gillis and Nick Laird. By focusing on the self, this study offers the first sustained exploration of what is arguably one of the most distinctive features of Irish poetry. Readings utilise the latest theories of the lyric filtered through the work of such philosophers as Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, Slavoj Žižek, Giorgio Agamben and Zygmunt Bauman, and connect an interdisciplinary approach with attention to the operations of the poetic text to bring out aspects of the self in Irish writing that have been given only cursory critical attention so far.

This book examines the ways in which a writer's presentation of self can achieve or impede access to power. Conversations about written voice and style have traditionally revolved around the aesthetics of stylistic choice. These choices, while they help establish a writer's presence in a text, too often ignore the needs of written identity as it crosses genres, disciplines, and rhetorical purposes. In contrast to stylistic investigations of a writer's'voice'and its various components—diction, detail, imagery, syntax, and tone, for example—this book focuses on language variation and the linguistic features of a writer's presence in a text, as well as the establishment of a writer's social, cultural, and personal identity in a given text. The author attempts to explain the methods by which writers present themselves to their audiences. This book will be of particular interest to students and teachers of rhetoric and composition studies, as well as writers more broadly.

In a neo-liberal era concerned with discourses of responsible individualism and the ‘selfie', there is an increased interest in personal lives and experiences. In contemporary life, the personal is understood to be political and these ideas cut across both the social sciences and humanities.This handbook is specifically concerned with auto/biography, which sits within the field of narrative, complementing biographical and life history research. Some of the contributors emphasise the place of narrative in the construction of auto/biography, whilst others disrupt the perceived boundaries between the individual and the social, the self and the other. The collection has nine sections: creativity and collaboration; families and relationships; epistolary lives; geography; madness; prison lives; professional lives; ‘race'; and social justice and disability. They illustrate the inter- and multi-disciplinary nature of auto/biography as a field. Each section features an introduction froma section editor, many of whom are established researchers and/or members of the British Sociological Association (BSA) Auto/Biography study group. The handbook provides the reader with cutting-edge research from authors at different stages in their careers, and will appeal to those with an interest in auto/biography, auto-ethnography, epistolary traditions, lived experiences, narrative analysis, the arts, education, politics, philosophy, history, personal life, reflexivity, research in practice and the sociology of the everyday.Chapter 1: A Case for Auto/Biography; Julie Parsons and Anne Chappell.Section One: Creativity and Collaboration; edited by Gayle Letherby. Chapter 2: The Times are a Changing: Culture(s) of Medicine; Theresa Compton. Chapter 3: Seventeen Minutes and Thirty-One Seconds: An Auto/Biographical Account of Collaboratively Witnessing and Representing an Untold Life Story; Kitrina Douglas andDavid Carless. Chapter 4: Reflections on a Collaborative, Creative'Working'Relationship; Deborah Davidson and Gayle Letherby. Section Two: Families and Relationships: Auto/Biography and Family, A Natural Affinity?; edited by David Morgan. Chapter 5: Life Story and Narrative Approaches in the Study of Family Lives; Julia Brannen. Chapter 6: The Research Methods for Discovering Housing Inequalities in Socio-Biographical Studies; Elizaveta Polukhina.Chapter 7: Auto/Biographical Research and The Family; Aidan Seery and Karin Bacon. Section Three: Epistolary Lives: Fragments, Sensibility, Assemblages in Auto/Biographical Research; edited by Maria Tamboukou. Chapter 8: Letter-Writing and the Actual Course of Things: Doing the Business, Helping the World Go Round; Liz Stanley. Chapter 9: The Unforeseeable Narrative: Epistolary Lives in Nineteenth Century Iceland; Erla Hulda Halldórsdóttir. Chapter 10: Auto/Pathographies In Situ:'Dying of Melancholy'in Nineteenth Century Greece; Dimitra Vassiliadou. Section Four: Geography Matters: Spatiality and Auto/Biography; edited by John Barker and Emma Wainwright. Chapter 11:'Trying to Keep Up': Intersections of Identity, Space, Time and Rhythm in Women Student Carer Auto/Biographical Accounts; Fin Cullen, John Barker and Pam Alldred. Chapter 12: Spatiality and Auto/Biographical Narratives of Encounter in Social Housing; Emma Wainwright, Elodie Marandet and Ellen McHugh.Chapter 13: “I Thought… I Saw… I Heard…”: The Ethical and Moral Tensions of Auto/Biographically Opportunistic Research in Public Spaces; Tracy Ann Hayes. Section Five: Madness, Dys-order and Autist/Biography: Auto/Biographical Challenges to Psychiatric Dominance; edited by Kay Inckle. Chapter 14: Autist/Biography; Alys

Haunted Selves, Haunting Places in English Literature and Culture offers a series of readings of poetry, the novel and other forms of art and cultural expression, to explore the relationship between subject and landscape, self and place. Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach grounded in close reading, the text places Jacques Derrida's work on spectrality in dialogue with particular aspects of phenomenology. The volume explores writing and culture from the 1880s to the present day, proceeding through four sections examining related questions of identity, memory, the landscape, and our modern relationship to the past. Julian Wolfreys presents a theoretically informed understanding of the efficacy of literature and culture in connecting us to the past in an affective and engaged manner.

This book examines temporal and formal disruptions found in American autobiographical narratives produced during the end of the nineteenth century. It argues that disruptions were primarily the result of encounters with new communication and transportation technologies. Through readings of major autobiographical works of the period, James E. Dobson argues that the range of affective responses to writing, communicating, and traveling at increasing speed and distance were registered in this literature's formal innovation. These autobiographical works, Dobson claims, complicate our understanding of the lived experience of time, temporality, and existing accounts of periodization. This study first examines the competing views of space and time in the nineteenth century and then moves to examine how high-speed train travel altered American literary regionalism, the region, and history. Later chapters examine two narratives of failed homecoming that are deeply ambivalent about modernity and technology, Henry James's The American Scene and Theodore Dreiser's A Hoosier Holiday, before a reading of the telephone network as a metaphor for historiography and autobiography in Henry Adams's The Education of Henry Adams.

This is a lively study of the autobiographical instinct in a variety of 16th and 17th century modes of writing in English, from letters and memoirs to pastoral, polemic and street ballads. The book's central concern is how'selves'are'betrayed'in texts, particularly in the centuries before the autobiography was a recognized genre. It suggests that self-representation in the early modern period was often indirect, emerging in oblique and surprising ways.

After Dorothy L. Sayers became famous for her fictional sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey, she began investigating the mysteries of Anglo-Catholic Christianity, writing plays for both stage and radio. However, because her modernist contemporaries disdained both best-sellers and religious fiction, Sayers has been largely overlooked by the academy. Writing Performances is the first work to position Sayers'diverse writings within the critical climate of high modernism. Employing exuberant illustrations from Sayers'detective fiction to make theoretical issues accessible, the book employs insights from performance theory to argue that Sayers, though a popularizer, presciently anticipated the postmodern ironizing of Enlightenment rationality and scientific objectivity.

Adorno and Modern Theatre explores the drama of Edward Bond, David Rudkin, Howard Barker and Sarah Kane in the context of the work of leading philosopher Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969). The book engages with key principles of Adorno's aesthetic theory and cultural critique and examines their influence on a generation of seminal post-war dramatists.

Shakespeare's Extremes is a controversial intervention in current critical debates on the status of the human in Shakespeare's work. By focusing on three flagrant cases of human exorbitance - Edgar, Caliban and Julius Caesar - this book seeks to limn out the domain of the human proper in Shakespeare.

Technology and Identity in Young Adult Fiction is not a historical study or a survey of narrative plots, but takes a more conceptual approach that engages with the central ideas of posthumanism: the fragmented nature of posthuman identity, the concept of agency as distributed and collective and the role of embodiment in understandings of selfhood.

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.

The first book-length study to trace the origins of the essay to the conte, Montaigne and Brief Narrative Form puts the reader in touch with how unstable times and exceptional artistic insights transform one genre to create a new artistic form.

Samuel Beckett's work is deeply concerned with physical contact - remembered, half-remembered, or imagined. Applying the philosophical writings of Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Merleau-Ponty that feature sensation, this study examines how Beckett's later work dramatizes moments of contact between self and self, self and world, and self and other.

Drawing on a broad concept of desire, informed by poststructuralist theorists this book examines the range of Hardy's work. It demonstrates the sustained nature of his thinking about desire, its relationship to the social and symbolic network in which human subjectivity is constituted and art's potential to offer fulfilment to the desiring subject.

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.

By examining these competing depictions of combat that coexist in sixteenth-century texts ranging from Arthurian romance to early modern medical texts, this study reveals both the importance of combat in understanding the humanist subject and the contours of the previously neglected pre-modern subject.

Focusing in particular on pairings of writers within the larger grouping of poets, this book suggests how literary partnerships became pivotal to American poets in the wake of Donald Allen's'New American Poetry'anthology.

Elizabethan English culture is saturated with tales and figures from Ovid s Metamorphoses. While most of these narratives interrogate metamorphosis and transformation, many tales - such as those of Philomela, Hecuba, or Orpheus - also highlight heightened states of emotion, especially in powerless or seemingly powerless characters. When these tales are translated and retold in the new cultural context of Renaissance England, a distinct politics of Ovidian emotion emerges. Through intertextual readings in diverse cultural contexts, Ovid and the Politics of Emotion in Elizabethan England reveals the ways these representations helped redefine emotions and the political efficacy of emotional expression in sixteenth-century England.

This innovative study examines the work of exiles from the Soviet Union who returned to a reformed post-Soviet Russia to initiate narrative processes of self-definition oriented toward a readership and nation seeking self-identity, all at a time of social, political and cultural transition within Russia itself.

The first critical survey of an unjustly neglected body of literature: the autobiographies and memoirs of writers of Irish birth or background who lived and worked in Britain between 1725 and the present day. It offers a stimulating and provocative introduction to the themes, preoccupations and narrative strategies of a diverse range of writers.

Analyzing real, speculative, and imaginary schemes of migration to and from Britain, this book addresses three interrelated movements: between France and Britain after the French Revolution, between Britain and North America also after the Revolution, and between West Africa and Britain in the years leading to the Revolution.

The Interpersonal Idiom offers a timely reformulation of identity in the age of Shakespeare, recovering a rich and now obsolete language that casts selfhood not as subjective experience but as the experience of others.

Modern Irish Autobiography provides the first comprehensive critical analysis of the Irish autobiographical tradition from the early nineteenth century to the present day. This pioneering collection offers readers a stimulating and provocative introduction to the principal themes, modes and narrative strategies of Irish autobiographers.

James Booth reads Philip Larkin's mature poetry in terms of his ambiguous self-image as lonely, anti-social outsider, plighted to his art, and as nine-to-five librarian, sharing the common plight of humanity. Booth's focus is on Larkin's artistry with words, the'verbal devices'through which this purest of lyric poets celebrates'the experience. The beauty.'Featuring discussion for the first time of two recently discovered poems by Larkin, this original and exciting new study will be of interest to all students, scholars and enthusiasts of Larkin.

The advent of relatively cheap editions in the mid-sixteenth century produced an explosion of verse, much of which represented the first person speaker as a version of the author. This book examines ways in which writers, often seeking advancement in their careers, harnessed verse for self-promotional purposes. Texts studied include a manuscript autobiography by Thomas Whythorne, printed verse by a woman, Isabella Whitney, travel and war narratives, as well as canonical texts by Spenser, Sidney and Shakespeare.

In this study of Yeats'poetry between 1902 and 1916, Greaves strongly reacts to the tendency in literary criticism to categorize Yeats'work as'modernist', Instead, Greaves offer a different way of looking at the transition in Yeats'work in this period, by examining the poems in the context of Yeats'life. As a result, the figure of Yeats the poet is resurrected from the exhaustive category of'modernism'and the complex connections between the figure of Yeats within the poems and its relationship with the Yeats who exists outside them is revealed.

Tauchert's book revisits the work of feminist icon Mary Wollstonecraft to offer new readings which are both astute and adventurous. It demands that we leave behind the baggage of years of argument over whether or not Wollstonecraft is feminist and instead offers a Wollstonecraft whose work intervenes in the formation of'womanhood', and as such is both valuable and timely. Giving a comprehensive account of her work, Tauchert makes a significant addition to current theories of feminine writing through her analysis of Wollstonecraft's techniques.

The scientific achievements of the modern world failed to impress the leading writers of this century, leaving them instead profoundly disturbed by a sense of lost values and of the insignificance of the individual in a universe seemingly indifferent to human concerns. In The Search for Selfhood in Modern Literature Roston explores the strategies adopted by such mid-century authors as Greene, Salinger, Osborne, Baldwin and others in their attempt to cope with the spiritual vacuity - strategies including the emergence of the anti-hero and of literary existentialism - and offer in the course of the investigation fascinatingly new insights into their work.

This is the first full length exploration of the relationship between Gothic fiction and Modernism in fiction and film. The Gothic's fascination with images of the fragmented self is echoed in the Modernist concern with the psyche and the paranoia of the everyday. The contributors explore how the Gothic influences a range of writers including James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, May Sinclair, Elizabeth Bowen and Djuna Barnes.

Drawing on aspects of Foucauldian feminist theory Thomas Hardy, Femininity and Dissent offers original and detailed readings of six critically under-valued novels: Desperate Remedies, A Pair of Blue Eyes, The Hand of Ethelberta, A Laodicean, Two on a Tower and The Well-Beloved, demonstrating Hardy's peculiarly modern appreciation of how individuals negotiate the forces which shape their sense of self. Tracing his interest in the evolutionary debate and the woman question this book reveals a new politically engaged rather than a grimly pessimistic Hardy.

Although the book is scholarly in approach, its plain and lively style, its original theories and its new treatment of Dickens'female characters ensures its accessibility and appeal to the general reader as well as to the specialist student.

Shelley's detractors since Hazlitt have noticed a division in the'self'of his poems. A central reasoning core fears the passions surrounding it and distrusts the language expressing it. A few of his admirers offer an alternative view of the poems as symbolical pointers to a non-linguistic reality transcending passion; most miss the point, justifying their admiration by referring to the poems'systems of thought. This reading of Shelley's major poems and critical prose finds the adverse case more convincing.

Women's novels have traditionally been read as'subjective'. Through an examination of three generations of women's fiction in the post-Romantic period, this book challenges traditional readings of women's novels and argues that fiction writing for women has often been a matter of self-erasure rather than self-inscription. In particular, it examines the changing strategies, sometimes collusive and sometimes rebellious, which Charlotte Bronte, Olive Schreiner and Katherine Mansfield employed in their tentative project of inscribing female subjectivity into the novel and story form.

An examination of a number of English women novelists who portrayed the crises and conflicts in the development of the female consciousness as a response to the anomalies of the rapidly changing world of the early twentieth century when opportunities for self-expression and fulfilment were beginning to open up for women but nineteenth-century values and prejudices still widely prevailed. May Sinclair, Radclyffe Hall, Rosamond Lehmann, Antonia White and Dorothy Richardson are seen as outspoken and innovative writers often marginalised or ignored by serious criticism.

Duality and the divided mind have been a source of perennial fascination for literary artists and especially for novelists, and this is particularly true of the Romantic generation and their later nineteenth-century heirs. This book deals with the double, or Doppelgnger, as a dominant theme in the fiction of the period, and with its relation to the problem of evil. It suggests that the literary double flourished best when psychological and religious understandings of human dividedness were in harmony, and declined when they began to grow apart. Writers analysed include E.T.A.Hoffmann, James Hogg, Poe, Dostoevsky and Stevenson; the final chapter relates the theme to the psychology of Jung.

A rich contribution to the study of autobiography.'- James Olney Suzanne Nalbantian provides a precise and highly original basis to identify literary art with her novel approach to autobiography. Re-examining key writers of the early twentieth-century - Proust, Joyce, Woolf, with Nin in their wake - Nalbantian discerns models of a hybrid genre characterised by a common aesthetics. She discovers in these writings a threshold of artistic transformation beyond the identification of biographical authenticity.