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«Kilpeläinen's engaging journey through Baldwin's postcategorical utopian thought shows how this writer's under-appreciated later works foresee today's heated ideological and philosophical debates. From political unconscious to Afrofuturism, this book maps Baldwin's Black queer wisdom: Labels and essentialized identities easily ‘become instruments of power,'dividing and alienating societies, cultures, and individuals.» (Magdalena J. Zaborowska, Professor of American Studies and Afroamerican and African Studies, University of Michigan) «This study is an important and timely analysis of Baldwin's later novels. Kilpeläinen's writing is sophisticated and eloquent, and his critical framework is startlingly clear and illuminating. Seizing on Baldwin's ‘incessant urgency,'he advances an authoritative, convincing argument that will add enduringly to our collective appreciation of America's prophetic witness.» (D. Quentin Miller, Professor of English, Suffolk University, Boston) This book examines the dialectic of ideology and utopia in three novels by James Baldwin. Taking Fredric Jameson's seminal theory of the political unconscious as its point of departure, Dr Pekka Kilpeläinen conceptualizes Baldwin's writing in terms of the impulse of postcategorical utopia, where the ideological categorizations based on race and sexuality, in particular, are challenged by the utopian impulse to imagine alternative futures. The readings of three of Baldwin's novels probe into the questions of ideological and utopian spatialities, transgressive interracial and same-sex relationships, and critiques of both Western modernity and its black counterculture. Baldwin's denouncement of the oppressive effects of identity categories penetrates his entire oeuvre, from his early, critically acclaimed work to his later, often ignored novels. Seen through the lens of postcategorical utopia, the urgency of Baldwin's vision gains a new sense of immediacy and relevance.

The Vortex That Unites Us is a study of totality in Russian literature, from the foundation of the modern Russian state to the present day. Considering a diversity of texts that have in common chiefly their prominence in the Russian literary canon, Jacob Emery examines the persistent ambition in Russian literature to gather the whole world into an artwork. Emery reveals how the diversity of totalizing figures in the Russian canon—often in alliance with ideologies like the totalitarian state or enlightenment reason—strive for the frontiers of space and time in order to guarantee the coherence of the globe and the continuity of history. He expores subjects like romantic metaphors of supernatural possession; Tolstoy's conception of art as a vector of emotional contagion; the panoramic ambitions of the avant-garde to grasp the globe in a new poetic medium; efforts of Soviet utopians to harmonize the whole of social life along aesthetic lines; Mandelstam's evocation of writing as a transcendental authority that guarantees a grandiose historical rhythm even when manifested as authoritarian repression; and the mass market of cultural commodities in which the exiled Vladimir Nabokov found success with his novel Lolita. The Vortex That Unites Us reveals a common thread in the disparate works it explores, bringing into a single horizon a variety of typically siloed texts and aesthetic approaches. In all these cases, the medium of totality is the body, inspired by artistic vision and compelled by aesthetic response.

Claims of ideology's end are, on the one hand, performative denials of ideology's inability to end; while, on the other hand, paradoxically, they also reiterate an idea that'ending'is simply what all ideologies eventually do. Situating her work around the intersecting publications of Daniel Bell's The End of Ideology (1960) and J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey (1961), Laurie Rodrigues argues that American novels express this paradox through nuanced applications of non-realist strategies, distorting realism in manners similar to ideology's distortions of reality, history, and belief. Reflecting the astonishing cultural variety of this period, The American Novel After Ideology, 1961 - 2000 examines Franny and Zooey, Carlene Hatcher Polite's The Flagellants (1967), Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead (1991), and Philip Roth's The Human Stain (2001) alongside the various discussions around ideology with which they intersect. Each novel's plotless narratives, dissolving subjectivities, and cultural codes organize the texts'peculiar relations to the post-ideological age, suggesting an aesthetic return of the repressed.

With the success of Fight Club, his novel-turned-movie, Chuck Palahniuk has become noticed for accurately capturing the exploitation of power in America in the 21st century. With cynicism and skepticism, he satirizes the manipulative aspects of ideologies and beliefs pushing society's understanding of the norm. In this work, Palahniuk's characters are analyzed as people who rebel against the systems in control. Mikhail Bakhtin's theory is applied to explain Palahniuk's application of the comic grotesque; theories from Louis Althusser and Slavoj Žižek help reveal aspects of ideology in Palahniuk's writing.

This book explores the topic of ideological manipulation in the translation of children's literature by addressing several crucial questions, including how target language norms and conventions affect the quality of a translation, how translations are selected on the basis of what is culturally accepted, who is involved in the selection of what should be translated for children in the target culture, and how this process takes place. The author presents different ways of looking at the translation of children's books, focusing particularly on the practices of intralingual and interlingual translations as a form of rewriting across a selection of European languages. This book will be of interest to Translation Studies and children's literature scholars, as well as those with a wider interest in the impact of ideology on culture.

Works do not have meanings, they soak up meanings: a work is a machine for libidinal investments (including the political kind). It is a process that sorts incommensurabilities and registers contradictions (which is not the same as solving them!) The inevitable and welcome conflict of interpretations - a discursive, ideological struggle - therefore needs to be supplemented by an account of this simultaneous processing of multiple meanings, rather than an abandonment to liberal pluralisms and tolerant (or intolerant) relativisms. This is not a book about'method', but it does propose a dialectic capable of holding together in one breath the heterogeneities that reflect our biological individualities, our submersion in collective history and class struggle, and our alienation to a disembodied new world of information and abstraction. Eschewing the arid secularities of philosophy, Walter Benjamin once recommended the alternative of the rich figurality of an older theology; in that spirit we here return to the antiquated Ptolemaic systems of ancient allegory and its multiple levels (a proposal first sketched out in The Political Unconscious); it is tested against the epic complexities of the overtly allegorical works of Dante, Spenser and the Goethe of Faust II, as well as symphonic form in music, and the structure of the novel, postmodern as well as Third-World: about which a notorious essay on National Allegory is here reprinted with a theoretical commentary; and an allegorical history of emotion is meanwhile rehearsed from its contemporary, geopolitical context.

Scrutinizing the aesthetic and ideological in the works by Lawrence, Woolf, and Eliot, this book gives a different perspective on Modernism and what are considered to be its principal features. In that respect, fragmentation, disunity, relativity of things, break with tradition, as well as the depiction of life's disorder, are disputed and seen as aesthetic means for the promotion of certain ideologies.Aesthetics and Ideology of D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and T. S. Eliot offers a smooth transition from general discussion and revision of some fixed concepts related to Modernism, through individual authors and their major works to the conclusion where the main findings are summarized and further explicated.Apart from dealing with Modernism in general, Aesthetics and Ideology of D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot presents a somewhat different view on the authors it deals with. They are not only seen as opponents of established religious, political, and social views, but to a certain extent as their perpetrators. This duality concerning their stances is reconciled by their insisting on the aesthetic unity.

This book argues that ideology is a prism through which the work of Vladimir Nabokov needs to be considered. It is thus the first attempt to foreground questions of ideology and politics within a field that has historically been resistant to such readings. The perception of Nabokov as an apolitical writer is one which the author encouraged throughout the latter part of his career in his non-fictional writings and in the small number of well-rehearsed interviews that he gave. When questions of ideology and politics have arisen in scholarship, they have only been featured in passing or have merely re-confirmed the author's self-designation as an «old-fashioned liberal». When we consider that Nabokov lived through some of the most traumatic historical ruptures of the past century then this lack of reference to ideology in the critical literature appears quite revealing. Through the analysis of works which have previously received little attention as well as new perspectives on better known works, this book demonstrates how ideology and politics were ever-present and had an indelible effect on Nabokov's literary aesthetics.

Si Friedrich Nietzsche a reconnu en Stendhal « le dernier grand psychologue de la France », on ne s'étonnera pas que celui-ci, en qualité de romancier, ait accordé toute son attention à ce qu'on dénommera ici les noeuds romanesques, facteurs de développement et de dynamisme des intrigues. Dans ce contexte, les concepts d'empathie et de manipulation jouent tout leur rôle, les relations intersubjectives comprenant, à des degrés divers, efforts d'empathie et démarches de manipulation. De tous les cas de figures, l'oeuvre stendhalienne fournit des exemples dont cet ouvrage livre l'analyse détaillée.

This study focuses on Dickens's response to questions of identity, conduct, and social organization that emerged in an era of major cultural unsettlement and change, not least with the decline of religious certainty and the rise of materialism. An analysis of A Christmas Carol as a paradigm of his concerns and strategies in these fields is followed by close readings of novels from different stages of his career, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend. These, and other works by Dickens, are seen to reflect ideologies currently at work in his society but also, more importantly, to participate in the construction of needful value systems and codes for regulating behaviour. Liberal humanism and middle-class hegemony feature largely in this process of culture formation, where Dickens played a crucial role in formulating and promulgating such salient guiding principles as those of sympathy, marriage and the family, economic responsibility, and hierarchy within and between groups. His treatment of the self is on one level driven by this project in shaping and stabilizing attitudes among a confederacy of readers, in that it offers positive models of development, of how to function and fit in; yet on another, especially in his sustained imaginative preoccupation with the figure of the outsider or misfit, this is one pre-eminent area where his writing transcends purposes of enculturation and paradoxically challenges its own ideological positions. His female characters in particular, as well as more obviously his anti-heroes, criminals, and other dissidents, are shown to question and subvert the moulds in which they are formally cast. The novels are confirmed not only as great creative achievements, an aspect this book consistently salutes, nor simply as a primary site of the evolving Victorian dispensation and revolution of ideas, but as a territory that predicts, engages, and illuminates our own complex modernity. Reference is made throughout the volume to other contemporary writings, including sociological, philosophic, and medical discourse, to recent cognate theory, and to traditions, like that of Puritan spiritual autobiography, which Dickens adapted to new ends.

The conviction that the development and promotion of the arts, humanities and culture through the study of literature and the aesthetic are the fundamental constituents of any progress in society is at the heart of this volume. The essays gathered here explore the role of the imagination and aesthetic awareness in an age when the corporatization of knowledge is in the process of transforming literary studies, and political commitment is in danger of disappearing behind a supposedly post-ideological late-capitalist consensus.The main focus of the volume is the mutual implication of aesthetics and ideology and the status and value of different types of art within the political arena. Challenging issues in contemporary aesthetics are examined within the wider framework of current debates on the disappearance of the real, the crisis in representation, and the use of new media.The wide range of examples collected here, stretching from experimental poetry in post-war Germany, political commitment in twentieth-century French theatre, and countercultural Rumanian theatre under Ceaușescu, to Neo-Victorian fiction, Verbatim theatre in the UK, and political theatre for the masses in Estonia, vouchsafe unique insights into the intersection of aesthetics and ideology and the practical consequences thereof. As such, the volume opens up a space for a meaningful engagement with authentic forms of art from inside and outside the Anglosphere, and, ultimately, uses these examples as a platform from which to imagine some form of “aesthethics”, representing an ideal union of aesthetics and ideology. This concept, first coined by the French philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, will prove to be relevant both within the parameters of the examples discussed here, but also beyond, for the contributors to this volume are unanimous in refusing to believe that aesthetics and ideology can exist one without the other, and in recognizing the centrality of ethics in any discussion of these notions.

The spectres of history haunt Irish fiction. In this compelling study, Matthew Schultz maps these rhetorical hauntings across a wide range of postcolonial Irish novels, and defines the spectre as a non-present presence that simultaneously symbolises and analyses an overlapping of Irish myth and Irish history. By exploring this exchange between literary discourse and historical events, Haunted historiographies provides literary historians and cultural critics with a theory of the spectre that exposes the various complex ways in which novelists remember, represent and reinvent historical narrative. It juxtaposes canonical and non-canonical novels that complicate long-held assumptions about four definitive events in modern Irish history – the Great Famine, the Irish Revolution, the Second World War and the Northern Irish Troubles – to demonstrate how historiographical Irish fiction from James Joyce and Samuel Beckett to Roddy Doyle and Sebastian Barry is both a product of Ireland's colonial history and also the rhetorical means by which a post-colonial culture has emerged.

Frances Burney and Narrative Prior to Ideology works between Burney's Journals and Letters and her fiction more thoroughly than any study of her in the past twenty-five years. By doing so, it offers significant reinterpretations of Burney's four novels: Evelina, Cecilia, Camilla, and The Wanderer. It describes Burney's eluding the major modern–isms through which critics have tried to read her: Feminism (with its “gendering” of beauty and reversal of gender roles); Capitalism and its Marxist critique (here the details of Burney's housekeeping become important); Professionalism (as a response to status inconsistency and class conflict); and Ian Watt's “Formal Realism” (Burney perhaps saved the novel from a sharp decline it suffered in the 1770s, even as she tried to distance herself from the genre). Burney's most successful writing appeared before the coining of “ideology.” But her standing “prior to ideology” is not a matter of chronological accident. Rather, she quietly but forcefully resisted shared explanations—domesticity as model for household management, debt as basis for family finance, professional status as a means to social confidence, the novel as the dominant literary genre—that became popular during her long and eventful life. Frederic Jameson has described Paul de Man, “in private conversation,” claiming, “Marxism... has no way of understanding the eighteenth century.” Frances Burney and Narrative Prior to Ideology conjoins Burney's “eighteenth-centuryness” with her modernity. Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Frances Burney and Narrative Prior to Ideology works between Burney's Journals and Letters and her fiction more thoroughly than any study of her in the past twenty-five years. By doing so, it offers significant reinterpretations of Burney's four novels: Evelina, Cecilia, Camilla, and The Wanderer. It describes Burney's eluding the major modern–isms through which critics have tried to read her: Feminism (with its “gendering” of beauty and reversal of gender roles); Capitalism and its Marxist critique (here the details of Burney's housekeeping become important); Professionalism (as a response to status inconsistency and class conflict); and Ian Watt's “Formal Realism” (Burney perhaps saved the novel from a sharp decline it suffered in the 1770s, even as she tried to distance herself from the genre).Burney's most successful writing appeared before the coining of “ideology.” But her standing “prior to ideology” is not a matter of chronological accident. Rather, she quietly but forcefully resisted shared explanations—domesticity as model for household management, debt as basis for family finance, professional status as a means to social confidence, the novel as the dominant literary genre—that became popular during her long and eventful life.Frederic Jameson has described Paul de Man, “in private conversation,” claiming, “Marxism... has no way of understanding the eighteenth century.” Frances Burney and Narrative Prior to Ideology conjoins Burney's “eighteenth-centuryness” with her modernity.

The essays included in this collection examine issues such as identity and ideology which are at play in the female autobiography practice, along with the problematicity that these trigger in terms of self-representation and traditional formal boundaries. The women writers analyzed here through mainly historical, literary, feminist and psychoanalytic lenses cover a long period in the history of Italy, spanning from the Fascist era to our time. In an attempt to organize and connect these texts which are chronologically far apart, we have divided our contributions into two main parts. The first, “Shapes of Ideology,” includes authors interacting primarily with political ideology in a way that eventually entails the challenge of the official “technologies of gender” (De Lauretis, 1987) and implicitly, a reflection on the gendered identity. In the second part, “Reconsidering ideology, negotiating autobiography,” while the political ideology is not completely excluded, it becomes however something more internalized and relevant to the writers'quest for identity. Such process bears consequences with respect to the canon of autobiography, as authors experiment with new forms of autobiographical narratives and readers become more and more an integral component of this personal endeavor.

How should we understand Victorian conflict? The Victorians were divided between multiple views of the political, religious and social issues that motivated their changing aspirations. Such debates are a fundamental aspect of the literature of the period and these essays propose new ways of understanding their significance.

In The Claims of Poverty, Kate Crassons explores a widespread ideological crisis concerning poverty that emerged in the aftermath of the plague in late medieval England. She identifies poverty as a central preoccupation in texts ranging from Piers Plowman and Wycliffite writings to The Book of Margery Kempe and the York cycle plays. Crassons shows that these and other works form a complex body of writing in which poets, dramatists, and preachers anxiously wrestled with the status of poverty as a force that is at once a sacred imitation of Christ and a social stigma; a voluntary form of life and an unwelcome hardship; an economic reality and a spiritual disposition. Crassons argues that literary texts significantly influenced the cultural conversation about poverty, deepening our understanding of its urgency as a social, economic, and religious issue. These texts not only record debates about the nature of poverty as a form of either vice or virtue, but explore epistemological and ethical aspects of the debates. When faced with a claim of poverty, people effectively become readers interpreting the signs of need in the body and speech of their fellow human beings. The literary and dramatic texts of late medieval England embodied the complexity of such interaction with particular acuteness, revealing the ethical stakes of interpretation as an act with direct material consequences. As The Claims of Poverty demonstrates, medieval literature shaped perceptions about who is defined as'poor,'and in so doing it emerged as a powerful cultural force that promoted competing models of community, sanctity, and justice.

In this book Honeyman looks at manifestations of youth agency (and representations of agency produced for youth) as depicted in fairy tales, childlore and folk literature, investigating the dynamic of ideological manipulation and independent resistance as it can be read or expressed in bodies, first through social puppetry and then through coercive temptation (our consumption replacing the more obvious strings that bind us). Reading tales like Popeye, Hansel & Gretel, and Pinocchio, Honeyman concentrates on the agency of young subjects through material relations, especially where food signifies the invisible strings used to control them in popular discourse and practice, modeling efforts to come out from under the hegemonic handler and take control, at least of their own body spaces, and ultimately finding that most examples indicate less power than the ideal holds.

The Knight's Tale is one of the most controversial of all the Canterbury Tales. Does Chaucer portray Theseus, the duke of Athens whose actions dominate the tale, as an ideal ruler, one who is noble, wise and chivalrous, or does the duke's behaviour reveal him to be immoral, self-seeking and tyrannical? This book (now in a corrected second printing) assesses the duke's conduct and thought in terms of the ideals set out in medieval mirrors for princes, particularly in Giles of Rome's De Regimine Principum. It argues that, when judged by the standards of these works, Theseus can be seen as a model prince in terms of his self-government ('ethics'), his rule of his household ('economics'), his governance of his realm ('politics) and his cosmography and philosophy.

British Literature of the Blitz interrogates the patriotic, utopian ideal of the People's War by analyzing conflicted representations of class and gender in literature and film. Its subtitle – Fighting the People's War – describes how British citizens both united to fight Nazi Germany and questioned the nationalist ideology binding them together.

Hegemony and Fantasy in Irish Drama, 1899-1949 offers a theoretically innovative reconsideration of drama produced in the Irish Renaissance, as well as an engagement with non-canonical drama in the under-researched period 1926-1949.