A chronologically arranged selection of books written and edited by faculty from the School of English.
Edmund Spenser
A Life
Andrew Hadfield
OUP Oxford
June 2012
Edmund Spenser's innovative poetic works have a central place in the canon of English literature. Yet he is remembered as a morally flawed, self-interested sycophant; complicit in England's ruthless colonisation of Ireland; in Karl Marx's words, 'Elizabeth's arse-kissing poet'-- a man on the make who aspired to be at court and who was prepared to exploit the Irish to get what he wanted.
In his vibrant and vivid book, the first biography of the poet for 60 years, Andrew Hadfield finds a more complex and subtle Spenser. How did a man who seemed destined to become a priest or a don become embroiled in politics? If he was intent on social climbing, why was he so astonishingly rude to the good and the great - Lord Burghley, the earl of Leicester, Sir Walter Ralegh, Elizabeth I and James VI? Why was he more at home with 'the middling sort' -- writers, publishers and printers, bureaucrats, soldiers, academics, secretaries, and clergymen -- than with the mighty and the powerful? How did the appalling slaughter he witnessed in Ireland impact on his imaginative powers? How did his marriage and family life shape his work?
Spenser's brilliant writing has always challenged our preconceptions. So too, Hadfield shows, does the contradictory relationship between his between life and his art.
Current Methods in Historical Semantics
Justyna A. Robinson, co-editor with Kathryn Allan
Mouton de Gruyter
December 2011
Series: Topics in English Linguistics [TiEL]
Innovative, data-driven methods provide more rigorous and systematic evidence for the description and explanation of diachronic semantic processes. The volume systematises, reviews, and promotes a range of empirical research techniques and theoretical perspectives that currently inform work across the discipline of historical semantics. In addition to emphasising the use of new technology, the potential of current theoretical models (e.g. within variationist, sociolinguistic or cognitive frameworks) is explored along the way.
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Hellenism and Loss in the Work of Virginia Woolf
Theodore Koulouris
Ashgate Publishing
December 2010
Taking up Virginia Woolf's fascination with Greek literature and culture, this book explores her engagement with the nineteenth-century phenomenon of British Hellenism and her transformation of that multifaceted socio-cultural and political reality into a particular textual aesthetic, which Theodore Koulouris defines as 'Greekness.' Woolf's 'Greekness', Koulouris argues, enabled her to navigate male and female appropriations of British Hellenism and was singly important in providing her with a language of mourning.
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The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms
Peter Brooker, co-editor with Andrzej Gasiorek, Deborah Longworth and Andrew Thacker
Oxford University Press
December 2010
The first of three volumes charting the history of the Modernist Magazine in Britain, North America, and Europe, this collection offers the first comprehensive study of the wide and varied range of ‘little magazines’ which were so instrumental in introducing the new writing and ideas that came to constitute literary and artistic modernism inthe UK and Ireland. In thirty-seven chapters, covering more than eighty magazines, expert contributorsinvestigate the inner dynamics and economic and intellectual conditions that governed the life of these fugitive but vibrant publications. We learn of the role of editors and sponsors, the relation of the arts to contemporary philosophy and politics, the effects of war and economic depression and of the survival in hard times of radical ideas and a belief in innovation. The chapters are arranged according to historical themes with accompanying contextual introductions, and include studies of the New Age, Blast, the Egoist and the Criterion, New Writing, New Verse, and Scrutiny as well as of lesser known magazines such as the Evergreen, Coterie, the Bermondsey Book, the Mask, Welsh Review, the Modern Scot, and the Bell. To return to the pages of these magazines returns us a world where the material constraints of costs and anxieties over censorship and declining readerships ran alongside the excitement of a new poem or manifesto. This collection therefore confirms the value of magazine culture to the field of modernist studies; it provides a rich and hithertounder-examined resource which both brings to light the debate and dialogue out of which modernism evolved and helps us recover the vitality and potential of that earlier discussion.
Contributors : Ann L. Ardis David Peters Corbett Paul Edwards Jason Harding Matthew Huculak Laura Marcus Mark Morrisson Frank Shovlin Cliff Wulfman
Key Terms in Semantics
M Lynne Murphy & Anu Koskela
Continuum
April 2010
Covers the key terms, concepts, thinkers and texts in semantics that students in linguistics and language studies will encounter.
'Clear, comprehensive and authoritative - this is an ideal companion to any course on semantics, from introductory to fairly advanced level. Students will really benefit from the many examples provided and the extensive use of cross-referencing.'
Paul Bennett, Senior Lecturer in Linguistics, School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures, University of Manchester, UK
Key Terms in Semantics explains the all the terms and concepts in semantics which students on linguistics and language studies course are likely to encounter during their undergraduate study. The book includes a section on key thinkers in semantics, from Aristotle to Noam Chomsky and will be a valuable desk reference for students throughout their undergraduate course. The final section presents a list of key readings in semantics, to signpost the reader towards classic articles, as well providing a springboard to further study. The book is accessibly written, with complex terms and concepts explained in an easy to understand and approachable manner.
Renaissance Transformations
The Making of English Writing 1500-1650
Margaret Healy and Thomas Healy
Edinburgh University Press
October 2009
Renaissance Transformations: The Making of English Writing 1500-1650 asserts the centrality of historical understanding in shaping critical vision. This collection of distinctive new essays explores the dynamic cultural, intellectual and social processes that moulded literary writing in the Renaissance. Acutely attentive to the complexities that we confront in our attempts to understand the past, this book explores important relations among literary form, material and imaginative culture which compel our attention in the twenty-first century. Addressing three crucial areas at the forefront of current academic inquiry - 'Making Writing: Form, Rhetoric and Print Culture', 'Shaping Communities: Textual Spaces, Mapping History' and 'Embodying Change: Psychic and Somatic Performances' - this innovative, timely volume is of fundamental importance to all those who study and teach Renaissance literature, history and culture.
Contributors are Danielle Clarke, Andrew Hadfield, Margaret Healy, Thomas Healy, Bernhard Klein, Michelle O'Callaghan, Neil Rhodes, Jennifer Richards Michael Schoenfeldt, William Sherman, Alan Stewart, and Susan Wiseman
An Introduction to Literature Criticism and Theory
4th Edition
Nicholas Royle, co-author with Andrew Bennett (Bristol)
Pearson
May 2009
Starting at ‘the beginning’ and concluding with ‘the end’, the book covers topics that range from the familiar (character, narrative, the author) to the more unusual (secrets, pleasure, ghosts). Eschewing abstract isms, Bennett and Royle successfully illuminate complex ideas by engaging directly with literary works – so that a reading of Jane Eyre opens up ways of thinking about racial difference, whilst Chaucer, Raymond Chandler and Monty Python are all invoked in a discussion of literary laughter.
The 4th edition of Bennett & Royle's academic bestseller, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory includes new chapters on 'animals' and 'ecology'. The latter chapter is downloadable from the Pearson website, as are the two new essays there on 'How to write an essay' and 'How to read (a poem by Auden)'.
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We Saw the Light
Conversations between the New American Cinema and Poetry
Daniel Kane
University of Iowa Press
May 2009
Series: Contemporary North American Poetry Series
“In the postwar America of the fifties and sixties, poets, artists, and filmmakers forged a powerful new counterculture based in friendships, love affairs, intellectual debates, and artistic collaborations. As the author says, ‘What a scene!’ For the first time a critic of great insight has viewed the total dynamics of this artistic world, focusing especially on the cross-pollination between underground filmmakers and poets. The result is explosive and revelatory, as Kane bobs and weaves through films and poems, politics and sexuality, enmities and passions from Anger to Brakhage, Ginsberg to Ashbery, providing not only a sense of history but breathtaking readings of the ways films and poems interbred and crashed against the repressions of American society, turning the fifties into the sixties and beyond. Few books combine such scholarly detail and insight with such passion and humor.” Tom Gunning, author, The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Cinema and Modernity
“In the 1950s and 1960s, filmmakers often thought of themselves as poets and frequently invoked the other medium as a model for their own projects. Since then, there has been very little acknowledgment of this kinship, but Daniel Kane's beautifully written book rediscovers it with tremendous erudition and generous attention to the history of both poetics and avant-garde film. With its brilliant structuring metaphor of imaginary conversations between poets and filmmakers, We Saw the Light virtually creates an important field for scholarship.” David E. James, author, The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles
“Daniel Kane's We Saw the Light is an original, smart, funny, and profound book. It is in one sense an archaeological dig, uncovering a root work of relations between filmmakers and poets in the post–World War II era; it is also a series of dazzling illuminations exposing fresh historical collaborations. Radical aesthetics combine with social politics, where ‘masculinity,’ ‘sanity,’ ‘sexuality,’ and ‘poetics’ are not monolithic signifiers but become part of Kane’s mobile ‘conversations’ between poetry and cinema, prompting new ways of seeing and knowing the world and self. Anyone interested in tracking the Beat or New York School of poets in their passion for cinema will want to read this book; anyone wanting to understand filmmakers who sought out their poetic doubles, and the ensuing interstitial fireworks, must read this book: it is like seeing the light for the first time.” Susan McCabe, author, Cinematic Modernism: Modern Poetry and Film
By the mid-1960s, New American poets and Underground filmmakers had established a vibrant community. Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, and Frank O’Hara joined Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, Robert Frank, Alfred Leslie, and Andy Warhol to hang out, make films, read poems, fight censorship, end racism, and shut down the Vietnam War. Their personal, political, and artistic collaborations led them to rethink the moving picture and the lyric, resulting in an extraordinary profusion of poetry/film hybrids.
Routledge Critical Thinkers: Sigmund Freud
2nd Edition
Pamela Thurschwell
Routledge
April 2009
Sigmund Freud’s impact on how we think, and on how we think about how we think, has been enormous. The twentieth century has been called the Freudian century, and whatever the twenty-first century chooses to believe about the workings of the human mind, it will be, on some level, indebted to Freud. Freud’s ideas about love, hate, childhood, family relations, civilisation, religion, sexuality, fantasy, art and the factors that motivate our most mundane thoughts and actions, function like myths for our culture; taken together they have been powerfully transformative, whether accepted or rejected.
The Routledge Critical Thinkers series introduces key figures in contemporary critical thought for students of language, literature, music and cultural studies. The work of Sigmund Freud has penetrated almost every area of literary theory and cultural studies, as well as contemporary culture. Pamela Thurschwell explains and contextualises psychoanalytic theory and its meaning for modern thinking. The updated second edition of her book introduces responses to Freud’s work, including the intersection of psychoanalysis with recent developments in literary studies such as post-colonial and queer theory. Thurschwell traces the contexts and developments of Freud’s work over the course of his career, exploring paradoxes and contradictions in his writing. It focuses on psychoanalysis as an interpretative strategy, paying special attention to Freud’s impact on literary and cultural theory, finally examining the recent backlash against Freud, and arguing for the continued relevance of psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud encourages and prepares readers to approach Freud’s original texts, ensuring that readers of all levels will find Freud accessible, challenging and of continued relevance.
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American Culture in the 1920s
Susan Currell
Edinburgh University Press
March 2009
Series: Twentieth-Century American Culture
The 1920s saw the United States rise to its current status as the leading world superpower, matched by an emerging cultural dominance that characterized the second half of the twentieth century. This book provides an stimulating account of the major cultural and intellectual trends of the decade that have been pivotal to its characterization as 'the jazz age'.
Currell's book places common representations of the 'roaring twenties' and the 'lost generation' into context through chapters on literature, music and performance, film and radio, and visual art and design, alongside the unprecedented rise of leisure and consumption in the 1920s.
In Memory of Jacques Derrida
Nicholas Royle
University of Edinburgh Press and University of Columbia Press
March 2009
In Memory of Jacques Derrida is a remarkable account of one of the greatest thinkers of our time. We are still coming to terms with the astonishing richness of Derrida’s writings, as well as his untimely death in 2004. It may be said that we are all ‘"in memory of Derrida,"’ regardless of whether or not we have read him.
The essays in Nicholas Royle’s book offer a series of lucid and incisive readings of Derrida’s work, as well as a more personal elegiac tribute. Derrida constantly engaged with the strange place of "death" in thinking, writing, and perception, and he exhibited a new kind of attentiveness to the importance and paradox of mourning in love and friendship. He also tackled questions of legacy, inheritance, the ghost, the gift and the nature of memory, remembering and forgetting. His work on mourning (what is mourning? when does it begin or end?) frequently references Shakespeare’s Hamlet, ‘"the true subject"’ of which was, for Derrida, mourning. Royle’s commemorative volume also puts Shakespeare at the centre of thinking about Derrida’s work. Adopting an autobiographical as well as critical approach, he launches a poignant testament to the enigma of Derrida as writer, teacher and friend, and advances a fascinating theory as to why his work remains so crucial to understanding the contemporary world.
Lost Intimacies
Rethinking Homosexuality under National Socialism
William Spurlin
Peter Lang Publishing
November 2008
Series: Gender, Sexuality, and Culture - Volume 4
Lost Intimacies: Rethinking Homosexuality under National Socialism uses queer theory as a hermeneutic tool with which to read against the grain of heterotextual narratives of the Holocaust and as a way of locating alternative pathways of meaning in dominant Holocaust research. Specifically addressing the racialization of sexuality, the book asks how the politics of sexuality can be more explicitly and systematically theorized, along with state-sanctioned homophobia under Nazism, with a clear recognition that homophobia seldom operated alone, but worked in conjunction with other axes of power, including race, gender, eugenics, and population politics. In theorizing gender and sexuality as entangled axes of analysis, the book allows the specificity of lesbian difference to emerge and challenges the received wisdom that lesbians were not as systematically persecuted under National Socialism.
Spurlin questions radically the wisdom of received scholarship that reduces Nazi fascism to latent homosexuality, and examines the possible implications of Nazi homophobia, and its imbrication with other deployments of power, for the study of contemporary culture where the homophobic impulse continues to reverberate, thereby challenging understandings of history steeped in notions of progressive modernity.
The Politics and Pleasures of Consuming Differently
Martin Ryle, co-editor with Kate Soper and Lyn Thomas
Palgrave Macmillan
November 2008
Series: Consumption and Public Life
Ryle’s recent work focuses on the critical discussion of contemporary novels which inscribe questions of environment, consumerism and the future. The Politics and Pleasures of Consuming Differently, which he co-edited with Kate Soper and Lyn Thomas in Palgrave’s ‘Consumption and Public Life’ series, includes contributions from social scientists, philosophers, and students and critics of media and culture in Britain, Europe and North America. Its focus is on the critical perspective opened up by alternative conceptions of the good life.
Ryle’s contribution to the collection, ‘The Past, the Future and the Golden Age: Some Contemporary Versions of Pastoral’, evaluates the renewed contemporary significance of what Raymond Williams (in The Country and the City) termed ‘retrospective Radicalism’. The chapter complements discussion of Williams’s political and theoretical position with critical commentary on recent novels by Michel Houellebecq, Kazuo Ishiguro and Ali Smith.
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Since Beckett
Contemporary Writing in the Wake of Modernism
Peter Boxall
Continuum
May 2008
This is a fascinating study of Beckett's legacy for contemporary writers, which is part of the growing interest in Beckett studies in the question of Beckett's reception and influence. Samuel Beckett is widely regarded as 'the last modernist', the writer in whose work the aesthetic principles which drove the modernist project dwindled and were finally exhausted. And yet despite this, it is striking that many of the most important contemporary writers, across the world, see their work as emerging from a Beckettian legacy.
So whilst Beckett belongs, in one sense, to the end of the modernist period, in another sense he is the well spring from which the contemporary, in a wide array of guises, can be seen to emerge. Since Beckett looks at a number of writers, in different national and political contexts, tracing the way in which Beckett's writing inhabits the contemporary, while at the same time reading back through Beckett to the modernist and proto-modernist forms he inherited.
In reading Beckett against the contemporary in this way, Peter Boxall offers both a compelling re-reading of Beckett, and a powerful new analysis of contemporary culture.
Childhood and Cinema
Vicky Lebeau
Reaktion Books
February 2008
Since its inception the world of cinema has embraced the image of the child and both extended and challenged its representations. Vicky Lebeau explores the complex and ongoing adventure of childhood on screen and examines how the child in film has been used to embody the aspirations and anxieties of modern life. Moving from early to contemporary cinema – a process that includes discussions of films such as Victorian ‘Child Pictures’, The Spirit of the Beehive, L’Enfant sauvage, 400 Blows, Lolita, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Tarnation and The Woodsman – she uncovers the compulsion of film-makers to visualize the child and their need to use childhood as a way of reflecting on sexuality, language, death and difference. By bringing together childhood and cinema as two institutions of modern culture, this book ultimately uses the figure of the child – as image, as narrative, and as myth – to reflect on the form and significance of cinema itself.
Thought-provoking and engaging, Childhood and Cinema is an original and challenging contribution to studies in childhood and visual culture that will be of interest to readers in the fields of literature, film and cultural studies.
Critical acclaim for Childhood and Cinema: 'Lebeau's deft look at cinema's treatment of childhood puts aside the cosy teddy bears in favour of the harsher realities of murder, death, child abuse and war. Moving seamlessly from The Exorcist to The Shining via Mysterious Skin and M among countless others, this is fascinating rather than squeamish. Excellent.' –Empire Magazine
'. . . a provocative and unique study of the figure of the child as it has been shaped by photography and cinema since the late nineteenth-century.' –Media and Culture
Freud: A Guide for the Perplexed
Céline Surprenant
Continuum
February 2008
It is widely acknowledged that Freud was one of the most influential and groundbreaking theorists of the twentieth century. His theories permeate almost every aspect of modern-day life: literature, philosophy, science, politics, art, religion and culture. Yet his thought and writings are notoriously difficult for students to grasp.
Freud: A Guide for the Perplexed is a clear and thorough account of Freud's thought, providing an ideal guide to the important and complex ideas of this key thinker. The book introduces some of the key Freudian concepts and themes and examines the ways in which they intersect with issues in philosophy and literary theory. Geared towards the specific requirements of students who need to reach a sound understanding of Freud's thought, the guide also provides a cogent and reliable way into some of the most important debates surrounding certain psychoanalytic concepts and their application outside the clinical domain. It discusses, for example, Freud’s ideas on the comic in relation to his views on religion. This is the ideal companion to the study of this most influential and challenging of theorists. The book includes chapters on The Psychoanalytic Cure, The Juxtaposition of 'Stories' and 'Mechanisms', Dreams, Affect and Representation, and Metapsychology.
Ostentation of Peacocks
Daniel Kane
Egg Box Publishing
October 2007
Daniel Kane is an established poet whose recent collection was warmly received by the critics:
‘This remarkable book adds up, heartily, to its own 'heap big meal'.’ - Bill Berkson
‘Daniel Kane is the revitalising voice twenty-first century poetry needs; fresh, funny and visionary, this book offers the reader a real world of fantasy with the lyric grace of early ashbery and the prophetic ambition of early ginsberg.’ - Jeremy Noel-Tod
‘The variegated plumage of Kane's elegant, iridescent, fan-tailed poems is a constant delight... a gorgeous collection, and one that deserves a 'harmonious welcome'.’ - Mark Ford
Finally, Rebecca Wolff comments: ‘Fun is missing from this world everywhere; but here it is, at times pitiless but still fun ... not only fun has been missing, but also compassion, and that is here too, '