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Mediating Vulnerability examines vulnerability from a range of connected perspectives. It responds to the vulnerability of species, their extinction but also their transformation. This tension between extreme danger and creativity is played out in literary studies through the pressures the discipline brings to bear on its own categories, particularly those of genre. Extinction and preservation on the one hand, transformation, adaptation and (re)mediation on the other. These two poles inform our comparative and interdisciplinary project. The volume is situated within the particular intercultural and intermedial context of contemporary cultural representation. Vulnerability is explored as a si...
Giorgio Manganelli (1922-1990), one of Italy's most radical and original writers, went further than most in exploring the creative possibilities of hybrid genres and open forms. Ostentation, theatricality, and a love of drapery and verbal excess are defining features of his body of work, which ranges from prose fiction, literary criticism, and drama to travel writing, treatises, commentaries, and imaginary interviews. This study examines the wealth of Manganelli's imagination - his grotesque animals, speaking corpses, and melancholy spectres - and argues that his spectacular eloquence was shaped by an exceptional awareness of literary and philosophical models. Following Manganelli's lead, the author addresses issues such as the boundaries of meaningful language, the relationship between literary and visual texts, fantasy and realism, and the power of literature to express the apprehensions and intimations of human consciousness.
New Authors and collections. Stories of the end of civilized life have always fascinated us, from the mythological world endings, Armageddon to Ragnorok, to the flood stories of across the Ancient world. They make us wonder what we would do if all around us came to an end: no transport, no fuel, no communications: a retreat into the desperation, the onslaught of disease, how would we survive? This is the source of zombie literature and provides the inspiration for this fabulous mix of horror and adventure, of classic and brand new writing in the successful series of Gothic Fantasy titles from Flame Tree. New, contemporary and notable writers featured are: Mike Adamson, Bill Davidson, Michael Paul Gonzalez, Michael Haynes, Liam Hogan, Jennifer Hudak, Curt Jeffreys, Su-Yee Lin, Wendy Nikel, Konstantine Paradias, Darren Ridgley, John B. Rosenman, Zach Shephard, Meryl Stenhouse, Morgan Sylvia, Lucy Taylor, Natalia Theodoridou, and Shannon Connor Winward. These appear alongside classic stories by authors such as Stephen Vincent Benét, George Allan England, M.P. Shiel, Jules Verne and H.G. Wells.
Context in Literary and Cultural Studies is an interdisciplinary volume that deals with the challenges of studying works of art and literature in their historical context today. The relationship between artworks and context has long been a central concern for aesthetic and cultural disciplines, and the question of context has been asked anew in all eras. Developments in contemporary culture and technology, as well as new theoretical and methodological orientations in the humanities, once again prompt us to rethink context in literary and cultural studies. This volume takes up that challenge. Introducing readers to new developments in literary and cultural theory, Context in Literary and Cult...
An Open Access edition of this book will be available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. In a world increasingly defined by the transnational and translingual, and by the pressures of globalization, it has become difficult to study culture as primarily a national phenomenon. A Handbook offers students across Modern Languages an introduction to the kind of methodological questions they need to look at culture transnationally. Each of the short essays takes a key concept in cultural study and suggests how it might be used to explore and illuminate some aspect of identity, mobility, translation, and cultural exchange across borders. The authors range over different language areas and their wide chronological reach provides broad coverage, as well as a flexible and practical methodology for studying cultures in a transnational framework. The essays show that an inclusive, transnational vision and practice of Modern Languages is central to understanding human interaction in an inclusive, globalized society. A Handbook stands as an effective and necessary theoretical and thematically diverse glossary and companion to the ‘national’ volumes in the series.
"This book is an offering. It contains eighteen essays in honour of Timothy Mathews, written by leading scholars in the fields of French, Comparative Literature, Visual Culture and Creative Critical Writing. These essays examine the power of serendipitous encounter, between artists, thinkers and artistic media as well as the importance of creative interjection in the arts and humanities. They advance fresh interpretations of some important figures in twentieth-century European culture - Apollinaire, Beckett, Benjamin, Calvino, Dalí, Genet, Nooteboom, Roubaud - using modes of reading that are both intellectually brave and open to fragility, intimate as well as critical, at once playful and earnest. They bring texts and artworks into relation in order to amply demonstrate that relation itself is a form of thinking"--
From Charles Dickens’ London to today’s megacities, a fascinating exploration of what urban walking tells us about modern life—for fans of Rebecca Solnit, Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City, and literary history. “A labyrinthine journey into the literature of walking and thinking,” as seen in the lives and works of Edgar Allan Poe, Virginia Woolf, Ray Bradbury, and other literary greats (Guardian). There is no such thing as a false step. Every time we walk we are going somewhere. Especially if we are going nowhere. Moving around the modern city is not a way of getting from A to B, but of understanding who and where we are. In a series of riveting intellectual rambles, Matthew Beaumon...
Pickering-Iazzi uses an array of cultural documents from 1990 to the present to examine the myths, values, codes of behaviour, and relationships produced by the Italian mafia through a wide cross-disciplinary lens.
Aracoeli (1982) was the last novel written by Elsa Morante (1912-85), one of the most significant Italian writers of the twentieth century. The journey, both geographical and memorial, of a homosexual son in search of his dead mother is a first-person narrative that has puzzled many critics for its darkness and despair. By combining scholars from different disciplines and cultural traditions, this volume re-evaluates the esthetical and theoretical complexity of Morante's novel and argues that it engages with crucial philosophical and epistemological questions in an original and profound way. Contributors explore the manifold tensions staged by the novel in connection with contemporary philos...
Lockdown Cultures is both a cultural response to our extraordinary times and a manifesto for the arts and humanities and their role in our post-pandemic society. This book offers a unique response to the question of how the humanities commented on and were impacted by one of the dominant crises of our times: the Covid-19 pandemic. While the role of engineers, epidemiologists and, of course, medics is assumed, Lockdown Cultures illustrates some of the ways in which the humanities understood and analysed 2020–21, the year of lockdown and plague. Though the impulse behind the book was topical, underpinning the richly varied and individual essays is a lasting concern with the value of the huma...