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Heresy and Heterotopia in Works by Lawrence Durrell gathers new essays by international scholars who examine heretical concepts and heterotopian counter-spaces in Durrell's thought and writing. The volume includes studies of texts set in locations from the Mediterranean to Cambodia, with spatial focus ranging from the Egypt of The Alexandria Quartet (and of Anatole France's Thaïs) to the scattered locations of The Avignon Quintet, with stops along the way for the island books and other treatments of wandering and exile in poetry as well as prose. The contributors approach Durrell's texts from a variety of perspectives, philosophical and intertextual, architectural and historical, mystical and digital. In so doing, they expose the deeper echoes set off by his wide-ranging literary production and map out the metaphysical, literary, and aesthetic connections that account for Durrell's impact on our understanding of those twentieth-century social and cultural paradigms that foreshadow the disruptions of today's world.
In recent decades, critical and theoretical debate in the field of culture and literature has called into question many literary categories, has re-discussed the literary canon, and has totally renovated critical approaches in the wake of major changes in western society such as the irruption of new cultural identities, the disruption of the well-established Euro-centric conception, and the need to establish new world visions. D. H. Lawrence has been a focus for critical debate since his early publications in the first decades of the 20th century. The force of his thought, his courageous challenge against the most important values of western industrial society, his rejection of England and i...
As traditional social hierarchies fall away, ever steeper levels of economic inequality and the entrenchment of new class distinctions lend a new glamor to the idea of aristocracy: witness the worldwide popularity of Downton Abbey, or the seemingly insatiable public fascination with the private lives of the British royal family. This collection of new essays investigates the enduring attraction to the icon of the aristocrat and the spectacle of aristocratic society. It traces the ambivalent reactions the aristocracy provokes and the needs (political, ideological, psychological, and otherwise) it caters to in modern times when the economic power of the landed classes have been eroded and their political role curtailed. In this interdisciplinary collection, aristocracy is considered from multiple viewpoints, including British and American literature, European history and politics, cultural studies, linguistics, visual arts, music, and media studies.
Henry Miller and Modernism: The Years in Paris, 1930–1939 represents a major reevaluation of Henry Miller, focusing on the Paris texts from 1930 to 1939. Finn Jensen analyzes Miller in the light of European modernism, in particular considering the many impulses Miller received in Paris. Jensen draws on theories of urban modernity to connect Miller’s narratives of a male protagonist alone in a modern metropolis with his time in Paris where he experienced a self-discovery as a writer. The book highlights several sources of inspiration for Miller including Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Hamsun, Strindberg and the American Transcendentalists. Jensen considers the key movements of modernity and analyzes their importance for Miller, studying Eschatology, the Avant-Garde, Dada, Surrealism, Expressionism, and Anarchism.
D. H. Lawrence is renowned for his scathing criticism of the ruling class, industrialisation of the country and wartime patriotism. However, his texts bear the imprint of contemporary dominant ideologies and discourses of the period. Comparing Lawrence’s texts to various major and minor contemporary novels, journal articles, political pamphlets and history books, this book aims to demonstrate that Lawrence’s texts are ambivalent: his texts harbour the dynamism of conflicting power struggles between the subversive and the reactionary. For example, in some apparently apolitical texts such as The White Peacock and Movements in European History, reactionary ideologies and wartime propaganda ...
While the dehumanizing effects of technology, modernity, and industrialization have been widely recognized in D. H. Lawrence's works, no book-length study has been dedicated to this topic. This collection of newly commissioned essays by a cast of international scholars fills a genuine void and investigates Lawrence's peculiar relationship with modern technology and modernity in its many and varied aspects. Addressing themes such as pastoral vs. industrial, mining, war, robots, ecocriticism, technologies of the self, film, poetic devices of technology, entertainment, and many others, these essays help to reevaluate Lawrence's complicated standing within the modernist literary tradition and reveal the true theoretical wealth of a writer whose whole life and work, according to T.S. Eliot, "was an assertion of what the modern world has lost."
Scholarly responses to Henry Miller's works have never been numerous and for many years Miller was not a fashionable writer for literary studies. In fact, there exist only three collections of essays concerning Henry Miller's oeuvre. Since these books appeared, a new generation of international Miller scholars has emerged, one that is re-energizing critical readings of this important American Modernist. Henry Miller: New Perspectives presents new essays on carefully chosen themes within Miller and his intellectual heritage to form the most authoritative collection ever published on this author.
Against skeptics, Männiste argues that Miller does indeed have a philosophy of his own, which underpins most of his texts. It is demonstrated that this philosophy, as a metaphysical sense of life, forms a system the understanding of which is necessary to adequately explain even some of the most basic of Miller's ideas. Building upon his notion of the inhuman artist, Miller's philosophical foundation is revealed through his literary attacks against the metaphysical design of the modern age. It is argued that, by repudiating some of the most potent elements of late modernity such as history, modern technology and an aesthetisized view of art, Miller paves the way for overcoming Western metaphysics. Finally it is showed that, philosophically, this aim is governed by Miller's idiosyncratic concept of art, in which one is led towards self-liberation through transcending the modern society and its dehumanizing pursuits.
Shortlisted for the ASLE-UKI Prize for Best Academic Monograph This is the first ecocritical book on the works of D. H. Lawrence and also the first to consider the links between nature and gender in the poetry and the novels. In his search for a balanced relationship between male and female characters, what role does nature play in the challenges Lawrence offers his readers? How far are the anxieties of his characters in negotiating relationships that might threaten their sense of self derived from the same source as their anxieties about engaging with the Other in nature? Indeed, might Lawrence’s metaphors drawn from nature actually be the causes of human actions in The Rainbow, for examp...
The Oxford Handbook of George Orwell offers a wide-ranging reconsideration of Orwell's life and work, focusing on the extensive connections between his novels, essays, diaries, columns, letters, and reviews. Accessible to general readers and to established scholars alike, forty-eight chapters written by an international team of Orwell specialists address familiar topics-such as Orwell's journalism, broadcasting, literary criticism, and politics-as well as less well-trodden areas of his output, such as his accounts of stupidity, kindness, and justice, and his connections with contemporaries like Jack Common, Katharine Burdekin, Wyndham Lewis, and Victor Serge. Sections on Orwell's professiona...