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British Fiction and the Struggle Against Work offers an account of British literary responses to work from the 1950s to the onset of the financial crisis of 2008/9. Roberto del Valle Alcalá argues that throughout this period, working-class writing developed new strategies of resistance against the social discipline imposed by capitalist work. As the latter becomes an increasingly pervasive and inescapable form of control and as its nature grows abstract, diffuse, and precarious, writing about it acquires a new antagonistic quality, producing new forms of subjective autonomy and new imaginaries of a possible life beyond its purview. By tracing a genealogy of working-class authors and texts t...
This Companion provides an engaging account of the postcolonial novel, from Joseph Conrad to Jean Rhys. Covering subjects from disability and diaspora to the sublime and the city, this Companion reveals the myriad traditions that have shaped the postcolonial literary landscape.
Questions of identity and identification are among the most important evolving concerns of contemporary cultural studies. Through processes of personal identification with discursively constructed subject positions, identities emerge across a wide range of cultural practices in the course of social interactions involving the use of language and other semiotic systems manifested in cultural artefacts of various kinds. The present collection includes a selection of papers on the topic of identity and identification in cultural studies today. Incorporating theoretical contributions and practical case studies, this monograph adds to contemporary debates on identity-forging practices from various...
Contemporary Capitalism, Crisis, and the Politics of Fiction: Literature Beyond Fordism proposes a fresh approach to contemporary fictional engagements with the idea of crisis in capitalism and its various social and economic manifestations. The book investigates how late-twentieth and twenty-first-century Anglophone fiction has imagined, interpreted, and in most cases resisted, the collapse of the socio-economic structures built after the Second World War and their replacement with a presumably immaterial order of finance-led economic development. Through a series of detailed readings of the words of authors Martin Amis, Hari Kunzru, Don DeLillo, Zia Haider Rahman, John Lanchester, Paul Murray and Zadie Smith among others, this study sheds light on the embattled and decidedly unstable nature of contemporary capitalism.
This book examines the relationship between empathy and neoliberalism as it unfolded in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and through the turbulent 2010s. Via close readings of contemporary novels, as well as various non-fictional texts, it traces the changing approaches to empathy in the post-financial-crisis imagination, highlighting a crucial re-conceptualization of empathy as a boundaryless force, untethered to local or social circumstance. This reconceptualization implicitly aligns empathy with the neoliberal ethos of globalism and distances it from the traditional notion of “sympathy.” Via complex dialogue with the novelistic tradition of sympathy, contemporary novelists highlight the problematics of boundaryless empathy, while exploring ways to resist neoliberal views and values. Analyzing engagements with empathy in post-2008 literature and culture, the book sheds light on the underlying affective dynamics that enabled the persistence of neoliberalism after the 2008 financial crisis, alongside efforts to challenge its dominance.
This volume pays tribute to the formidable legacy of Hena Maes–Jelinek (1929–2008), a pioneering postcolonial scholar who was a professor at the University of Liège, in Belgium. Along with a few moving and affectionate pieces retracing the life and career of this remarkable and deeply human intellectual figure, the collection contains poems, short fiction, and metafiction. The bulk of the book consists of contributions on various areas of postcolonial literature, including the work of Wilson Harris, the ground-breaking writer to whom Hena Maes–Jelinek devoted much of her career. Other writers treated include Ben Okri, Leone Ross, Kamau Brathwaite, Jamaica Kincaid, Peter Carey, Murray ...
The Future of Postcolonial Studies celebrates the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of The Empire Writes Back by the now famous troika - Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. When The Empire Writes Back first appeared in 1989, it put postcolonial cultures and their post-invasion narratives on the map. This vibrant collection of fifteen chapters by both established and emerging scholars taps into this early mapping while merging these concerns with present trends which have been grouped as: comparing, converting, greening, post-queering and utopia. The postcolonial is a centrifugal force that continues to energize globalization, transnational, diaspora, area and queer studies. Spanning the colonial period from the 1860s to the present, The Future of Postcolonial Studies ventures into other postcolonies outside of the Anglophone purview. In reassessing the nation-state, language, race, religion, sexuality, the environment, and the very idea of 'the future,' this volume reasserts the notion that postcolonial is an "anticipatory discourse" and bears testimony to the driving energy and thus the future of postcolonial studies.
Into our Labours explores the literary representation of work across the globe since 1850, setting out to show that the literature of modernity is best understood in the light of the worlding of capitalism. The book proposes that a determinative relation exists between changing modes of work and changes in the forms, genres, and aesthetic strategies of the writing that bears witness to them. Two aspects of the ‘worlding’ of modernity, especially, are emphasised. First, an ‘inaugural’ experience of capitalist social relations, whose literary registration sometimes makes itself known through a crisis of representation, as the forms of space- and time-consciousness demanded by life in c...
Revista de Estudios Ingleses es un anuario dirigido y gestionado por miembros del Departamento de Filología Inglesa y Alemana de la Universidad de Almería con el propósito de ofrecer un foro de intercambio de producción científica en campos del conocimiento tan diversos como la lengua inglesa, literatura en lengua inglesa, didáctica del inglés, traducción, inglés para fines específicos y otros igualmente vinculados a los estudios ingleses.
This book is a cultural critique of labor and globalization that considers whether one can represent the other. The cultural representation of labor is a challenge in how globalization is understood. Workers may be everywhere in the world but cultural correlatives are problematic. By elaborating cultural theory and practice this book examines why this might be so. If globalization unites workers via production and capital flows, it often writes over traditional or progressive forms of unity. Worlds of work have expanded in the last half century, yet labor has receded within cultural discourse. By considering critical and historical concepts in the workers’ inquiry, the subject, and value, and provocative projects in cultural representation itself, this study expands our lexicon of labor to understand more fully what “workers of the world” means under globalization. As such the book offers broad appeal to students and teachers of Global and Cultural Studies and will interest all those who take seriously how the worker is articulated at a global scale.