Böcker i Continuum Literary Studies-serien

Analyses the use of caricature as one of the key strategies in narrative fiction since the war. This monograph also analyses some of the best known postwar novelists including Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates, Angela Carter and Will Self, reveals how they use caricature to express postmodern conceptions of the self.

A radical reconsideration of a major and popular genre influenced by the thought of the significant French philosopher Gilles Deleuze.

Provides a structured process of writing activities using imitation, variation and experimentation. This work contains practical composition techniques such as 'transformational writing', 're-writing' or 'translation'. It also includes appendices with examples of the range of activities that can be used and an indicative list of literary examples.

A detailed study of Maggie Gee's work that illustrates how she is rewriting the mid-Victorian condition-of-England novel for 21st-century Britain.

An exploration of the use of re-writing by contemporary women writers that reveals a shift from 1960s irony to nostalgia in the twenty-first century. It traces the move in contemporary women's writing from the self-conscious, ironic parodies of postmodernism to the nostalgic and historical turn of the twenty-first century.

Apocalyptic nightmares that humanly-created intelligences will one day rise up against their creators haunt the western creative imagination. This study applies Kierkegaard's "Concept of Anxiety" to Blake's creation myths to explain how Enlightenment personality conceptions created fear of independently thinking beings.

Chance, and its representation in literature, has a long and problematic history. This book examines the ways mid-twentieth century writers represent chance, arguing that their depictions of, and anxieties about, chance mark a new relationship between author and narrative.

Are we living in a post-temporal age? Has history come to an end? This book argues against the widespread perception of postmodern narrativity as atemporal and a historical, claiming that postmodernity is characterized by an explosion of heterogeneous narrative 'timeshapes' or chronotopes.

Discussing the work of Thomas Hardy, Richard Jefferies, John Cowper Powys and Mary Butts, this title maps various districts of the 'west country' to redefine the 'parochial'; while being keenly aware of their own status as natives locked into complex histories of self-exile and return, estrangement and ardent identification.

Offers an analysis of the philosophical connection between Hopkins and Heidegger. This monograph argues that the work of Hopkins does no less than propose solutions to a number of hitherto unresolved questions regarding Heidegger's later writings, vitalizing the concepts of both writers beyond their local contexts.

'Negative capability', the term John Keats used only once in a letter to his brothers, is a well-known but surprisingly unexplored concept in literary criticism and aesthetics. This book clarifies the meaning of the term and offers an anatomy of its key components, and provides an account of the history of this idea.

Drawing together diverse literary, critical and theoretical texts in which the palimpsest has appeared since its inauguration by Thomas De Quincey in 1845, this work provides a genealogy of this metaphor. It also provides a reference point and critical tool for future employment of the concept of 'palimpsestuousness'.

Explores the ways in which philosophical discourse in the Romantic period used literature to express philosophical problems and paradoxes which philosophy found itself incapable of expressing on its own terms. This book engages with a variety of Romantic writings, including literature, philosophy and political theory.

Investigates how the notion of incarnation has been employed in phenomenology and how this has influenced literary criticism. This book examines the interest that Joyce and Proust share in the concept of incarnation.

Organised around each decade of the post war period, this book analyses novels written by and for women from 1945 onwards. Each chapter identifies a specific genre in popular fiction for women which marked that period and provides case studies focusing on writers and texts which enjoyed a wide readership.

Presents a comparative study, which encourages a way of thinking about Joyce not as an isolated figure but, as someone who is understood in the company of others. This work places Joyce and his time in dialogue with other figures or different historical periods or languages other than English.

Looks at a range of fiction and film texts, since 1950s, in order to analyse the ways in which masculinity has been represented in popular culture in Britain and the United States. This work covers numerous genres, including spy fiction, science fiction, the Western and police thrillers.

A genuinely ground-breaking study of Beckett's notes on his reading during the interwar years, now available in paperback for the first time.

Argues that a true understanding of Philip Larkin as man and poet lies beyond his enduring public appeal and the variety of criticism that has been applied to his work. This book sheds light on the hitherto ignored spiritual significance of his work. It draws upon insights gained from the history of art and the study of religion and myth.

Charts the history of weakness in a selection of canonical works in literature and philosophy. Beginning with Plato and Aristotle, this book explores weakness as it interpreted by Lao Tzu, Nietzsche, the Romantics, Dickens and Modernists. It examines what feminist critics Elaine Showalter and Luce Irigaray make of the figure of the weaker vessel.

Considers the shifts in aesthetic representation over the period 1885-1930 that coincide both with the rise of literary Modernism and imperialism's high point. This title argues that modernist literary writing should be read in terms of its response and relationship to events overseas.

A collection of research by international scholars on Beckett, as well as younger academics, analysing a number of Beckett's poems, plays and short stories through consideration of mortality and death. It explores the theme of deathliness in relation to Beckett's work as a whole.

From 1888 to 1915 Robert Louis Stevenson and Jack London were uniquely placed to witness and record the imperial struggle for the South Pacific. Engaging the major European colonial empires and the USA, the struggle questioned ideas of liberty, racial identity and class like few other arenas of the time.Exploring a unique moment in South Pacific and Western history through the work of Stevenson and London, this study assesses the impact of their national identities on works like The Amateur Emigrant and Adventure; discusses their attitudes towards colonialism, race and class; shows how they negotiated different cultures and peoples in their writing and considers where both writers are placed in the Western tradition of writing about the Pacific.By contextualizing Stevenson''s and London''s South Pacific work, this study reveals two critical voices of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century colonialism that deserve to stand beside their contemporary Joseph Conrad in shaping contemporary attitudes towards imperialism, race, and class.