Böcker i Continuum Literary Studies-serien

As a specific category, London Gothic is becoming as important for understanding ourselves today as it has been for thinking about the cultural productions of the late-nineteenth century. This book focuses on Gothic representations of London, and also includes essays from scholars reading London Gothic as it is manifested in a variety of media.

Focussing on the significance of sensation, this study develops a Deleuzian poetics of reading, through an examination of contemporary innovative poetry. It suggests that a Deleuzian way of reading offers a firm purchase on notoriously difficult texts, providing concepts and a language that aids their understanding.

Modernist troublemaker in the 1890s, Nobel Prize winner in 1920, and indefensible Nazi sympathiser in the 1930s and 40s, Knut Hamsun continues to provoke condemnation, apologia and critical confusion. This title analyses the heterogeneous and conflicted legacies of the enigmatic European writer, Knut Hamsun.

With reference to television series such as "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes", "Inspector Morse", and "Midsomer Murders", this title uses adaptation as the basis for an exercise in later twentieth-century cultural history, illustrating the fundamental role detective fictions play in popular beliefs about the nature of crime and Englishness.

A study of Kurt Vonnegut's novels, approaching them as literary experiments attempting to comprehend the American experience in the postmodern condition.

Offers a collection of essays that explores the implications of how we choose to represent crime to ourselves. This title focuses beyond classic English detective fiction, the American 'hard-boiled' crime novel and the gangster movie and discusses staple themes of crime fiction and cinema.

Offers insight into the role that the religious imagination plays in the creation of sacred worlds. Covering foundational questions regarding the relation between words and worlds and the parameters of the sacred, this work explores different ways of using interdisciplinary resources to open up our understanding of religion and literature.

Examines detective fiction and its complex relationship to the modern and to modernity. This monograph focuses on two key themes: the moral relationship of detection to a particular social world and the attempt to restore and even improve the social world that has been threatened and fractured by a crime, usually that of murder.

Death is indisputably central to Beckett's writing and reception. This collection of research considers a number of Beckett's poems, novels, plays and short stories through considerations of mortality and death. It includes chapters that explore the theme of deathliness in relation to Beckett's work as a whole, through three main approaches.

Taking as its point of departure the notion of community in mid-twentieth century French literature and thought, this study seeks to uncover the ways in which Breton, Bataille, Sartre and Barthes used literature and art to engage with the question of reconceptualizing society.

Presents the analysis of the representation of London in post-war fiction from Iris Murdoch to Zadie Smith, exploring the literary re-imagining of the city in post-war fiction and arguing that the image, history, and narrative of the city has been transformed alongside the physical rebuilding and repositioning of the capital.

Analyses the symbolic role played by contemporary fiction in the break-up of political and cultural consensus in British public life. This study explores how British identity has been explored and renegotiated by contemporary writers.

A monograph analysing a number of modern British women writers and the way in which the canon of post-war British writing has been formed. It argues that literary excellence, demonstrated by style and imaginative power, is often missing in many works that have become modern classics and makes a case for the value of the 'universal' in literature.

Argues that Melville does not belong in the tradition of the American Renaissance, but rather creates a baroque literary cartography, artistically engaging with spaces beyond the national model.

Despite winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, Doris Lessing has received relatively little critical attention. This essay collection reflects and explores the incredible variety of Lessing's border crossings and positions her writing in its various social and cultural contexts.

Drawing on a range of theoretical ideas and approaches, this book illuminates Coetzee's texts including: deconstruction and the 'school of singularity', ethics and power, gender studies, queer theory, issues surrounding the body and animal rights.

What is the relation between Beckett's work and the ethical? Is Beckett's work profoundly ethical in its implications, as both humanist and deconstructionist readings have insisted in their different ways? This collection of essays seeks to map out this debate in Beckett criticism.

Uses close analysis of key African-American literary texts to investigate the links between the development of blues and jazz and the development of modern African-American literature. This study also examines the highly varied manifestations of a jazz aesthetic as possibly the fundamental common demoninator which links these writers.

Explores the study of literature and literary history in the light of globalization and argues that international canonization of books and authors can be used as an instrument for textual analysis of world literature. This title also offers a nuanced understanding of the mechanism of canonization in the international sphere.

A collection of research by some of the leading international scholars on Beckett and phenomenology - both comparing and contrasting his work with key figures in phenomenology and analysing phenomenological themes and their dramatization in Beckett's work. It examines the phenomenal in Beckett's literary worlds.

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. This title studies Beckett's legacy for contemporary writers, which is part of the interest in Beckett studies in the question of Beckett's reception and influence.

Offers an approach to contemporary literature, emphasising the links in the depiction of marginalized groups in contemporary fiction. This study provides readings of a wide range of contemporary British novels that represent characters or communities at the margin of society.

Jonathan Franzen is one of the most influential, critically-significant and popular contemporary American novelists. This book offers a study of his work and attempts to articulate where American fiction is headed after postmodernism.

The word 'decay' is often used by critics in general reference to Beckett's thematic emphasis and philosophical outlook. This book explores the concept of decay as providing the fundamental core of Beckett's work, examining the theme of decay in terms of physical, mental and linguistic deterioration.

Argues against the idea that the 'postmodern condition' of late twentieth and early twenty-first century culture has undermined the close and creative association between religious practice and literature. This study suggests that the novel has become an increasingly vital, dynamic and problematic space for engaging with the sacred.

Contributes to the understanding of an important but overlooked aspect of modern poetry, offering a comparative approach to the topic. This collection of research explores the interaction of religious awareness and literary expression in English poetry in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

A monograph, which surveys the portrayal of finance and money in British fiction. It argues that British fiction demystifies the 'weightless' economy of contemporary money and critiques the popular sense of money as being everywhere but nowhere.

Addresses the ways in which we read literary history according to quite specific images of growth, development, progression, flourishing and succession. This book argues that the literary and historical imagery of releasing the radical spirit of a text from the dead weight of received tradition is the dominant doxa of historicism.

Provides a critical and cultural theory-based study of male jealousy in western culture and its connections with paranoia. This book traces the meanings of jealousy and the representation of jealous men and argues that jealousy is promoted within patriarchy. It also explores the economy of possession and its relationship to the body.

Presents a critique of views that the fiction of Joseph Conrad is innocent of any interest in or concern with sexuality and the erotic, and that when he does attempt to depict sexual desire or erotic excitement, it results in bad writing. This book argues for a revision of the view that Conrad lacks understanding of and interest in sexuality.