Liminal Postmodernisms

The Encyclopedia of Postmodernism provides comprehensive and authoritative coverage of academic disciplines, critical terms and central figures relating to the vast field of postmodern studies. With three cross-referenced sections, the volume is easily accessible to readers with specialized research agendas and general interests in contemporary cultural, historical, literary and philosophical issues. Since its inception in the 1960s, postmodernism has emerged as a significant cultural, political and intellectual force that many scholars would argue defines our era. Postmodernism, in its various configurations, has consistently challenged concepts of selfhood, knowledge formation, aesthetics, ethics, history and politics. This Encyclopedia offers a wide-range of perspectives on postmodernism that illustrates the plurality of this critical concept that is so much part of our current intellectual debates. In this regard, the volume does not adhere to a single definition of postmodernism as much as it documents the use of the term across a variety of academic and cultural pursuits. The Encyclopedia of Postmodernism, it must be noted, resists simply presenting postmodernism as a new style among many styles occuring in the post-disciplinary academy. Documenting the use of the term acknowledges that postmodernism has a much deeper and long-lasting effect on academic and cultural life. In general, the volume rests on the understanding that postmodernism is not so much a style as it is an on-going process, a process of both disintegration and reformation.

Why do so many contemporary British novels revert to the Victorian tradition in order to find a new source of inspiration? What does it mean from an ideological point of view to build a modern form of art by resurrecting and recycling an art of the past? From a formal point of view what are the aesthetic priorities established by these postmodernist novels? Those are the main questions tackled by this study intended for anybody interested in the aesthetic and ideological evolution of very recent fiction. What this analysis ultimately proposes is a reevaluation and a redefinition of postmodernism such as it is illustrated by the British novels which paradoxically both praise and mock, honour and debunk, imitate and subvert their Victorian models. Unashamedly opportunistic and deliberately exploiting the spirit of the time, this late form of postmodernism cannibalizes and reshapes not only Victorianism but all the other previous aesthetic movements - including early postmodernism.

This lively and fascinating new collection of European essays on contemporary Anglophone fiction has arisen out of the ESSE/3 Conference, which was held in Glasgow in September 1995. The contributors live and work in University English Departments in Bulgaria, Croatia, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, The Netherlands, Portugal and Spain, as well as in the United Kingdom itself. Essays on general theoretical aspects of the subject head and conclude the collection, and there are also essays on individual writers or groups of writers, such as John Fowles, A.S. Byatt, Charles Palliser, Peter Ackroyd, William Golding, Doris Lessing, Daphne du Maurier, Angela Carter and Christina Stead. The performative aspect of the subject-matter of these essays is balanced by a locational aspect, including utopian and dystopian writing in authors as diverse as Michael Crichton, Jenny Diski and Salman Rushdie, and the travel literature of Bruce Chatwin. These essays show theoretical alertness, but no single theoretical position is privileged. The aim of the collection is to provide an indication of the range of work being carried out throughout European academe on Anglophone (mainly British) writing today.

Marina Warner is such a widely celebrated writer that it is a source of some wonderment that this is the first full-length study of her work. Perhaps that is because she is so hard to characterize. For example, she is an English writer yet she has an international perspective on her country. Again, she is a novelist whose work is rooted in traditional forms such as legend, romance and fairy tale yet who is wholly contemporary in her thinking. Other paradoxes come to mind. While her numerous works of scholarship are taken seriously within the academy, she has resolutely remained an independent writer who only recently accepted an affiliation to a university. Again, her vision is secular, yet in both her critical and creative writing she returns again and again to the idea of the sacred or supernatural. Above all, she has an equally strong sense of myth and of history, their interaction being the basis of her fiction and the focus of her scholarship. In sum, she is a wonderfully ambitious and challenging writer whose contribution needs assessing, book by book - which is precisely what this pioneering Writers and their Work achieves.

The Symbolic Scenarios of Islamism initiates a dialogue between the discourse of three of the most discussed figures in the history of the Sunni Islamic movement—Hasan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb, and Osama bin Laden—and contemporary debates across religion and political theory, providing a crucial foundation upon which to situate current developments in world politics. Redressing the inefficiency of the terms in which the debate on Islam and Islamism is generally conducted, the book examines the role played by tradition, modernity, and transmodernity as major "symbolic scenarios" of Islamist discourses, highlighting the internal complexity and dynamism of Islamism. By uncovering forms of knowledge that have hitherto gone unnoticed or have been marginalised by traditional and dominant approaches to politics, accounting for central political ideas in non-Western sources and in the Global South, the book provides a unique contribution towards rethinking the nature of citizenship, antagonism, space, and frontiers required today. While offering valuable reading for scholars of Islamic studies, religious studies and politics, it provides a critical perspective for academics with an interest in discourse theory, post-colonial theory, political philosophy, and comparative political thought.

Magic realism has long been treated as a phenomenon restricted to postcolonial literature. Drawing on works from Britain, Lies that Tell the Truth compellingly shows how magic realist fiction can be produced also at what is usually considered to be the cultural centre without forfeiting the mode’s postcolonial attitude and aims. A close analysis of works by Angela Carter, Salman Rushdie, Jeanette Winterson, Robert Nye and others reveals how the techniques of magic realism generate a complex critique of the West’s rational-empirical worldview from within a Western context itself. Understanding magic realism as a fictional analogue of anthropology and sociology, Lies that Tell the Truth reads the mode as a frequently humorous but at the same time critical investigation into people’s attempts to make sense of their world. By laying bare the manifold strategies employed to make meaning, magic realist fiction indicates that knowledge and reality cannot be reduced to hard facts, but that people’s dreams and fears, ideas, stories and beliefs must equally be taken into account.