Mobility In Literature And Culture 1500 1900

Literature as cultural discourse has always courted mobility. From the nomadic wanderings of the heroes of Homer and Virgil through the adventures of the medieval knight-errants to the travellers of modern times, movement and mobility have been constitutive elements of story-telling. Since writers have begun to explore the experiential dimension of movement their texts have embraced the essential changeability and instability of ‘mobile worlds’. In this sense literature reflects and processes the transformative force of movement on the perception of the world and is part of the broader cultural discourses of mobility. From the 1936 film Night Mail to the rapid movements of the dime novel detective and the metaphorical coding of automobility in Futurist poetry the essays in this volume offer new perspectives on the phenomenon of mobility at the intersection between the literary imagination and cultural experience. They explore movement as a decisive force of change in the story of modernity and show how literature in its representation of mobility simultaneously aims both to mirror and to grasp the phenomenon.

English Topographies in Literature and Culture takes a spatial approach to the study of English culture, focussing on writing landscapes, London psychogeography, heritage discourses, urban planning and idiosyncratic spatial practices such as suburban gardening. Space thus emerges as both political and shaped by affect.

Cultural Memory, a subtle and comprehensive process of identity formation, promotion and transmission, is considered as a set of symbolic practices and protocols, with particular emphasis on repositories of memory and the institutionalized forms in which they are embodied.

This volume investigates the portrayal of London in recent British literature and culture and looks at the way in which they have articulated competing versions of the contemporary city.

Introducing "narrative mobility" as a new approach in comparative studies of Iran and the US, this book reinterprets the politics and aesthetics of relations between the nations through an analysis of Iranian and American authors. The book focuses specifically on three authors—Simin Daneshvar, Shahriar Mandanipour, and Don DeLillo—who each employ narrative mobility to rethink intercultural negotiation, addressing parallel issues in America and Iran from different, but complementary, perspectives. The book analyzes the employment of parallel narrational techniques, presenting physically and virtually mobile characters who embody their respective countries as they move from one culture to another. The strange affinity between Iran and the US is ultimately revealed by viewing literary works as a "contact zone" through which the complicated relations and shared history of the two nations can be renegotiated. On a more theoretical level, the book reflects on the role of literature—in particular the novel as a transnational medium—as a bridge between nations in a period of globalization. With its focus on cross-cultural connections, the book will be of interest to anyone studying or researching comparative literature, US–Iran relations, and cultural studies generally.

This book makes an important contribution to transatlantic literary studies and an emerging body of work on identity formation and print culture in the Atlantic world. The collection identifies the ways in which historically-situated but malleable subjectivities engage with popular and pressing debates about class, slavery, natural knowledge, democracy, and religion. In addition, the book also considers the ways in which material texts and genres, including, for example, the essay, the guidebook, the travel narrative, the periodical, the novel, and the poem, can be scrutinized in relation to historically-situated transatlantic transitions, transformations, and border crossings. The volume is underpinned by a thorough examination of historical and conceptual frameworks and prioritizes notions of circulation and exchange, as opposed to transfer and continuance, in its analysis of authors, texts, and ideas. The collection is concerned with the movement of people, texts, and ideas in the currents of transatlantic markets and politics, taking a fresh look at a range of canonical and popular writers of the period, including Austen, Poe, Crèvecoeur, Brockden Brown, Sedgwick, Hemans, Bulwer-Lytton, Dickens, and Melville. In different ways, the essays gathered together here are concerned with the potentially empowering realities of the transitive, circulatory, and contingent experiences of transatlantic literary and cultural production as they are manifest in the long nineteenth century.

Transatlantic literary studies have provided important new perspectives on North American, British and Irish literature. They have led to a revision of literary history and the idea of a national literature. They have changed the perception of the Anglo-American literary market and its many processes of transatlantic production, distribution, reception and criticism. Rather than dwelling on comparisons or engaging with the notion of ‘influence,’ transatlantic literary studies seek to understand North American, British and Irish literature as linked with each other by virtue of multi-layered historical and cultural ties and pay special attention to the many refractions and mutual interferences that have characterized these traditions since colonial times. This handbook brings together articles that summarize some of the crucial transatlantic concepts, debates and topics. The contributions contained in this volume examine periods in literary and cultural history, literary movements, individual authors as well as genres from a transatlantic perspective, combining theoretical insight with textual analysis.