Novels Maps Modernity

This book examines how readers and novelists alike have used maps, guidebooks, and other geographical media to imagine and represent the space of the novel from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.

"This book examines how readers and novelists alike have used maps, guidebooks, and other geographical media to imagine and represent the space of the novel from the mid-nineteenth century to the present."--Provided by publisher.

A PDF version of this book is available for free in open access via the OAPEN Library platform (www. oapen. org). Ciaran Carson is one of the most challenging and inventive of contemporary Irish writers, exhibiting verbal brilliance, formal complexity, and intellectual daring across a remarkably varied body of work. This study considers the full range of his oeuvre, in poetry, prose, and translations, and discusses the major themes to which he returns, including: memory and history, narrative, language and translation, mapping, violence, and power. It argues that the singularity of Carson's writing is to be found in his radical imaginative engagements with ideas of space and place. The city of Belfast, in particular, occupies a crucially important place in his texts, serving as an imaginative focal point around which his many other concerns are constellated. The city, in all its volatile mutability, is an abiding frame of reference and a reservoir of creative impetus for Carson's imagination. Accordingly, the book adopts an interdisciplinary approach that draws upon geography, urbanism, and cultural theory as well as literary criticism. It provides both a stimulating and thorough introduction to Carson's work, and a flexible critical framework for exploring literary representations of space.

This book re-evaluates the rural English novel in the twentieth century in relation to the recognised artistic responses to modernity. It argues that the most important writers in this tradition have had a very significant bearing on the trajectory of English cultural life through the modernist period and beyond.

This book examines the representation of conspiracy in Victorian and Edwardian literature, and traces a genealogy from works by Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Collins, James, Conrad, and others to the modern conspiracy novel.

This study considers the work of two experimental British women modernists writing in the tumultuous interwar period--Virginia Woolf and Olive Moore--by examining four crucial incarnations of female embodiment and subjectivity: female bodies, geographical imagery, national ideology and textual experimentation. Dickinson proposes that the ways Mrs. Dalloway, and The Waves by Virginia Woolf and Spleen and Fugue by Olive Moore reflect, expose and criticize physical, geographical and national bodies in the narrative and form of their texts reveal the authors’ attempts to try on new forms and experiment with new possibilities of female embodiment and subjectivity.

Bringing together Canadian, American, and British scholars, this volume explores the relationship between modernism and modern celebrity culture. In support of the collection's overriding thesis that modern celebrity and modernism are mutually determining phenomena, the contributors take on a range of transatlantic canonical and noncanonical figures, from the expected (Virginia Woolf and F. Scott Fitzgerald) to the surprising (Elvis and Hitler). Illuminating case studies are balanced by the volume's attentiveness to broader issues related to modernist aesthetics, as the contributors consider celebrity in relationship to identity, commodification, print culture, personality, visual cultures, and theatricality. As the first book to read modernism and celebrity in the context of the crises of individual agency occasioned by the emergence of mass-mediated culture, Modernist Star Maps argues that the relationship between modernism and the popular is unthinkable without celebrity. Moreover, celebrity's strange evolution during the twentieth century is unimaginable without the intercession of modernism's system of cultural value. This innovative collection opens new avenues for understanding celebrity not only for modernist scholars but for critical theorists and cultural studies scholars.

This is the first study of the literary theories of H. G. Wells, the founding father of English science fiction and once the most widely read writer in the world. It explores his entire career, during which he produced popular science, educational theory, history, politics, and prophecy, as well as realist, experimental, and science fiction.