Ruins In The Literary And Cultural Imagination

This book focuses on literal and metaphorical ruins, as they are appropriated and imagined in different forms of writing. Examining British and American literature and culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the book begins in the era of industrial modernity with studies of Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Henry James and Daphne Du Maurier. It then moves on to the significance of ruins in the twentieth century, against the backdrop of conflict, waste and destruction, analyzing authors such as Beckett and Pinter, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton and Leonard Cohen. The collection concludes with current debates on ruins, through discussions of Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht, as well as reflections on the refugee crisis that take the ruin beyond the text, offering new perspectives on its diverse legacies and conceptual resources.

This book engages with the relationship between ruins, dilapidation, and abandonment and cultural events performed within such spaces. Following the author’s fieldwork in the UK, Bosnia Herzegovina, Poland, Germany, Greece, and Sicily, chapters describe, investigate, and reflect upon live performance events which have taken place in sites of decay and abandonment. The book’s main focus is upon modern economic ruins and ruins of warfare. Each chapter provides several case studies based upon the author’s own site visits and interviews with actors, directors, producers, curators, writers, and other artists. The book contextualises these events within the wider framework of Ruin Studies and provides brief summaries of how we might understand the ruin in terms of time, politics, culture, and atmospheres. The book is particularly preoccupied with artists’ reasons and motivations for placing performance events in ruined spaces and how these work dramaturgically.

This encyclopaedia will be an indispensable resource and recourse for all who are thinking about cities and the urban, and the relation of cities to literature, and to ways of writing about cities. Covering a vast terrain, this work will include entries on theorists, individual writers, individual cities, countries, cities in relation to the arts, film and music, urban space, pre/early and modern cities, concepts and movements and definitions amongst others. Written by an international team of contributors, this will be the first resource of its kind to pull together such a comprehensive overview of the field.

The Renaissance was the Ruin-naissance, the birth of the ruin as a distinct category of cultural discourse, one that inspired voluminous poetic production. For humanists, the ruin became the material sign that marked the rupture between themselves and classical antiquity. In the first full-length book to document this cultural phenomenon, Andrew Hui explains how the invention of the ruin propelled poets into creating works that were self-aware of their absorption of the past as well as their own survival in the future.

Translated here into English for the first time is a monumental work of literary history and criticism comparable in scope and achievement to Eric Auerbach’s Mimesis. Italian critic Francesco Orlando explores Western literature’s obsession with outmoded and nonfunctional objects (ruins, obsolete machinery, broken things, trash, etc.). Combining the insights of psychoanalysis and literary-political history, Orlando traces this obsession to a turning point in history, at the end of eighteenth-century industrialization, when the functional becomes the dominant value of Western culture. Roaming through every genre and much of the history of Western literature, the author identifies distinct categories into which obsolete images can be classified and provides myriad examples. The function of literature, he concludes, is to remind us of what we have lost and what we are losing as we rush toward the future.

The present state of research in precarity demands meta-questions and hence we need to probe both philosophy and practice in light of precarity’s different manifestations. The plural perspectives by which this phenomenon can be addressed also suggest potential for further theorization alongside that of Butler and her critics. By inviting scholars and experts from different fields and disciplines, and by applying multiple frameworks, methodological approaches, and critical lenses, this volume seeks to explore the different facets of our precarious world, while providing insights into the challenges of our possible futures.

The Poetics of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Postmodern Literature provides an interdisciplinary exploration in early medical trauma treatment and the emergent postmodern canon of the 1960s and 1970s. By identifying key postmodern literary tropes (paranoia, uncanniness, biomediation) as products of an overarching post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) narrative paradigm, this concise study reveals unexplored aspects of the canonical novels at hand—such as the link between individual and collective traumatization—highlights the presence of epic elements in postmodern narratives, and identifies the influence of emerging psychiatric treatment on the post-WWII novels at hand. Performing a medical humanities reading of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-5 (1969), and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), this book introduces a novel way of examining trauma at the intersection of narrative, history, and medicine and recalibrates the importance of postmodern politics of transformation, while making the case for an aesthetics of trauma. By examining the historico-political developments that dictated the formation of PTSD in the wake of the wars in Korea and Vietnam, this book argues that the perception of PTSD symptoms directly influenced aesthetic and literary tropes of the Cold War era.

This collection of essays explores the hotel as a site of modernity, a space of mobility and transience that shaped the transnational and transcultural modernist activity of the first half of the twentieth century. As a trope for social and cultural mobility, transitory and precarious modes of living, and experiences of personal and political transformation, the hotel space in modernist writing complicates binaries such as public and private, risk and rootedness, and convention and experimentation. It is also a prime location for modernist production and the cross-fertilization of heterogeneous, inter- and trans- literary, cultural, national, and affective modes. The study of the hotel in the work of authors such as E. M. Forster, Katherine Mansfield, Kay Boyle, and Joseph Roth reveals the ways in which the hotel nuances the notions of mobilities, networks, and communities in terms of gender, nation, and class. Whereas Mary Butts, Djuna Barnes, Anaïs Nin, and Denton Welch negotiate affective and bodily states which arise from the alienation experienced at liminal hotel spaces and which lead to new poetics of space, Vicki Baum, Georg Lukács, James Joyce, and Elizabeth Bishop explore the socio-political and cultural conflicts which are manifested in and by the hotel. This volume invites us to think of “hotel modernisms” as situated in or enabled by this dynamic space. Including chapters which traverse the boundaries of nation and class, it regards the hotel as the transcultural space of modernity par excellence.