Temporalities In Of Crises In Anglophone Literatures

Literary works play a crucial role in modelling and conceptualising temporalities. This becomes particularly apparent in times of crises, which put conventionalised temporal patterns and routines under pressure. During crises, past, present, and future appear to collapse into each other and give way to temporal disjunction and rupture. Offering pluralised and context-sensitive approaches to temporalities in and of crises, this volume explores how literature’s engagement with crises suggests both the need for and possibility of rethinking ‘time’. The volume is committed to examining the affordances of specific genres and their potential in pointing beyond temporalities of crises to facilitate a sense of futurity. Individual essays are grounded in recent theories of temporality and literary form, which are related to novel advancements in ecocriticism, queer studies, affect theory, and postcolonial studies. The chapters cover a broad range of examples from different literary genres to reveal the knowledge of literature about temporalities in and of crises.

Owing to the diverse research interests of the contributors, this collection of essays offers a varied picture of the current approaches to Anglo-American literature and culture, and points to the need for a deeper understanding of current cultural, economic and social processes in the globalizing and globalized culture of the West. Because “crisis” seems to be the key word of contemporary Western culture, the first part of the book, titled “In the Face of Crises”, explores the implicit or explicit idea of a crisis between the real and the simulated, suggesting that one of the major issues for the contemporary man is how to deal with the virtual or with the “absence of the real”. Our fast-paced, technology-laden and materialist-oriented existence brings about the need to rethink our human identity, putting into perspective our relationship to technology, the impact of capitalist economy and colonial past, as well as consequences of constant warfare. The second part of the book, “New Perspectives on Literary Genres”, analyzes forms, topics and styles in literary texts belonging to specific, sometimes marginalized, genres. Literary analyses in this section also touch upon the idea of crisis: be it the crisis of understanding and redefining a particular genre, or a crisis that is inherent in the controversial topic or form of the text. As a reaction to recent allegations concerning the crisis of humanities as “non-profitable”, this book shows that humanist research is indispensable and crucial for understanding the human condition, making this book a relevant addition to the contemporary discussion of literature and culture.

Temporalities presents a concise critical introduction to the treatment of time throughout literature. Russell West-Pavlov examines time as a crucial part of the critical theories of Newton, Freud, Ricoeur, Benjamin, and through related concepts, such as psychology, gender and postmodernism. The author also explores representations of time in a broad range of texts, ranging from the writings of St. Augustine and Sterne's Tristram Shandy, to Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. This comprehensive and accessible guide establishes temporality as an essential theme within literary and cultural studies.

This book is a new study of Chinua Achebe’s novels in which they are read as works of literary art, as literary works are studied and discussed within the discipline of literary studies and criticism. A central concept, care, which is a humane value, is found to run in the texts, and is the crux of the test that the major characters are subjected to. What challenges them as things to be taken care of through concern may be a human being in a dire circumstance, as with Ikemefuna (Things Fall Apart), the human group itself exposed to famine in what should be harvest time (Arrow of God), or the state which needs to be brought to its proper being, as Heidegger would say (No Longer at Ease and A Man of the People), or human suffering calling to be relieved (Anthills of the Savannah). The novels are all in the tragic mode, because intervention is under some kind of interdiction.

This edited volume aims to reposition intertextuality in relation to recent trends in critical practice. Inspired by the work of Sara Ahmed in particular, our authors explore and reconfigure classic theories of authorship, influence and the text (including those by Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Harold Bloom), updating these conversations to include intersectionality specifically, broadly understood to include gendered, racial and other forms of social justice including disability, and the progressive impact of the transmission and transformation of texts. This diverse volume includes discussions of major canonical works such as James Joyce’s Ulysses alongside the recent contemporary literature by authors such as Siri Husvedt and Maggie O’Farrell, as well as theoretical interventions. This volume also engages with how intertextuality can facilitate interdisciplinary and ekphrastic thinking and representation, as the inspiration of music and the visual arts for texts and their transmission is addressed. The choice of intertexts become deliberately political, ethical and artistic signifiers for the authors discussed in this volume, and our contributors are thus enabled to address topics ranging from visual impairment to Shakespearean motherhood to the influence of Jazz culture on writing on the Northern Irish Troubles.

Defined as an ecological epoch in which humans have the most impact on the environment, the Anthropocene poses challenging questions to literary and cultural studies. If, in the Anthropocene, the distinction between nature and culture increasingly collapses, we have to rethink our division between historiography and natural history, as well as notions of the subject and of agency since the Enlightenment. This anthology collects papers from literary and cultural studies that address various issues surrounding the topic. Even though the new epoch seems to require a collective self-understanding as a unified species, readings of the Anthropocene and conceptualizations of human-nature relationships largely differ in Anglophone literatures and cultures. These differing perspectives are reflected in the structure of this book, which is divided into five separate sections: the introductory part familiarizes the reader with the concept and the challenges it poses for the humanities in general and for literary and cultural studies in particular, and the three following sections combine broader, more theoretical, essays with in-depth critical readings of US, Canadian, and Australian representations of the Anthropocene in literature. The final part moves beyond literature to include media theoretical perspectives and discussions of photography and cinema in the Anthropocene.

Indian literature is produced in a wealth of languages but there is an asymmetry in the exposure the writing gets, which owes partly to the politics of translation into English. This book represents the first comprehensive political scrutiny of the concerns and attitudes of Indian language literature after 1947 to cover such a wide range, including voices from the cultural margins of the nation like Kashmiri and Manipuri, that of women alongside those of minority and marginalised communities. In examining the politics of the writing especially in relation to concerns like nationhood, caste, tradition and modernity, postcoloniality, gender issues and religious conflict, the book goes beyond the declared ideology of each writer to get at covert significations pointing to widely shared but often unacknowledged biases. The book is deeply analytical but lucid and jargon-free and, to those unfamiliar with the writers, it introduces a new keenness into Indian literary criticism to make its objects exciting.

This is the first book- length academic study of the portrayal in contemporary historical crime fiction of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust and their legacies. It discusses novels written by five authors: David Downing, Philip Kerr, Luke McCallin, Joseph Kanon and David Thomas. Their work belongs to a subgenre of the historical crime novel that has emerged since the late 1980s to become a significant body of writing located at the intersection of crime fiction and Holocaust literature. The readings of these novels explore questions of form and genre to ask how popular fiction might approach the Holocaust. Themes of resistance and complicity and the relationship between them, and problems of guilt and responsibility are also discussed. This book also explores questions of justice to show how these novels explore social and moral justice, and vengeance and revenge, as alternatives to ordinary legal justice after the Holocaust.