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174 results in English literature after 1945

Page 1 of 9

The British Novel of Ideas
  • George Eliot to Zadie Smith
  • Edited by Rachel Potter, Matthew Taunton
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    December 2024
    Print publication:
    31 December 2024
  • The novel of ideas is an important form that is both under-theorised and largely neglected in accounts of the development of the novel in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This book sets out the history of this critical hostility, which took hold as the aesthetic protocols of literary modernism became established among key literary tastemakers in Britain. It then proposes a revaluation and a critical reclamation of the novel of ideas, showcasing a range of perceptive, sympathetic, and sensitive ways of reading novels in which discursive argumentation is foregrounded and where the clash of ideas is vital to the novelistic effect. Through thematic chapters as well as new accounts of key novelists in the British tradition-including George Eliot, H. G. Wells, Doris Lessing and Kamila Shamsie-this book repositions the novel of ideas as a major form in modern British literature.

Twentieth-Century Literature and the Aftermath of War
  • Rachel Bryan
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    December 2024
    Print publication:
    30 November 2024
  • Students of twentieth-century literature are familiar with narratives that associate devastating wars with conceptual, societal, and aesthetic upheavals. What these accounts overlook, however, is a body of psychologically attuned modern writing that was less interested in this shattering of faith and form than in those counterfactual modes of resistance deployed by individuals and nations in response to mass violence and profound change. Twentieth-Century Literature and the Aftermath of War is an innovative study of the attention paid to such reparative, stabilising impulses in post-war writings from across the last century. Focusing on works by Henry James, Elizabeth Bowen, and Kazuo Ishiguro as case studies, it argues that to fully understand the relationship between modern warfare and literary art, we must learn to engage with texts whose modernity lies in their acknowledgement of the draw felt towards, and contested ethics of, consolatory counterfactuals.

The Cambridge Companion to Literature in a Digital Age
  • Edited by Adam Hammond
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    October 2024
    Print publication:
    30 November 2024
  • Literature has experienced two great medium shifts, each with profound implications for its forms, genres, and cultures: that from orality to writing, and that from writing to printing. Today we are experiencing a third shift, from printed to digital forms. As with the previous shifts, this transformation is reconfiguring literature and literary culture. The Cambridge Companion to Literature in the Digital Age is organized around the question of what is at stake for literary studies in this latest transition. Rather than dividing its chapters by methodology or approach, this volume proceeds by exploring the major categories of literary investigation that are coming under pressure in the digital age: concepts such as the canon, periodization, authorship, and narrative. With chapters written by leading experts in all facets of literary studies, this book shows why all those who read, study, and teach literature today ought to attend to the digital.

The Cambridge Introduction to Literary Posthumanism
  • Joseph Tabbi
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    October 2024
    Print publication:
    30 November 2024
  • At a time when scholars in both literary and scientific disciplines are advancing the term posthumanism, this book offers a through-line. Beginning with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and continuing into the post-print, born-digital excursions of Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl, this literary introduction defines posthumanism and provides a summary account of the key literary and cultural theorists in the field. It embraces humanist refusals from Melville's Bartelby to Thomas Pynchon's authorial surrogation, and more recent evasions and avoidances in the writing of William Gibson, Tom McCarthy, Coleson Whitehead, Jeanette Winterson, and Claire-Louise Bennett. This book also provides close readings of key posthuman fiction, poetry, and conceptual approaches that help ground the discipline.

The Possibility of Literature
  • The Novel and the Politics of Form
  • Peter Boxall
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    October 2024
    Print publication:
    05 September 2024
  • The Possibility of Literature is an essential collection from one of the most powerful and distinctive voices in contemporary literary studies. Bringing together key compositions from the last twenty-five years, as well as several new pieces, the book demonstrates the changing fate of literary thinking over the first decades of the twenty-first century. Peter Boxall traces here the profound shifts in the global conditions that make literature possible as these have occurred in the historical passage from 9/11 to Covid 19. Exploring questions such as 'The Idea of Beauty', the nature of 'Mere Being', or the possibilities of Rereading, the author anatomises the myriad forces that shape the literary imagination. At the same time, he gives vivid critical expression to the imaginative possibilities of literature itself – those unique forms of communal life that literature makes possible in a dramatically changing world, and that lead us towards a new shared future.

The Cambridge Companion to Jack Kerouac
  • Edited by Steven Belletto
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 2024
    Print publication:
    27 June 2024
  • Jack Kerouac is among the most important and influential writers to emerge from mid-twentieth century America. Founder of the Beat Generation literary movement, Kerouac's most famous novel, On the Road, was known as the bible of this generation, and inspired untold people to question the rigid social and cultural expectations of 1950s America. And yet despite its undeniable influence, On the Road is only a small piece of Kerouac's literary achievement, and there are now well over forty Kerouac books published. The centerpiece to this work is Kerouac's multi-volume Duluoz Legend, named for his fictional alter-ego, Jack Duluoz, and comprising numerous books written over decades that together tell the story of Duluoz's life and times. This volume offers fresh perspectives on his multifaceted body of work, ranging from detailed analyses of his most significant books to wide-angle perspectives that place Kerouac in key literary, theoretical, and cultural contexts.

The Cambridge Companion to American Utopian Literature and Culture since 1945
  • Edited by Sherryl Vint
  • Published online:
    09 May 2024
    Print publication:
    16 May 2024
  • Providing a comprehensive overview of American thought in the period following World War II, after which the US became a global military and economic leader, this book explores the origins of American utopianism and provides a trenchant critique from the point of view of those left out of the hegemonic ideal. Centring the voices of those oppressed by or omitted from the consumerist American Dream, this book celebrates alternative ways of thinking about how to create a better world through daily practices of generosity, justice, and care. The chapters collected here emphasize utopianism as a practice of social transformation, not as a literary genre depicting a putatively perfect society, and urgently make the case for why we need utopian thought today. With chapters on climate change, economic justice, technology, and more, alongside chapters exploring utopian traditions outside Western frameworks, this book opens a new discussion in utopian thought and theory.

Robert Lowell In Context
  • Edited by Thomas Austenfeld, Grzegorz Kość
  • Published online:
    28 March 2024
    Print publication:
    04 April 2024
  • Robert Lowell was one of the most influential American poets of the 20th century. This volume explores the various contexts of Lowell's life and work and evaluates his oeuvre from new perspectives. Individual chapters address his relation to the South, his religious evolution, aspects of his marriages and private life, his bipolar disorder seen through new theories of mental illness, his work as a letter writer and a connoisseur of art and photography. The book also introduces new parameters for a contemporary study of Lowell, commenting on current debates about race and privilege, feminism, ecoconsciousness, his engagement with the natural environment as well as his friendships with Randall Jarrell and Robert Penn Warren.

The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre since 1945
  • Edited by Jen Harvie, Dan Rebellato
  • Published online:
    14 March 2024
    Print publication:
    21 March 2024
  • British theatre underwent a vast transformation and expansion in the decades after World War II. This Companion explores the historical, political, and social contexts and conditions that not only allowed it to expand but, crucially, shaped it. Resisting a critical tendency to focus on plays alone, the collection expands understanding of British theatre by illuminating contexts such as funding, unionisation, devolution, immigration, and changes to legislation. Divided into four parts, it guides readers through changing attitudes to theatre-making (acting, directing, writing), theatre sectors (West End, subsidised, Fringe), theatre communities (audiences, Black theatre, queer theatre), and theatre's relationship to the state (government, infrastructure, nationhood). Supplemented by a valuable Chronology and Guide to Further Reading, it presents up-to-date approaches informed by critical race theory, queer studies, audience studies, and archival research to demonstrate important new ways of conceptualising post-war British theatre's history, practices and potential futures.

The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Novel and Politics
  • Edited by Bryan M. Santin
  • Published online:
    07 October 2023
    Print publication:
    12 October 2023
  • Surveying the relationship between American politics and the twentieth-century novel, this volume analyzes how political movements, ideas, and events shaped the American novel. It also shows how those political phenomena were shaped in turn by long-form prose fiction. The book is made up of three major sections. The first section considers philosophical ideologies and broad political movements that were both politically and literarily significant in the twentieth-century United States, including progressive liberalism, conservatism, socialism and communism, feminism, and Black liberation movements. The second section analyzes the evolving political valences of key popular genres and literary forms in the twentieth-century American novel, focusing on crime fiction, science fiction, postmodern metafiction and immigrant fiction. The third section examines ten diverse politically-minded novels that serve as exemplary case studies across the century. Combining detailed literary analysis with innovative political theory, this Companion provides a groundbreaking study of the politics of twentieth-century American fiction.

The Cambridge Companion to the American Graphic Novel
  • Edited by Jan Baetens, Hugo Frey, Fabrice Leroy
  • Published online:
    10 January 2024
    Print publication:
    28 September 2023
  • The Cambridge Companion to the American Graphic Novel explores the important role of the graphic novel in reflecting American society and in the shaping of the American imagination. Using key examples, this volume reviews the historical development of various subgenres within the graphic novel tradition and examines how graphic novelists have created multiple and different accounts of the American experience, including that of African American, Asian American, Jewish, Latinx, and LGBTQ+ communities. Reading the American graphic novel opens a debate on how major works have changed the idea of America from that once found in the quintessential action or superhero comics to show new, different, intimate accounts of historical change as well as social and individual, personal experience. It guides readers through the theoretical text-image scholarship to explain the meaning of the complex borderlines between graphic novels, comics, newspaper strips, caricature, literature, and art.

W. G. Sebald in Context
  • Edited by Uwe Schütte
  • Published online:
    24 August 2023
    Print publication:
    07 September 2023
  • The German academic and writer W. G. Sebald made an astounding ascent into the canon of world literature. In this volume, leading experts from both the English- and the German-speaking worlds explore his celebrated prose works published in the short span from 1996 to his premature death in 2001. Special attention is paid to Sebald's unpublished texts and books awaiting translation into English. The volume – illustrated with many unpublished archive images – scrutinizes the dual nature of Sebald's life and work, located between Germany and England, academic and literary writing, vilification and idolization. Through nearly forty essays on a broad range of topics, W. G. Sebald in Context achieves a revision of our understanding of Sebald, defying many clichés about him. Particular attention is paid to the manifold ways in which Sebald's writings exerted a legacy far beyond literature, especially in the areas of art, cinema, and popular music.

Planetary Pynchon
  • History, Modernity, and the Anthropocene
  • Tore Rye Andersen
  • Published online:
    24 August 2023
    Print publication:
    24 August 2023
  • While Thomas Pynchon is usually described as an American author who primarily writes about American reality, Planetary Pynchon: History, Modernity, and the Anthropocene argues that his major novels, Gravity's Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day, can profitably be read as a global trilogy that presents a coherent historical account of how the emergence and spread of European modernity across the world have had devastating consequences for the planet and its inhabitants. This book sets a new agenda in Pynchon studies, charting his early anticipation of anthropocenic and planetary ideas, including globalization's demand for constant growth. It combines close textual readings with broad perspectives on large thematic arcs and stylistic developments across Pynchon's entire career as well as an extensive dialogue with the rich reception of his work.

Drawing from the Archives
  • Comics Memory in the Contemporary Graphic Novel
  • Benoît Crucifix
  • Published online:
    06 July 2023
    Print publication:
    20 July 2023
  • Following Art Spiegelman's declaration that 'the future of comics is in the past,' this book considers comics memory in the contemporary North American graphic novel. Cartoonists such as Chris Ware, Seth, Charles Burns, Daniel Clowes, and others have not only produced some of the most important graphic novels, they have also turned to the history of comics as a common visual heritage to pass on to new readers. This book is a full-length study of contemporary cartoonists when they are at work as historians: it offers a detailed description of how they draw from the archives of comics history, examining the different gestures of collecting, curating, reprinting, forging, swiping, and undrawing that give shape to their engagement with the past. In recognizing these different acts of transmission, this book argues for a material and vernacular history of how comics are remembered, shared, and recirculated over time.

Prosthetic Agency
  • Literature, Culture and Masculinity after World War II
  • Gill Plain
  • Published online:
    29 June 2023
    Print publication:
    13 July 2023
  • Prosthetic Agency: Literature, Culture and Masculinity after World War II examines the social and psychic upheaval of demobilisation. It maps the rapid transition from wartime regimentation to individual responsibility, from intense homosociality to heteronormative expectations, from normativity to disability and from uniformed masculinity to domestic citizenship. This book considers some of the many ways in which popular culture of the time sought to mediate these difficult transitions, exploring films, popular fiction, memoir and biography. In particular, the book explores how technology was imagined as a new space of masculine becoming and how disability was written, represented and assimilated. Through a focus on popular narrative, this book explores the modes of masculinity promoted as ideally suited to national reconstruction and tries to make sense of a culture of rehabilitation that could not name or know itself as such.

J. M. Coetzee and the Limits of the Novel
  • John Bolin
  • Published online:
    08 June 2023
    Print publication:
    22 June 2023
  • J. M. Coetzee is widely recognized as one of the most important writers working in English. As a South African (now Australian) novelist composing his best-known works in the latter third of the twentieth century, Coetzee has understandably often been read through the lenses of postcolonial theory and post-war ethics. Yet his reception is entering a new phase bolstered by thousands of pages of new and unpublished empirical evidence housed at the J. M. Coetzee archive at The Harry Ransom Center (University of Texas, Austin). This material provokes a re-reading of Coetzee's project even as it uncovers keys to his process of formal experimentation and compositional evolution up to and including Disgrace (1999). Following Coetzee's false starts, his confrontation of narrative impasses, and his shifting deployment of source materials, J. M. Coetzee and the Limits of the Novel provides a new series of detailed snapshots of one of the world's most celebrated authors.

The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry and Politics since 1900
  • Edited by Daniel Morris
  • Published online:
    27 April 2023
    Print publication:
    27 April 2023
  • The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth Century American Poetry and Politics shows how American poets have addressed political phenomena since 1900. This book helps students, teachers, and general readers make sense of the scope and complexity of the relationships between poetry and politics. Offering detailed case studies, this book discusses the relationships between poetry and social views found in work by well-established authors such as Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, and Gwendolyn Brooks, as well as lesser known, but influential figures such as Muriel Rukeyser. This book also emphasizes the crucial role contemporary African-American poets such as Claudia Rankine and leading spoken word poets play in documenting political themes in our current moment. Individual chapters focus on specific political issues - race, institutions, propaganda, incarceration, immigration, environment, war, public monuments, history, technology - in a memorable and teachable way for poetry students and teachers.

The Cambridge Companion to Kazuo Ishiguro
  • Edited by Andrew Bennett
  • Published online:
    16 March 2023
    Print publication:
    23 March 2023
  • The Cambridge Companion to Kazuo Ishiguro offers an accessible introduction to key aspects of the novelist's remarkable body of work. The volume addresses Ishiguro's engagement with fundamental questions of humanity and personal responsibility, with aesthetic value and political valency, with the vicissitudes of memory and historical documentation, and with questions of family, home, and homelessness. Focused through the personal experiences of some of the most memorable characters in contemporary fiction, Ishiguro's writing speaks to the major communitarian questions of our time – questions of nationalism and colonialism, race and ethnicity, migration, war, and cultural memory and social justice. The chapters attend to Ishiguro's highly readable novels while also ranging across his other creative output. Gathering together established and emerging scholars from the UK, Europe, the USA, and East Asia, the volume offers a survey of key works and themes while also moving critical discussion forward in new and challenging ways.

New Orleans
  • A Writer's City
  • T. R. Johnson
  • Published online:
    23 February 2023
    Print publication:
    02 March 2023
  • The neighborhoods of New Orleans have given rise to an extraordinary outpouring of important writing. Over the last century and a half or so, these stories and songs have given the city its singular place in the human imagination. This book leads the reader along five thoroughfares that define these different parts of town – Royal, St. Claude, Esplanade, Basin, and St. Charles – to explore how the writers who have lived around them have responded in closely related ways to the environments they share. On the outskirts of New Orleans today, the city's precarious relation to its watery surroundings and the vexed legacies of race loom especially large. But the city's literature shows us that these themes have been near to hand for New Orleans writers for several generations, whether reflected through questions of masquerade, dreams of escape, the innocence of children, or the power of money or of violence or of memory.

A History of World War One Poetry
  • Edited by Jane Potter
  • Published online:
    18 January 2023
    Print publication:
    12 January 2023
  • Situating First World War poetry in a truly global context, this book reaches beyond the British soldier-poet canon. A History of World War One Poetry examines popular and literary, ephemeral and enduring poems that the cataclysm of 1914-1918 inspired. Across Europe, poets wrestled with the same problem: how to represent a global conflict, dominated by modern technology, involving millions of combatants and countless civilians. For literary scholars this has meant discovering and engaging with the work of men and women writing in other languages, on other fronts, and from different national perspectives. Poems are presented in their original languages and in English translations, some for the very first time, while a Coda reflects on the study and significance of First World War poetry in the wake of the Centenary. A History of World War One Poetry offers a new perspective on the literary and human experience of 1914-1918.

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