What are we to make of the Victorians’ fascination with collecting? What effect did their encounters with the curious, exotic and downright odd have on Victorian writers and their works? The essays in this collection take up these questions by examining the phenomenon of bric-Ã -brac in Victorian literature. The contributors to Literary Bric-Ã -Brac and the Victorians: From Commodities to Oddities explore sites of unusual concurrence (including museums, the home, art galleries, private col...

An ARTery Best Book of the YearAn Art of Manliness Best Book of the YearIn a culture that has become progressively more skeptical and materialistic, the desires of the individual self stand supreme, Mark Edmundson says. We spare little thought for the great ideals that once gave life meaning and worth. Self and Soul is an impassioned effort to defend the values of the Soul.“An impassioned critique of Western society, a relentless assault on...

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDHow does a literary historian end up thinking in terms of z-scores, principal component analysis, and clustering coefficients? The essays in Distant Reading led to a new and often contested paradigm of literary analysis. In presenting them here Franco Moretti reconstructs his intellectual trajectory, the theoretical influences over his work, and explores the polemics that have often developed around his posit...

Including more than 30 essential works of science fiction criticism in a single volume, this is a comprehensive introduction to the study of this enduringly popular genre. Science Fiction Criticism: An Anthology of Essential Writings covers such topics as:·Definitions and boundaries of the genre·The many forms of science fiction, from time travel to 'inner space'·Ideology and identity: from utopian fantasy to feminist, queer and environmental readings·...

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com.Drawing on a wide range of examples from literature, comics, film, television and digital media, Nerd Ecology is the first substantial ecocritical study of nerd culture's engagement with environmental issues. Exploring such works as Star Trek, Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, Joss Whedon's ...

This provocative book posits a new theory of women's writing characterized by what Claire Raymond calls 'the posthumous voice.'This suggestive term evokes the way that women's writing both forefronts and hides the author's implied body within and behind the written work. Tracing the use of the disembodied posthumous voice in fiction and poetry by Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, Emily Dickinson, and Sylvia Plath, Raymond's study sounds out the ways that the trope of the posthumous voice succee...

From the Biblical period and Classical Antiquity to the rise of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, aspects of Persian culture have been integral to European history. A diverse constellation of European artists, poets, and thinkers have looked to Persia for inspiration, finding there a rich cultural counterpoint and frame of reference. Interest in all things Persian was no passing fancy but an enduring fascination that has shaped not just Western views but the self-image of Iranians up ...

Object fetishism is becoming a more and more pervasive phenomenon. Focusing on literature and the visual arts, including cinema, this book suggests a parallelism between fetishism and artistic creativity, based on a poetics of detail, which has been brilliantly exemplified by Flaubert's style. After exploring canonical accounts of fetishism (Marx, Freud, Benjamin), by combining a historicist approach with theoretical speculation, Massimo Fusillo identifies a few interpretive patterns of ob...

The period immediately following the end of the First World War witnessed an outpouring of artistic and literary creativity, as those that had lived through the war years sought to communicate their experiences and opinions. In Germany this manifested itself broadly into two camps, one condemning the war outright; the other condemning the defeat. Of the former, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front remains the archetypal example of an anti-war novel, and one that has become...

Compared to how it looked 150 years ago at the eve of the colonial conquest, today’s India is almost completely unrecognizable. A sovereign nation, with a teeming, industrious population, it is an economic powerhouse and the world’s largest democracy. It can boast of robust legal institutions and a dizzying plurality of cultures, in addition to a lively and unrestricted print and electronic media. The question is how did it get to where it is now?Covering the period from 1800 to 19...

The idea for this study came to me in the course of my reading of innova tive US-American! fiction of the last three decades. I observed that much of it is cast in the comic mode - or, more precisely, that there seems to be in contemporary fiction an affinity between 'innovation' and 'the comic' and that this affinity, furthermore, appears to be characteristic of postmo dernism. It is obvious, at the same time, that comic has become an elusive and, more often than not, a disputable categor...

1590s Drama and Militarism is a fascinating interdisciplinary study of various textual interventions into the military realities of the late Elizabethan period. Its major strength is its insistence on the discursive nature of militarism, and the author convincingly uses literary and non-literary texts-including manuals and contemporary military correspondence-to reconstruct the particular anxieties which surrounded the military exigencies of the 1590s, a particularly fraught and unstable p...