The second volume shines a light on the cultural and social changes that took place during the epoch of European Restorations, when the death of the Napoleonic empire existed as a crucial moment for contemporaries. Expanding the transnational approach of Volume I, the chapters focus on the transmutation of ordinary experiences of war into folklore and popular culture, the emergence of grassroots radical politics and conspiracies on the Left and Right, and the relationship between literacy ...

The English Civil War has become a frequent point of reference in contemporary political debate. A bitter and bloody series of conflicts, it shook the very foundations of seventeenth-century Britain. This is the first attempt to portray the visual legacy of this period, as passed down, revisited and periodically reworked over two and a half centuries of subsequent English history.Highly regarded art historian Stephen Bann deftly interprets the mass of visual evidence accessible toda...

Stephen Bann examines the arguments for the centrality of French modernist painting. He begins by focusing particularly on the notion of the modernist break, as it has been interpreted with regard to painters like Manet and Ingres. He argues that ‘curiosity’, with its origins in the seventeenth-century world-view can be a valid concept for understanding some aspects of contemporary art that contest the modern, suggesting ways of sidetracking the modern by adopting a lengthier historical vi...

Julia Kristeva presents a thoroughly original and compelling reading of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, first delivered at the 1992 T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures at Canterbury. Kristeva's first essay, “Proust and Time Embodied,” takes a broadly psychoanalytical, linguistically sensitive approach to Proust’s exploration of time and the operation of memory. Next, in “In Search of Madeline,” she delves into Proust’s concept of the little cake that flooded him with the taste of ch...

Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925–2006) was one of Scotland's leading twentieth-century public intellectuals, and famously one of its most brilliant and combative correspondents. His letters raise issues of particular and widespread interest both within Scotland and further afield. His correspondence with Stephen Bann, the English poet and academic, have a very special place in this context. These letters present in a clear and commensurable form the development of his ideas about poetry and art, ...

An astonishing work of cultural criticism, this book is widely recognized as a brilliant and devastating challenge to conventional views of literature, anthropology, religion, and psychoanalysis. In its scope and interest it can be compared with Freud's Totem and Taboo, the subtext Girard refutes with polemic daring, vast erudition, and a persuasiveness that leaves the listener compelled to respond, one way or another.This is the single fullest summation of Girard's ideas ...

These letters to (and from) Finlay’s friend, the English poet and scholar, Stephen Bann, centre on the initial development of the garden at Stonypath, near Edinburgh, later to become the world renowned Little Sparta’. They cover Finlay’s turn away from poetry towards sculpture and garden design, and the thinking behind, and consequences of, this development.

A spectre is haunting us: fear. We are constantly confronted with apocalyptic scenarios: pandemics, world war, the climate catastrophe. Images of the end of the world and the end of human civilization are conjured up with ever greater urgency. Anxiously, we face a bleak future. Preoccupied with crisis management, life becomes a matter of survival.But it is precisely at such moments of fear and despair that hope arises like a phoenix from the ashes. Only hope can give us back a life...

Sartre's powerful political passions were united with a memorable literary gift, placing him foremost among the novelists, as well as the philosophers, of our time. Iris Murdoch's pioneering study analyses and evaluates the different strands of Sartre's rich and complex oeurve. Combining the objectivity of the scholar with a profound interest in contemporary problems, Iris Murdoch discusses the tradition of philosophical, political and aesthetic thought that gives historical authenticity t...

A book which should appeal to both literary theorists and to readers of the novel, this study invites the reader to consider how the plot reflects the patterns of human destiny and seeks to impose a new meaning on life.

Newly published lectures by Foucault on madness, literature, and structuralism.Perceiving an enigmatic relationship between madness, language, and literature, French philosopher Michel Foucault developed ideas during the 1960s that are less explicit in his later, more well-known writings. Collected here, these previously unpublished texts reveal a Foucault who undertakes an analysis of language and experience detached from their historical constraints. Three issues...

Unlock the more straightforward side of Nausea with this concise and insightful summary and analysis!This engaging summary presents an analysis of Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre, which follows one man as he becomes truly aware of the existence of the world around him and grapples with the rising sense of panic this causes. This realisation leads him to abandon the historical biography he is working on and embrace fiction instead, as a way of freeing h...