How was modern character made or remade at the turn of the twentieth century? Modern Character: 1888-1905 considers a range of literary and dramatic texts, showcasing the extraordinary efforts of various writers to rethink and reinvent 'human character' during this period. Arguing that many of the most significant breakthroughs happened in the small theatres of Europe in the 1890s, the book's first section demonstrates how the countervailing currents of Naturalism and Sym...

Films like Welcome to the Dollhouse and Happiness established Todd Solondz as independent cinema's premier satirist. Blending a trademark black humor into atmospheres of grueling bleakness, Solondz repeatedly takes moviegoers into a bland suburban junk space peopled by the damaged, the neglected, and the depraved.Julian Murphet appraises the career of the controversial, if increasingly ignored, indie film auteur. Through close readings and a discussion with the director, Murphet dissects h...

This book treats William Faulkner's major fiction--from Flags in the Dust through to Absalom, Absalom!--to a searching reappraisal under the spotlight of a media-historical inquiry. It proposes that Faulkner's inveterate attraction to the paradigms of romance was disciplined and masked by the recurrent use of metaphorical figures borrowed from the new media ecology. Faulkner dressed up his romance materials in the technological garb of radio, gramophony, photography, and ...

The history of the modern riot parallels the development of the modern novel and the modern lyric. Yet there has been no sustained attempt to trace or theorize the various ways writers over time and in different contexts have shaped cultural perceptions of the riot as a distinctive form of political and social expression. Through a focus on questions of voice, massing, and mediation, this collection is the first cross-cultural study of the interrelatedness of a prevalent mode of political ...

Elizabeth Harrower: Critical Essays is the first sustained study of this acclaimed Australian author. It brings together two celebrated novelists and ten noted critics of Australian literature to consider the legacy and continuing importance of this major literary figure.The essays examine all of Harrower's published fiction, from her first short story to the long-delayed publication of In Certain Circles in 2014. Together they provide an wide ranging introduction...

Styles of Extinction: Cormac McCarthy's The Road brings together several leading literary scholars, one major philosopher, as well as a handful of emerging critical voices, all of whom deploy their own specialist methods in order to think through this bestselling, Zeitgeist-defining event of contemporary literature. There are two dominant modes of analysis gathered here: the first, performed by Julian Murphet, Paul Sheehan, and Mark Steven, is to locate the novel within its politi...

Flann O'Brien & Modernism brings a much-needed refreshment to the state of scholarship on this increasingly recognised but still widely misunderstood 'second generation' modernist. Rather than construe him as a postmodernist, it correctly locates O'Brien's work as the product of a late modernist sensibility and cultural context. Similarly, while there should be no doubt of his Irishness, and his profound debts to Irish language, history and culture, this collection seeks to unders...

Communism and Poetry: Writing Against Capital addresses the relationship between an upsurge in collective political practice around the world since 2000, and the crystallization of newly engaged forms of poetry. Considering an array of perspectives—poets, poet-critics, activists and theorists—these essays shed new light on the active interface between emancipatory political thought and poetic production and explore how poetry and the new communism are creating mutually innovative ...

This new collection of essays on Coetzee examines how his novels create and unsettle literary authority. Its unique contribution is to show how Coetzee provokes us into reconsidering certain basic formal and existential questions such as the nature of literary realism, the authority of the author and the constitution of the human self in a posthumanist setting by consciously revealing the literary-theoretical seams of his work. Strong Opinions makes the innovative claim that Coetzee's work...

Modernism and Masculinity investigates the varied dimensions and manifestations of masculinity in the modernist period. Thirteen essays from leading scholars reframe critical trends in modernist studies by examining distinctive features of modernist literary and cultural work through the lens of masculinity and male privilege. The volume attends to masculinity as an unstable horizon of gendered ideologies, subjectivities and representational practices, allowing for fresh interdisciplinary ...

William Faulkner in the Media Ecology explores the Nobel Prize-winning author immersed in the new media of his time. Intersecting with twentieth-century technology such as photography, film, and sound recording, these twelve essays portray Faulkner as not only as a writer looking back on the history of the U.S. South, but also as a screenwriter, aviator, and celebrity. This fresh, interdisciplinary approach to Faulkner presents an innovative way of reassessing a body of literary work that ...