This handbook offers a comprehensive overview of the connections between memory and literature. Organized into six interrelated sections, the book explores both the value of approaches and concepts from literary studies for memory scholarship and the plurality of ways in which literature can advance theories of memory. Chapters cover reading and writing memory and literature; remediations and intersections; local and global cultures; postcolonial and decolonial approaches; environmental an...

This international and interdisciplinary volume explores the relations between translation, migration, and memory. It brings together humanities researchers from a range of disciplines including history, museum studies, memory studies, translation studies, and literary, cultural, and media studies to examine memory and migration through the interconnecting lens of translation. The innovatory perspective adopted by Translating Worlds understands translation’s explanatory reach as e...

The increasing centrality of memory to work being done across a wide range of disciplines has brought along with it vexed questions and far-reaching changes in the way knowledge is pursued. This timely collection provides a forum for demonstrating how various disciplines are addressing these concerns. Is an historian's approach to memory similar to that of theorists in media or cultural studies, or are their understandings in fact contradictory? Which methods of analysis are most appropria...

In the last decade, a focus on memory in the human sciences has encouraged new approaches to the study of the past. As the humanities and social sciences have put into question their own claims to objectivity, authority, and universality, memory has appeared to offer a way of engaging with knowledge of the past as inevitably partial, subjective, and local. At the same time, memory and memorial practices have become sites of contestation, and the politics of memory are increasingly prominen...

A focus on memory has come to prominence across a wide range of disciplines. History, literature, philosophy, anthropology, and cultural studies have placed memory at the heart of their interrogations of subjectivity, narrative, time and imagination. At the same time, memory has emerged as a central theme and preoccupation in popular literature, film and television, and the emergence of memory as an academic theme cannot be separated from its prominence in the wider culture. This volume re...

This inter-disciplinary volume demonstrates, from a range of perspectives, the complex cultural work and struggles over meaning that lie at the heart of what we call memory.In the last decade, a focus on memory in the human sciences has encouraged new approaches to the study of the past. As the humanities and social sciences have put into question their own claims to objectivity, authority and universality, memory has appeared to offer a way of engaging with knowledge of the past a...

Looking at a diverse range of texts including Marilyn French's The Women's Room, Philip Roth's Patrimony, the writings of Walter Benjamin and Fredric Jameson, and films such as Cinema Paradiso, Susannah Radstone argues that though time has been foregrounded in theories of postmodernism, those theories have ignored the question of time and sexual difference.The Sexual Politics of Time proposes that the contemporary western world has witnessed a sh...

This book is a critical, transdisciplinary examination of a broad range of philosophical ideas, theoretical concepts, and artistic projects of community in the 20th and 21st century in the context of global/local social and political changes.This volume opens new vitas by focusing on carefully selected instances of multipronged crises in which existing concepts of commonality are questioned, reformulated, or even speculatively designed with a (better) future in view. As many author...

Present Imperfect asks how South African writers have responded to the end of apartheid, to the hopes that attended the birth of the 'new' nation in 1994, and to the inevitable disappointments that have followed. The first full-length study of affect in South Africa's literature, it understands 'disappointment' both as a description of bad feeling and as naming a missed appointment with all that was promised by the anti-colonial and anti-apartheid Struggle (a dis-appointment). Att...

Beginning theory has been helping students navigate through the thickets of literary and cultural theory for over two decades. This new and expanded fourth edition continues to offer readers the best single-volume introduction to the field. The bewildering variety of approaches, theorists and technical language is lucidly and expertly unravelled. Unlike many books which assume certain positions about the critics and the theories they represent, Beginning theory allows rea...

Comparative Literature is both the past and the future of literary studies. Its history is intimately linked to the political upheavals of modernity: from colonial empire-building in the nineteenth century, via the Jewish diaspora of the twentieth century, to the postcolonial culture wars of the twenty-first century, attempts at 'comparison' have defined the international agenda of literature. But what is comparative literature? Ambitious readers looking to stretch themselves are usually i...

The last few decades have witnessed an explosion in ideas and theories on art. Art itself has never been so topical, but much recent thinking remains inaccessible and difficult to use. This book assesses the work of those thinkers (including artists) who have had a major impact on making, criticizing and interpreting art since the 1960s. With entries by leading international experts, this book presents a concise, critical appraisal of thinkers and their ideas about art and its place in the...