Bloomsbury, Beasts and British Modernist Literature
Bloomsbury, Beasts and British Modernist Literature

Author: Derek Ryan

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-12-15

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 100919254X

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Bloomsbury, Beasts and British Modernist Literature reveals how the Bloomsbury group's fascination with beasts – from pests to pets, tiny insects to big game – became an integral part of their critique of modernity and conceptualisation of more-than-human worlds. Through a series of close readings, it argues that for Leonard Woolf, David Garnett, Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster, profound shifts in interspecies relations were intimately connected to questions of imperialism, race, gender, sexuality and technology. Whether in their hunting narratives, zoo fictions, canine biographies or (un)entomological aesthetics, these writers repeatedly test the boundaries between, and imagine transformations of, human and nonhuman by insisting that we attend to the material contexts in which they meet. In demonstrating this, the book enrichens our understanding of British modernism while intervening in debates on the cultural significance of animality from the turn of the twentieth century to the Second World War.

Bloomsbury, Beasts and British Modernist Literature
Bloomsbury, Beasts and British Modernist Literature

Author: Derek Ryan

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-12-31

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1009182978

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Argues that the Bloomsbury group's fascination with beasts was integral to their exploration of imperialism, race, gender, sexuality and technology.

Global Literature and the Environment
Global Literature and the Environment

Author: Matthew Whittle

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-08-02

Total Pages: 181

ISBN-13: 1040096883

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Global Literature and the Environment analyses literatures from across the world that connect readers to the localized impacts of the climate and ecological emergencies. The book contextualizes ecological breakdown within the history of imperialist-capitalism, exploring how literature helps us to imagine and create a habitable and just world for all forms of life. The four chapters are organised according to the elements of the climate system that are at risk. ‘Earth’ examines Caribbean, American, South African, and British literatures that explore how dominant human groups have exploited soils, minerals, metals, and oil in pursuit of economic aims. ‘Water’ engages with poetic representations of, and responses to, extraction, pollution, and global warming in the fresh- and saltwaters of Nigeria and the icescapes of Alaska. ‘Air’ analyses prose and poetry that depicts atmospheric pollution caused by gas flaring in the Niger Delta and the production of pesticides in India. ‘Life’ attends to the ways in which literature contextualizes the drivers of, and proposed solutions to, mass species extinction across North America, Africa, Australasia, and Aotearoa New Zealand. This accessible and engaging book explores novels, plays and poetry by writers including Octavia Butler, C.L.R. James, dg nanouk okpik, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Imbolo Mbue, Indra Sinha, Witi Ihimaera, J.M. Coetzee, and Henrietta Rose-Innes, amongst many others. It introduces readers to the concept of the Anthropocene alongside perspectives that challenge the assumption that the climate crisis is caused by an undifferentiated humanity. In doing so, the book draws on, and combines, a range of theoretical approaches, including postcolonialism, Indigenous studies, ecocriticism, cultural materialism, and animal studies.

Modernism's Inhuman Worlds
Modernism's Inhuman Worlds

Author: Rasheed Tazudeen

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2024-08-15

Total Pages: 185

ISBN-13: 1501776517

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Modernism's Inhuman Worlds explores the centrality of ecological precarity, species indeterminacy, planetary change, and the specter of extinction to modernist and contemporary metamodernist literatures. Modernist ecologies, Rasheed Tazudeen argues, emerge in response to the enigma of how to imagine inhuman being—including soils, forests, oceans, and the earth itself—through languages and epistemologies that have only ever been humanist. How might (meta)modernist aesthetics help us to imagine (with) inhuman worlds, including the worlds still to be made on the other side of mass extinction? Through innovative readings of canonical and emergent modernist and metamodernist works, Tazudeen theorizes inhuman modernism as a call toward further receptivity to the worlds, beings, and relations that tend to go unthought within Western humanist epistemologies. Modernist engagements with the figures of enigma, riddle, and metaphor, according to the book's central argument, offer a means toward what Franz Kafka calls an "otherwise" speaking, based on language's obliqueness to inhuman and planetary being. Drawing on ecocriticism, decolonial and feminist science studies, postcolonial theory, inhuman geography, and sound studies, Tazudeen analyzes an inhuman modernist lineage—spanning from Darwin, Carroll, and Flaubert, through Joyce, Kafka, and Woolf, to contemporary poetic works—as both part of a collaborative rethinking of modernism's planetary and inhuman aesthetics, as well as occasions for imagining new modes of livingness for the extinctions to come.

Virginia Woolf and the Materiality of Theory
Virginia Woolf and the Materiality of Theory

Author: Derek Ryan

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2015-09-01

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 0748676457

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Derek Ryan demonstrates how materiality is theorised in Woolf's writings by focusing on the connections she makes between culture and nature, embodiment and environment, human and nonhuman, life and matter.

Femininity and Authorship in the Novels of Elizabeth von Arnim
Femininity and Authorship in the Novels of Elizabeth von Arnim

Author: Juliane Römhild

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2014-06-25

Total Pages: 197

ISBN-13: 1611477042

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When Elizabeth von Arnim anonymously published her debut Elizabeth and Her German Garden (1898), she became a literary star overnight. The mystery surrounding the identity of this witty aristocratic diarist in her romantic garden kept readers guessing: Who was Elizabeth? A Prussian Princess? The daughter of Queen Victoria? Throughout her long and successful career as one of England’s best satirical novelists, von Arnim never officially revealed her identity. Instead, to her readers and friends she simply became known as “Elizabeth.” From her first book to her capricious autobiography All the Dogs of My Life (1936), throughout her career von Arnim would explore questions of identity and self-representation. And in spite of von Arnim’s love of masquerades and guises, her books include funny and surprisingly personal meditations on the challenges of being a woman writer wrestling with a masculine literary tradition, of taking pride in one’s commercial success while moving in Modernist circles, and of being both a hard-working professional and an elegant hostess. In tracing the conflict between femininity and authorship in von Arnim’s works, this book engages with key literary issues of the time. Von Arnim’s early books offer a witty critique of New Woman fiction. Von Arnim’s self-positioning on the literary market and her relationships with writers like Katherine Mansfield, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf shed light on the relationship between middlebrow and modernist literature. Von Arnim’s complex autobiography, finally, gives a tentative answer to the all-important question: can a writing woman be a lady?

The Comic Turn in Contemporary English Fiction
The Comic Turn in Contemporary English Fiction

Author: Huw Marsh

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2020-07-09

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 1474293042

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The Comic Turn in Contemporary English Fiction explores the importance of comedy in contemporary literature and culture. In an era largely defined by a mood of crisis, bleakness, cruelty, melancholia, environmental catastrophe and collapse, Huw Marsh argues that contemporary fiction is as likely to treat these subjects comically as it is to treat them gravely, and that the recognition and proper analysis of this humour opens up new ways to think about literature. Structured around readings of authors including Martin Amis, Nicola Barker, Julian Barnes, Jonathan Coe, Howard Jacobson, Magnus Mills and Zadie Smith, this book suggests not only that much of the most interesting contemporary writing is funny and that there is a comic tendency in contemporary fiction, but also that this humour, this comic licence, allows writers of contemporary fiction to do peculiar and interesting things – things that are funny in the sense of odd or strange and that may in turn inspire a funny turn in readers. Marsh offers a series of original critical and theoretical frameworks for discussing questions of literary genre, style, affect and politics, demonstrating that comedy is an often neglected mode that plays a generative role in much of the most interesting contemporary writing, creating sites of rich political, stylistic, cognitive and ethical contestation whose analysis offers a new perspective on the present.