In contrast to the micropolitics of Foucault, macropolitics emphasizes that political transformations at the level of the state have great importance for many developments in nineteenth-century writing.
In the course of the nineteenth century France built up a colonial empire second only to Britain's. The literary tradition in which it dealt with its colonial 'Other' is frequently understood in terms of Edward Said's description of Orientalism as both a Western projection and a 'will to govern' over the Orient. There is, however, a body of works that eludes such a simple categorisation, offering glimpses of colonial resistance, of a critique of imperialist hegemony, or of a blurring of the boundaries between the Self and the Other. Some of the ways in which the imperialist enterprise is subverted in the metropolitan literature of this period are examined in this volume through detailed case studies of key works by Chateaubriand, Hugo, Flaubert and Segalen.
Brian Hamnett examines key historical novels by Scott, Balzac, Manzoni, Dickens, Eliot, Flaubert, Fontane, Galdós, and Tolstoy, revealing the contradictions inherent in this form of fiction and exploring the challenges writers encountered in attempting to represent a reality that linked past and present.
Excerpts from criticism of the works of novelists, poets, playwrights, short story writers and other creative writers who lived between 1800 and 1900, from the first published critical appraisals to current evaluations.
Over a period of several centuries, the academic study of risk has evolved as a distinct body of thought, which continues to influence conceptual developments in fields such as economics, management, politics and sociology. However, few scholarly works have given a chronological account of cultural and intellectual trends relating to the understanding and analysis of risks. Risk: A Study of its Origins, History and Politics aims to fill this gap by providing a detailed study of key turning points in the evolution of society's understanding of risk. Using a wide range of primary and secondary materials, Matthias Beck and Beth Kewell map the political origins and moral reach of some of the most influential ideas associated with risk and uncertainty at specific periods of time. The historical focus of the book makes it an excellent introduction for readers who wish to go beyond specific risk management techniques and their theoretical underpinnings, to gain an understanding of the history and politics of risk.
In Mercenaries in British and American Literature, 1790-1830, Erik Simpson proposes the mercenary as a meeting point of psychological, national, and ideological issues that connected the severed nations of Britain and America following the American Revolution.When writers treat the figure of the mercenary in literary works, the general issues of incentive, independence, and national service become intertwined with two of the well-known social developments of the period: an increased ability of young people to choose their spouses and the shift from patronage to commercial, market-based support of authorship. While the slave, a traditional focus of transatlantic studies, troubles the rhetoric of liberty through a lack of autonomy and consent, the mercenary raises questions about liberty by embodying its excess. Simpson argues that the mercenary of popular imagination takes monstrous advantage of modern freedoms by contracting away the ostensibly natural and foundational bonds of civil society.Substan
This book applies the growing theoretical field of hauntology to a body of literature which has previously been examined through the lenses of Orientalism and exoticism. Through a chronological study and close readings of the writings of Théophile Gautier, Eugène Fromentin, Gustave Flaubert, and Pierre Loti, the project identifies haunting echoes within the texts which demonstrate an ambivalence of attitudes towards colonialism and which undermine any claim towards a monolithic imperialist French ideology. Whereas hauntological theory has be used to illuminate literature from the Francophone post-colonial period, it has not yet been applied to texts produced during the French colonial period. The originality of this project thus lies in the application of Derridean hauntological theory to works from an earlier period, each of which in one way or another addresses the theme of colonial violence. By revisiting four classic works of colonial Orientalism with haunting as a principal theme, this analysis provides a critical witnessing of France’s violent colonization of Algeria that demonstrates France’s latent anxieties about the colonial project at the time.