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Volume ten of an 11-volume series of literary criticism selected from works ranging from Classical Greece to the present day. As well as what are considered to be the most important critical texts of each era, the books contain brief biographies of the authors. ... Read more

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Emily Dickinson's Open Folios: Scenes of Reading, Surfaces of Writing is a fine facsimile edition and aesthetic exploration of a group of forty late drafts and fragments hitherto known as the "Lord letters." The drafts are presented in facsimile form on high-quality paper alongside typed transcriptions that reproduce as fully as possible the shock of script and startling array of visual details inscribed on the surfaces of the manuscripts.
Werner argues that a redefinition of the editorial enterprise is needed to approach the revelations of these writings-- the details that have been all but erased by editorial interventions and print conventions in the twentieth century. Paradoxically, "un-editing" them allows an exploration of the relationship between medium and messages. Werner's commentary forsakes the claims to comprehensiveness generally associated with scholarly narrative in favor of a series of speculative and fragmentary "close-ups"--a portrait in pieces. Finally, she proposes the acts of both reading and writing as visual poems.
A crucial reference for Dickinson scholars, this book is also of primary importance to textual scholars, editorial theorists, and students of gender and cultural studies interested in the production, dissemination, and interpretation of works by women writers.
This publication has been supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Marta L. Werner received her Ph.D. from the State University of New York-Buffalo. She is an independent scholar and a member of the Emily Dickinson Editing Collective.
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Most readers, including professional literary academics, spend little time wondering about the state of the texts they are using. Yet the nature and status of texts, and the method of their editing, have profound effects on the ways they can be read. Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age introduces the basic vocabulary of textual criticism, demonstrates how literary criticism suffers from ignorance of textual processes, and offers practical advice on the preparation, presentation, and uses of scholarly editions.
Over the last decade, a major shift in the goals of scholarly editing has occurred, and the field has moved to acknowledge multiple texts and process as the editorial goal. Developments in electronic text presentation have released editors from the limitations and presuppositions about text imposed by the nature of printed books. And developments in literary criticism, including "new historicism," intertextuality, and contextualism, have put demands on editors to produce editions adequate for the new questions being asked of texts. This third edition of Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age has been thoroughly revised and updated to address current debates and controversies in the field.
The volume is divided into three parts. Part 1, Theory, explores eight crucial concepts that affect the planning and execution of scholarly editions. Part 2, Practice, focuses on how the different views of editorial concerns influence selections of copy-text (or base text), how they influence an editor's emendation policy, and how they affect the arrangement and scope of textual apparatus. Part 3, Practicalities, explores the practical problems facing all scholarly editors, regardless of the theories they follow, and outlines ways in which computer technology has changed production processes and presentation options for scholarly editions.
In earlier editions, Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age has been repeatedly praised for the clarity with which it presents the range of editorial problems and the varieties of approaches to their solution. This new edition will prove an essential resource for students of scholarly editing and for anyone interested in the close relationship between textual criticism and literary criticism.
Peter L. Shillingsburg is Professor of English, University of North Texas
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In this study Professor Fernndez examines narratives written by Gustavo Sainz as representative postmodernist fiction. The author focuses on Sainz's use of narrative techniques associated with postmodernism, such as carnivalized images, hybridization and fragmentation, and historiographic metafiction. The author also analyzes Sainz's novels as a cultural response and a criticism of the literary and sociopolitical hegemony of modernism. Finally, Professor Fernndez suggests that Sainz's novels represent both a national and a universal expression of Mexico's hybrid society, especially during the civil unrest of 1968. ... Read more

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This book explores the memorializing practices of American veterans of the Vietnam War at several of the most significant contemporary sites of memory in the United States and Vietnam. These sites include veterans' memoirs, museum exhibits, replicas of the National Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and tourism to Vietnam. Because war memorializing has, since the late 1960s, shifted focus from national soul searching to personal identity and recovery, I emphasize how contemporary narratives of the war, shaped more by memory than by history, often are detached from the specific history of the war and its political controversies. Drawing on trauma and cultural memory scholarship, as well as empirical data gathered duringfield research in the U.S. and Vietnam, the author examines how veterans' memorializing practices have become increasingly individualized, commodified, and conservative since the early 1980s. ... Read more

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Parody: The Art That Plays with Art explodes the near-universal belief that parody is a copycat genre or that it consists of a collection of trivial and derivative forms. Parody is revealed as an uber-technique, a principal source of innovation and invention in the arts. The technique is defined in terms of three major variations that bang, bind, and blend artistic conventions into contrasting pairings, the results of which are upheavals of existing conventions and the formation of unexpected and sometimes startling and revolutionary new configurations. Parodic art fashions a galaxy of contrasts, and from these stem an illusionistic sense of multiplicity and an array of divergent meanings and interpretive paths. This book, an extreme departure from existing analyses of parody, is nonetheless highly accessible and will be of major interest not only to scholars but to general readers and to professional writers as well. Parody: The Art That Plays with Art is particularly suited for readers interested in modernism, postmodernism, meta-art, criticism, satire, and irony. ... Read more

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This study provides a fresh assessment of Spanish Romanticism through a sympathetic appraisal of its literary theory and criticism.It identifies the origins of Spanish Romantic thought in the theories of German Romantic thinkers, in particular Herder's historicism.The range of reference, from the articles of Böhl von Faber to the judgments made by Cañete and Valera is counterpointed by the detail of close readings of books and articles published between 1834 and 1844, together with an examination of the ideas that informed the creative work of Fernán Caballero. Derek Flitter's use of the history of ideas offers a corrective to the recent preponderance of political approaches to Spanish Romanticism, countering their stress on its radical and liberal associations with a detailed demonstration that the majority of Spanish Romantic writers derived their inspiration from restorative, traditionalist, and Christian elements in their contemporaries' theory and criticism. ... Read more

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Divided into three parts - history, theory and praxis - this book examines the relationship between nihilism and postmodernism in relation to the sublime. Arguing against the simplistic division in literary criticism between nihilism and the sublime, the book demonstrates that both are clearly implicated with the Enlightenment. Postmodernism, as a product of Enlightenment, is therefore implicitly related to both nihilism and the sublime, despite the fact that it is often characterized as either nihilistic or sublime. Containing chapters on aesthetics and ethics, this book presents a coherent thesis for reappraising the relationship between nihilism and the sublime, and grounds this argument with frequent references to postmodern literature, making it a book suitable for both researchers and those more generally interested in postmodern literature. ... Read more

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"Novels, Maps, Modernity is a remarkable book that promises to transform our knowledge of the representation of space in modern fiction." - Brian Richardson, University of Maryland

"Bulson’s informative book maps out the territory and points the way to further research and discovery." - Ian Pindar, Times Literary Supplement

Novels, Maps, Modernity argues that cartographic devices—including maps, sea charts, and aerial photographs—have radically shaped how novelistic space has been imagined and represented from the midnineteenth century to the end of the twentieth. More than an antidote to disorientation, Eric Bulson demonstrates that they conceal a more complex story about capitalism, urbanization, empire, and world war.

Guiding readers through the "cartographic encounters" of Melville, Joyce, Pynchon and the long tradition of literary mapping, Bulson provides an original and thoughtful argument about space and the modern novel.

In this volume, Bulson examines:

• the development of novelistic space from realism to postmodernism

• the "reality effect" of mapping and signposting within novels

• the juxtaposition of map and text

• the rise of literary maps and guidebooks.

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The Architecture of Address traces the evolution of an American species of lyric capable of public pronouncement without polemic. Beginning with Whitman, Jake Adam York seeks to describe a kind of poem wherein the most ambitious poets--including Hart Crane and Robert Lowell--occupy and reconstruct important public spaces. This study argues that American poets become civic actors when their poems imagine and reconstruct the conceptual architecture of the monument. ... Read more

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An examination of the importance of oral experience as reflected in literature and using psychoanalytic theory as forwarded by Freud, Karl Abraham, Melanie Klein, and Julia Kristeva. The meaning of oral experience is explored with reference to several texts, looking at the oral bond between mother and child in Proust and questions of disordered eating raised by aggressive orality found in Conrad's Heart of Darkness . Throughout a case is made for the pervasive pleasures, dreads, desires and dramas of the mouth. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

The Apopoesis of the Dissertation
How seldom are dissertations works of art!Yet why shouldn't they be?Why shouldn't they use language in its fullness?How small must those dissertations be that demand anything less. (How small was my own!)

Of another book in this series of "Outstanding Dissertations" another reviewer wrote, "A dissertation is not a book, and by publishing one as a book, Routledge rather does the author a disservice."I had similar misgivings when a friend first referred me to this volume.I expected yet another rehash of Freud and fiction, an audition in which some fresh young voice sings her professors' tired, old-fashioned tunes.But a quick Look Inside on Amazon to the first pages will show this is not just another dissertation.It is at once the work of a mature, panoptic literary observer and a transcendent work of art by a gifted poet.

There are passages in Word of Mouth that were programmed as a mentor's tired tune, but in Skubal's voice they're only études set in a larger, flawless rondo between poet and pedant.These étude passages on Freud, anthropology, and literary criticism are performed with technical precision and impeccable diction, but all the wisdom of this extraordinarily beautiful book emerges in the passages of poetry that join and unify the études.In the process the études themselves are transformed, as it were, from Czerny to Chopin.

For most readers, the most familiar transformations will lie in the obligatory passages of literary criticism.All the warhorses are here:Light in August, Gatsby, The Tempest, many more.A central theme across all these passages is Hunger, but the right hand is gone off playing scholarly filigree.The main theme is now a hungry obligato in the left hand. Instead of Joe Christmas' driving hunger on the lam, we hear, cross-hands, the hunger of the little Joe eating a pink worm of toothpaste; instead of aerial right-hand magic in the Tempest, we're given Caliban in the bass; instead of the starvation scene from Jane Eyre, Skubal plays on the Wide Sargasso Sea.

Do not be misled by the modesty of the opening poem, as it casts the entire work in the subjunctive mood ("I thought I would devise a poem...").This is a work conceived on an epic scale.Even as the opening poem disclaims aspirations to Joycean scale, Word of Mouth is a subconscious Bildungsroman of Here Comes Everybody.Its every chapter speaks to every one of us, minor episodes in life's novel, bound together by a common, obsessive, daily hunger, and brought in the end to a commensal vicus of recirculation, back to helpless infancy and its environs. ... Read more

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Satire plays a prominent and often controversial role in postcolonial fiction. Satire and the Postcolonial Novel offers the first study of this topic, employing the insights of postcolonial comparative theories to revisit Western formulations of "satire" and the "satiric."
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"Foreign Bodies" investigates the relation between the notion of trauma and possible forms of representation within the necessary constraints that traumatic experience itself imposes. While many influential trauma theorists have focused on the notion of textual "voice" in their search for appropriate, effective, and adequate representational modes, the book argues that the act of narrating trauma cannot exclude corporeality as one of the central figures of this telling. One of the distinctive features of this book is, therefore, the attempt at tracing the indissoluble bond--detected in the work of a number of contemporary artists such as Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Dorothy Allison, and photographer Sally Mann--between voice and body, trauma and corporeality. In so doing, the book proposes a new direction within trauma studies, one that explicitly views the body as a medium of self-expression and, crucially, textual working through. By conceptually reading these narratives against the Freudian metaphor for traumatic memory that of a quasi-palpable "foreign body" the author attempts to increase or modify current knowledge on the relationship between expressive culture and trauma. ... Read more

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Out of Touch investigates how skin has become acrucial but disavowed figure in twentieth-century literature, theory and cultural criticism. These discourses reveal the extent to which skin likewise figures in the emergence of visual technologies positioned at the heart of the contest between surface depth and, by extension, between Western globalization and identity politics. Skin itself comes into explicit focus, though, only after a half-century of alternatingcirculation and suppression in American discourses about 'colour-blindness,' during which time colonialism elsewhere had begun to lose its purchase. Skin emerges most spectacularly at the close of this century in body modification practices - especially tattoo - that link visuality to writing and embodiment, urging complex identity politics that hedge against globalization. Nevertheless, even as interventions on theskin characterize the millennial turn, fantasy and science fiction literature and film trumpet skin's passing in the cybernetic age. Similarly feminist theory - otherwise concerned with corporeality - calls for abandoning the skin as a hostile boundary.Out of Touch produces a genealogy by which we can discern the implications of just such myriad tensions skin poses in novels as distinctive as Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway , Ellison's Invisible Man , Pynchon's Gravity Rainbow andAcker's Empire of the Senseless . ... Read more

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This work investigates the ways in which post Second World War American artists represent new information and biomedical technologies and their effects on human identity and agency. Examining canonical authors such as Thomas Pynchon, science fiction writers such as Octavia Butler and popular filmmakers such as Steven Spielberg, the author shows how these artists use the figure of the part-organic, part-technical 'cyborg' to explore how the increasingly intimate connections between ourselves and our technologies change the contours of national, racial, sexual and labouring identities. ... Read more

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Drawing upon historicist and cultural studies approaches to literature, this book argues that the Romantic construction of the self emerged out of the growth of commercial print culture and the expansion and fragmentation of the reading public beginning in eighteenth-century Britain.
Arguing for continuity between eighteenth-century literature and the rise of Romanticism, this groundbreaking book traces the influence of new print market conditions on the development of the Romantic poetic self. ... Read more

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American literary realism burgeoned during a period of tremendous technological innovation. Because the realists evinced not only a fascination with this new technology but also an ethos that seems to align itself with science, many have paired the two fields rather unproblematically. But this book demonstrates that many realist writers, from Mark Twain to Stephen Crane, Charles W. Chesnutt to Edith Wharton, felt a great deal of anxiety about the advent of new technologies – precisely at the crucial intersection of ethics and language. For these writers, the communication revolution was a troubling phenomenon, not only because of the ways in which the new machines had changed and increased the circulation of language but, more pointedly, because of the ways in which language itself had effectively become a machine: a vehicle perpetuating some of society’s most pernicious clichés and stereotypes – particularly stereotypes of race – in unthinking iteration. This work takes a close look at how the realists tried to forge an ethical position between the two poles of science and sentimentality, attempting to create an alternative mode of speech that, avoiding the trap of codifying iteration, could enable ethical action.