Books by Nicholas Royle

A mix of memoir and narrative non-fiction, White Spines is a book about Nicholas Royle's passion for Picador's fiction publishing from the 1970s to the end of the 1990s.

Before the exquisitely painful ''loss of her marbles'', Mrs Royle, a nurse by profession, is a marvellously no-nonsense character, an autodidact who reads widely and voraciously from Trollope to Woolf, White to Winterson - swears at her fox-hunting neighbours, and instils in the young Nick a love of reading and wildlife that will form his character and his career. He captures the spirit of post-war parenting as well as of his mother whose dementia and death were triggered by the tragedy of losing her other son - Royle''s younger brother - to cancer in his twenties.

A lucid, original and inventive critical introduction to Helene Cixous (1937-). Royle offers close readings of many of her works, from Inside (1969) to the present. He foregrounds Cixous's importance for 'English literature' as well as creative writing, autobiography, narrative theory, psychoanalysis, ecology, gender studies and queer theory. -- .

Paul Kinder, a novelist with one forgotten book to his name, teaches creative writing in a university in the north-west of England. Either you'll laugh, or you'll cry. Or maybe both.

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) was the most original and inspiring writer and philosopher of our time. In a series of distinctive essays that are at once self-contained and intricately linked, Royle explores the legacies of Derrida's thinking in the context of philosophy, language, globalisation, war, terrorism, justice, the democracy to come, poetry, literature, memory, mourning, the gift, friendship and dreams. Lucid, inventive and at times funny, Royle allows us to appreciate how much Derrida's work has altered the ways we read and think. Autobiography, children's literature, the Gothic and modernist fiction, for example, figure together with philosophy, queer studies, speech act theory and psychoanalysis. The writings of Horace Walpole, Herman Melville, E. M. Forster, Elizabeth Bowen, Joe Brainard and David McKee are illuminatingly put in play alongside Shakespeare. Royle's book suggests that one of Derrida's most profound legacies has to do with the combination of responsibility and freedom his work inspires for both reading and writing. In Memory of Jacques Derrida offers an exceptionally clear overview of Derrida's work, while also tracing directions in which it might productively be read in the future.

'Reading Veering generates the intense joy of veering. An exuberantly successful medium, Royle calls up swarms of passages from literature and elsewhere where the word or concept "e;veering"e; is salient. On this basis he creates new theories of literature and of creative writing's place in criticism. Royle's best book yet.'J. Hillis Miller, Distinguished Research Professor of Comparative Literature and English, University of California, Irvine'Nicholas Royle is one of the most interesting, inventive, and provocative thinkers of literary language currently writing in English, and he has done something truly extraordinary here. By allowing a theory of literature to emerge right from the traces of the veering movements of fiction and poetry, he has thoroughly renewed the possibility of thinking in the wake of our literary encounters. Veering issues a general license to read, once again, with all the wonder, generosity, and freedom it calls forth on every page.'Professor Peggy Kamuf, University of Southern California'Every genre, every great work has its way of veering. This fascinating, richly compendious, necessary book shows the way forward for literary studies. Nicholas Royle's twisty key opens and magically re-opens the wonders of the canon and beyond. The spiralling pleasure he takes in doing so lightens, refreshes, instructs and inspires. Royle is a wonderful communicator about literature and theory and a uniquely powerful, original critical voice. This is his most exciting and widely relevant work so far.'Sarah Wood, University of KentReflections on the figure of veering form the basis for a new theory of literatureExploring images of swerving, loss of control, digressing and deviating, Veering provides new critical perspectives on all major literary genres: the novel, poetry, drama, the short story and the essay, as well as creative writing Royle works with insights from Lewis Carroll, Freud, Adorno, Raymond Williams, Edward Said, Deleuze, Cixous and Derrida. With wit and irony he investigates veering in the writings of Jonson, Milton, Dryden, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Melville, Hardy, Proust, Lawrence, Bowen, J.H. Prynne and many others. Contrary to a widespread sense that literature has become increasingly irrelevant to our culture and everyday life, Royle brilliantly traces a strange but compelling literary turn

This is the first book-length study of the uncanny, an important topic for contemporary thinking on literature, film, philosophy, psychoanalysis, feminism and queer history. -- .