Books in the EDINBURGH CRITICAL STUDIES IN series

[headline]Advances our understanding of the literary legacy of contemporary ecological crises to investigate the interfaces of humanity and nature At this critical juncture in which the biodiversity of planet Earth appears to be shrinking fast and furiously, Louis Kirk McAuley invites us to consider the ways in which particular unruly natures, including animals, plants and minerals, actively intervene in literature to decentre the human. Drawing upon invasion biology, McAuley offers transformative ecocritical interpretations of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and American literature and highlights the heterarchical nature of empire building. This includes analyses of texts composed by (or about) persons residing at, or just outside, the edges of the British and American Empires, including St Kitts and Nevis, Haiti, Cuba, Hawaii and Samoa, which were built around the global transfer of animals and plants. Offering biotic readings of this literature, McAuley highlights the human place in nature and provides practical literary examples of the ways oceans facilitate the confusion of time and place. [bio]Louis Kirk McAuley has been Associate Professor in the Department of English at Washington State University, USA, since 2014. He has published numerous articles and book chapters and is the author of Print Technology in Scotland and America, 1740-1800 (2013).

[headline]Rethinks the relationship between architecture, literature and (in)visibility in the nineteenth-century city Ben Moore presents a new approach to reading urban modernity in nineteenth-century literature, by bringing together hidden, mobile and transparent features of city space as part of a single system he calls 'invisible architecture'. Resisting narratives of the nineteenth-century as progressing from concealment to transparency, he instead argues for a dynamic interaction between these tendencies. Across two parts, this book addresses a range of apparently disparate buildings and spaces. Part I offers new readings of three writers and their cities: Elizabeth Gaskell and Manchester, Charles Dickens and London, and Émile Zola and Paris, focusing on the cellar-dwelling, the railway and river, and the department store respectively. Part II takes a broader view by analysing three spatial forms that have not usually been considered features of nineteenth-century modernity: the Gothic cathedral, the arabesque and white walls. Through these readings, the book extends our understanding of the uneven modernity of this period. [bio]Ben Moore is Assistant Professor in English Literature at the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands. He is the author of Human Tissue in the Realist Novel, 1850-1895 (2023) and Co-Editor of the Gaskell Journal. His work has appeared in journals including Victorian Literature and Culture, Modernism/modernity, Modern Language Review and the Journal of Victorian Culture, as well as in various handbooks and edited collections.

The first volume devoted to Derek Walcott's lifelong engagement with the visual arts Walcott's lifelong concern with painting and painters deeply inflected his aesthetics and politics. Walcott's interventions on the relationship between Caribbean and colonial history have been thoroughly scrutinised, but arguably he was also keen to address and (re)write an art history of which, paraphrasing a line from Omeros, the Caribbean 'too' was/is 'capable'. Contextualising and putting in conversation Walcott's published and unpublished writing, drawings and paintings with specific artists from the Caribbean, Europe, South and North America, Derek Walcott's Painters recalibrates and sharpens our understanding of Walcott's articulation of his own politics and poetics, and of the Caribbean's contributions to Atlantic and global culture. Maria Cristina Fumagalli is Professor in Literature at the University of Essex. Her publications include On the Edge: Writing the Border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic (2015; 2018), Caribbean Perspectives on Modernity: Returning Medusa's Gaze (2009) and The Flight of the Vernacular: Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott and the Impress of Dante (2001).

Examines the ways in which the material culture of the First World War shaped modernism Often studied for its fascination with the shell-shocked mind, modernist literature is also packed with more tangible traces of the First World War, from helmets, trench art and tombstones to shop signs, military newspapers and leaflets dropped from aeroplanes. Modernism, Material Culture and the First World War asks what experimental writers read into these objects and how the conflict prompted a way of thinking of their writings as objects in their own right. Ranging from 1914 to the early 1940s, the chapters in this book explore prose and poems by Guillaume Apollinaire, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Hope Mirrlees and Mulk Raj Anand. Cedric Van Dijck is a postdoctoral fellow in English Literature at the University of Brussels (VUB). He is a co-editor of The Edinburgh Companion to First World War Periodicals (2023) and The Intellectual Response to the First World War (2017).

Reconceptualises Shakespeare's representations of selfhood by drawing on a long history of the interpreting self We share with Shakespeare, it seems, the assumption that to be human is to know through interpretation. This innovative study examines Shakespeare's compelling dramatisations of the interpreting self through the lens of a hermeneutical tradition that spans culture-shaping early modern religious beliefs about human knowing and pivotal philosophical ideas of our age. What is it to be an interpreting self? Shakespeare, the Reformation and the Interpreting Self offers fresh perspectives on critical questions about the self's finitude, agency, motivations, self-knowledge and ethical relation to others; questions that were of great relevance in Shakespeare's England and which continue to frame present-day dilemmas and debates about human experience and human being. Roberta Kwan is an Honorary Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Media, Communication, Creative Arts, Language, and Literature at Macquarie University, Sydney.

Demonstrates what Victorian poetry tells us about the relationship between poetry and time Time and Timelessness explores the question of poetry's relation to time and argues that this relation is historically contingent - as the concept of time changes, so too do the shaping forms and definitions of poetry. Victorian literature provides a rich testing field for its hypothesis, since the nineteenth century saw momentous changes in the ways people thought about and experienced time. This book demonstrates that these changes were an important factor for some of the long-term developments in Victorian poetry, like its loss of cultural prestige, the popularity of mixed genres like the poetic sequence, the dramatic monologue and the verse novel, and the demise of metrical poetry as the norm. Moreover, the historical perspective offered questions some widely held assumptions, not only about poetry, but also about time itself. Thus, the theoretical relevance of this study extends well beyond its Victorian context. [Bio]Irmtraud Huber is Professor of English Literature at the University of Konstanz.

Explores abstraction as a keyword in aesthetic modernism and in critical thinking since Marx Abstraction is one of the most important words in modernism and in the critical thought of modernity, yet its complex work is invariably hidden in plain sight. What do we want from abstraction? Does it refer to thought, or to art? Is it a term of reproach, or of affirmation? Beyond these distinctions, Jeff Wallace's new intellectual history of abstraction in modernism and modernity proposes that abstraction is always uniquely concerned with the importance and revaluation of the inhuman in and for the human. Wallace's case studies range across the writings of Raymond Williams and Paul Valéry, Marx and Marxist aesthetics, the discourse on abstract visual art in Cézanne, Kandinsky, Mondrian and Newman, the literary experimentalisms of Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens and Samuel Beckett, and the twenty-first-century legacies of modernist abstraction in two forms: the post-Deleuzian resurgence of interest in the philosophies of William James, Henri Bergson and A. N. Whitehead; and the act of looking at the abstract canvas in plays by Yasmina Reza, John Logan and Lee Hall. Contrary to habitual associations of abstraction's difficulty with the exclusivity of high modernism, Wallace finds an inclusive and democratic impulse at the heart of the difficulty itself - the promise of an abstraction for all. Jeff Wallace is Professor Emeritus at Cardiff Metropolitan University, UK. He is the author of Beginning Modernism (2011) and D. H. Lawrence, Science and the Posthuman (2005), and has written widely on Lawrence, on science and literature in modern and contemporary writing, and on critical posthumanism. He was a founding editor of the journal Key Words and currently co-edits the series New Literary Theory.