Books in the Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory series

The Civil War was the first 'image war', as photographs of the battlefields became the dominant means for capturing an epochal historical moment. This title examines how key19th-century American writers attempted to combat, understand, and incorporate the advent of photography in their fiction.

This study provides copious historical context for the role the Ottoman Empire played in the development of imperial discourses in a time when the colonial holdings of Great Britain increased exponentially.

Analyzing novels by Charles Dickens, H Rider Haggard and Thomas Hardy, this book examines nineteenth-century literary representations of the pathologized female body in relation to biomedical discourses about gender and society in Victorian England.

This title suggests that although the treatment and evasion of the Holocaust in certain postmodern texts often seems irresponsible, the texts have a deep affinity with ethical theories anchored in notions of obsession, persecution and trauma.

The relationship of writers and artists to mass-marketplaces and popular cultural forms is often understood as one of ambivalence. This book redirects this established line of inquiry, considering the practical and conceptual interfaces between literary practice and dominant economic institutions and ideas.

Through interdisciplinary engagement with fiction and popular culture, this book explores the philsophical, social, and aesthetic implications of twentieth-century America's obsession with eliminating waste.

This book examines a sequence of crisis in nineteenth-century print culture in order to offer an original narrative of what it meant, and what it could have meant to be a Victorian Novelist.

Exploring the intertwined topics of nationalism, transnationalism and fundamentalism, Nyla Ali Khan discusses the representation of South Asian life in the works of four Anglophone writers: Naipaul, Rushdie, Ghosh and Desai.

Drawing on women's wills, merchants' tracts, mock testaments, mercantilist pamphlets and theatrical account books, and utilizing the work in economic theory and history, this book examines the history of economic thought as the history of discourse. It finds linguistic and generic stress placed on an ethics of credit that allows for self-interest.

Historicizes the Tower of London's evolving meanings in English culture alongside its representations in twenty-four English history plays, 1579-c 1634, by William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe and others.

Focusing on plays which appear prominently in the writing of Irish nationalist movement of early twentieth century, this book explores how Irish writers such as Sean O'Casey, Samuel Beckett, and Seamus Heaney, resisted English cultural colonization through a combination of reappropriation and critique of Shakespeare's work.

Examines the genesis of Chicago's two identified literary renaissance periods (1890-1920 and 1930-1950) through the writings of Dreiser, Hughes, Wright, and Farrell. This book shows that the relationship of these four writers demonstrates a continuity of thought between the two renaissance periods.

Using narrative theory and postcolonial theory, this study reveals the cultural changes that turned England from a nation that abstained from investing in the internationally conceived Suez Canal to an imperial power who, by 1875, owned it.

Examines twentieth-century Jewish writing that challenges imperialist ventures and calls for solidarity with the colonized, most notably the Arabs of Palestine and Africans in the Americas. This title proposes that Jewish studies and postcolonial studies have much in common.

Presenting a way of reading that helps us discern some previously unnoticed or unnoticeable features of Asian diaspora poetry, this volume highlights how poetry plays a significant role in mediating and defining cross-cultural and transnational positions.

Explores the themes of alienation and displacement in a genre of post-World War II novels that portrays the pursuit of an authentic travel experience in a culturally unfamiliar place. This book examines the capacity of popular culture for social critique, and the relationship between leisure travel and postcolonial cultures.

Examines the unique cultural space of Victorian cathedral towns as they appear in the literary work of Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope, arguing that Dickens and Trollope use the cathedral town's enclosure, and its overt connections between sacred and secular as an ideal locus from which to critique Victorian religious attitudes.

Medical, popular, and literary understanding about the imagination converged when Thomas Willis asserted that he had discovered the area of the brain that facilitated imagining. Taking this 'discovery' as paradigmatic, this work examines the reverberations of the medical investigation of the imagination in early British novels.

This is a collection of essays representative of diverse geographies, all of which underscore moments of disordered eating. The volume removes the pathology and stigma surrounding non-normative eating, highlighting these acts as expressions of resistance against the sociopolitical order of operations.

Addressing the two principal literary works in which transformation in the meaning of equity in sixteenth century England becomes apparent, Thomas More's "Utopia" and Edmund Spenser's "Faerie Queene", this work sketches the history of equity to its roots in the Greek concept of "epieikeia", presenting both distinctions, and an esoteric meaning.

A deconstructive psychoanalytic study of hysteria, using literary texts to foreground a telling encounter between two growing discourses within English studies: that of emotion/affect and trauma studies. This text brings together academic foci - history of medicine, aesthetic theory, speech act theory, feminism, and gender and performance studies.

Working at the crossroads of contemporary geographical and cultural theories about social space and questions of modernity and modernism, this book explores how social space functions as sites which foreground DH Lawrence and Virginia Woolf's critiques of the social order and longings for change.

Reveals the strain of a moment in American cultural history that led several writers - including Emerson, Warner, and Melville - to render the rupture of loss in various ways. This book shows how these three writers rejected Calvinist and sentimental models of bereavement, creating instead the compensations of a mature American literature.

Examines plays, pageants, maps, and masques. This book locates the ways in which these ephemeral events contributed to change in the spatial concepts and physical topograpy of early modern London.

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. This book examines how veterans' memorializing practices have become increasingly individualized, commodified, and conservative since the early 1980s.

Undertakes a reconceptualization of the theoretical and experiential framework of the Romantic sublime by shifting the focus from Burke's and Kant's prescriptions of natural vastness and grandeur to the narrower but no less wondrous spaces, objects and experiences of everyday life.