Books in the Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature series

Exploring the shifting semiotics and symbolism of shipwreck, the interdisciplinary essays in this volume provide a history of the shipwreck motif in literature and art as they consider how depictions have varied over time, and across genres and cultures.

This volume engages with the recent and ongoing consolidation of "world literature" as a paradigm of study, noting that literature is never simply a given, but is always performatively and materially instituted by translators, publishers, academics, critics, readers, and authors. It substantiates, refines, and interrogates current approaches to world literature, focusing on the poetics of writers themselves, market dynamics, postcolonial negotiations, and translation, engaging a range of related disciplines. This book explores how singular literary works become inserted in transnational systems, and how transnational and institutional dimensions of literature are inflected in literary works.

This interdisciplinary volume discusses whether the increasing salience of the Anthropocene concept in the humanities and the social sciences constitutes an "Anthropocenic turn."

Prison Writing and the Literary World offers scholarly essays exploring international prison writings in relation to wartime internment, political imprisonment, resistance and independence-creation, regimes of terror, and personal narratives of development grappling with race, class and gender.

Following the spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences, Spatial Literary Studies draw upon diverse critical and theoretical traditions in disclosing, analyzing, and exploring the significance of space, place, and mapping in literature and in the world, thus making possible new textual geographies and literary cartographies.

In our image-mediated era, this book tries to raise awareness about the importance of dialogue between art and literature. Offering an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary perspective, the book provides an inspiring overview of the literary and visual department both in Europe and America from the Renaissance to the twentieth century.

This book explores cultural representations of motherhood in Europe and considers how they affect how motherhood is negotiated as both institution and lived experience. It focuses on literature, and also includes essays on representations in philosophy, art, social policy, TV, and film. It expands hegemonic notions of motherhood, analyzing shifting conceptions of maternal subjectivity and embodiment, exploring contexts in which mothering takes place, and asking what it means to be a 'mother' in Europe today. It will be of interest to those working in gender, women's, and feminist studies, literary and cultural studies, criminology, politics, medical ethics, midwifery, and related fields.

War, migration, and refugeehood are inextricably linked and the complex nature of all three phenomena offers profound opportunities for representation and misrepresentation. This volume brings together international contributors and practitioners from a wide range of fields and backgrounds to explore and problematize textual and visual inscriptions of war and migration in the arts, the media, academic, public, and political discourses. The essays in this collection address the academic and political interest in representations of the migrant and the refugee, and examine the constructed nature of concepts such as 'war,' 'refuge(e),' 'victim,' 'border,' 'home,' 'non-place,' and 'dis/location.'

Celebrating the anniversary of Testimony, this collection joins leading academics from a range of fields to explore the meaning, use, and value of testimony in law and politics, its relationship to other forms of writing, and its place in society. These issues are necessarily inflected by the question of witnessing violence, pain, and suffering at both the local and global level, across cultures, and in postcolonial contexts. It presents an interdisciplinary concern over the current and future nature of witnessing as it plays out through a `new¿ Europe, post-9/11 US, war-torn Africa, and in countless refugee and detention centers, and as it is worked out by lawyers, journalists, medics, and novelists.

This interdisciplinary collection of essays focuses on critical and theoretical responses to the apocalypse of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century cultural production. Examining the ways in which apocalyptic discourses have had an impact on how we read the world¿s globalised space, the traumatic burden of history, and the mutual relationship between language and eschatological belief, fifteen original essays by a group of internationally established and emerging critics reflect on the apocalypse, its past tradition, pervasive present and future legacy.

This book's most notable contribution lies in linking the notion of `glocality¿, that is, the intermeshing of local and global forces to representations of subjectivity in the material and figurative space of the Canadian city. Dealing with oppositional discourses as multiculturalism, postcolonialism, feminism, diaspora, and environmentalism this book is an essential reference for any scholar with an interest in these areas.

Contemporary Trauma Narratives: Liminality and the Ethics of Form gives an insight into the relationship between the difficulty of putting traumatic events or experiences into words and the subsequent ethicality of aesthetic forms used to represent trauma. It is an excellent resource for scholars of contemporary literature, trauma studies and literary theory.

This book refocuses current understandings of American Literature from the revolutionary period to the present-day through an analytical accounting of class, reestablishing a foundation for discussions of class in American culture. American Studies scholars have explored the ways in which American society operates through inequality and modes of social control, focusing primarily on issues of status group identities involving race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and disability. The essays in this volume focus on both the historically changing experience of class and its continuing hold on American life. The collection visits popular as well as canonical literature, recognizing that class is constructed in and mediated by the affective and the sensational. It analyzes class division, class difference, and class identity in American culture, enabling readers to grasp why class matters, as well as the economic, social, and political matter of class. Redefining the field of American literary cultural studies and asking it to rethink its preoccupation with race and gender as primary determinants of identity, contributors explore the disciplining of the laboring body and of the emotions, the political role of the novel in contesting the limits of class power and authority, and the role of the modern consumer culture in both blurring and sharpening class divisions.

The book¿s main focus is on the development of an awareness of speech pathology in the literary imaginary from the late-eighteenth century to the present, studying the novel, drama, epic poetry, lyric poetry, children¿s literature, autobiography and autopathography, and clinical case studies and guidebooks on speech therapy. The volume addresses a growing interest, both in popular culture and the humanities, regarding the portrayal of conditions such as stuttering, aphasia and mutism, along with the status of the Self in relation to those conditions. Since speech pathologies are neither illnesses nor outwardly physical disabilities, critical studies of their representation have tended to occupy a liminal position in relation to other discourses such as literary and cultural theory, and even disability studies. One of the primary aims of this collection is to address this marginalization, and to position a cultural criticism of speech pathology within literary studies.

In our image-mediated era, this book tries to raise awareness about the importance of dialogue between art and literature. Offering an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary perspective, the book provides an inspiring overview of the literary and visual department both in Europe and America from the Renaissance to the twentieth century.

This book offers a thorough examination of the relationship that Stanley Cavell¿s celebrated philosophical work has to the ways in which the United States has been imagined and articulated in its literature, highlighting how literature and philosophy are conjoined in the ethical and political project of national self-definition.

Singularity and Transnational Poetics brings together scholars working in the fields of literary and cultural studies, translation studies, and transnational literatures. The volume¿s central concern is to explore `singularity¿ as a conceptual tool for the comparative study of contemporary literatures beyond national frameworks, and by implication, as a tool to analyze human existence. Contributors explore how singularity might move our conceptions of cultural identity from prevailing frameworks of self/other toward the premises of being as `singular plural¿. Through a close reading of transnational literatures from Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands, France, and South Africa, this collection offers a new approach to reading literature that will challenge a reader¿s established notions of identity, individuality, communicability, and social cohesion.

Exploring environmental literature from a feminist perspective, this volume presents a diversity of feminist ecocritical approaches to affirm the continuing contributions, relevance, and necessity of a feminist perspective in environmental literature, culture, and science. Feminist ecocriticism has a substantial history, with roots in second- and third-wave feminist literary criticism, women¿s environmental writing and social change activisms, and eco-cultural critique, and yet both feminist and ecofeminist literary perspectives have been marginalized. The essays in this collection build on the belief that the repertoire of violence (conceptual and literal) toward nature and women comprising our daily lives must become central to our ecocritical discussions, and that basic literacy in theories about ethics are fundamental to these discussions. The book offers an international collection of scholarship that includes ecocritical theory, literary criticism, and ecocultural analyses, bringing a diversity of perspectives in terms of gender, sexuality, and race. Reconnecting with the histories of feminist and ecofeminist literary criticism, and utilizing new developments in postcolonial ecocriticism, animal studies, queer theory, feminist and gender studies, cross-cultural and international ecocriticism, this timely volume develops a continuing and international feminist ecocritical perspective on literature, language, and culture.

This volume, a collection with contributions from some of the major scholars of the Gothic in literature and culture, reflects on how recent Gothic studies have foregrounded a plethora of technologies associated with Gothic literary and cultural production. The engaging essays look into the links between technologies and the proliferation of the Gothic seen in an excess of Gothic texts and tropes: Frankensteinesque experiments, the manufacture of synthetic (true?) blood, Moreauesque hybrids, the power of the Borg, Dr Jekyll''s chemical experimentations, the machinery of Steampunk, or the corporeal modifications of Edward Scissorhands. Further, they explore how techno-science has contributed to the proliferation of the Gothic: Gothic in social media, digital technologies, the on-line gaming and virtual Goth/ic communities, the special effects of Gothic-horror cinema. Contributors address how Gothic technologies have, in a general sense, produced and perpetuated ideologies and influenced the politics of cultural practice, asking significant questions: How has the technology of the Gothic contributed to the writing of self and other? How have Gothic technologies been gendered, sexualized, encrypted, coded or de-coded? How has the Gothic manifested itself in new technologies across diverse geographical locations? This volume explores how Gothic technologies textualize identities and construct communities within a complex network of power relations in local, national, transnational, and global contexts. It will be of interest to scholars of the literary Gothic, extending beyond to include fascinating interventions into the areas of cultural studies, popular culture, science fiction, film, and TV.