Bloomsbury Literary Studies

H.G. Wells, Tom Cruise, Life on Mars and Doctor Who

Peter Beck reflects on points raised by his recently published book The War of the Worlds: from H.G. Wells to Orson Welles, Jeff Wayne, Steven Spielberg and beyond:

In The War of the Worlds: from H.G. Wells to Orson Welles, Jeff Wayne, Steven Spielberg and beyond (Bloomsbury: 2016), you state that H.G. Wells’s book, though published in 1898, still sells well today.

The book remains in print, and is widely available online and in translation.  We can expect more editions next year with the expiration of copyright. For most readers, the story about a Martian invasion of Britain proves an excellent read, an exciting sci-fi page-turner raising such fantasy counterfactuals as ‘Is there life on Mars?’ and if so ‘What if the Martians invaded earth?’. It sells also as a tie-in book to such adaptations as the Steven Spielberg/Tom Cruise film and Jeff Wayne’s music stage show.

Does The War of the Worlds possess any contemporary resonance?

The story’s enduring appeal derives in part from its timeless focus upon such questions about life on Mars and national security. For Jeff Wayne, Wells’s storyline ‘resonates today’, and still talks to the present-day world. Stephen Baxter, the bestselling sci-fi writer, and Niall Ferguson, the historian, are among those giving Wells high praise for his prescience.

What does The War of the Worlds tell us about Wells as a writer?

The War of the Worlds highlights Wells’s skills as a writer of what he called scientific romances, a magician who encouraged readers to suspend their disbelief by mixing doses of fantasy with substantial portions of real life.  The War of the Worlds shows how Wells’s writing drew upon his personal experience, strong sense of time and place, scientific knowledge, creative imaginative skills, and informed vision of the time to come.

How did the book’s success impact upon Wells’s reputation?

The War of the Worlds was instrumental in enabling Wells, who began writing the story when he was only 29 years old, to make his mark in the challenging literary world. In turn today he is represented as one of the founders of science fiction, indeed - to quote Brian Aldiss – ‘the Shakespeare of science fiction’. Just as Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) inspired television’s Doctor Who, so The War of the Worlds pioneered alien invasion stories.

How far have adaptations become people’s initial point of contact with The War of the Worlds?

The story has proved highly adaptable. Frequently reimagined and retold over time, The War of the Worlds has been taken repeatedly to new and diverse audiences through a wide range of multimedia formats setting the story in different locations and time periods. Thus, for many people today The War of the Worlds has come to mean, say, a film, a music show or a radio drama.

How would you describe your new book?

Apart from telling readers a lot about Wells as a writer, especially his rapid emergence as a new young writer and present-day cultural significance, my book is best represented as a biography of The War of the Worlds. In brief, it analyses critically Wells’s book – its inspiration, research, writing, reception and impact – as well as the story’s active and successful multimedia afterlife, with special emphasis placed upon adaptations by Orson Welles, Steven Spielberg and Jeff Wayne. There is also a substantial focus upon the Wellsian literary heritage.

Finally, your book can be seen also as marking two important Wellsian anniversaries.

Yes – My book’s publication date was targeted towards these anniversaries. 2016 marks the 150^th anniversary of Wells’s birth (21 September) and the 70^th anniversary of his death (13 August).

 

Peter J. Beck is Emeritus Professor of History at Kingston University.  His previous books include Presenting History: Past and Present (2012) and Using History, making British Policy: the Treasury and the Foreign Office 1950-76 (2006).

 

New Releases: May 2016

May is shaping up to be an exciting month for Bloomsbury Lit—we have an incredible range of new titles coming out on subjects including Kerouac’s poetics, the future of literary theory, and reagency in the contemporary American novel. Take a look at some of our new titles below:

 

In Subject of the Event: Reagency in the American Novel after 2000, Sebastian Huber examines the conception of events and subjects in five contemporary American novels: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Jess Walter’s The Zero, Mark Z. Danielewski’s Only Revolutions, Paul Beatty’s Slumberland and Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day.

 

 

Visualizing Jewish Narrative: Jewish Comics and Graphic Novels explores Jewish comics creators’ tackling of themes such as Jewish identity, the Holocaust and the Israel/Palestine conflict, with chapters by leading and emerging scholars in contemporary comic book studies.

 

 

Hassan Melehy’s Kerouac: Language, Poetics, and Territory offers a reassessment of Jack Kerouac’s poetic theory and practice from the perspective of their central yet most overlooked component: the fact that he thought and worked in two languages, his native French and his adopted English. If you’re in New York, stop by the Kerouac book launch on May 20^th at KGB bar—details here.

 

Macbeth, Macbeth is an unprecedented collaboration between two leading Shakespeareans – with commentary throughout on the narrative's sources and the process of adaptation, this critical reimagining of Shakespeare's Macbeth opens up vivid new insights into one of the most familiar plays in the literary canon.

 

 

In Dead Theory: Derrida, Death, and the Afterlife of Theory, leading scholars explore the afterlives of Theory following the deaths of its first generations of thinkers and its legacies for contemporary criticism.

 

 

 

British Fictions of the Sixties: The Making of the Swinging Decade charts how the dramatic socio-political changes that marked the decade impacted on the development of fiction during the 1960s.

Crunch Lit: The Future of Finance

Guest post by Katy Shaw

The financial world has long been a source of fascination for writers, and this intensified in the wake of the credit crunch. In my new monograph Crunch Lit I argue that following the financial crisis, literature was mobilised as an effective means of cultural resistance—a site for the struggle over the legitimacy of reality. Rewriting events, literary representations offer fictionalized micro-histories of a highly contested period that engage in a dialogic interaction with the lived fallout from the crisis. As part of a challenge to define the events of 2007–8, authors interrogate the capacity of contemporary genre writing to represent a new millennial crisis of credit and understand its legacy for contemporary society. Using writings not as a form of imaginative escape from the chaotic and confusing reality facing global economic systems, but as an exercise in critical understanding and reframing, they suggest that contemporary writings can be relevant and revealing in their social and political purpose.

Collectively, the corpus of cultural representations analysed by Crunch Lit – from stage drama and musicals, to stand-up comedy, reality television and movie screenplays – highlights the interconnected state of finance and society during and after the credit crunch. Reframing our relationship with and understanding of contemporary finance, these works transgress the boundaries of established narratives on finance and instead offer critical and alternative standpoints on the financialization of society in the new millennium. In literary examinations of what went wrong, why, and where the finger of blame should be pointed, artists foreground the financial ignorance of the pre-crunch period, the drama of events as credit froze and the benefit of hindsight afforded to cultural interventions created in the post-crunch period.

 

The credit crunch of 2007–8 made visible the impact of financialization across society, culture politic and the economy in the twenty-first century. More fundamentally, it revealed a new narrative: that savers, spenders and lenders were variously implicated in its international circuits of influence. The recognition that contemporary global capitalism cannot be dismissed or escaped has led to a fresh desire to engage with and understand it. The problem of what happens after the credit crunch, of how to ‘correct’ identified flaws in our financial systems and cultures, to improve public financial literacy and engineer a new relationship between the social and the economic, is a profoundly collective one.

The way forward raises important economic, social, political and moral questions for twenty-first-century societies. The consequences of the credit crunch will affect societies for years to come. In their response to the crunch, the governments of the UK and the United States transferred the debt bubble from a private to a public sector problem. While banks were given huge sums of money to be bailed out, public spending was cut across sectors in a desperate attempt to balance the books.

Admitting that something is not working is a vital step towards recognition and an impetus to change. Encouraging us to stop dreaming, cultural representations of the 2007–8 credit crunch form part of a wider dialogue about the need to move towards a new system, one governed by tighter regulation, intelligent finance and an end to the mystifications that have masked the operation of the financial sector to date. Improving financial literacy, enhancing awareness of the internal mechanisms of contemporary finance and critically reviewing the impact of financialization on twenty-first-century society, Crunch Lit foregrounds the need to think carefully about contemporary uses of capital, and the possibility of making capital our servant, rather than our master.

In 2010, the Archbishop of Canterbury in the UK, Rowan Williams, used an open lecture to tell the public that the credit crunch has taught us that ‘economics is too important to be left to economists’. Offering accessible contexts and intelligible representations of hitherto seemingly unpresentable events, they foster new communities of understanding, reframing the period of economic freedom preceding the crunch. From the rise of finance during the 1980s, to the fast finance of the 1990s, and the emergence of a financialization in the new millennium, new literary representations of the 2007–8 credit crunch remind contemporary audiences that value does not begin, and end, with the economic.


Katy Shaw is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature and Director of C21: Centre for Twenty-First Century Writings at the University of Brighton, UK. She is the author of Crunch Lit, part of Bloomsbury's series 21st Century Genre Fiction. Her previous publications include David Peace: Texts and Contexts and Funny Women: Gender and Comedy in the 21st Century.

What the Dickens shall we do about Chaucer?

Tomorrow marks the anniversary of Chaucer's death. Gail Ashton, author of the forthcoming Medieval Afterlives in Contemporary Culture discusses Chaucer in this latest post!

What the Dickens shall we do about Chaucer?

Ever wondered why no one in the UK seems to read Chaucer anymore? Why Gail Ashton sees a ‘residual affection for Chaucer’ compromised at every turn? Read on…

It is the tap end of one of the hardest winters for decades.  I am sitting in a steamy café talking to a former senior examiner about Chaucer’s shrinking presence in a UK school system.  I recognised him from the scarf he said he’d be wearing; his bobble hat threw me for a while, but we joke about blind dates and strangers on a train and I forget for a moment why we’re meeting in this way. It’s all rather reminiscent of a spy movie and this makes me laugh as much as it concerns me.

My ‘date’ – let’s call him Geoffrey, Mr G for the craic -  tells me how he’s taught Chaucer extensively, all the usual ‘culprits’: the Miller’s, Wife’s, Pardoner’s, Knight’s, Nun’s Priest’s tales—, his interest in Chaucer’s narrative and story-making matching my own.  His eyes light as he recalls reading the ‘Nun’s Priest’s Tale’ aloud to kids, their delight in the humour of it.  He likes the ‘Merchant’s Tale’ too its ‘cynicism’ which can ‘make it modern,’ fresh.

Later he will say ‘as you shut the door on Chaucer it very quickly stays shut.’ And I will walk back along the road against the fading light and press of commuters hurrying home, just as earlier I wandered around the museum, and took tea with a professor I taught with, in a former life. It seems apt.

Driving in, I was tuned to Jeremy Vine’s BBC Radio 2 lunchtime show which was debating a recent parliamentary call to ensure all school children will have read Dickens by the time they are ten. The phone-in celebrates National Dickens Day (2012), each caller someone of a certain age extolling Dickens’ humanistic impulses, universal values, a mordant social commentary made to speak for our economically depressed contemporary times. On this day Dickens is both fully alive (in films, TV series) and long-gone, a ‘classic’ author whom nostalgic readers quote at length. Claire Tomalin’s recent Charles Dickens: A Life (2011) shares air space with Prince Charles’ rally to get children reading again. I am already depressed.

I share with Mr G my concerns about children being force fed a diet of classics, recount how I’ve just heard an academic warn against reading Dickens too early on the grounds he’s a ‘mature read’. Mr G responds with an anecdote about how at one presentation he gave in Newcastle, someone demanded to know ‘why are you not teaching my child Dryden?’  Education in the UK has, Mr G says, an ultra-conservative agenda that ‘cuts across all parties’ and where English usually takes the brunt of reform—as in 2000, under Labour, when ‘a wholesale root and branch renewal gave us more of the same.’ The watchword, he believes, is always ‘rigour,’ something seemingly achieved only by teaching and examining canonical, pre-20th Century authors, often, specifically, those our political leaders studied at school and university.

At the same time, it seems, no-one wants to invest in Geoffrey Chaucer. Mr G speaks of a ‘residual affection for Chaucer’ yet I hear it compromised at every turn.  He invites me to contemplate my suspicions about educational idealogy in the UK, and then triple the worst of them. Dominated by inspections, assessment and examination league tables—which are, he suggests, ‘more pernicious than I’ll ever know’ — teachers are ‘scared witless.’ No teacher, he says, is going to take a risk with Chaucer who is perceived as less accessible to today’s students with his ‘weird language’ and as one of those authors available ‘only for the best. I wonder if this is why those schools already at the top of the table (grammar or independent schools) will teach Chaucer when, Mr G tells me, ‘few comprehensive schools dare risk it.’ And just to compound the inequity, most teachers ‘go to default,’ teaching only the texts and authors they were taught at A level.

Is it then that no-one reads Chaucer today? Or that no-one reads anything very much at all?

Mr G insists that, contrary to popular belief, kids today do read, are, in fact, highly text-literate; the problem comes from the gulf between what and how they read, and what the UK examination system assesses. We are, he says, asking technical questions about how Chaucer constructs his narratives for instance, even as no-one is teaching the ‘nuts and bolts’ of how he does it; ‘the technical repertoire isn’t there.’ Here, of course, we too fall into the honey-trap of nostalgia, reminiscing about how we read aloud in our old-school classrooms, something no-one does anymore, so that ‘the sound’s gone.’  Instead Chaucer’s work becomes ‘a story you had to decode’ he’s ‘written about as though he’s a novelist.’  So, all sense of Chaucer as a poet seems to have gone.

If we no longer recognise Chaucer as a poet, in what sense do we read him, then, if at all? Oddly enough in the recent past, Chaucer has appeared on examination syllabi in sections on Poetry.  Surely this was good?  Mr G thinks not, telling me that the pressure to impose on English Literature a grid of tick box, quantitative criteria—‘the right buttons’ —leads to many compromises and ‘mile-off thinking.’  The result: a relatively random choice of texts which, inadvertently, ‘gave Chaucer more chance.’ Michael Gove’s (former Education Minister) more recent ruthless so-called radicalisation of UK curricula – more of the same – means ‘now Chaucer fits less easily into the new comparative model.’ And where once Chaucer might have been an option for coursework, government reforms have ensured that final end of course examination is currently the only acceptable mode of assessment.

Or is it? Chaucer’s face, it seems, simply doesn’t fit.

As ever, nothing is quite as it appears.  Even if Chaucer was formerly available for coursework, in Mr G’s long experience as an examiner not a single school ever took this up, which raises further questions: about accessibility (again) , innovation, ways of teaching.  So, too, despite Mr G’s earlier comments about a lack of technical vocabulary with which to discuss Chaucer’s text, he feels ‘and anyway that’s not crucial.’ What about, he asks, exploring Chaucer’s work through issues, contexts and ideologies, thinking about, say sex and sexuality? ‘The moral pornography of, say, the ‘Merchant’s Tale’… that’s glossed over…that’s got lost in the way we ask the questions.’  

In Mr G’s view, ‘The really interesting questions are not the ones being asked,’ of any writers. The best thing on one of the new A level papers (2014), he says, is the section on narrative ‘which is where Chaucer should be and isn’t … Chaucer could  be there and be really fascinating’—if only we were free to ask ‘what interesting narratives can we do’ rather than ‘how does the question correlate to the assessment criteria we’re given.’

Yet even if ‘how sad (it is) that he doesn’t fit,’ —and we do—I am forced to concede that perhaps I am barking up the wrong tree.  I’ve already been told that it’s the specifics that matter—which is why the exam questions hardly change—and not the broader issues, or the place of narrative, or genre in our culture. I persist: should we teach a ‘modernised’ Chaucer? Incorporate his afterlives, the web, TV adaptations? Hit those text-literate, media savvy kids right where they most hurt?

The town clock strikes. Day draws to a close. Mr G demands, ‘who’s to say who we should read?’ I agree. Then, ‘what’s the point of every kid reading Chaucer if you stop as soon as you can?’ I admit I don’t read him for pleasure.  We both confess (sheepish? defiant?) we rarely go to the theatre. And I wander home, thinking on Mr G’s quick look, that comment said not at the end, but which may be the final word after all: ‘who says I’d teach him at all?’
Here’s the thing. I still would.


Read more...Gail Ashton, ‘Silence in the Library?- Medievalist Poetry Shout-Out,’ in Medieval Afterlives in Contemporary Culture

Read more...Gail Ashton in Conversation with Gwyneth Lewis and Patience Agbabi, this website.
Gwyneth Lewis, former Welsh Poet Laureate, says, ‘If you don’t have help to read Chaucer at school, then you’re never going to venture into that world.’ Likewise, we have to show students how to access the Bible, ‘the biggest source for literature until now; ’otherwise we give ‘our children roots into their culture which are more shallow...it’s like being cut off from the water table.’

Patience Agbabi, Telling Tales (2014), is currently working with The Full English to produce a teaching pack on Chaucer for use in UK schools. She says,

There’s a freshness to Chaucer’s language that makes it timeless. That’s what I first fell in love with as an A Level student. I was astonished at how accessible and irreverent he was...

Everyone I’ve met who studied Chaucer at A’ Level loved it yet it has dipped in the popularity stakes. I hope my book, and the proposed Teaching Pack, will in a small way change that trend. The pack will give teachers several pedagogic approaches so they feel more equipped to take Chaucer into the classroom. Clearly a whole generation have missed out on studying Chaucer themselves so it’s especially daunting for them to teach it.

I presentedTelling Tales as a seminar, workshop and keynote performance at the NATE conferences in 2013 and 2014. Everyone agreed that Chaucer should have a higher profile on the National Curriculum. I suspect our results-led society has frightened secondary school teachers into going for the easier options. Yes, the language is challenging but in some ways, easier than Shakespeare’s in-jokes to the groundlings. If A’ level students experienced the electrifying live version of The Reeve’s Tale as I did at Cheltenham Literature Festival, they’d love Chaucer. This was performed by Trevor Eaton ‘The Chaucer Man’. (Actually, there was an A’ Level class in attendance and they did love Chaucer). I perceive there’s also a move away from poetry in general and Chaucer is seen as the most difficult.

Forthcoming this Spring! Recommend Medieval Afterlives in Contemporary Culture to your librarian!

Centre21 Takes The Stage: Latitude 2014

We are delighted to announce that Centre21 has been invited to host a stage at Latitude Festival 2014.

The University of Brighton is joining one of the UK’s biggest festivals by organising a tribute to miners’ strike poetry: The Miners’ Strike 30 Years On.

 From the press release:

Dr Katy Shaw, Principal Lecturer in the Faculty of Arts, will examine the legacy of the miners’ strike during Latitude Festival 2014, which is expected to draw tens of thousands of people to Southwold in Suffolk in July.

Big names in the music world including former Blur member Damon Albarn and Haim are in the Latitude lineup but the festival will also have stages dedicated to comedy and literature.

Dr Shaw was invited to host The Poetry Arena at the festival as a result of her role as Director of the Faculty’s Centre 21 which is dedicated to research on 21^st century writings, and her book Mining the Meaning which examines strikers’ poems from 1984-5.

Latitude starts on 17 July and our event will be on Sunday, 20 July. For more information, go to http://www.latitudefestival.com/

 

Check out the full press release here.

Call for Proposals - New Horizons for Contemporary Writing

Bloomsbury are very excited to be announcing the launch of a brand new series on contemporary literature, edited by Peter Boxall (University of Sussex), Stephen J. Burn (University of Glasgow) and Bryan Cheyette (University of Reading).

Call for Proposals

The editors invite proposals for a new series of research monographs (typically 90,000 words long) to be published by Bloomsbury. The series — New Horizons for Contemporary Writing — will promote innovative scholarly works that set out new critical models, and respond to the range of emerging literary possibilities. As the reigning literary critical paradigms of the last few decades have entered a period of fertile redefinition, titles in this series will map out alternative intellectual frameworks and explore the possibility of a more supple interdisciplinarity that connects new theoretical developments to contemporary literature’s own innovations.

Possible subjects include:

• World Literature;
• Legacies of Theory;
• Post-feminism;
• Human, animal, machine;
• The return of the real;
• History, memory and temporality;
• Science and the humanities;
• Contemporary literature after postmodernism and/or postcolonialism;
• Contemporary formations of the body;
• Translation in a transcultural context;
• Fictions of democracy;
• The future of the novel;  
• Visuality and narrative;
• Newness in a global age;
• Post-ethnicity;
• Voice, ventriloquism, and mutism.

Questions, proposals, and expressions of interest should be sent to: [email protected]

For consideration as part of the first tranche of publications, please send proposals by 1 February 2014.

And keep an eye on this site for news of the first titles very soon.

Charles Dickens in Europe - Five Things You May Not Know

We're very excited here at the Bloomsbury office to have received our rather beautiful printed copies of the magnificent two-volume Reception of Charles Dickens in Europe. Edited by Michael Hollington and a must for any University Library, this book brings together nearly fifty international contributors to provide a comprehensive survey of Charles Dickens's reception throughout Europe from his own lifetime through to the present day. With guides to major translations in each country and an historical timeline of Dickens's European reception, the book is a fantastic addition to our long-running Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe series.

To celebrate, here's five interesting fact about Dickens's reception in Europe taken from the book, that you might not know:

• The first European-language translation of a Dickens novel was the German edition of The Pickwick Papers, published in 1837.
• Dickens's account of his time in the USA, American Notes, was not published in French until the year 2000.
• One of Dickens's most devoted Danish fans was Hans Christian Andersen - the famous writer of fairy tales - who spent 5 weeks at the Dickens family home in Gad's Hill in the summer of 1857.
• Dickens's most popular book in Poland is A Christmas Carol - the story of Ebenezer Scrooge has been published in no less than 54 different Polish editions.
• The first European film adaptation of a Dickens novel was a 1906 silent French film adaptation of Oliver Twist.

The Reception of Charles Dickens in Europe is available now for library purchase. To find out more about The Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe series, please click the link.

Comparative Literature Roundup

Bloomsbury Literary Studies has been busy in 2013 – check out these recent additions to our comparative literature list!

In The Book of Imitation and Desire: Reading Milan Kundera with René Girard Trevor Cribben Merrill offers a bold reassessment of Milan Kundera’s place in the contemporary canon. Building on theorist René Girard’s notion of “triangular desire,” he shows that modern classics such as The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting display a counterintuitive—and bitterly funny—understanding of human attraction.

“The contribution that Trevor Merrill’s book makes is at least threefold : it sheds new light on the work of one of our era’s strongest novelists; it extends and confirms the literary reach of René Girard’s main hypotheses; and it helps us to better understand our own existence. And it does all of this in a style that’s clear, precise, and elegant. What more could be asked of a major work of literary criticism?”
–  François Ricard, McGill University, Canada

Price: £60.00 / $110.00


If the September 11 terror attacks opened up an era of crises and exceptions of which we are yet to see the end, it is perhaps not surprising that care has emerged in the early twenty-first century as a key political issue. Narrative Care: Biopolitics and the Novel approaches contemporary narratives of care, such as J.M. Coetzee’s Slow Man, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Paul Auster’s The Book of Illusions, and Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, through the lens of a growing body of theoretical writings on biopolitics.

“Novels govern our lives: Narrative Care allows us to understand this statement literally. Should we try to escape the biopolitical scene of literature? Would that cure our political wounds? Arne De Boever offers an alternative solution: to subtract the emancipatory practice of care from its biopolitical appropriation. This solution implies that we think the relations between the novel, aesthetics, and politics anew. It's rare to see a literary critic take such good care of philosophy.”
–  Frédéric Neyrat, Philosopher and Visiting Scholar in the Department of Comparative Literature, University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA

Price: £55.00 / $100.00


Romancing Fascism argues that intellectual responsibility can only be safeguarded if criticism is mobilised both as a poetic and as a critically enlightened endeavour. In this analysis of allegory as a function of modernity, what is made clear is the difficulty, if not impossibility, of definitively determining the genealogical antecedents of intellectual trends, particularly those considered pernicious to clear thinking.

“Kath Kerr-Koch’s thoroughly researched and densely argued study analyses the uses of allegory in these three (apparently) disparate writers. Kerr-Koch boldly attempts the rehabilitation of de Man, so drastically fallen from critical-theoretical favour, in the context of an examination of the positive resistant potential of allegory in the contemporary world.”
–  Patrick Williams, Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies, Nottingham Trent University, UK

Price: £60.00 / $110.00


Finally, Thomas Mann in English: A Study in Literary Translation is the most recent volume in our New Directions in German Studies series, a forum for the publication of new works in all areas of German Studies (German, Austrian, and Swiss literature, culture, and cinema from any period). David Horton provides a new insight into the ways in which one of Europe's major twentieth-century authors has been imported into English. This book provides the first systematic exploration of the English versions, illustrating the vicissitudes of literary translation through a principled discussion of a major author.

“Anyone interested in Mann and the literary and linguistic aspects of the transformation a text undergoes in the process of translation will profit from this meticulously argued study.”
–  Jens Rieckmann, Emeritus Professor of German, University of California, Irvine, USA

Price: £60.00 / $110.00


For those of you interested in keeping up to date on the latest scholarship in Comparative Literature, find these titles and more on offer at our website.

Choice Outstanding Academic Titles 2012

2012 was another great year for Literary Studies publishing. Two of our titles The Comic Mode in English Literature and The Nine Lives of William Shakespeare  (which is now under The Arden Shakespeare brand) were named Outstanding Academic Titles by Choice. Here is more about the award:

Every year, Choice subject editors single out for recognition  the most significant print and electronic works reviewed in Choice during the previous calendar year…this prestigious list of publications reflects the best in scholarly titles and attracts extraordinary attention from the academic library community. 

Congratulations to both authors, Murray Roston and Graham Holderness, and as the fantastic 2013 reviews come in, we are sure that we will be seeing more Bloomsbury Literary Studies winners next year!

 

Confessions: The Philosophy of Transparency

By Thomas Docherty

This great post appeared on our Bloomsbury Philosophy blog last week and we thought you may all be interested as well. In it, we look at how Docherty traces the history of confessional writing in order to develop his philosophy of transparency and argue that transparency as the norm is not conducive to democracy. Enjoy!

In a world where we demand transparency of institutions, from courts of law to tabloid newspapers, where we consume celebrity gossip full of ‘confessions’ and push for  resignation of public figures as confession of personal misdemeanours, Docherty’s Confessions: The Philosophy of Transparency contributes a much-needed  philosophical and literary analysis of our increasingly ‘confessional culture’. Has our  fixation by the almost everyday nature of confessional discourse banalized confession  such that it loses its former legal and religious significance? Is a culture of transparency good for democracy?

Tracing the history of confessional writing, Docherty explores confession as opposed to merely statement, through the content and context of the confession and in the confessing subject’s relation to others. Via this literary critique, we see in all the writing “a certain philosophical foundation or substratum – the conditions under which it is possible to assert a confessional mode.” (Introduction) From these roots and contributions to contemporary confessional discourse, Docherty develops a philosophy of confession that is pertinent for contemporary political culture: a culture based on transparency.

“If the book has a purpose beyond the matters of literary critique, it is as a contribution to our possibilities for living together in democratic organisation.” (Preface)

Contrary to the tendency to regard transparency as a general social and ethical good, Docherty argues that transparency as the norm is not conducive to democracy. This is because the culture of confession with which it goes hand-in-hand has significant consequences for the relation of citizens to the public sphere and to intimate human relatedness. What does this mean?

Docherty argues that democracy depends on modes of communication and modes of human relatedness – intimacies and public actions – that demarcate public and private spheres; a demarcation upon which social order is based. Contemporary confessional culture, grounded in demand for transparency, alters these modes and thus disturbs the dimensions of and relations between the public and the private. This in turn endangers the social order. At the heart of this concern is that transparency has engendered a society in which autonomy (the very authority of the subject that says “I confess”) is grounded in guilt and victimhood.

Docherty ultimately intends to expose flaws within the formation of modern cultural life. A bold intention; a highly relevant and widely informed, inter-disciplinary result.

Thomas Docherty is Professor of English at Warwick University. He has published on most areas of English and comparative literature from the renaissance to the present day. He specializes in the philosophy of literary criticism, in critical theory, and in cultural history in relation primarily to European philosophy and literatures.

Confessions: The Philosophy of Transparency combines literary criticism of modern literature with political philosophy and cultural studies. It is part of Warwick Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities, or The WISH List.

May 2012 • 9781849666596 • 224 pages • £50.00 or £45.00 online at http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/confessions-9781849666596/

Praise for Confessions:

“[A] learned, sophisticated and powerful counterblast to a culture whose demand for immediate transparency is inseparable from a range of disabling fetishes, from management and security to space and speed, `truth and reconciliation' and, above all, identity and identity-politics. Everyone should read it.” – Andrew Gibson, Research Professor of Modern Literature and Theory, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK

“I have to confess to liking this book a lot. It is a literary, theoretical and autobiographical tour de force. Docherty's acute critical sense ranges across the philosophical and cultural landscape to read Paul de Man, Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt and the Lisbon Lions. A few more books like this and the humanities might be worth fighting for after all.” – Martin McQuillan, Kingston University, UK