Bloomsbury Literary Studies

Announcing Bloomsbury Comics Studies

In the week that thousands of people head off to San Diego Comic-Con for the world’s premier celebration of comic book culture in all its forms, we’re delighted to announce the launch of a new series of guides to the many worlds of comics and graphic novels.

Later this year we will be publishing the first books in our new Bloomsbury Comics Studies series. Edited by Derek Parker Royal (who you can hear regularly on The Comics Alternative Podcast), the series explores major genres, themes and creators in accessible reference guide format, covering key texts, historical and social contexts and central critical debates.

The first book in the series looks at that most enduringly popular of comics genres: Superhero Comics. Written by Chris Gavaler (Washington and Lee University, USA), the book charts the history of the genre, including key characters such as pre-Comic Code figures Superman and Batman to contemporary heroes like Ms. Marvel, Black Panther and the X-Men.

 

Also publishing to launch the series is Andrew J. Kunka’s volume on Autobiographical Comics. This book covers the key texts that have shaped this genre of comics, including Maus, Persepolis and American Splendor, as well as key critical debates and terms in the study of graphic life writing.

The series will be launching this Fall and we have further volumes in the works in which we’ll be covering children’s and young adult comics, webcomics, Manga, the work of Alan Moore and much, much more.

To be continued…

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.

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.

Reading New India in the Pink City: Jaipur Literature Festival 2013

Emma Dawson Varughese, author of Reading New India: Post Millennial Indian Fiction in English talks about her new book and its recent launch at the inspiring Jaipur Literature Festival 2013.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As you enter Diggi Palace, your eyes are awash with pink – pink banners, pink lanterns and swathes of pink cloth moving haplessly in the January breeze of the pink city, Jaipur. It’s not only the ‘pinkness’ of the Jaipur Literature Festival which proves mesmerising, the footfall at the biggest literature festival in Asia is also captivating, with various tents, rooms, stalls and bookshops, the Jaipur Literature Festival is certainly something to experience, especially if it involves your book launch...

Reading New India: Post-Millennial Indian fiction in English was inaugurated at the literary festival at Diggi Palace to a Saturday afternoon audience. As a slice of ‘New India’ itself sat under the canopy of the ‘TATA Steel Front Lawns’, Namita Gokhale co-director of the festival presented a copy of Reading New India to the public, underscoring its importance in the contemporary literary scene of India.

The idea for Reading New India came as I flew out of Mumbai in stormy monsoon clouds in 2009. I had, once again been hit by the staggering development and construction each time I left the airport, be that in Mumbai, Bangalore, Cochin or Delhi. In tandem, the literary production of Indian fiction in English was equally staggering and I knew then, that this body of new writing deserved academic attention. Academics from both the UK and India have echoed this need, Prof Malashri Lal of the University of Delhi endorsing the publication, saying that: "it’s the first book to focus on fiction at the millennium, the crossroad for India’s globalization". There has been particular interest from universities in Hyderabad, Bangalore and from Rajasthan looking for a text to complement literary courses and postgraduate interests in contemporary Indian fiction.

Prof John Thieme of the University of East Anglia writes about Reading New India:

"A compelling introduction to the multitude of fresh voices to be found in the pages of twenty-first century Indian fiction. Putting its main emphasis on novels published within India itself, many of them unknown outside the country, it invites its readers to fasten their seatbelts for a journey into a land of call centres, reality shows, ‘‘Metro Reads’’, MTV and variant sexual behaviour."

Much of Reading New India is about young and aspirational, urban India, the narratives explored in the book suggest that postcolonial narratives belong to an erstwhile India and that post-millennial fiction in English from India captures and critiques a post-liberalised India of the noughties and beyond. Chick Lit, new waves of historical fiction, Crick Lit (my term) and the graphic novel are all manifest of this post-millennial literary feast and as the publishing scene in India keeps growing, offering affordable paperback books of these various and engaging narratives of life in 21^st century India, reading and understanding new India becomes ever more necessary. Indeed, evidence of  ‘new India’ is all around, malls in the metros push up, flyovers re-sculpt the urban landscape, cranes hang on the skyline, and as 2013 sees Jaipur’s autorickshaws fitted with inbuilt satnavs, one thing is for sure - more people will certainly make it to Diggi Palace in 2014.

E. Dawson Varughese is an independent scholar in literary and cultural studies. She is an experienced field researcher of world literature in English and is the author of Beyond The Postcolonial: World Englishes Literature (2012). See her work at: www.beyondthepostcolonial.com

Reading New India: Post-Millennial Indian fiction in English is out now, RRP £19.99, available for just £17.99 from www.bloomsbury.com

The Greatest Literary Moustaches!

It’s Movember and we love a good literary moustache. So much so, we’ve put together a collection of our all-time favourites! From the Walrus to the Mexican, and the Handlebar to the Horseshoe, it seems there is no end to the amount of creative facial topiary in the literary world… Something tells me Shakespeare set a trend.

Mark Twain

‘There has been nothing as good since’ said Ernest Hemingway about Mark Twain’s legendary book Huckleberry Finn. But, he could just as well have been talking about Twain’s famous moustache.

Mark Twain wasn’t without opinion when it came to facial hair, directing the following vitriol towards the beard: ‘it performs no useful function; it is a nuisance and a discomfort; all nations hate it; all nations persecute it with the razor’. Must have been why he plumped for this rather impressive looking moustache. And with matching eyebrows too.

Read our Bedside, Bathtub & Armchair guide to Mark Twain. It reveals all sorts of fantastic facts about this intriguing writer... did you know that he started smoking at 7 and often smoked 40 cigars a day? Nope, me neither. Pretty impressive shocking.

Rudyard Kipling

‘Being kissed by a man who didn’t wax his moustache was like eating an egg without salt’. We couldn't agree more Rudyard Kipling.

This 'tash is so impressive that we've opted for a side portrait shot so you can really see the full depth of this impressive literary bush. Look out for our new book on Rudyard Kipling and Japan - no other leading English literary figure of his day spent so long in that country or wrote so fully about it.

George Orwell

George Orwell said, in his famous 6 Rules for Writing, ‘Never use a long word where a short one will do’. It would seem he had the same approach to moustaches. I’m calling this one... modest yet confident.

George Orwell also wrote an essay in the Evening Standard in 1946 about his rules for drinking tea. Whilst not related in any way to moustaches, I still think it deserves a special mention. Orwell employed the essay as a tool to entertain, illuminate and provoke readers as well as help him fashion his distinctive 'literary' voice. George Orwell the Essayist by Peter Marks gives these compelling pieces the critical attention they merit.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

What can we say about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s moustache? It’s a wonder he had any time to write considering the hours he must have put in taming and trimming this sublime example of facial topiary.  I know what you must be thinking, ‘I WISH I could get my hands on some of his moustache trimmings’. Well, I’m afraid the opportunity has been and passed, with one moustache & ACD fan purchasing his moustache trimmings. They came neatly packaged up in the original envelope they were kept in for so many years with the following inscription: ‘My beloved moustache hairs’. I'm sure the new owner feels the same.

Walt Whitman

Is it a moustache or a beard? Are there side-burns in there? We can't quite figure it out. And that's what makes Walt Whitman's contributions to facial topiary so impressive.

In Whitman’s Queer Children, Catherine Davies looks at 'the anxious relationship between the homosexual and his American home'  in the work of four gay twentieth-century poets - Hart Crane, Allen Ginsberg, James Merrill and John Ashbery. Dwelling on the nurturing adaptable heritage of Walt Whitman, she considers Whitman’s renegotiation of the dialectic between the public and the private as a context for the project of the homosexual epic.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche sports the unique looking walrus-handlebar moustache. Otherwise known as the moustache that launched a thousand philosophical arguments (and its own facebook page). 

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche posits the Übermensch as a goal that humanity can set for itself. Did he set this goal for his own facial hair? There is one thing we can be sure of – he set the philosophical world alight with this revolutionary 'tash.

Still a bit confused? Nietzsche: A Guide for the Perplexed will tell you everything you need to know.

Edgar Allen Poe

It's fair to say that EAP employed his moustache in a rather gothic manner. An article in Scribner’s Magazine in 1878 reveals that 'He wore a dark mustache, scrupulously kept, but not entirely concealing a slightly contracted expression of the mouth and an occasional twitching of the upper lip, resembling a sneer. This sneer, indeed, was easily excited — a motion of the lip, scarcely perceptible, and yet intensely expressive. There was in it nothing of ill-nature, but much of sarcasm … '

So impressive was his moustache that is spawned this imaginative looking t-shirt. If anyone could let me know where to buy it, I’d really appreciate it.

An inescapable black pit, an innocent buried alive, and the deranged hallucinations of a murderer all haunt Tales of Mystery and Imagination - a collection of Edgar Allan Poe's most celebrated chilling stories.

Ernest Hemingway

All hail Ernest Hemingway's contribution to the moustache world! We know that he loved hunting in Africa, bullfighting in Spain, deep-sea fishing in Florida and this is the perfect moustache to match. Hemingway married four times, often falling for one woman while still married to another. With this dashing moustache I think we can see why he was so irresistible to women.

Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel García Márquez once characterised common European perceptions of Latin America as ‘a man with a moustache and a guitar and a revolver’. He might have kept the moustache, but he certainly broke other pre-existing stereotypes by putting Latin American writing on the literary map.

If a moustache could ever be described as ‘friendly’ then this is certainly it. You can find out more about this compelling man by reading our biography by Gerald Martin and literary guide to Love in the Time of Cholera by Tom Fahy.

Stefan Zweig

Born in Vienna in 1881, Stefan Zweig was one of the most respected authors of his time. And not just for his epic looking moustache. The Economist hailed him as a 'Secret Superstar' and the New Yorker called him an 'Escape Artist' earlier this year.

Foreseeing Nazi Germany's domination of Europe, Zweig and his wife left Austria in 1933. Despairing at Europe's future and feeling increasingly isolated, they committed suicide together in 1942. As Zweig's correspondence all but ceased with the outbreak of World War II, little is known about his final years. Stefan and Lotte Zweig's South American Letters, edited by Darién J. Davis and Oliver Marshall, reproduces personal letters written by the couple during this time and creates a fascinating picture of the last years of this famed author, cast adrift by the rise of Nazism and enforced exile.

Joseph Conrad

Some critics have commented that Joseph Conrad was known for his pessimistic writing style and stark presentation of the human condition. I don’t think he helped matters with this harsh looking moustache. There is one thing that the critics certainly agree upon - Heart of Darkness is a landmark text of 20th century literature that continues to resonate to this day. We certainly love it. One of our latest books, Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ and Contemporary Thought by Nidesh Lawtoo brings this book into philosophical dialogue and includes the first publication in English of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's essay, 'The Horror of the West', described by J. Hillis Miller as 'a major essay on Conrad's novel, one of the best ever written'.

That's it for our literary moustache round up! Of course we couldn't include everyone - Dostoevsky, James Joyce, Herman Melville, William Faulkner, Gustave Flaubert... the list could go on and on. It would also be impossible to choose a favourite. But we want to hear from you -  who would get your vote for the most impressive literary moustache? Who can't you believe that we have left out? Is there any obscure Russian writer with a more impressive offering than Nietzsche (probably)?  Let us know so we can add it to our literary moustache hall of fame.

In the meantime, good luck to anyone still plugging away at their Movember efforts. The crowd above would be very proud.

Jenny Tighe

Comic Books and American Cultural History: An Anthology

Comic Books and American Cultural History: An Anthology has just published in the UK and I am delighted to say that it is available on inspection for all lecturers cosidering course adoption of at least 12 copies or more! Further details of how to order can be found here. In the meantime, read an exclusive digital preview of the book by clicking on the on the left.

Over the last twenty years, there has been a proliferation of book-length works focusing on the history of comic books, but few have investigated how comics can be used as sources for doing American cultural history. This highly original collection of essays, demonstrates how comic books can be used as primary sources in the teaching and understanding of American history - a unique and exciting new book!

Jenny Tighe