Bloomsbury Literary Studies

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.

March Conference Update

Last month, our Literary Studies team attended two exciting conferences to showcase our latest releases. The American Comparative Literature Association hosted their annual meeting at Harvard University from March 17^th through 20^th. Our books were a big hit, with our eye-catching Object Lessons collection making a great display.  Attendees were excited to hear about some of our recently launched series, including New Modernisms, Literatures as World Literature, and Literatures, Culture, Translation, all of which feature cutting-edge research focused on global developments in literature and literary scholarship.

 

 

From March 31^st to April 2^nd, over 12,000 scholars, students, and writers gathered at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference in Los Angeles to attend panels, listen to readings, and explore the bookfair. With over 800 exhibitors, the bookfair offered an incredible range of material from publishers, journals, and literary organizations. Creative writing professors, MFA students, and curious readers alike found great new books at the Bloomsbury booth – from the writing course favorite Bending Genre and the unique handbook Poetry: A Survivor’s Guide to our always popular Object Lessons, we truly had something for everyone. Our Writers’ and Artists’ Companions offered attendees new perspectives on writing in all kinds of genres, including Literary Non-Fiction, Crime and Thriller Writing, and Historical Fiction. We loved having the chance to see our some of our authors, including fellow exhibitors Christopher Schaberg and Mark Yakich at the New Orleans Review booth.

 

 

Both conferences were great opportunities for the Bloomsbury team to show off the fascinating books we publish and help readers find just what they’re looking for. It was wonderful to hear so much positive feedback about our projects – we couldn’t be more proud of our Literary Studies list, and we can’t wait to bring a full range of new books to next year’s conferences. We hope to see you there!

6 Lessons We Learned from the Object Lessons “Ask Us Anything!”

In less than 30,000 words, each book in the Object Lessons series opens our eyes to the buried meanings, uses, and significance of ordinary things. Last week, the authors and editors of Object Lessons came together on a Reddit AMA to answer questions about the series and the six new titles published last month. Here are some interesting facts we learned from the chat:

1. We’ve been storing tomatoes wrong all this time.
“Never refrigerate tomatoes. They give off ethylene gas that makes other produce spoil faster.”
—Jonathan Rees, Refrigerator

 

via GIPHY

 

2. Everything is waste once we stop using it.
“The immensity of waste and its ability to complicate our presentist feelings about time and desire can also have a productive, even optimistic function. It might force us to extract more from our time and our desires while we can.”
—Brian Thill, Waste

3. Phone booths really are emotional places.
“There's the famous scene in Anchorman when Ron Burgundy screams that he's in ‘a glass case of emotion.’ That scene says it all, in my opinion.”
—Ariana Kelly, Phone Booth

via GIPHY

 

4. That little voice in the back of your head actually does something.
“Five years ago, a man was found who has no inner voice. Even more surprising, his adult children have no inner voice, either. And they are all extremely dyslexic--inner silence makes it nearly impossible for them to read.”
—John Biguenet, Silence

5. There’s actually a reason so many films have swanky hotel scenes.
“In the early 20th Century, it seemed tempting to tell stories in hotels, because it was possible to bring together different sorts of characters, and it's easy and effective to recreate the clean-lined Art Deco hotel rooms, fashionable at the time, for shooting in black-and-white.”
—Joanna Walsh, Hotel

 

via GIPHY

 

6. Glass used to be a verb.
“In Shakespeare's time, to ‘glass’ something meant to showcase it, perhaps placing it in glass or in front of a mirror or just more broadly to turn our attention to it.”
—John Garrison, Glass

Learn more about Object Lessons at the Bloomsbury website or at objectsobjectsobjects.com.

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.

Late Walter Benjamin and On Modern Poetry - "Highly Recommended"

We were delighted to see a bumper crop of Bloomsbury titles reviewed in the latest issue of Choice, the review journal of the Association for College & Research Libraries. We were particularly delighted to receive the coveted "highly recommended" rating for not one but two of our books.

Describing the book as "at once inventive and conceptually rich", Michael Uebel of the University of Texas writes of John Schad's The Late Walter Benjamin: "This is a witty, smart novel that combines literary criticism with philosophy and local history... [It] will delight and challenge readers and admirers of Benjamin and it will intrigue anyone interested in intellectual and social history."

In a similarly glowing review of another of our recent books, On Modern Poetry by Robert Rowland Smith, R.T. Prus of Southeastern Oklahoma State University writes: "[Smith] presents a lucid, delightful approach to reading modern poetry... He brings an intense clarity to the issues, supporting his discussion with close readings of poems by Keats, Tennyson, Arnold, Hardy, Tennyson, Symons, Larkin and Prynne."

Obviously we all thought these we were great books already, but it's always nice when other people think so too. Do check out the links above if you want to find out more about either of these books.

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

Our 2013 Catalogue!

I am delighted to announce that the new Bloomsbury Literary Studies catalogue, now also including The Arden Shakespeare and Methuen Drama, has published! You can read it online here. As you will have noticed, for the first time this catalogue is coming out under the Bloomsbury name instead of the separate Continuum and Bloomsbury Academic imprints. We wanted to give you some background to this rebranding. In 2008, Bloomsbury decided to invest in building a new academic division. Growth since that decision was taken has been very rapid: we now publish around 1,100 titles each year, with a particularly big presence in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and our backlist comprises some 20,000 titles. The purchase of Continuum in 2011 was a key part of this growth.

We believe we are stronger as a group, which is why we have taken the strategic decision to adopt the Bloomsbury name for all academic titles that we publish. With effect from 1st September 2012, all new Continuum titles will be published under the Bloomsbury brand, although we will be retaining the Methuen Drama and The Arden Shakespeare imprints given the rich history of publishing excellence associated with these names. This will make it easier for you to find quality publishing in literary studies, rather than navigating across a number of imprints.

The values of Continuum, Bloomsbury Academic, The Arden Shakespeare and other imprints which you have appreciated over the years are already integral to the larger entity that is Bloomsbury. Much has changed over the past 12 months, but we remain as committed to our authors and to publishing the same high quality textbooks, course books, primary texts, research monographs, reference works, professional and general interest books, journals and online resources.

Publishing in Print and Digital

Bloomsbury leads the way in digital publishing, for example with the launch of Drama Online in spring 2013 (p.53). Featuring the pre-eminent drama titles from the Methuen Drama, The Arden Shakespeare and Faber and Faber lists it will form a collection of the most studied, performed and critically acclaimed plays from the last two and half thousand years. In addition, expert student guidance in the form of scholarly notes, annotated texts, critical analysis and contextual information alongside performance and practitioner texts and video and audio material, will make this an essential study tool meeting the full range of drama teaching needs. Visit www.dramaonlinelibrary.com for more information.

Highlights

We are also proud to be presenting a very strong selection of new books for readers at all levels: from a new edition of Peter Barry’s English in Practice (p.3) for students embarking on undergraduate study for the first time, through to cutting edge scholarly research. Other highlights include two new titles in our Arvon series of creative writing guides covering Crime and Thriller Writing and Literary Non-Fiction (p.49), as well as Estimating Emerson (p.29), an anthology of critical responses to the great American writer’s work. Do check out the latest titles in the third series of the prestigious The Arden Shakespeare, too, including new editions of Coriolanus and Romeo and Juliet (p.55).

New Website

Finally we are delighted to announce that our new global website www.bloomsbury.com will launch in mid November 2012. This site will bring together everything under the Bloomsbury Group, including Continuum, The Arden Shakespeare, Methuen Drama, Berg, T&T Clark, Bristol Classical Press, and A&C Black titles. The site features enhanced academic functionality such as online previews, digital inspection copies, textbook companion sites and online resources. We will let you know when it is up and running!

We hope you enjoy reading about our 2013 publishing as much as we have enjoyed commissioning it!

Bloomsbury Literary Studies

Improvisation as Art by Edgar Landgraf

Improvisation as Art, the first book in our new series “New Directions in German Studies”, has been insightfully and well-reviewed in the latest issue of the German Quarterly. An extract:

“Both students and scholars of 18th and early 19th-century German literature, as well as anyone interested in modern notions of art and improvisation will benefit highly from this erudite and clearly written study, which expands on Luhmann’s descriptive and avowedly value-free, sociological theory of art and makes it accessible to a wider audience. By including in the discussion also an opponent of systems theory, Jacques Derrida, who insisted on the ‘incalculability of the incalculable’ and on openness for the advent of ‘the other’ (19–29), Landgraf contributes to current debates on ideas of freedom and the role of art and/as improvisation in society, inviting our participation.” -- German Quarterly (Winter 2012, reviewed by May Mergenthaler, The Ohio State University)

Other recently published titles in this series: 

The German Picaro and Modernity by Bernhard Malkmus

Citation and Precedent by Thomas O. Beebee

The Textual Life of Airports in the New York Times

A nice shout out to Chris Schaberg’s The Textual Life of Airports in Joe Sharkey’s NYT article, “Handy Travel Tips From Those in the Know”:

“And consider this from Christopher Schaberg, an assistant professor of English at Loyola University and the author of a book, The Textual Life of Airports: Reading the Culture of Flight (Continuum, 2011), which one academic reviewer said ‘explores that most quotidian space of ennui, the airport.’

“Pay attention not only to public art in airports, but also to your own place within, no matter how grim or humble a concourse might seem, Professor Schaberg advised. ‘Think of your time spent in the airport as an art walk of sorts. You are actually part of a giant, living art piece, the architectural matrix and social swirl that we recognize as airport life.’”

New Film about J. Hillis Miller

I've just learned about a new documentary on J. Hillis Miller entitled The First Sail: J. Hillis Miller. It was screened last October at the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere at the University of Florida. I am not sure how one gets to see the film (which was made by Dragan Kujundzic) but you can view a trailer here: The First Sail: J. Hillis Miller. (Nice to see Eamonn Dunne’s monograph on Miller making a cameo at around the 40 sec mark.)