Bloomsbury Literary Studies

The Aesthetics of Care: On the Literary Representation of Animals

Guest post by Josephine Donovan

I’ve long been concerned about the aestheticization of evil; that is, the setting off or the framing of evil deeds as material to be appreciated for the beauty of its arrangement (in the case of pictures) or for the transgressive thrill provided (in the case of literature) by the experience of vicariously entering or glimpsing into forbidden territory.  

Here is a good example of the aestheticization of evil: it occurs in the war novel, The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien.

For all its horror [O’Brien writes] you can’t help but gape at the awful majesty of combat.  You stare out at tracer rounds unwinding through the dark like brilliant red ribbons. . . . You admire . . . the great sheets of metal-fire streaming down . . . the purply orange glow of napalm. . . . [A]n artillery barrage has the aesthetic purity of absolute moral indifference–a powerful implacable beauty.

Here atrocious evil is disconnected from its ethical effect–the killing and hideous wounding of living creatures (not to mention the destruction of the environment).  The scene is set off from its ethical context, framed, and viewed purely from a dispassionate aesthetic point of view.

In my book, The Aesthetics of Care, I explore the various aesthetic theories—mainly variations on the Kantian—that justify and legitimize such aestheticization; instead, I propose an aesthetics of care that doesn’t elide ethical consideration of the subjects being treated.  I then examine a series of works of literature—by such figures as Willa Cather, Leo Tolstoy, J. M. Coetzee, and others—from the critical perspective of an aesthetics of care, focusing on the treatment of animals therein.  All too often, I argue, in the fictions of modernity animals are framed aesthetically without regard to their ethical status.  There are, however, writers, such as those noted above, who treat animals as ethical subjects with stories of their own.

Focusing on the animal as subject opens up new ways of looking at received classics.  Anna Karenina, for example, is rarely, if ever, considered with attention to its animal characters.  Yet doing so reveals aspects of the novel (and the author) hitherto ignored.  Levin’s dog Laska, for example, receives a great deal of detailed attention by Tolstoy.  She is really a character in her own right.  Such a shift away from human-centered reading necessarily puts a new and limiting perspective on the human doings in the novel–a perspective Tolstoy offers in several of his short stories, such as “Three Deaths” and “Strider,” to great effect.

My hope in writing this book was to intensify readers’ awareness of animal characters as subjects and to propose alternatives to their habitual aestheticization, which continues to be a common fictional practice. More broadly, I critique the aestheticization of evil seen in other works and hold that ethical considerations must not be overriden by aesthetic interests and concerns.  My overall hope is that my readings may provoke readers to further reflect upon these issues.  

 

Josephine Donovan is Emerita Professor of English at the University of Maine, USA.  Her other books include:  Feminist Theory: The Intellectual Traditions, 4th ed. (2012)—named an Outstanding Academic Book by Choice; European Local-Color Literature (2010)—both Bloomsbury books; and Women and the Rise of the Novel, 1405-1726, 2d ed. (2013)—also a Choice Outstanding Academic Book.  With Carol J. Adams she co-edited The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics (2007) and Animals and Women (1995).  

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.

Environmental Cultures: Day 5

We hope you’ve enjoyed hearing about our Environmental Cultures series this week and have had a chance to browse the texts of the first two books on our open access platform. Look out for these books coming later this year:

The next book arrives in August, when we publish Cities and Wetlands: The Return of the Repressed in Nature and Culture by Rod Giblett, exploring the cultural histories of swampland cities, from New Orleans to London, Paris and Venice.

In October, we’ll be publishing Nerd Ecology: Defending the Earth with Unpopular Culture, in which Anthony Lioi explores geek culture’s engagement with environmental issues, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the X-Men to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

Also in October, comes Astrida Neimanis’s book Bodies of Water, an innovative theoretical work that seeks to build a posthuman feminist phenomenology from our liquid bodies.

And to finish the week, here’s series editor Richard Kerridge on the future of the series, and the sorts of proposals we’re looking for, plus an unexpected guest who offers proof that nature will not be denied…

 

Environmental Cultures: Day 4

Continuing the celebrations for our new open access Environmental Cultures series, today we hear from three members of the series’ international Editorial Board who tell us about their ambitions for the series and the forthcoming books they are looking forward to reading.

 

Professor Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, University of Warwick, UK:

 “Environmental Humanities is here to stay, and this distinctive series shows us why. The editors, themselves leading scholars in the field, have put together a fabulously rich and varied list of authors. Unlike many others, the series is genuinely interested in showcasing the works of innovative young researchers alongside those by more established ones. It is serious about being non-parochial - the list of forthcoming works includes authors from Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, Australia, Sweden, and the US. Future titles will range further afield to consider Canadian, Australian, Polish, and Chinese literatures. It focuses on both canonical and non-canonical literary cultures - romanticism alongside ‘nerd culture’; British nature writing as well as climate fiction; postcolonial eco-criticism and digital humanities. While committed to the most exacting standards of scrutiny and peer-review, the series promises to reach a wide audience. It will provide a new and welcoming home for those writers who work collaboratively as well those who prefer non-traditional methods such as narrative scholarship. I am sure this series will be the preferred destination for a new generation of scholars, teachers and readers who are committed to the struggle to decide the future of our planet.”

 

Dr. Mandy Bloomfield, University of Plymouth, UK:

“It’s a pleasure and a privilege to be closely involved with Bloomsbury Academic’s new Environmental Cultures series. Promising to extend and expand the Environmental Humanities in fertile new directions, and to demonstrate the value of interdisciplinarity in this field, this series opens up vigorous and inventive avenues of scholarship and cultural enquiry. I’m pleased to have the opportunity to contribute to forming some of these trajectories.

It was very satisfying to receive the first title in the post the other day; Serenella Iovino’s wide-ranging study Ecocriticism and Italy immediately brings an international dimension to the series and sets the tone for original, rigorous and bold scholarship. I’m also looking forward to the wonderful array of forthcoming titles waiting in the wings, which include groundbreaking work by early career academics as well as more established figures. In particular, as somebody who works on modern and contemporary poetics, I’m eagerly awaiting the publication of Matthew Griffiths’s The New Poetics of Climate Change. This book reads modernist poetics, from the likes of T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens to contemporary poets such as Jorie Graham, in relation to the unsettling spatial and temporal scales of global climate change. Griffiths demonstrates how such writers’ modes of formal experimentation might offer models for negotiating these disorientating shifts. Having had many lively discussions with the author about his work as it has developed over the years, I’m so pleased to see this project come to fruition. Another title I’m really looking forward to is Anthony Lioi’s Nerd Ecology which looks way beyond the literary canon to works of ‘unpopular culture,’ arguing that cultural productions as diverse as Star Trek, X-Men and the novels of Haruki Murakami do valuable kinds of ecological thinking to which ecocritics should pay more attention. I feel sure that my students will find this title as compelling as I do! Lastly, I’m delighted that Kate Rigby is publishing her next book with us. Rigby’s reputation as an inventive and rigorous critical thinker is well established. Her forthcoming book Romantic Ecologies in Postcolonial Perspective sparks dialogues between canonical Romanticism, postcolonial theory and non-European ecological knowledge, bringing lively new ideas and debates to the field.

Titles such as these set exciting precedents for the series. In the future I hope and fully expect to see Environmental Cultures continuing to support and disseminate cutting-edge work; my particular aspirations are for us to publish new work that explores the nexus of literature and the environmental sciences, as well as more work on ecopoetics, particularly in relation to lesser-known and more experimental work. I have no doubt that this series will shape the future directions of the Environmental Humanities.”

 

Christa Grewe-Volpp, University of Mannheim, Germany:

As an ecocritic over the past 15 to 20 years, I am delighted to be a member of the advisory board for the Environmental Cultures series at Bloomsbury Academic. I have closely followed the development of ecocriticism (both in my research and in my teaching) from initially focusing on regional places and the pastoral imagination mostly in Anglo-American literature to developing a much broader conception of the natural environment.  These new impulses include the metropolis and global flows, as well as the human and the non-human body in the literature of Europe, South East Asia and Australia / New Zealand. Ecocriticism has become a theoretically diverse and sophisticated discipline, making use of interdisciplinary research from various academic fields (such as place studies, postcolonial studies, animal studies, environmental justice studies, gender studies, race studies, posthumanism) to further investigate the intricate interactions between humans and their physical environment. It has not only strongly diversified in its approaches over the years, but has also grown exponentially worldwide.

I am excited that the Environmental Cultures series reflects these developments and contributes to their further diversification internationally, thus playing a leading role in the future of the environmental humanities. The forthcoming titles by young and established scholars promise a fresh look at the imbrications of nature and culture from the perspective of the 21^st century. I look forward to more titles on pressing contemporary issues such as climate change, migration, the ecological, economic and social consequences of resource depletion, issues of race, gender and the unequal distribution of environmental risk.

In my position as board member, I hope to include not only scholarly work on various literary genres, but also on film, art, architecture, landscape planning, and am eager to encounter new topics in this vibrant field . The Environmental Cultures series has the great potential to advance the debates in the environmental humanities in important and innovative ways and I am so happy to be a part of it!

Environmental Cultures: Day 3

Hubert Zapf is Professor and Chair of American Literature at the University of Augsburg, Germany. Here, he tells us 4 things you need to know about his new book Literature as Cultural Ecology, out now in our new Environmental Cultures series.

 

1. Literature as Cultural Ecology is the first study which systematically connects ecocriticism and literary studies with the discourse of sustainability. In this way, ecocriticism and literary studies are assessed in their hitherto underestimated relevance for the sustainability debate and for the new interdisciplinary framework of the environmental humanities. The book conceives of literature as a form of  sustainable textuality which produces ever-renewable sources of creative energy for language, narrative, and imagination that continually transform and renew the larger cultural system. In this view, literature reconnects cultural to natural ecosystems and links the imaginary futures of modern civilization to its evolutionary conditions of emergence. Literature is described as a long-term form of cultural self-reflection and storehouse of creative energy, which offers a powerful potential of cultural critique and self-correction that is indispensable for the future evolution of culture beyond merely economic and techno-scientific concerns.
2. The book considers literature not just as a medium that illustrates insights from other, supposedly more authoritative forms of knowledge but as a distinct and culturally relevant form of ecological knowledge in its own right. Concrete textual analysis and interpretation as the core competence of literary scholars gains new significance not as a derivative application of pre-existing scientific knowledge but as a specifically rich and complex source of ecocultural knowledge which is relevant to other disciplines in the environmental humanities in turn.
3. My book practices a transnational and transcultural approach to ecocritical thought both in its theoretical premises and in its concept of the text. In terms of its theoretical foundations, a cultural ecology of literature resonates with the work of theorists such as Gregory Bateson, a British scholar living in the US; Peter Finke, a German biologist, linguist, and systems theorist; Wendy Wheeler, a British biosemiotician with strong theoretical links to the American pragmatist Charles Sanders Pierce as well as to the Baltic-Scandinavian school of biosemiotics; the Frankfurt school of critical theory and its postmodern ramifications in the eco-aesthetic philosophy of Gernot Böhme and in the sociological theory of Ulrich Beck’s world risk society; as well as Italian and Turkish ecocritics Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann’s approach of a material ecocriticism. In terms of the textual examples discussed in the book, they range from the 19th and 20^th century to contemporary literature, from poetry to novels, from American to British, Indian, South African, and German literatures, thereby advocating a transcultural concept of literary texts and an ‘ecocosmopolitan’ (Ursula Heise) perspective on literary ecology.
4. Finally, Literature as Cultural Ecology is transdisciplinary in its scope and theoretical-methodological conception. Beyond environmental issues in a more narrow sense, the book also deals with more general topics of an ecocultural aesthetics and epistemology. Among these are “Text and Life,” dealing with literature as a cultural-ecological form of ‘knowledge of life’ different from and complementary to the contemporary life sciences; “Order and Chaos,” discussing the necessary co-agency of the forces of order and chaos in both ecology and in aesthetics; “Connecting Patterns and Creative Energies,” exploring the interplay between ‘patterns which connect’ (Bateson) and transgressive excess in creative processes; “Matter and  Mind,” examining the dynamic interactivity between matter and mind in literary texts as exemplified in the poetics of the four elements; “Solid and Fluid,” focusing on the beach as a liminal space between land and sea, culture and nature as a particularly productive site of literary creativity;  “Wound and Voice,” mapping the outlines of a cultural ecology of literary trauma narratives; “Absence and Presence,” placing a cultural ecology of literature within the polarity of absence and presence as discursive modes of texts; and “Local and Global,” tracing conflicting orientations between the local and the global, and between postcolonial and transcultural-ecocosmopolitan models of ecological thought in contemporary texts within the frameworks of climate change and the Anthropocene. In all of these chapters, different dimensions of transdisciplinarity are explored, in which the epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic functions of literature as cultural ecology are demonstrated both on a theoretical plane and in textual examples.

 

Literature as Cultural Ecology is available to buy from Bloomsbury. You can also find the open access version of the book available here.

Some Lessons from Object Lessons

Guest post by Christopher Schaberg

Earlier this past month when I emailed the Advisory Board of the Object Lessons series to announce the release of our six latest titles (Silence, Phone Booth, Hotel, Waste, Refrigerator, and Glass), I was delighted by one common theme in board members’ responses: several of them planned to teach classes using at least a couple of the Object Lessons books.

I had been thinking about the possibility Object Lessons books assigned in college courses since we launched the series, but I never quite knew how it would play out. One early idea I had was that Object Lessons books could be adopted for “common reading” curricula, especially for First-Year Experience type programs. (Driver’s License, anyone?) It was gratifying when one of our first books, Remote Control, was picked up for an introductory media studies course—that made complete sense.

More recently, during a Reddit AMA that my co-editor Ian Bogost and I did with the current six Object Lessons authors, we got a question about teaching Object Lessons—and I began to realize the scalability and groupings of the topics within the series. For instance, Waste, Dust, Silence, and Golf Ball could be used as the basis of an environmental humanities reading group. Remote Control, Phone Booth, Refrigerator, and Glass could form the backbone of a technology studies seminar. Hood, Driver’s License, and Cigarette Lighter could provide the foundation for an American Studies course focused on everyday objects. The combinations are myriad—and we’re only talking about fifteen books so far (including the five titles forthcoming in January).

I designed one my own courses this semester around the Object Lessons series, taking a quite pragmatic approach. In my class we started with Ian’s book Alien Phenomenology, or What it’s Like to Be a Thing, and Jane Bennett’s book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. I used these two books to provide students with a sense of the intellectual background that (in part) inspired the series. I also brought in several excerpts from literary texts, examples that evince the rich lives of ordinary things in fiction and poetry. These showed us how often writers use everyday objects even when they are not explicitly trying to be object-oriented ontologists.

Then we moved into the actual series. I shared our original series proposal with my students, and we talked about what it means to edit a series of books. We and read and discussed the first four titles, and then considered Russell Jacoby’s blistering critique of the series in the Chronicle Review last April—we talked about it not only in terms of Jacoby’s theoretical positions and arguments, but also to see how we might use his more concrete feedback to refine the series moving forward. The new six titles then offered real case studies to talk about how the series has since developed and widened in scope; and we lingered on Joanna Walsh’s Hotel by way of discussing the creative potential of Object Lessons books, even within our relatively tight constraints (one thing in 25-30k words!).

Currently in my class we’re talking about the practical ends of the series—design, marketing, publicity, and review venues—as we prepare our next five titles (Cigarette Lighter, Hood, Dust, Shipping Container, and Bookshelf) for publication in January 2016. Meanwhile, my excellent and interested students are working on their own projects through which to think about the series: for example, one student is working independently on an Instagram account for the series; another has launched her own small press for poetry chapbooks, and she’s applying lessons learned about the ins and outs of publishing, drawn from our series. Other students are trying their hands at writing object-oriented essays. (Here’s an amazing essay that was written by one of my students the first time I tried this assignment, a couple years ago in a Contemporary Nonfiction course.)

But finally, all these things are not just about Object Lessons: I’m constantly reminding my students that the series is only one teeny tiny part of a vast and dynamically shifting landscape of media and publishing. This is a terrain that is continuous with literary production and consumption—topics more commonly considered the proper domain of English departments. We’re not all that far from the rest of their curriculum; in fact, we’re deep inside it, seeing and shaping how books come to life.

The Object Lessons series has given me a way to invite my students into an active field, one where texts are lively things not only to be read, but to be crafted, worked on, and realized in context. Without being too heavy handed about it, the series has become a place of praxis, where rubbery abstract ideas meet the firm road of the real, and books find their way into the hands of readers. It has also been a surprising confluence of my teaching, my research activities, and my service to the profession. I don’t think it’s a stretch to see this example as transferable: if you are editing a series of books, organizing a conference on your campus, or guest-editing a journal issue—invite your students to get involved! These sorts of collaborative activities not only give students actual skills, but they also help break down the musty and specious divisions between college and the so-called “real world.”

And the series has had a real impact on my writing, too. Reading our terrific manuscripts has reinvigorated my own fervor for inquiry, and as I work on a new book project (a third book about air travel—I know, I know!), I find myself borrowing from the keen energy and stylistic moves of our Object Lessons authors. My next book may not be an Object Lessons book per se, but I hope it will reflect the same spirit of wonder, playfulness, and critical imagination.

Since its inception, Object Lessons has been an exhilarating collaboration between scholars, editors, designers, writers, readers, reviewers, and booksellers. Inviting students into this collaborative sphere has not only been incredibly rewarding; it has also been remarkably easy, perhaps because my students recognize that this is no mere simulation or exercise—it’s something real.

 

Christopher Schaberg is Associate Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans, USA. His latest book is The End of Airports, forthcoming from Bloomsbury. He is series co-editor with Ian Bogost of Object Lessons. For more information on the series, visit the Bloomsbury website or www.objectobjectsobjects.com. 

Object Lessons photo courtesy of Alan Pham

Call for Proposals: Environmental Cultures - A New Open Content Series

Environmental Cultures is a new open content series from Bloomsbury Academic that aims to publish innovative work in ecocriticism and the environmental humanities.

Environmental crisis is simultaneously and inseparably material and cultural, destructive and revolutionary. Besides complicating and endangering relationships between humans and other beings, it transforms human identities, communities and nations in unpredictable ways. Old distinctions between nature and culture are being eroded; new values, genres and media are emerging that respond to the crisis with mourning, scepticism, dismay, resourcefulness or ironic resignation.

Environmental Cultures reflects the belief that cultural criticism can help avert, resolve, mitigate or at least comprehend ecological problems. It will publish ambitious, innovative literary ecocriticism and interdisciplinary, transnational and pedagogical scholarship on both traditional and digital media. The series will encourage reflexive theoretical critique and searching exploration of anti-environmentalist cultural forms as well as sophisticated literary analysis. Cultures are unavoidably environmental, for good and ill. Environmental Cultures will show how.

We seek book proposals on any topic in this field. We are especially looking for monographs that take the environmental humanities in new directions or widen its geographical scope, such as:

• digital ecocriticism;
• world/comparative literatures;
• anti-environmentalist cultures;
• new modes of nature writing;
• literary responses to ecological science.

We are also commissioning ecocritical studies of national or regional literatures. We will commission monographs and collaboratively written books, but not edited collections or conference proceedings.

Titles in the Environmental Cultures series will be published as Bloomsbury Open Content. This successful publishing model ensures that the full text of each book is freely available online (under a Creative Commons licence) for browsing and searching at the same time as being available for sale as print or ebooks.

Series editors: Richard Kerridge (Bath Spa University, UK) and Greg Garrard (University of British Columbia, Canada).

To have a proposal considered for the series, please email Dr Greg Garrard ([email protected]) for the form.

On Modern Poetry and Writing the Self named Choice Outstanding Academic Titles 2013

Continuing a mulit-year streak, two Literary Studies books have been named Choice Outstanding Academic Titles for 2013. Congratulations to On Modern Poetry by Robert Rowland Smith and Writing the Self by Peter Heehs.

More about Choice Outstanding Academic Titles:

Every year, Choice subject editors single out for recognition the most significant print and electronic works reviewed in Choice during the previous calendar year. Appearing annually in Choice’s January issue, this prestigious list of publications reflects the best in scholarly titles and attracts extraordinary attention from the academic library community. The 2013 feature includes 663 titles in 54 disciplines and subsections. In awarding Outstanding Academic Title status, the editors apply several criteria to reviewed titles:

•     Overall excellence in presentation and scholarship
•     Importance relative to other literature in the field
•     Distinction as a first treatment of a given subject in book or electronic form
•     Originality or uniqueness of treatment
•     Value to undergraduate students
•     Importance in building undergraduate library collections

Writing the Self: Diaries, Memoirs, and the History of the Self traces the history of the idea of the self, in diaries, memoirs and other first-person writings, from the Iron Age to the age of the Internet.

Start reading it here:

More information


On Modern Poetry: From Theory to Total Criticism explores the divide between practical criticism and theory in 20th century criticism to propose a new way of reading poetry.

Start reading it here:

More information
   

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.

Emma L. E. Rees Answers Our Questions About "The Vagina: A Literary and Cultural History"

We asked author Emma L. E. Rees a few questions about her book, The Vagina: A Literary and Cultural History, out now in hardcover.

Buy it here. 

Request an exam or desk copy here. 

Bloomsbury: Why write a serious book about The Vagina? What does it mean to you professionally? And personally?

Emma L. E. Rees: The vagina – not just as biological entity but as powerful cultural symbol – has become a hot topic in recent years. I owe an immense debt to Eve Ensler (The Vagina Monologues), of course, and although some aspects of her work come under fire in my book, I do acknowledge and respect her trailblazing bravery. We live in an age where pornography is more easily accessible than ever before and where, at the same time, it is utterly divorced from reality. Women face unprecedented physical and political attacks from legislators and spiritual leaders, as well as from men who quite simply hate women and girls. What struck me as I began to research the book was that the sometimes wilful misunderstandings of the vagina, and their resulting responses of fearful revulsion and hatred, were nothing new, but were in fact firmly rooted in deep-seated cultural assumptions. For example, in The Vagina, I draw pretty direct links between the sometimes brilliant satire of South Park and the explicit lyrics of 12^th-century itinerant European poet-musicians. I certainly never expected that to happen! I also demonstrate how the ancient myth of the vagina dentata (the ‘toothed vagina’) serves to justify some of the abhorrent practices being carried out against women, girls and transgendered people worldwide today. I’m pissed off by how powerful men cannot acknowledge the reality of the vagina, but instead want to control, demonise, or attack it. Being pissed off has always been a great motivator for me!

B: Describe the moment in which you realized you were writing a full length book about Vaginas?

ER: There’s a character in George Eliot’s Middlemarch called Casaubon – an awful, emotionally arid man – whose life’s work is a Key to All Mythologies. It’s – of course – a work he can never finish because of its vast scope. I set out with an unintentionally Casaubon-like aim: to write a history of all vaginas everywhere, ever. The total impossibility of that task very quickly dawned on me, of course, so, I tested the water by publishing a couple of vagina-related essays (on Shakespeare, and Charlotte Brontë). The responses were pretty positive and soon I began to see a clearer focus for a book. But it all started – as the book’s own narrative does – with an accidental visit to a remote parish church deep in the British countryside in the 1990s.*

*Explained in detail in Revealing the Vagina: Introduction

B: What was the most exhilarating aspect of your research for The Vagina?

ER: Realising that it was a book that could reach people; that could lead to activism beyond academia; realising that the zeitgeist was on my side – as senators debate women’s bodies and reproductive rights and as activists who reclaim the word ‘Pussy’ become the suffragettes of the 21^st century; and realising that I might be able to educate people and get them to look – really look – (metaphorically or – of course – literally) at the vagina and think about it in new, positive ways. 

B: What was the best reaction a friend or colleague had to the news of the subject of your forthcoming book?

ER: There isn’t one that stands out, really. People have been generally very supportive. The students I teach have been intrigued and, ultimately, enlightened. Family members have been supportive but won’t really see what I’m trying to do in the book until they read it. I think it’s fun telling people about the book and its uncompromisingly clear title. Reactions vary and nearly always make me laugh – I’ve learned to maintain eye-contact and say ‘My book is called The Vagina’, and watch as they sometimes blush, or, not being at all sure that they can have heard me correctly, ask me to repeat myself. Most often, though, there will be a long, drawn-out ‘Riiiiight …’ followed by – in the UK, at least – a quick change of topic to the weather or last night’s TV.

B: Can you describe some of the images in the book? How did you choose them?

ER: Several of the images are details from Judy Chicago’s momentous art installation, The Dinner Party. Judy was very generous and supportive in terms of giving permission. I just think it’s really important to be able to direct your reader to a visual image instead of increasing the interpretive distance by attempting to describe it. This is the case with the wonderful Artemisia Gentileschi painting I include, of Judith slaying Holofernes: the picture says so much more than I can say about it, so I really wanted it in there. An Italian friend was invaluable in terms of helping me negotiate the minefield of Italian bureaucracy in order to secure permission to use it. I only met official resistance in trying to get hold of two images which in the end I had to drop: one, a Frida Kahlo painting, is in the private collection of a globally-famous singer whose publicist tried to help out, but who ultimately couldn’t; the other was a painting by an artist best known for her large canvases which are, according to the Foundation and Museum who refused to give me permission to reproduce them in the book, of flowers – just flowers – and have no genital imagery in them at all. I just don’t buy that, and it’s a shame they’re not in the finished product.  I do think the book’s title and subject-matter scared some people off granting image reproduction permissions – but that just serves to underscore why there’s an urgent need for this very book!

B: What inspired you during the writing process? Any particular place, person, book or album?

ER: As with so much of what I do, I tend to write in an ‘all or nothing’ kind of way. Gladstone’s Library (a residential library in North Wales) was instrumental in getting the book finished. There, everything’s taken care of, and I can write flat out for, perhaps, 12 or more hours a day. Solidly. It’s a luxury that everyday life doesn’t afford. I have to work in silence, and am most productive on days when I’m not lecturing, when I can sit and read and write in the quiet of my home, preferably looking out at the garden, surrounded by my cats and dog. Walking Mitzvah, our Golden Retriever, is also a wonderful way to relax and to ponder the day’s work: her boundless joie de vivre takes me out of myself. Writing can be a pretty blissful existence. That sounds trite, I know, but my maternal grandmother was in service (she was a maid in a big house, very Downton Abbey style) and my paternal grandfather was almost killed in the Welsh coal pits (he trained as a teacher once he realised being a miner wasn’t for him), so I have little time for people who say that writing’s hard. It can be difficult and frustrating and all-consuming, but it’s not hard like working in a mine or lighting fires at 6am on a bitterly cold winter’s morning is hard. On a lighter note, watching DVD box sets with my husband is a perfect way to stop work: we’re just about to start Season 4 of Breaking Bad.

B: What are three incredible things you learned while writing this book?

ER: Two positive ones, and a negative. The first is a fact that’s always fascinated me, and that I could think more about for the book: it’s the idea of the reach of ideas. Anthropologically-speaking, before lines of communication were open between cultures, before any possibility of, if you like, intellectual contamination, very, very different and geographically isolated communities were coming up with their own stories about the vagina dentata. This suggests a remarkable pervasiveness of an almost primal misogyny and fear.

The second is that without language we cannot have meaning – a key plea in my book is to find a name for the unnameable. In other words, what does it mean that, in English-speaking culture, the single most abhorrent and taboo word is also the only accurate word for describing a woman’s sexual organs? Why is the ‘c-word’ not seen?

A third, more negative thing that has struck me is that there are an awful lot of people out there who are determined to be upset or affronted by this book without having read a page. And these haters, trolls and misogynists, who prowl the internet looking to make mischief, hurt feelings and cause emotional pain, are precisely the sort of people who make me confident that the time is right for The Vagina. The incredible fact is that for every lowlife hater there are many, many supporters. The lesson really is not to read the comments posted on articles online!

B: Why should people without vaginas read this book?

ER: Because they most likely know – and may even respect – some people with vaginas! Because they never previously realised how South Park or Sex and the City make important interventions into debates around the cultural centrality and paradox of the vagina. Because to be squeamish about the reality of women’s bodies is a ridiculous philosophical illogicality. And because not challenging one’s own prejudices perpetuates petty small-mindedness and conflict. In other words, why the hell shouldn’t they read it?!

B: What’s next? What comes after vaginas?

ER: The first and last words of The Vagina are the same – I’m not going to put a spoiler here, but the gist is that, in my writing, topics seem to find me, rather than me finding them. The next book is, to my mind, an entirely logical development from The Vagina, but to other people it will almost certainly look like a thematic departure. I’m not ready to share my thoughts and plans about it yet, but it’s safe to say that no other body parts are going to feature in quite the same way as they do in The Vagina!