Literature and Culture
Focussing on the intersection between literature and culture mainly in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this category showcases a diverse range of research areas from a broad geographical spread, touching on topics including technology, literary cultures, comics and graphic novels, world cinema, and magic realism. Writers such as J. M. Coetzee and Thomas Pynchon are represented as well as the canon-shifting work of the feminist publishing house Virago in bringing female-authored classics back into print.
Works on Literature and Culture by our departmental staff
J. M. Coetzee and the Limits of the Novel
J. M. Coetzee is widely recognized as one of the most important writers working in English. As a South African (now Australian) novelist composing his best-known works in the latter third of the twentieth century, Coetzee has understandably often been read through the lenses of postcolonial theory and post-war ethics. Yet his reception is entering a new phase bolstered by thousands of pages of new and unpublished empirical evidence housed at the J. M. Coetzee archive at The Harry Ransom Center (University of Texas, Austin).
This material provokes a re-reading of Coetzee's project even as it uncovers keys to his process of formal experimentation and compositional evolution up to and including Disgrace (1999). Following Coetzee's false starts, his confrontation of narrative impasses, and his shifting deployment of source materials, J. M. Coetzee and the Limits of the Novel provides a new series of detailed snapshots of one of the world's most celebrated authors.
Magic Realism, World Cinema, and the Avant-Garde
This book follows the hybrid and contradictory history of magic realism through the writings of three key figures – art historian Franz Roh, novelist Alejo Carpentier, and cultural critic Fredric Jameson – drawing links between their political, aesthetic, and philosophical ideas on art’s relationship to reality.
Magic realism is vast in scope, spanning almost a century, and is often confused with neighbouring styles of literature or art, most notably surrealism. The fascinating conditions of modernist Europe are complex and contradictory, a spirit that magic realism has taken on as it travels far and wide. The filmmakers and writers in this book acknowledge the importance of feeling, atmosphere, and mood to subtly provoke and resist global capitalism.
Theirs is the history of magic-realist cinema. The book explores this history through the modernist avant-garde in search of a new theory of cinematic magic realism. It uncovers a resistant, geopolitical form of world cinema – moving from Europe, through Latin America and the former Soviet Union, to Thailand – that emerges from these ideas.
The US Graphic Novel
The US Graphic Novel provides a history of the graphic novel in the United States from the 1910s to the present, analysing the ways that changes in the comics industry, book trade, and webcomic distribution have shaped the publication of long-form comics. As well as examining the publishing structures through which graphic novels have been created and distributed, The US Graphic Novel pays attention to how the concept of the graphic novel developed through the twentieth century, as artists, fans, art historians, journalists, and reviewers debated whether it was possible for a comic to be a novel – especially after the term “graphic novel” was coined in 1964.
Technologies of the Self-Portrait
This book demonstrates how artists have radically revisited the genre of the self-portrait by using a range of technologies and media that mark different phases in what can be described as a history of self- or selves-production.
Gabriella Giannachi shows how artists constructed their presence, subjectivity, and personhood, by using a range of technologies and media including mirrors, photography, sculpture, video, virtual reality and social media, to produce an increasingly fluid, multiple, and social representation of their ‘self’.
This interdisciplinary book draws from art history, performance studies, visual culture, new media theory, philosophy, computer science, and neuroscience to offer a radical new reading of the genre.
The New Pynchon Studies
This book captures a cross-section of the most significant recent developments in criticism on one of the most challenging authors of our time. It brings together essays by a new generation of Pynchon critics alongside some more established names in the field, building on and moving beyond existing critical paradigms in the study of Pynchon's work.
In a critical landscape in which the postmodernism of Pynchon's earlier novels has been thoroughly established, this collection presents fresh analytical methodologies and new perspectives on Pynchon's fiction informed by the more expansive, globalized, and politicized network models that undergird recent advances in American literary theory and criticism.
The New Pynchon Studies illustrates how Pynchon's later novels, Against the Day, Inherent Vice, and Bleeding Edge, demand a re-orientation of our approach to his entire oeuvre and enables readers to trace lines of continuity and development in his writing from V. to the present day.
The Worlding of the South African Novel
The Worlding of the South African Novel develops from something of a paradox: that despite momentous political transition from apartheid to democracy, little in South Africa’s socio-economic reality has actually changed. Poyner discusses how the contemporary South African novel engages with this reality. In forms of literary experiment, the novels open up intellectual spaces shaping or contesting the idea of the “new South Africa”.
The mediatising of truth at the TRC hearings, how best to deal with a spectacular yet covert past, the shaping for “unimagined communities” of an inclusive public sphere, HIV/AIDS as the preeminent site testing capitalist modernity, white anxieties about land reform, disease as environmental injustice and the fostering of an enabling restorative cultural memory: Poyner argues that through these key nodes of intellectual thought, the novels speak to recent debates on world-literature to register the “shock” of an uneven modernity produced by a capitalist world economy.
Virago Reprints and Modern Classics
Reprinting, republishing and re-covering old books in new clothes is an established publishing practice. How are books that have fallen out of taste and favour resituated by publishers, and recognised by readers, as relevant and timely? This Element outlines three historical textures within British culture of the late 1970s and early 1980s – History, Remembrance and Heritage – that enabled Virago's reprint publishing to become a commercial and cultural success.
With detailed archival case studies of the Virago Reprint Library, Testament of Youth and the Virago Modern Classics, it elaborates how reprints were profitable for the publisher and moved Virago's books - and the Virago brand name - from the periphery of culture to the centre. Throughout Virago's reprint publishing - and especially with the Modern Classics - the epistemic revelation that women writers were forgotten and could, therefore, be rediscovered, was repeated, again and again, and made culturally productive through the marketplace.
Live Literature
This ground-breaking book explores the phenomenal growth of live literature in the digitalizing 21st century. Wiles asks why literary events appeal and matter to people, and how they can transform the ways in which fiction is received and valued. Readers are immersed in the experience of two contrasting events: a major literary festival and an intimate LGBTQ+ salon. Evocative scenes and observations are interwoven with sharp critical analysis and entertaining conversations with well-known author-performers, reader-audiences, producers, critics, and booksellers.
Adaptation and resilience in the performing arts
This book offers insights into some of the digital innovations, structural adaptations and analogue solutions that enabled live performance in the UK to survive through the COVID-19 pandemic. It provides evidence of values-led policies and practices that have improved the wellbeing of the creative workforce and have increased access to live performance. Through sections that address digital innovations, workforce resilience and programming live performances outdoors and in community settings, this book provides practical insights into the challenges live performance faced during the pandemic.
It shows how, in order to survive, individuals and companies within the sector drew on the creativity and resourcefulness of its workforce, and on new and existing networks. In these accounts, the pandemic functioned as catalyst for technological innovations, stock-taking regarding exploitative industry structures, and a re-valuing of the role of live performance for community-building.