Literature and Politics
This globally diverse category features critical work which examines the intersections between literature and politics, with a particular focus on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It covers a vast range of topics of vital importance to modern life, including climate change, food systems, class conflict, post-truth cultures, global feminism, and post-colonialism. As well as researching the political significance of Anglophone writing, our authors research literatures from the Arab world, the Caribbean, and the Indian subcontinent. These are fascinating studies of world history in the making.
Works on Literature and Politics by our departmental staff
Literary and Cultural Production, World-Ecology, and the Global Food System
Dr Chris Campbell (2021)
Literary and Cultural Production, World-Ecology, and the Global Food System
Literary and Cultural Production, World-Ecology, and the Global Food System marks a significant intervention into the field of literary food studies. Drawing on new work in world literature, cultural studies, and environmental studies, the essays gathered here explore how literary and cultural texts have represented and responded to the global food system from the late nineteenth century to the present day.
Covering topics such as the impact of colonial monocultures and industrial agriculture, enclosure and the loss of the commons, the meatification of diets, the toxification of landscapes, and the consequences of climate breakdown, the volume ranges across the globe, from Thailand to Brazil, Cyprus to the Caribbean. Whether it is anxieties over imported meat in late Victorian Britain, labour struggles on Guatemalan banana plantations, or food dependency in Puerto Rico, the contributors to this volume show how fiction, poetry, drama, film, and music have critically explored and contributed to food cultures worldwide.
Counterfeit Culture: Truth and Authenticity in the American Prose Epic since 1960
Counterfeit Culture explores the possibility of writing epic in an age of alternative facts. Examining six attempts to forge an American prose epic since 1960, this study goes on to trace a national tradition of inauthenticity, stretching back across four centuries. In works by authors such as Pynchon, Gaddis and Burroughs, the contemporary turn away from truth and authenticity can be seen as a return to an established line of literary tricksters and confidence men, with tropes of fraud and artifice running deep in the American grain.
Combining archival work with historically-inflected analysis of literary narrative, this book ranges through questions of identity, technology, history, and music in its engagement. From Marguerite Young's inquiry into psychological disintegration to William T. Vollmann's ongoing cycle of false histories, the study introduces a new reading of the American epic.
Resting Places: On Wounds, War and the Irish Revolution
Haunted by the killings during Ireland's War of Independence and Civil War, the author reflects on her Catholic upbringing in West Cork in the 1980s and 1990s, her Protestant neighbours, having a child and, latterly, her work teaching Irish literature at an English university.
Ireland, Migration and Return Migration
Drawing on historical, literary and cultural studies perspectives, this project examines the phenomenon of the “Returned Yank” in the Irish cultural imagination, taking as its point of departure the most exhaustively discussed Returned Yank narrative, The Quiet Man (dir. John Ford, 1952). Often dismissed as a figure that embodies the sentimentality and nostalgia of Irish America writ large, this study argues that the Returned Yank’s role in the Irish cultural imagination is much more varied and complex than this simplistic construction allows.
Their repeated appearances in Irish literature and culture after 1952 – in remarkably heterogeneous cultural representations – refute claims of the “aesthetic caution” of Irish writers, dramatists and filmmakers responding to debates about tradition v. modernity in Ireland.
The Caribbean: Aesthetics, World-Ecology, Politics
This unique edited collection of scholarly articles brings together the work of a diverse range of literary and cultural critics, creative writers, and environmental and social activists. It marks an important contribution to the fields of Caribbean Studies, postcolonial studies, and ecocriticism. Through its deployment of the concept of world-ecology, the volume intervenes in two of the most vital areas of investigation in current literary studies.
On the one hand, it represents an engagement with the field of world literature, around which there has been an upsurge in debate over the past decade or so. On the other, it responds to new developments in the field of environmental humanities, which derive their urgency from concerns over the planetary ecosystem.
21st-Century Climate Imaginaries
Climate crisis images and narratives produced by the global north often shape the way environmental change is understood and managed. This book examines how apocalyptic 'climate memes' – familiar from environmental media, eco-art and science communication – risk invisibilizing eco-social injustices, and perpetuating violent planetary responses. My focus is on alternative climate imaginaries emerging from global south, Indigenous-led and anti-colonial movements.
Through case studies in Chile, Greenland, the Pacific Islands and Canada, the book considers key contemporary artists, activists and scholars whose creative interventions re-route colonial, extractive, and late capitalist thinking. Among them are the artistic and filmic collaborations, land defense projects, performances and installations of activist artists including Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, Craig Santos Perez, Cecilia Vicuna, Rita Wong and JR Carpenter.
The book advocates for the role of collaborative, creative, and grassroots action in reconfiguring ecological relations and enabling a shift away from technocratic solutions to culturally and contextually grounded practices.
Class War: A Literary History
A thrilling and vivid work of history, Class War weaves together literature and politics to chart the making and unmaking of social class through revolutionary combat. In a narrative that spans the globe and more than two centuries of history, Mark Steven traces the history of class war from the Haitian Revolution to Black Lives Matter.
Surveying the literature of revolution, from the poetry of Shelley and Byron to the novels of Émile Zola and Jack London, exploring the writings of Frantz Fanon, Che Guevara, and Assata Shakur, Class War reveals the interplay between military action and the politics of class, showing how solidarity flourishes in times of conflict. Written with verve and ranging across diverse historical settings, Class War traverses industrial battles, guerrilla insurgencies, and anticolonial resistance, as well as large-scale combat operations waged against capitalism’s regimes and its interstate system.
In our age of economic crisis, ecological catastrophe, and planetary unrest, Steven tells the stories of those whose actions will help guide future militants toward a revolutionary horizon.
Narratives of Dislocation in the Arab World: Rewriting Ghurba
This monograph explores and investigates narratives of physical, psychological, and emotional dislocation that take place within the Arab world, approaching them as manifestations of the Arabic word ghurba, or estrangement, as a feeling and state of being.
Distancing itself from the centrality of the “West” in postcolonial and Arabic literary studies, the book explores experiences of migration, displacement and cosmopolitanism that do not directly ensue from the encounter with Europe or the European other. Covering texts from the Levant, Egypt, the Arabian Peninsula and beyond from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, the book grounds narratives of dislocation in the political, social and cultural structures that affect the everyday lived experiences of individuals and communities.
Gender, Sexuality and Feminism in Pakistani Urdu Writing
As the first study of its kind, this book offers a new understanding of progressive women’s poetry in Urdu and the legacy of postcolonial politics. It underlines Urdu’s linguistic hybridities, the context of the zenana, reform, and rekhti to illustrate how the modernising impulse under colonial rule impacted women as subjects in textual form.
It argues that canonical texts for sharif women from Mirat-ul Arus to Umrao Jan Ada need to be looked at alongside women’s diaries and autobiographies so that we have an overall picture of gendered lives from imaginative fiction, memoirs and biographies.