Myth as Symbol
Reconsidering the connection between literature and psychoanalysis, this study explores the modern literary reworking of myth. From Jungian archetypes to the Freudian unconscious, it analyzes figures like Undine and Medea to explore timeless questions.
Hilarion’s Asse
Nine authors unlock Laurence Sterne’s kaleidoscopic humour. This volume explores its many facets—the genial, bawdy, sentimental, philosophical, irreverent, and ludicrous—sending the classic text spiralling right off the page.
Theory That Matters
Theory That Matters offers an up-to-date assessment of literary and cultural theory. The volume launches a defence of theory, demonstrating this is not achieved at the expense of praxis, but by showing its currency through a variety of contexts.
As Time Goes By
This volume provides literary analyses of ageing through writers from Cervantes to Cixous. Exploring universal themes, these essays offer portraits of what age is, has been, and might be, demonstrating literature’s power to reflect social trends.
The Lives of Texts
Exploring the metaphor of a text as a living organism, this book traces life-like phenomena—birth, maturation, death, and resurrection—in literature from the Middle Ages to popular culture, including works by Mary Shelley, J.K. Rowling, and Neil Gaiman.
Miracle Enough
This is the first comparable collection of essays on Mervyn Peake ever published. Selected from an international conference, these papers by scholars and artists take a wide variety of approaches to his work—from the Gormenghast trilogy to his poetry and art.
This is the first book of academic criticism on the connection between Christianity and the detective story. It covers Chesterton, Sayers, and contemporary TV crime dramas, making the case that mystery writing provides both entertainment and religious insight.
Idioms of Ontology
Walt Whitman is a philosophical poet, but this aspect of his work is often neglected. This book throws the Whitmanesque self into a phenomenological context, examining the notion of selfhood against the views of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Levinas.
Making Up
Research in creative writing is not only about the works it produces, but the explorations a creative writer undertakes. Through creative writing, a writer can explore ideas, concepts, and states of mind. This collection shows what this growing field does and more.
The Threat and Allure of the Magical
This collection of essays explores intersections between the occult and the political, and the entanglement of magic, modernity, media, and aesthetics. Topics range from the witch in print media and the Third Reich’s occult to 19th-century novellas and film.
The Famished Road
This volume offers a journey into Ben Okri’s The Famished Road. Contributors look beyond pre-conceived categories to embrace the otherness of the text, offering new ways of reading Okri’s prose and reliance on myth. Includes an exclusive interview with Ben Okri.
Un-Australian Fictions
Un-Australian Fictions analyses literary works from 1988-2008 that challenge the national ethos and mythology. These texts reflect the destabilisation of once certain borders of Australianness, asking what it means to be Australian in a new millennium.
In the Mirror of the Past
Confronted by overwhelming events, we turn to myth. These essays discuss myth in modern speculative fiction, showing how fantasy becomes a mythic mirror in which we hope to see answers to vexing questions or a reality superior to our own.
In 19th-century Italy, suicide transformed from a rare sin into a widespread phenomenon. This book provides the first interdisciplinary account, exploring it through literature, art, and politics, and examining major figures like Leopardi and Salgari.
This collection of essays by international scholars explores Henry James’s use of duplicity—a key strategy in his arsenal of ambiguity. The essays examine duplicitous characters, subtexts, and self-representation in his fiction and non-fiction.
Essays in Defence of the Female Sex
This volume explores the pivotal figures and contradictions of the *querelle des femmes* in Stuart England. Through an analysis of early feminist pamphlets, it sheds light on women’s difficult path towards emancipation and a new kind of thought.
The Silence of Fallout
How do we address the nuclear question in a post-Cold War world? Scholars of Nuclear Criticism converse with emergent voices, renewing this conversation and taking it in exciting new directions for future generations caught in a struggle with nuclear legacies.
Ex-centric Writing
This volume of essays examines postcolonial alienation through the anamorphic lens of madness. In fiction from Africa, the Caribbean, Australia, and Asia, the mad character’s vision is a warning against discourses that pass as the natural order of things.
Encountering Ephemera 1500-1800
This collection redefines ephemera by challenging the opposition between the transitory and the enduring. Essays explore how materials from broadside ballads to performance reveal the dynamic unfixity of early modern and eighteenth-century cultural practices.
The Central and the Peripheral
The division between secure centres and unknown peripheries is obsolete. How can we find our way in a world where peripheries become centres and centres turn into peripheries? This book explores how this problem is dealt with in literature and culture.