To what extent is queer anti-identitarian? And how is it experienced by activists at the European level? At queer festivals, activists, artists and participants come together to build new forms of sociability and practice their ideals through anti-binary and inclusive idioms of gender and sexuality. These ideals are moreover channelled through a series of organisational and cultural practices t…
Middle English popular romance is the most audacious and compendious testimony to the imaginary world of the English Middle Ages. Yet, with few exceptions, it remains under read and under studied. Pulp fictions of medieval England demonstrates that popular romance merits and rewards serious critical attention and that it is crucial to our understanding of the complex and conflicted world of med…
From the white editorial authentication of slave narratives, to the cultural hybridity of the Harlem Renaissance, to the overtly independent publications of the Black Arts Movement, to the commercial power of Oprah's Book Club, African American textuality has been uniquely shaped by the contests for cultural power inherent in literary production and distribution. Always haunted by the commodifi…
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. How might queer theory transform our interpretations of medieval Japanese literature and how might this literature reorient the assumptions, priorities, and critical practices of queer theory? Through a close reading of The Tale…
It is strange— Proust wrote in 1909—that, in the most widely different departments... there should be no other literature which exercises over me so powerful an influence as English and American.â€? In the spirit of Proust's admission, this engaging and critical volume offers the first comparative reading of the French novelist in the context of American art, literature, and culture. In …
Gary Saul Morson's ideas about life and literature have long inspired, annoyed, and provoked specialists and general readers. His work on prosaics (his coinage) argues that life's defining events are not grand but ordinary, and that the world's fundamental state is mess. Viewing time as a field of possibilities, he maintains that contingency and freedom are real. To represent open time, some ma…
Proofs of Genius: Collected Editions from the American Revolution to the Digital Age is the first extensive study of the collected edition as an editorial genre within American literary history. Unlike editions of an author’s “selected works” or thematic anthologies, which clearly indicate the presence of non-authorial editorial intervention, collected editions have typically been arrange…
There is no doubt that the beginning of the twenty-first century was marked by crises of debt. Less well known is that literature played a historical role in defining and teaching debt to the public. Promissory Notes: On the Literary Conditions of Debt addresses how neoliberal finance has depended upon a historical linking of geopolitical inequality and financial representation that positions t…
his volume examines the "problems" with Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor. While the play is not considered one of the playwright's "problem plays," the author of this short volume believes there are many inconsistencies within the work, particularly with the character of Falstaff.
Privately Empowered responds to the lack of adequate attention paid to Islam in Africa in comparison to the Middle East and the Arab world. Shirin Edwin points to the embrace between Islam and politics that has limited Islamic feminist discourse to regions where it evolves in tandem with the nation-state and is commonly understood in terms of activism, social affiliations, or struggles for lega…