German radicals of the 1960s announced the death of literature. For them, literature both past and present, as well as conventional discussions of literary issues, had lost its meaning. In The Institution of Criticism, Peter Uwe Hohendahl explores the implications of this crisis from a Marxist perspective and attempts to define the tasks and responsibilities of criticism in advanced capitalist …
In Literary Obscenities, Erik Bachman offers a comparative historical account of the parallel development of legal obscenity and literary modernism in this period. Getting Off the Page demonstrates that obscenity trials in the early twentieth century staged a wide-ranging cultural debate about the broader ramifications of the printed word’s power to “deprave,” “excite,” and offend—o…
A literary mirror is the first English-language work to comprehensively analyse Indonesian-language literature from Bali from a literary and cultural viewpoint. It covers the period from 1920 to 2000. This is an extremely rich field for research into the ways Balinese view their culture and how they respond to external cultural forces. This work complements the large number of existing studies …
Seductive Reasoning takes a provocative look at contemporary Anglo-American literary theory, calling into question the critical consensus on pluralism's nature and its status in literary studies. Drawing on the insights of Marxist and feminist critical theory and on the works of Althusser, Derrida, and Foucault, Rooney reads the pluralist’s invitation to join in a "dialogue" as a seductive ge…
I haven’t made a single mistake in my life. I’ve just made a lot of good decisions that went really badly. Try as we might, we simply can’t imagine what our world would now look like, had our forefathers decided to use asparagus instead of electricity. In Humid, All Too Humid, social commentator Dominic Pettman curates the overheated thoughts of his own feverish mind, in response to a wor…
This collection of short stories features work by Elizabeth Gaskell.
Dante's intranslatability paradoxically causes a steady flux of translations, overwhelming in America, much more modest in the Netherlands. However, the tiny Netherlands witnessed a remarkable boom of Dante translations around the year 2000: within a short period seven cantiche were translated by Dutchmen and seven by Americans. This historic moment gave rise to a seminar about these recent tra…
A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. What are the pleasures of reading translations of South Asian literature, and what does it take to enjoy a translated text? This volume provides opportunities to explore such questions by bringing together a whole set of new translations by David Shulman, noted scholar of South Asia. The translated selectio…
The first major interpretation of recent South Asian diasporic writing in specifically transatlantic terms.The book is organised around four key themes: home and nation; travel and return; racial mixing; and food and eating. Ruth Maxey offers readings of canonical and less well-known South Asian American and British Asian writers and texts and of key cinematic works. She explores the formal and…
This collection of essays studies the encounter between allegedly ahistorical concepts of narrative and eighteenth-century literature from across Europe. At issue is the question of whether the theoretical concepts underpinning narratology are, despite their appearance of ahistorical generality, actually derived from the historical study of a particular period and type of literature. The essays…