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This book makes the attempt to wed reason and the poetic. The tool for this attempt is Rational Poetic Experimentalism (RPE), which is introduced and explored in this book. According to RPE, it makes sense to look for poetic elements in human reality (including reason), outside of the realm of imaginative literature. Provocatively, RPE contends that philosophy’s search for truth has not been a great success so far. So, why not experiment with philosophical concepts and look for thought-provoking ideas by employing the principles of RPE, instead of fruitlessly searching for truths using conventional methods?
Reimagining Nineteenth-Century Historical Subjects
This volume explores the many paradoxes of neo-Victorian biofiction, a genre that yokes together the real and the imaginary, biography and fiction, and generates oxymoronic combinations like creative facts, fictional truth, or poetic truthfulness. Contemporary biofictions recreating nineteenth-century lives demonstrate the crucial but always ethically ambiguous revision and supplementation of the historical archive. Due to the tension between ethical empathy and consumerist voyeurism, between traumatic testimony and exploitative exposé, the epistemological response is per force one of hermeneutic suspicion and iconoclasm. In the final account, this volume highlights neo-Victorianism’s deconstruction of master-narratives and the consequent democratic rehabilitation of over-looked microhistories.
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Paul Muldoon and the Language of Poetry is the first book in years that attends to the entire oeuvre of the Irish-American poet, critic, lyricist, dramatist and Princeton professor from his debut with New Weather in 1973 up to his very recent publications. Ruben Moi’s book explores, in correspondence with language philosophy and critical debate, how Muldoon’s ingenious language and inventive form give shape and significance to his poetry, and how his linguistic panache and technical verve keep language forever surprising, new and alive.
In Pathos, Poetry and Politics in Michel Houellebecq's fiction, Russell Williams examines the literary style of France's most notorious novelist. Houellebecq is frequently the focus of debate for his provocative comments about Islam and the decline of Western civilisation. This book refocuses attention on how such provocation is an integral part of the texture of his novels.
Williams considers Houellebecq's writing about literature and outlines the key principles of the author's poetics, founded on an acute sensitivity to reading experience. He then explores Houellebecq's earliest poetry before mapping this poetic voice into his subsequent fiction, including Sérotonine (2019). Houellebecq's relationship with genre fiction and the crucial issue of the authorial persona that exists in and around his texts are also explored.
Tracing the Development of the Pirate Motif with Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean
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Postmodern Pirates offers a comprehensive analysis of Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean series and the pirate motif through the lens of postmodern theories. Susanne Zhanial shows how the postmodern elements determine the movies’ aesthetics, narratives, and character portrayals, but also places the movies within Hollywood’s contemporary blockbuster machinery. The book then offers a diachronic analysis of the pirate motif in British literature and Hollywood movies. It aims to explain our ongoing fascination with the maritime outlaw, focuses on how a text’s cultural background influences the pirate’s portrayal, and pays special attention to the aspect of gender. Through the intertextual references in Pirates of the Caribbean, the motif’s development is always tied to Disney’s postmodern movie series.
Interdisciplinary Approaches to Authorship and Meaning
Volume Editor:
In Biblical Exegesis without Authorial Intention? Interdisciplinary Approaches to Authorship and Meaning, Clarissa Breu offers interdisciplinary contributions to the question of the author in biblical interpretation with a focus on “death of the author” theory. The wide range of approaches represented in the volume comprises mostly postmodern theory (e. g. Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Paul de Man, Julia Kristeva and Gilles Deleuze), but also the implied author and intentio operis. Furthermore, psychology, choreography, reader-response theories and anthropological studies are reflected. Inasmuch as the contributions demonstrate that biblical studies could utilize significantly more differentiated views on the author than are predominantly presumed within the discipline, it is an invitation to question the importance and place attributed to the author.
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Varisco’s Culture Still Matters: Notes from the Field is on the relationship between ethnographic fieldwork and the culture concept in the ongoing debate over the future of anthropology, drawing on the history of both concepts. Despite being the major social science that offers a methodology and tools to understand diverse cultures worldwide, scholars within and outside anthropology have attacked this field for all manner of sins, including fostering colonialism and essentializing others. This book revitalizes constructive debate of this vibrant field’s history, methods and contributions, drawing on the author’s ethnographic experience in Yemen. It covers complicated theoretical concepts about culture and their critiques in readable prose, accessible to students and interested social scientists in other fields.

With forewords from Bryan S. Turner and Anouar Majid.
The Butcher Boy, Breakfast on Pluto and Winterwood
Volume Editor:
Few contemporary Irish writers have been more attuned to the historical influence of partition on Ireland’s culture and literary representation than Patrick McCabe. In the recent context of Brexit, his work produced in the late nineteen nineties and early two-thousands carries considerable poignancy, especially in relation to the Catholic Church, gender roles and persistence of a history of violence in Ireland. This volume attends to three novels, The Butcher Boy, Breakfast on Pluto and Winterwood as an emblematic representation of Ireland in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Contributors are: K. Brisley Brennan, Aisling Cormack, Flore Coulouma, Luke Gibbons, Lindsay Haney, Barbara Hoffmann, Jennifer Keating, James F. Knapp, Colin MacCabe, Kristina Varade.
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Qui se cache derrière le « Je » et ses mensonges ? Écriture du fantasme plonge au cœur de la littérature contemporaine de langue française pour désigner comme fantasmes, au sens psychanalytique, les projections imaginaires qui peuplent les romans de Jean-Philippe Toussaint et Tanguy Viel. Prenant appui sur la définition du fantasme de Sigmund Freud et sur l’identification de sa logique par Jacques Lacan, la fiction fantasmatique est envisagée comme un moyen pour un narrateur à l’identité diffractée de faire récit. Cette nouvelle logique narrative est étudiée à la lumière des dispositifs modernes de l’image – photographie et cinéma, essentiellement –, dont Toussaint et Viel s’inspirent pour déconstruire les cadres représentatifs traditionnels et interroger le rapport entre identification et récit aujourd’hui.

Who lies behind the "I" and its deceitful nature? Écriture du fantasme delves into the heart of contemporary French-language literature to psychoanalytically designate as fantasies the imaginary projections which populate the novels of Jean-Philippe Toussaint and Tanguy Viel. Fantasized fiction is regarded as a means for a narrator with a diffracted identity to exist through the narration, based on how Sigmund Freud defined fantasy and on how Jacques Lacan deciphers its logic. This new sense of narration is studied through modern imagery devices – essentially photography and cinema. Toussaint and Viel use these as inspiration to deconstruct the traditional representative frameworks and question the current correlation between identification and narrative.
‘No One Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Forgotten’
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Can it be ever possible to write about war in a work of fiction? asks a protagonist of one of Makine’s strongly metafictional and intensely historical novels. Helena Duffy’s World War II in Andreï Makine’s Historiographic Metafiction redirects this question at the Franco-Russian author’s fiction itself by investigating its portrayal of Soviet involvement in the struggle against Hitler. To write back into the history of the Great Fatherland War its unmourned victims — invalids, Jews, POWs, women or starving Leningraders — is the self-acknowledged ambition of a novelist committed to the postmodern empowerment of those hitherto silenced by dominant historiographies. Whether Makine succeeds at giving voice to those whose suffering jarred with the triumphalist narrative of the war concocted by Soviet authorities is the central concern of Duffy’s book.