Literary Theory

Prose Pictures and Fictional Recollection

Leonid Bilmes, HSE University Exploring the relationship between ekphrasis, memory and narrative in modern and contemporary fiction after Proust, this book considers how Vladimir Nabokov, WG Sebald, Lydia Davis, Ali Smith and Ben Lerner have all variously employed and reshaped Proust’s way of depicting memory in their fiction.

UK January 2023 • US January 2023 • 256 pages • 10 bw illus HB 9781350336834 • £8500 / $11500 ePub 9781350336858 • £7650 / $10578 ePdf 9781350336841 • £7650 / $10578 Bloomsbury Academic

Tears, Liquids and Porous Bodies in Literature Across the Ages

Niobe’s Siblings

Norbert Lennartz Focusing on the precarious relationship between porosity and its opposite - closure, containment and stoniness - this book argues that Romeo’s, Pamela’s or Harley’s tears are neither British nor Italian excretions, but markers that indicate the extent to which different societies and epochs respond to and tolerate bodily porosity From this new angle, literary history turns out to be a meandering narrative in which ‘female’ porosity and ‘manly’ stoniness clash, in which their relationship is constantly re-negotiated and in which effusive and 'feminine' genres (letters, poetic effusions, streams of consciousness) are pitted against stony and astringent forms of masculinity (epitaphs, sonnets, stanzas etymologically seen as architectural rooms) Taking in works from writers as diverse as Aphra Behn, William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, Charlotte Bronte, John Keats, TS Eliot and DH Lawrence, this book spans approximately 300 years and unpacks how bodily liquidity, porosity and petrification recur as a pattern and underlie the chequered history of the body and genders

UK March 2023 • US March 2023 • 280 pages • 8 bw illus PB 9781350187115 • £2899 / $3995 Previously published in HB 9781350186965 ePub 9781350186989 • £7650 / $10578 ePdf 9781350186972 • £7650 / $10578 Bloomsbury Academic

Literary Theories of Uncertainty

Edited by Mette Leonard Hoeg, University of Oxford, UK As the first study to consider the uncertainty of meaning as it relates to contemporary literature and literary theory, Literary Theories of Uncertainty demonstrates how this notion functions both as literary feature and literary device in twentiethcentury Modernist texts Grounded in Derridian concepts of uncertainty and calling upon theories of interpretation, this text is broken down into three sections: poststructuralist legacies of uncertainty; life-writing and uncertainty; and contemporary literary uncertainties

Literary Theories of Uncertainty collates original and diverse discussions by some of the most inquiring minds of literary, cultural and critical theory to map out the contours of the theory of uncertainty Nikhil Govind, Head of the Manipal Centre for Humanities, Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE), Karnataka, India. The book closely reads the conceptual and narrative intricacies of the epic through the four foundational terms of dharma (law), artha (worldliness), kama (desire) and moksha (freedom), offering riveting insights on the moral psychology of Indic civilization Drawing from scholarly forays in philology, history, religious studies, and pre-modern Asian traditions, this critical attention by a literary scholar to the Mahabharata's own narrative impulses and the internal vigor of select episodes brings to fore the gripping dilemmas that animate the epic

UK October 2022 • US October 2022 • 200 pages HB 9789393715814 • £8500 / $11500 ePub 9789393715951 • £7650 / $10578 ePdf 9789393715852 • £7650 / $10578 Bloomsbury Academic India World All Languages (excluding India/Indian subcontinent)

Theory in the "Post" Era

A Vocabulary for the 21st-Century Conceptual Commons

Edited by Christian Moraru, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, USA, Andrei Terian, Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania & Alexandru Matei, Transilvania University of Brasov, Romania Since the Cold War’s end and especially in the third millennium, theorists have been exploring the aftermath—and sometimes the “after,” pure and simple—of whole paradigms, the crisis or “passing” of anthropocentrism, of an entire ontological and cultural “condition,” and the corresponding rise of an antagonist model It is no coincidence, the contributors to this volume argue, that this “post” moment is also a time when theory is practiced as a world genre Perhaps more than other humanist constituencies, today’s theorists work and belong in a theory commons that is transnational if still “uneven” economically, politically, and otherwise

UK March 2023 • US March 2023 • 376 pages PB 9781501381973 • £2899 / $3995 Previously published in HB 9781501358951 ePub 9781501358968 • £7934 / $10800 ePdf 9781501358975 • £7934 / $10800 Bloomsbury Academic

UK March 2023 • US March 2023 • 224 pages • 6 bw illus PB 9781350259706 • £2899 / $3995 Previously published in HB 9781350146044 ePub 9781350146068 • £7650 / $10578 ePdf 9781350146051 • £7650 / $10578 Bloomsbury Academic