8 minute read
Comparative Literature
The Monopoly of an Idea
Francis O'Gorman, University of Edinburgh, UK Unquestionable liberalism in higher education, literature, and art has led to damaging consequences. In the 20th century, what had been open-minded inquiry gradually gathered an assumption that judgment, particularly moral judgment, had no part in a university education. Without intellectual critique of liberalism, populism, crude versions of nationalism, violent versions of exclusion, and a spurning of establishments that once looked secure – all extremist positions – have become the only realistic options for taking a different view. Francis O’Gorman reassesses the topics that liberalism has made taboo and is optimistic that serious thinking can revive the virtues of what has been cast-out.
UK January 2022 • US January 2022 • 192 pages HB 9781501336799 • £20.00 / $19.95 ePub 9781501336805 • £13.80 / $17.95 ePdf 9781501336812 • £13.80 / $17.95 Bloomsbury Academic World English
Off-White
Yellowface and Chinglish by AngloAmerican Culture
Sheng-mei Ma, Michigan State University, USA Off-White interrogates seminal Anglo-American fiction and film on off-white bodies and voices. It commences with one Nobel laureate, Pearl Buck, and ends with another, Kazuo Ishiguro, almost a century later. The trajectory in between illustrates that the detective and mystery genres continue unabated their stock yellowface characters, who exude a magnetic field so powerful as to pull in Japanese anime. This universal drive to fashion a foil is ingrained in any will to power, so much so that even millennial China creates an “off-yellow,” darker-hued Orient in Huallywood films to silhouette its global ascent.
UK May 2021 • US May 2021 • 264 pages • 64 b&w images PB 9781501381478 • £28.99 / $39.95 Previously published in HB 9781501352201 ePub 9781501352188 • £27.60 / $35.95 ePdf 9781501352195 • £27.60 / $35.95 Bloomsbury Academic
Transferences
The Aesthetics and Poetics of the Therapeutic Relationship
Maren Scheurer, Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany Transferences investigates the interdisciplinary attraction between psychoanalysis and the arts by exploring the therapeutic relationship as a recurring figure. The book presents a new approach to examining psychoanalytic themes and formal devices in texts like J. M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K, Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, Peter Shaffer’s Equus, and the HBO series In Treatment. Transferences argues that psychoanalysts as well as writers and other artists are fascinated by the therapeutic relationship because it provides a unique site to negotiate the narrative and artistic underpinnings of psychoanalysis and reflect and reinvent the aesthetic and poetic potentiality of art.
UK April 2021 • US April 2021 • 336 pages PB 9781501381447 • £28.99 / $39.95 Previously published in HB 9781501352447 ePub 9781501352454 • £27.60 / $35.95 ePdf 9781501352461 • £27.60 / $35.95 Series: Psychoanalytic Horizons • Bloomsbury Academic Locations and Orientations in World Literatures
Edited by Bo G. Ekelund, Adnan Mahmutovic & Helena Wulff, Stockholm University, Sweden
This book is available through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com.
This volume explores literary works and practices in the dynamic relation between locations and orientations. Case studies demonstrate that 4 key concepts (cosmopolitan, vernacular, location, orientation) can frame analyses of different types of contemporary literary texts, allowing for distinctions not captured by other conceptual pairs like center-periphery, local-global and North-South. Expressive practices in a wide range of language areas – from Europe to the Pacific – are analyzed to show how spatiality is at stake in the cosmopolitan-vernacular dynamic.
UK November 2021 • US November 2021 • 288 pages HB 9781501374104 • £90.00 / $120.00 ePub 9781501374111 • £83.60 / $108.00 ePdf 9781501374128 • £83.60 / $108.00 Series: Cosmopolitan-Vernacular Dynamics in World Literatures • Bloomsbury Academic
Psychoanalytic Horizons
Mari Ruti, University of Toronto, Canada, Esther Rashkin, Peter L. Rudnytsky
Circumcision on the Couch
The Cultural, Psychological and Gendered Dimensions of the World's Oldest Surgery
Jordan Osserman, University College London, UK Male circumcision is a powerful site through which questions of gender, race, religion, sexuality and psyche have been negotiated throughout human history. In recent years, a movement of “intactivists” have fuelled debate internationally around their demand to keep penises “intact.” Whatever its medical consequences, the significance of male circumcision lies in realms beyond the purely organic and into the psychosocial and the fundamental problems therein. Jordan Osserman turns to ancient religious texts and more contemporary work by Lacan, Freud, Derrida, and Phillip Roth to analyze circumcision’s role in desire, one’s sense of belonging and entry into the symbolic order.
UK December 2021 • US December 2021 • 208 pages HB 9781501368165 • £90.00 / $120.00 ePub 9781501368172 • £83.60 / $108.00 ePdf 9781501368189 • £83.60 / $108.00 Series: Psychoanalytic Horizons • Bloomsbury Academic
The Writing Cure
Emma Lieber, The New School, USA Emma Lieber traces dreams, scenes, and signifiers that emerge from a decade-long analysis while critically exploring psychoanalytic theory and literary texts. By writing the moment of its termination in real time, performing the convergence of theory and life on which psychoanalysis itself balances, the volume articulates what psychoanalysis does for its patients. Lieber considers what psychoanalysis—"the talking cure"—has to do with writing, from the foundation of psychoanalysis on Freud’s distinctive writing practice to the extent to which the cure involves a new kind of self-writing.
UK November 2021 • US November 2021 • 160 pages PB 9781501370724 • £28.99 / $39.95 Previously published in HB 9781501360169 ePub 9781501360176 • £69.79 / $90.00 ePdf 9781501360183 • £69.79 / $90.00 Series: Psychoanalytic Horizons • Bloomsbury Academic
Risk, Cosmopolitanism, and Neoliberal Contemporary Life
Emily Johansen, Texas A&M University, USA Emily Johansen investigates depictions of global danger and safety in contemporary transnational fictional and popular texts—those characterized by a narrative or representational emphasis on border crossing and global interdependences. She demonstrates how these texts use risk to question and re-imagine the norms and practices of contemporary global citizenship. Beyond Safety thus brings together three of the central keywords of contemporary literary criticism of the last ten years (cosmopolitanism, precarity, neoliberalism) and shows how their intersection allows for a fuller conception of contemporary life and imagines a new global future.
UK October 2021 • US October 2021 • 208 pages HB 9781501377013 • £80.00 / $110.00 ePub 9781501377020 • £76.69 / $99.00 ePdf 9781501377037 • £76.69 / $99.00 Bloomsbury Academic
Mexican Literature as World Literature
Edited by Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, Washington University in Saint Louis, USA This is a landmark collection that studies the major interventions of Mexican literature of all genres in world literary circuits from the 16th century forward. It features a wide range of essays in dialogue with theorists and critics of the concept of world literature. Authors show how the arrival of Spanish conquerors and priests, the work of enlightenment naturalists, the rise of Mexican academies, the culture of the Mexican Revolution and Mexican neoliberalism have played major roles in the formation of world literary structures. It also features major scholars in Mexican literary studies and studies on some of Mexico’s most important authors – Sor Juana, Carlos Fuentes, Octavio Paz and Juan Rulfo.
UK October 2021 • US October 2021 • 288 pages • 2 bw illus HB 9781501374784 • £90.00 / $120.00 ePub 9781501374807 • £83.60 / $108.00 ePdf 9781501374791 • £83.60 / $108.00 Series: Literatures as World Literature • Bloomsbury Academic Addressing Untranslatable Aspects of Gender, Genre, and Ontology
Edited by Oscar Jansson, Lund University, Sweden & David LaRocca, Binghamton University, USA The notion of Geschlecht – denoting gender, genre, kinship, and more – exemplifies the most pertinent questions of the transnational and transdisciplinary structures of contemporary humanities. What happens in the transference from one language, tradition, or form to another? Combining detailed case studies of “category problems” in literature, philosophy, theatre, media, cinema, and performing arts, with excerpts from canonical texts—by field-defining thinkers such as Derrida, Malabou, Nancy, and Irigaray—the volume presents “the Geschlecht complex” as a fulcrum for any interpretive endeavor, as an invaluable mode of thought for the present and inevitable complexities of theorizing in the 21st century.
UK December 2021 • US December 2021 • 272 pages HB 9781501381928 • £90.00 / $120.00 ePub 9781501381935 • £83.60 / $108.00 ePdf 9781501381942 • £83.60 / $108.00 Bloomsbury Academic
Time Regained
World Literature and Cinema
Delia Ungureanu, Harvard University, USA Over the past 30 years, the fields of world literature and world cinema have developed on parallel but largely separate tracks, with little recognition of their underlying similarities and the ways that each can learn from the other. Time Regained does not move from literature to cinema but exists simultaneously in both fields. The 7 filmmakers selected here are themselves also writers or people with literary training, and therefore produce a new type of world cinema. Their films produce new readings of literary texts that world literature studies wouldn’t have been able to achieve with its own instruments.
UK November 2021 • US November 2021 • 336 pages • 8 page color plate section 39 b&w images HB 9781501355790 • £90.00 / $120.00 ePub 9781501355806 • £83.60 / $108.00 ePdf 9781501355813 • £83.60 / $108.00 Bloomsbury Academic
Synaesthetics
Art as Synaesthesia
Paul Gordon, University of Colorado, Boulder, USA Art as synaesthetic is proposed as a new theory and applied to various media, including works—such as movies, illustrated books, and song lyrics—that explicitly cross over into media involving the different senses. Art as synaesthetic is not limited to those "crossover" works, because even an individual poem or novel or painting calls upon different senses in creating its syn-aesthetic "meaning.” Although previous studies have often devolved into seeing obvious connection between art and synaesthesia or adamantly rejecting such a notion, Synaesthetics furthers our understanding of synaesthesia as an important, if not essential, component of artistic expression.
UK June 2021 • US June 2021 • 208 pages PB 9781501383182 • £28.99 / $39.95 Previously published in HB 9781501356797 ePub 9781501356803 • £79.76 / $103.50 ePdf 9781501356810 • £79.76 / $103.50 Bloomsbury Academic
Living Philosophy in Kierkegaard, Melville, and Others
Edward F. Mooney, Syracuse University, USA Edward F. Mooney takes us into the lived philosophies of Melville, Kierkegaard, Henry Bugbee, and others who write deeply in ways that bring philosophy and religion into the fabric of daily life, in its simplicities, crises, and moments of communion and joy. Along the way Mooney explores meditations on wilderness, on the enigma of self-deception, the role of maternal love and the pain of separations, and the pervasiveness of “difficult reality” where valuable things are presented to us under two (or more) aspects at once.
UK June 2021 • US June 2021 • 200 pages PB 9781501383120 • £28.99 / $39.95 Previously published in HB 9781501357718 ePub 9781501357725 • £79.76 / $103.50 ePdf 9781501357732 • £79.76 / $103.50 Bloomsbury Academic
