British & Irish Literature

From Blair to Brexit

Edited by Sara Upstone, Kingston University, London, UK & Peter Ely, independent scholar, UK Examining how British writers are addressing the urgent matter of how we form and express group belonging in the 21st century, this book examines the most challenging issues for community in Britain in the past five years, notably Brexit and the Covid-19 crisis. Exploring questions of identity and local and national belonging, this book discusses works from contemporary British writers including Ali Smith, John McGregor, Bernadine Evaristo, Jonathan Coe and Sarah Hall, among others, to demonstrate some of the resources that literature can offer for a renewed understanding of identity and community.

UK November 2022 • US November 2022 • 224 pages • 10 bw illus HB 9781350244023 • £85.00 / $115.00 ePub 9781350244047 • £76.50 / $105.78 ePdf 9781350244030 • £76.50 / $105.78 Bloomsbury Academic

Politics and Literature at the Dawn of World War II

James A. W. Heffernan, Dartmouth College, USA

The first comprehensive study of how the outbreak of the Second World War shaped the literary work of American, English, and European writers during the first years of the war, before its outcome was known, this book shows how the imminence and outbreak of the Second World War ignited the imaginations of writers ranging from Ernest Hemingway, W.H. Auden, and James Joyce to Bertolt Brecht, Evelyn Waugh, Henry Green, and Irène Némirovsky.

UK December 2022 • US December 2022 • 224 pages • 2 bw illus HB 9781350324954 • £85.00 / $115.00 ePub 9781350324978 • £76.50 / $105.78 ePdf 9781350324961 • £76.50 / $105.78 Bloomsbury Academic 'Invisible Music', Prose and the Art of Canorography

Polly Paulusma, independent scholar From her unique standpoint as singer-songwriterscholar, Polly Paulusma examines the influences of Carter’s 1960s folk singing, unknown until now, on her prose writing. Recent critical attention has focused on Carter’s relationship with folk/fairy tales, but this book uses a newly available archive containing Carter’s folk song notes, books, LPs and recordings to change the debate, proving Carter performed folk songs. Placing this archive alongside the album sleeve notes Carter wrote and her diaries and essays, it reimagines Carter’s prose as a vehicle for the singing voice, and reveals a writing style imbued with ‘songfulness’ informed by her singing praxis.

UK December 2022 • US December 2022 • 256 pages • 28 bw illus HB 9781350296282 • £85.00 / $115.00 ePub 9781350296305 • £76.50 / $105.78 ePdf 9781350296299 • £76.50 / $105.78 Series: Bloomsbury Studies in Global Women’s Writing • Bloomsbury Academic World English

The Intersection of Class and Space in British Post-War Writing

Kitchen Sink Aesthetics

Simon Lee Centering on the British kitchen sink realism movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s, specifically its documentation of the built environment’s influence on class consciousness, this book highlights the settings of a variety of novels, plays, and films, offering new ways of thinking about how spatial representation in cultural production sustains or intervenes in the process of social stratification.

UK January 2023 • US January 2023 • 272 pages HB 9781350193093 • £85.00 / $115.00 ePub 9781350193116 • £76.50 / $105.78 ePdf 9781350193109 • £76.50 / $105.78 Bloomsbury Academic

The Bloomsbury Handbook to Agatha Christie

Edited by Mary Anna Evans, University of Oklahoma, USA & J.C. Bernthal, University of Suffolk, UK The first academic companion to the work of Agatha Christie, this book provides an expansive survey of contemporary scholarship on her. Writing on topics as varied as ecocriticism and the anthropocene, popular modernism, middlebrow fiction, queer theory, feminism, crime and the state, and more, contributors address the spectrum of Christie’s work.

UK October 2022 • US October 2022 • 424 pages • 18 b/w images HB 9781350212473 • £130.00 / $175.00 ePub 9781350212497 • £117.00 / $162.12 ePdf 9781350212480 • £117.00 / $162.12 Series: Bloomsbury Handbooks • Bloomsbury Academic

Ian Fleming and the Politics of Ambivalence

Ian Kinane, University of Roehampton, UK Previously considered an avowed nationalist, this book explores how Ian Fleming’s writing and his representational politics contain a resistance to imperial rhetoric. Through an examination of Fleming’s Jamaica-set novels Live and Let Die, Dr No, The Man with the Golden Gun, his short stories and the film adaptations, Ian Kinane reveals Fleming's ambivalence to British decolonisation and to wider Anglo-Caribbean relations. Offering crucial insight into the public imagination during the birth of modern British multiculturalism, Kinane connects the novels to contemporary conservative concerns regarding migration and the ways that the misrepresentation of cultures have led to fraught global geo-political relations.

UK October 2022 • US October 2022 • 224 pages PB 9781350235380 • £28.99 / $39.95 Previously published in HB 9781350128965 ePub 9781350128989 • £76.50 / $105.78 ePdf 9781350128972 • £76.50 / $105.78 Bloomsbury Academic