Literature

This book argues that the literature of the early twentieth-century in England and Ireland was deeply organized around a reckoning with grievous violence, imagined as intimate, direct, and often transformative. The book aims to excavate and amplify a consistent feature of this literature, which is that its central operations (formal as well as thematic) emerge specifically in reference to violence. The book offers a variety of new terms and paradigms for reading violence in literary works, most centrally the concepts it names “enchanted and disenchanted violence.” In addition to defining key aspects of literary violence in the period, including the notion of “violet hour,” the book explores three major historical episodes: dynamite violence and anarchism in the nineteenth century, which provided a vibrant, new consciousness about explosion, sensationalism, and the limits of political meaning in the act of violence; the turbulent events consuming Ireland in the first thirty years of the century, including the Rising, the War of Independence, and the Civil War, all of which play a vital role in defining the literary corpus; and the 1930s build-up to WWII, including the event that most enthralled Europe in these years, the Spanish Civil War. These historical upheavals provide the imaginative and physical material for a re-reading of four canonical writers (Eliot, Conrad, Yeats, and Woolf), understood not only as including violence in their works, but as generating their primary styles and plots out of its deformations. Included also in this panorama are a host of other works, literary and non-literary, including visual culture, journalism, popular novels, and other modernist texts.

Where previous studies of ‘Augustanism’ have concentrated largely upon political concerns, this book explores the translation of the Roman Augustan aesthetic into a vernacular equivalent by English neoclassical poets and does so through the analysis of translations. It has its genesis in the claim made implicitly by Dryden at the conclusion of his Virgil that he had given English poetry the kind of refinement in language and style that Virgil had given the Latin. The opening chapter explores the mediation of the Augustan aesthetic to the early Renaissance by way of the De Arte Poetica of the neo Latin Renaissance poet Vida, represented here in the Augustan version of Pitt. The second chapter charts early English engagements with the classical inheritance before moving on to its chief focus, Dryden's relation to his early predecessors in the refinement of the heroic couplet, Denham and Waller, and the establishment of the full Augustan aesthetic represented in Dryden's Virgil. The third and fourth chapters consider the effect of the Augustan aesthetic upon the translation of silver Latin poets, concentrating on Dryden's Persius and Juvenal, Rowe's Lucan and Pope's Statius and finally on the climactic Augustan achievement, Pope's Homer. The distinguishing strengths of Augustan poetic artistry are shown to advantage in a brief epilogue juxtaposing Augustan and modern versions.

The book describes and analyses the condition of autobiographical writing in Britain during the Romantic period. As well as chapter-length studies of major autobiographical works by Coleridge, Byron, and Lamb, it provides a wide-ranging account of the rapidly expanding field of published self-writing during the period. The book also demonstrates that the category of ‘autobiography’ emerged in the literary public sphere during these years, and that instances of autobiographical writing need to be read in relation to the conditions under which they were circulated and read. Part I deals with the emergence of a sense of genre: the idea of autobiography, as it made its way into the literary environment. Part II examines how the anxieties and restrictions attendant upon the idea of self-writing are reflected in published texts, which present themselves as autobiographies. Part III focuses on readings of autobiographical works, exploring some examples of their representations of the situation of self-writing, and considering what sort of readings are involved when we interpret a given text as an autobiography. Overall, the book emphasizes the uncertain and contested transactions between Romantic autobiographical writing and the literary public sphere.

This book demonstrates that ‘the awkward age’ formed a fault-line in Victorian female experience, an unusual phase in which restlessness, self-interest, and rebellion were possible. Tracing evolving treatments of female adolescence though a host of long-forgotten women's fictions, the book reveals that representations of the girl in popular women's literature importantly anticipated depictions of the feminist in the fin de siècle New Woman writing; conservative portrayals of girls' hopes, dreams, and subsequent frustrations helped clear a literary and cultural space for the New Woman's ‘awakening’ to disaffected consciousness. The book thus both historicises the evolution and mythic appeal of the female adolescent and works to receive suggestive exchanges between apparently diverse female literary traditions.

While everyone knows that the nineteenth-century novel is obsessed with gaffes, lapses, and blunders, who could have predicted that these would have so important a structural role to play in the novel and its rise? Who knew that the novel in fact relies on its characters’ mistakes for its structural coherence, for its authority, for its form? Drawing simultaneously on the terms of narrative theory, sociology, and psychoanalysis, this book examines the necessary relation between social and literary form in the nineteenth-century novel as it is expressed at the site of the represented social mistake (eating peas with your knife, wearing the wrong thing, talking out of turn, etc.). Through close and careful readings of novels by Flaubert, Eliot, James, and others, this book shows that the novel achieves its coherence at the level of character, plot, and narration not in spite but because of the social mistake.

Balzac's reputation is as a novelist. But short stories make up over half La Comédie humaine, in addition to scores of other tales and articles. Short forms appear early in Balzac's output, and shape his work throughout his career. This book looks at the whole of this corpus, at the nature of short fiction, and at how Balzac's novels developed from his stories — at the links between literary genesis and genre. It explores the roles of short fiction in Balzac' s creation, its part in producing effects of virtuality and perspective, and reflects ultimately on the relationship between brevity and length in La Comédie humaine.

What happens when philosophy and literature meet? What is at stake when the text of a so-called single author begins to speak in two languages, now the language of theoretical reflexion, now the language of narrative fiction? And what relation does writing have to the limit that defines it, but, by exposing it to the limitlessness that lies beyond it, also threatens its possibility? These are some of the questions raised by three of the most provocative and influential French writers of the 20th century: Georges Bataille (1897-1962), Pierre Klossowski (1905-2001), and Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003). Examining all three together for the first time, this pioneering study explores their response to a double challenge: that of assuming the burden of philosophy whilst at the same time affirming the shadows, spirits, and spectres that go under the name of literature. It considers in detail the philosophical and literary heritage shared by all three writers (Sade, Hegel, and Nietzsche), and analyses in turn both the philosophical writing and literary output of all three authors, paying particular attention to Bataille's Histoire de l'œil, Le Bleu du ciel, and Madame Edwarda; Klossowski's Les Lois de l'hospitalité, and Blanchot's Le Très-Haut and Le Dernier Homme.

This book provides an examination of Baudelaire's art criticism and its relationship with his creative writing. It is the first book in English to treat in one volume the diverse aspects of the subject: the principal aesthetic ideas; the importance of Delacroix, Boudin, Meryon, Guys, and Manet; the essays on laughter and caricature; and the language and rhetoric of the Salons and other critical writings. The title reflects Baudelaire's conviction, which emphasizes in relation to Delacroix, Daumier, Guys, and Wagner, that all art, whether it is painting, poetry or music, springs from the memory of the artist and speaks to the memory of the consumer of that art. This idea, exemplified in his own creative writing, extends to criticism itself, which is seen primarily as a phenomenon of recognition, and it is that sense of recognition that the author has sought to emphasize throughout.