Literature

This book explores the relations between literature and biography in France by tracing their history since the emergence of the two terms during the 18th century. This is when term ‘biographie’ first saw the light of day in the French language, and the word ‘littérature’ began to acquire its modern sense of writing marked by an aesthetic character. Arguing that the ‘idea of literature’ is inherently open to revision and contestation, the book examines the way in which biographically orientated texts have been engaged in turning literature into a question about its own definition. At the same time, it tracks the evolving forms of biographical writing in French culture, and proposes a reappraisal of biography that takes account not only of its forms, but also of its functions. The capacity of biography to intervene in debates about definitions of the literary argues for the need to consider this functional dimension of biographical writing. Although the study has important theoretical implications as regards both biography and the literary, it is intended first and foremost as a history, offering an account of the development of French literature through a dual focus on the question of literature and its relations with biography, and tracing the changing ideas about literature and chronicling the different forms taken by biography in the period. It includes readings of major authors and texts in the light of these concerns, from Rousseau to the ‘life-writing’ of contemporary authors such as Michon and Roubaud. Other authors discussed include Mme de Staël, Victor Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, Barbey d'Aurevilly, Baudelaire, Nerval, Mallarmé, Schwob, Proust, Gide, Leiris, Sartre, Genet, Barthes, and Laporte.

The first comprehensive inquiry into the origin and growth of regional language cinema in India, this book traces the development of Kannada cinema from the 1940s to the new millennium. Focusing on the role regional language cinema plays, the book examines the conflict between the ‘region’ and the ‘nation’ in the regional consciousness. It explores how its origin in a princely state under indirect British rule had an impact on the shaping of Kannada cinema, and inquiries into the effect of the linguistic reorganization of the states in the 1950s upon regional identity. Exploring the influence of national developments—from the ascendancy of Indira Gandhi in the 1960s to economic liberalization in the 1990s—on regional identity, the book provides first-time assessments of the Kannada star Rajkumar as a regional icon and the changing meaning of Bangalore city to the Kannada-speaking public.

Exemplifying a new methodology identified as “animality studies,” which focuses on constructions of animality at specific historical and cultural moments without the explicit emphasis on animal advocacy that is often found in animal studies, this book explores animality at the turn of the twentieth century in the United States. At that moment, shifts in what it meant to be both “human” and “animal” became crucial in terms of producing new ways of thinking about a wide range of human behaviors, including homosexuality, labor exploitation, and the lynching of black men. The discourse of “the jungle” was born at the confluence of Darwin and Freud; once human behavior could be explained, supposedly, by animal instincts that were naturally violent in the name of survival and heterosexual in the name of reproduction. Literary and cultural texts at the turn of the twentieth century addressed the “beast within,” shifting away from a Protestant Christian formulation of a devilish inner beast that was sinful and violent. This book’s central argument is that Darwinist-Freudian formulations of the human animal were often contested rather than reinforced by writers such as Jack London, Henry James and Frank Norris and cultural events such as a circus elephant publicly electrocuted at Coney Island and the Scopes “Monkey Trial.” This book reveals how the figure of the animal evolved in U.S. literature and culture at the turn of the century, particularly through the birth of the jungle: a discourse that continues to enable enduring justifications of homophobia, economic exploitation, and racism in the United States and beyond.

This book examines the relation between Blake's text and the visual designs in The Four Zoas, one of the most important works in Blake's oeuvre. It uncovers a Blake deeply engaged with the cultural discourses of his time, in profound dialogue with Swedenborg, Locke, and Young. In the course of this conversation, Blake anatomizes a remarkable variety of cultural practices (including religion, science, and art) designed to achieve transcendence. He focuses in particular on the fate of the body in cultures of transcendence, developing perhaps the first theory of sexual sublimation. Blake's radical visual and verbal strategies in this poem are part of an attempt to defer the movement of transcendence, long enough for the reader to see the warring elements of the fallen world as the dismembered body of humanity.

Starting from the botanical crazes inspired by Linnaeus in the 18th century, and exploring the variations it spawned — natural history, landscape architecture, polemical battles over botany's prurience — this book offers a fresh reading of the courtship novel from Jane Austen to George Eliot and Henry James. By reanimating a cultural understanding of botany and sexuality that we have lost, it provides a new and powerful account of the novel's role in scripting sexualized courtship, and illuminates how the novel and popular science together created a cultural figure, the blooming girl, that stood at the center of both fictional and scientific worlds.

Animals and ‘wild men’ are everywhere in medieval culture, but their role in illuminating medieval constructions of humanity has never been properly explored. This book gathers together a large number of themes and subjects, including the Bestiary, heraldry, and hunting, and examines them as part of a unified discourse about the body and its creative transformations. ‘Human’ and ‘animal’ are terms traditionally opposed to one another, but their relationship must always be characterized by a dynamic instability. Humans scout into the animal zone, manipulating and reshaping ‘animal’ bodies in accordance with their own social imaginings — yet these forays are risky since they lead to questions about what humanity consists in, and whether it can ever be forfeited. Studies of birds, foxes, ‘game’ animals, the wild man, and shape-shifting women fill out the argument of this book, which examines works by Chaucer, Gower, the Gawain-poet, and Henryson, as well as showing that many less familiar texts have rewards that an informed reading can reveal.

This book argues that poetry played a major role in the mediation of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars to the British public, and that the wars had a significant impact on poetic practices and theories in the Romantic period. It examines a wide range of writers, both canonical (Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Byron) and non-canonical (Smith, Southey, Scott, and Hemans), and locates their work within the huge amount of war poetry published in newspapers and magazines. It shows that poetry was a crucial form through which what were seen as the first modern or ‘total’ wars were imagined in Britain and that it was central to the cultural and political debates over the conflict with France. While the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars compelled poets to re-examine their roles, it was poetry itself which produced a major transformation of the imagining of war that would be influential throughout the 19th century.