Modernism at the beach

Departing from the conventional association of modernism with the city, this book reveals the beach as a surprisingly generative setting for twentieth-century literature and art. Interweaving environmental humanities, queer and feminist theory, and cultural history, Hannah Freed-Thall offers new ...

Moments for nothing

Gabriele Schwab draws on decades of close engagement with Beckett to explore how his work speaks to our current existential anxieties and fears.

Nabokov and the real world

From award-winning literary scholar Robert Alter, a masterful exploration of how Nabokov used artifice to evoke the dilemmas, pain, and exaltation of the human conditionAdmirers and detractors of Vladimir Nabokov have viewed him as an ingenious contriver of literary games, teasing and even outsma...

Novel sounds

Novel Sounds shows how Southern writers turned to rock music and its technologies—tape, radio, vinyl—to develop the “rock novel.” Florence Dore considers the work of writers like William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and William Styron alongside Bessie Smith, Lead Belly, and Bob Dylan to uncover d...

Old schools

Old Schools marks out a modernist countertradition: a series of engagements with classical education after the rise of progressive pedagogical theories. The book shows how figures in various cultural vanguards, from Victorian Britain to 1970s Brazil, reimagined the old school to make it facilitat...

Overdetermined

Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan explores how writers, critics, teachers, and students of Indian English literatures negotiate and resist the categories through which the field is defined: ethnic, postcolonial, and Anglophone.

Perplexing plots

David Bordwell reveals how crime fiction, plays, and films made unconventional narrative mainstream. A sweeping, kaleidoscopic account written in a lively, conversational style, Perplexing Plots offers an ambitious new understanding of how popular culture has evolved over the past century.

Poetry after barbarism

Against a backdrop of xenophobic and ethnonationalist fantasies of linguistic purity, Poetry After Barbarism uncovers a stateless, polyglot poetry of resistance—the poetry of motherless tongues.

Poetry in general

Keegan Cook Finberg argues that poetry became an increasingly capacious force in the second half of the twentieth century because it could speak directly to the degradation of the social-democratic notion of the public.

Preserving fire

Texts that elucidate the poetics of a major American poet at the center of the vibrant Beat and Surrealist movements.

Psychic empire

Cate I. Reilly argues that modernist texts can be understood as critically responding to objective scientific models of the psyche, not simply illustrating their findings.

Ralph ellison and cinema

The first dedicated study of the relation between cinema and the work of African American author Ralph Ellison (1913–1994).

Reading greek australian literature through the paramythi

This book explores Greek Australian literature through its paramythic tropes and focuses on reading it as a bridge between multiculturalism and world literature.

Redlining culture

Richard Jean So draws on big data, computational methods, literary history, and close readings to offer an unprecedented analysis of racial inequality in American publishing that reveals the persistence of an extreme bias toward white authors.

Residual futures

Franz Prichard offers a pathbreaking analysis of the works wrought from Japan's intensive urbanization in the 1960s and 1970s. He maps the ways in which Japanese filmmakers, writers, photographers, and other artists came to grips with the entwined ecologies of a drastic transformation.

Samuel beckett and the arts

The volume examines the relationship between Samuel Beckett and Italian culture from an intermedial perspective. 

Seeing through abstraction

This book examines how writers of the Republican era (1912–1949) came to recognize and respond to “information.”

Silences

Special 25th anniversary edition of the landmark survey that revolutionized the view of literary history.

States of disconnect

States of Disconnect examines the breakdown of transnationalism through readings of literary texts that express aversion to pairing ideas of China and India. Adhira Mangalagiri proposes the concept of “disconnect”: a crisis of transnationalism perceptible in moments when a connection is severed, ...

Static forms

Shir Alon develops a new theory of the emergence of modernist literary forms through a series of parallel readings of Arabic and Hebrew prose.

Stitch, unstitch

In Stitch, Unstitch, Kristin Grogan argues that modernist poetry was deeply shaped by ordinary labor and the people who performed it. This relationship provoked powerful political and aesthetic experiments—and allowed modernist poets to imagine ways of life beyond the demand to earn a living.

The american poet laureate

The American Poet Laureate shows how the state has been the silent center of poetic production in the United States since World War II. It is the first history of the national poetry office, the U.S. poet laureate.

The black aerial imagination

Delali Kumavie examines how aviation and flight have shaped Black lives and the global Black cultural imagination, arguing that representations of air travel reveal the structures circumscribing Black existence.

The century

“This book is our textbook for the education we most need.” —DAN BEACHY-QUICK

The dynamic frame

Patrick Keating offers an innovative history of the aesthetics of the camera that examines how camera movement shaped the classical Hollywood style. In careful readings of dozens of films, he explores how major figures like F. W. Murnau, Orson Welles, and Alfred Hitchcock used camera movement to ...

The ex-human

Michael Bérubé explores the surprising insights of classic and contemporary works of SF that depict civilizational collapse and contemplate human extinction.

The fact of resonance

The Fact of Resonance returns to the colonial and technological contexts in which theories of the novel developed, seeking in sound an alternative premise for theorizing modernist narrative form. The book shows how the experience of reading is undergirded by the sonic.

The first book

An illuminating look at the poetic debut in twentieth-century American literary culture"We have many poets of the First Book," the poet and critic Louis Simpson remarked in 1957, describing a sense that the debut poetry collection not only launched the contemporary poetic career but also had come...

The freest speech in russia

The first English-language study of contemporary Russian poetry and its embrace of freedom—formally, thematically, and spirituallySince 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, Russian poetry has exuded a powerful awareness of freedom, both aesthetic and political. No longer confined to the cultural...

The fury archives

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, radical women’s movements and the avant-gardes were often in contact with one another. Jill Richards argues that these movements were deeply interconnected. Rather than focus on the demand for the vote, The Fury Archives turns to the daily pra...

The gentrification plot

Thomas Heise identifies and investigates the emerging “gentrification plot” in contemporary crime fiction. He considers recent novels that depict the sweeping transformations of five iconic neighborhoods—the Lower East Side, Chinatown, Red Hook, Harlem, and Bedford-Stuyvesant.

The lives of the poems and three talks

Lectures that meander, accumulate, and adjust in an echolocating search for the in-between places where poetry lives.

The living stream

Edna Longley’s second collection of essays for Bloodaxe investigates the links between Irish literature (especially contemporary poetry), Irish culture and Irish politics. The Living Stream takes its title from Yeats’s poem ‘Easter 1916’: ‘Hearts with one purpose alone/ Through summer and winter ...

The microeconomic mode

Literature, film, and television have become obsessed with the intersection of survival and choice. Jane Elliott analyzes this new and distinctive aesthetic phenomenon, which she calls the microeconomic mode, through close readings that show how an aesthetics of choice has reshaped contemporary u...

The music of time

A revelatory and deeply personal history of twentieth-century poetry by prize-winning poet and memoirist John BurnsidePoetry helps us to make sense of our world, transforming what the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam called the "noise of time" into a kind of music. The Music of Time is a unique histo...

The next instalment

The popular front novel in britain, 1934-1940

This book explores the cultural formation of the anti-fascist Popular Front strategy in Britain and proposes a new framework for reading British fiction of this period.

The prison-house of language

A groundbreaking critical introduction to Structuralism and Russian Formalism by the acclaimed literary theoristIn The Prison-House of Language, Fredric Jameson, one of the most important literary and cultural critics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, provides a thorough historical and...

The racial unfamiliar

John Brooks examines a range of abstractionist, experimental, and genre-defying works by Black writers and artists that challenge how audiences perceive and imagine race. He argues that literature and visual art that exceed the confines of familiar conceptions of Black identity can upend received...

The rise of pacific literature

Maebh Long and Matthew Hayward identify the local innovations and international networks that spurred Pacific literature’s golden age by reading crucial works against the poetry, prose, and plays on the syllabi of the University of Papua New Guinea and the University of the South Pacific.

The savage detectives reread

David Kurnick argues that the controversies surrounding Roberto Bolaño’s life and work have obscured his achievements—and that The Savage Detectives is still underappreciated for the subtlety and vitality of its portrait of collective life. He explores the novel as an epic of social structure and...

The sisterhood

The Sisterhood tells the story of how a remarkable community of Black women writers transformed American writing and cultural institutions.

The typographic imagination

Nathan Shockey examines the emergence of new forms of reading, writing, and thinking in Japan from the last years of the nineteenth century through the first decades of the twentieth. The Typographic Imagination presents a multivalent vision of the rise of mass print media and the transformation ...

The unworthy scholar from pingjiang

Xiang Kairan, who wrote under the pen name “The Unworthy Scholar from Pingjiang,” is remembered as the father of modern Chinese martial arts fiction. In this book, John Christopher Hamm shows how Xiang Kairan’s work and career offer a new lens on the transformations of fiction and popular culture...