Bøger i Cambridge Critical Concepts serien

Decadence and Literature explains how the concept of decadence has developed since Roman times into a major cultural trope with broad explanatory power. No longer just a term of opprobrium for mannered art or immoral behaviour, decadence today describes complex cultural and social responses to modernity in all its forms.

"Whereas previous books have explored how literature depicts or discusses scientific concepts, this book argues that literature is a technology. It shows how literature has been shaped by technological revolutions, and reveals the essential work that literature has done in helping to uncover the consequences of new technologies"--

"Literature and Medicine considers how these two dynamic fields have crossed over, and how they have developed alongside one another. It covers a broad spectrum of conceptual, thematic, theoretical, and methodological approaches that provide a solid foundation for understanding a vibrant interdisciplinary field"--

Diaspora is an ancient term that gained broad new significance in the twentieth century. At its simplest, diaspora refers to the geographic dispersion of a people from a common originary space to other sites. It pulls together ideas of people, movement, memory, and home, but also troubles them. In this volume, established and newer scholars provide fresh explorations of diaspora for twenty-first century literary studies. The volume re-examines major diaspora origin stories, theorizes diaspora through its conceptual intimacies and entanglements, and analyzes literary and visual-cultural texts to reimagine the genres, genders, and genealogies of diaspora. Literary mappings move across Africa, the Americas, Middle East, Asia, Europe, and Pacific Islands, and through Atlantic, Pacific, Mediterranean, Gulf, and Indian waters. Chapters reflect on diaspora as a key concept for migration, postcolonial, global comparative race, environmental, gender, and queer studies. The volume is thus an accessible and provocative account of diaspora as a vital resource for literary studies in a bordered world.

War and Literary Studies poses two main questions: First, how has war shaped the field of literary studies? And second, when scholars today study the literature of war what are the key concepts in play? Seeking to complement the extant scholarship, this volume adopts a wider and more systematic approach as it directs our attention to the relation between warfare and literary studies as a field of knowledge. What are the key characteristics of the language of war? Of gender in war? Which questions are central to the way we engage with war and trauma or war and sensation? In which ways were prominent 20th century theories such as critical theory, French postwar theory, postcolonial theory shaped by war? How might emergent concepts such as 'revolution,' 'the anthropocene' or 'capitalism' inflect the study of war and literature?

What does it mean to write in and about sound? How can literature, seemingly a silent, visual medium, be sound-bearing? This volume considers these questions by attending to the energy generated by the sonic in literary studies from the late nineteenth century to the present. Sound, whether understood as noise, music, rhythm, voice or vibration, has long shaped literary cultures and their scholarship. In original chapters written by leading scholars in the field, this book tunes in to the literary text as a site of vocalisation, rhythmics and dissonance, as well as an archive of soundscapes, modes of listening, and sound technologies. Sound and Literature is unique for the breadth and plurality of its approach, and for its interrogation and methodological mapping of the field of literary sound studies.

"Nature and Literary Studies supplies a broad and accessible overview of one of the most important and contested keywords in modern literary studies. Drawing together the work of leading scholars of a variety of critical approaches, historical periods, and cultural traditions, the book examines nature's philosophical, theological, and scientific origins in literature, as well as how literary representations of nature evolved in response to colonialism, industrialization, and new forms of scientific knowledge. Surveying nature's diverse applications in twenty-first-century literary studies and critical theory, the volume seeks to reconcile nature's ideological baggage with its fundamental role in fostering appreciation of nonhuman being and agency. Including chapters on wilderness, pastoral, gender studies, critical race theory, and digital literature, the book is a key resource for students and professors seeking to understand nature's role in the environmental humanities"--

This book is for literary scholars working across a range of periods who are interested in the ways in which literature interacts with and shapes our notions of globalization and global phenomena. It will appeal predominantly to contemporary and twentieth century scholars and students, but also people studying earlier periods.

Appealing to research students and specialist scholars, this book brings fresh perspectives to many of Surrealism's enduring critical concepts and experimental practices by placing them within an expanded historical and geographical framework. The book's interdisciplinary focus makes it relevant for a range of arts and humanities disciplines.

This book offers insight into the history of ideas behind magical realism by exploring its development in regions across the globe and providing new perspectives on primitivism, ethnography, and selfhood. It will appeal to graduate students and researchers of postcolonial fiction, transnational literary developments, and magical realism.

The essays in this volume detail the history of literary representations of climate and climate's influence on literature. They explore and challenge the idea, fostered since the Enlightenment development of climate science, that climate belongs to the realm of science, somehow separate from literature and the realm of the imagination.

Terrorism has long been part of our world, and the lack of understanding of its history is a major global policy problem. This book explores how literature has represented terrorism from the Renaissance to the present and what it can teach us about the issues we face.

With essays that range in interest from food and race, to the foodscapes of US literature, to food comics, this volume will appeal to generalists and specialists with an interest in the burgeoning field of food and literature. Readers who peruse the New York Times and National Public Radio (NPR) sections on food, as well as scholars in food studies, will find work of interest in this collection.

Law and Literature presents an accessible new study of the many ways in which law and literature interact by providing a multi-focused history of literature's critical interest in ideas of law and justice, ranging from classical tragedy to comics, and from East Africa to Elizabethan England.

This book offers an overview of the origins of literary trauma theory, records the evolution of the concept of trauma in relation to literature, addresses the relevance of literary understandings of trauma, and examines how the concept has impacted the study of literature.

Time and Literature features twenty essays on topics from aesthetics and narratology to globalisation and queer temporalities, and showcases how time studies, often referred to as 'the temporal turn', cut across and illuminate research in every field of literature, as well as interdisciplinary approaches drawing upon history, philosophy, anthropology, and the natural sciences.

This collection provides a wide-ranging survey of where the field of literary animal studies currently stands. It will be a key resource for specialists who wish to keep current on developments in the field, and non-specialists who seek to understand how these fields have shaped the relationship between human and non-human animal life.

The Global South and Literature explores the historical, cultural and literary applications of the term applied to twenty-first-century flows of transnational cultural influence, tracing their manifestations across the Global Southern traditions of Africa, Asia and Latin America.

This volume explores a wide range of affects, affect theory, and literature to consolidate a fresh understanding of the importance of affect for literary writing. The book will be of importance to students and academics in literary studies, philosophy, media, and communication studies.

This book reviews the evolution of the concept of Orientalism as it has been explored, imagined and narrated in literature. Building upon existing scholarship, it aims to give readers a comprehensive grasp of the origins and present contours of Orientalism, and to point out future directions in this field.