Contemporary Literature

Creaturely Forms in Contemporary Literature

Narrating the War Against Animals

Dominic O'Key Through close readings of works by W. G. Sebald, J. M. Coetzee and Mahasweta Devi, this book explores how contemporary authors are rethinking the relations between humans and other animals in an age of mass extinction and mass over-production. In doing so, it shows how contemporary literature mediates and contests, but also reimagines, the relations between humans and other animals. Introducing the category of the ‘creaturely’ to denote a shared space between the human and the nonhuman, it draws from theoretical work on the human/animal distinction in Posthumanist and Postcolonial Studies to develop an account of how literature thematically and formally dismantles human exceptionalism. It argues that there are literary texts which turn towards animals in order to imagine less violent ways of being human, calling these texts ‘creaturely forms’ and arguing that the authors it examines - Sebald, Coetzee and Mahasweta - develop creaturely forms of storytelling. Psychoanalytic Queer and Trans Theories

Chris Coffman Working at the intersection of psychoanalytic, queer, and transgender theories, this book argues for the need to read Lacanian psychoanalysis through a queer and trans-positive framework. In so doing, challenges the dimensions of fantasy at play in efforts to insist on the continued validity of the binary gender system. Targeting the Lacanian concept of “sexual difference” - that desire is structured through the difference between masculine and feminine - it argues that this idea is not transhistorical, as orthodox Lacanians claim, but rather a historically contingent fantasy. As such, it argues that psychoanalytic queer theorists need to go beyond this fantasy to register truly the full range of sexualities and modes of embodiment.

UK January 2022 • US January 2022 • 256 pages HB 9781350200005 • £85.00 / $115.00 ePub 9781350200029 • £76.50 / $100.32 ePdf 9781350200012 • £76.50 / $100.32 Bloomsbury Academic

UK January 2022 • US January 2022 • 216 pages • 4 b/w illus HB 9781350189621 • £85.00 / $115.00 ePub 9781350189645 • £76.50 / $100.32 ePdf 9781350189638 • £76.50 / $100.32 Series: New Horizons in Contemporary Writing • Bloomsbury Academic

Rereading Empathy

Edited by Emily Johansen, Texas A&M University, USA & Alissa G. Karl, SUNY Brockport, USA If we all had more skill with empathy, so the claim goes, we would all be better citizens. But what does it mean to empathize with others? How do we develop this skill? And what does it offer that older models of solidarity don’t? Rereading Empathy takes up these questions, examining the uses to which calls for empathy are put in the face of ever expanding economic and social precarity. The contributors draw on a variety of historical and contemporary literary and cultural archives to illustrate the work that empathy is supposed to enable—and to query alternative models of building collective futures.

UK June 2022 • US June 2022 • 256 pages HB 9781501376856 • £90.00 / $120.00 ePub 9781501376863 • £83.60 / $108.00 ePdf 9781501376870 • £83.60 / $108.00 Bloomsbury Academic

Marilynne Robinson, Theologian of the Ordinary

Andrew Cunning, Independent Scholar, UK This book posits that Robinson’s widely celebrated novels and essays are best understood as emerging from a foundational theology that has ‘the Ordinary’ as its source. Providing an analysis of Robinson’s published output, a synthesis of the unstudied and unpublished notebooks, letters and drafts from Yale University's Robinson archive and an original interview with Robinson, Andrew Cunning constructs an authentically Robinsonian theology that is at once distinctly American and conversant with key continental thinkers, including Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud and Levinas. Arguing that ‘the Ordinary’ demands an artistic response, this book reads Robinson’s fiction as her theological response to the surplus of meaning in ordinary experience.

UK June 2022 • US June 2022 • 208 pages PB 9781501371349 • £28.99 / $39.95 Previously published in HB 9781501358999 ePub 9781501359002 • £76.69 / $99.00 ePdf 9781501359019 • £76.69 / $99.00 Bloomsbury Academic

Neo-Victorianism, Empathy and Reading

Muren Zhang, East China Normal University, China Calling upon the writings of Margaret Atwood, Julian Barnes, Graeme Macrae Burnet and Sarah Waters this book examines the ethics of the textreader relationship in neo-Victorian literature, focusing upon the role played by empathy in this engagement. Bringing together recent cultural and theoretical research on narrative temporality, empathy and affect, Muren Zhang presents neo-Victorian literature as a genre defined by its experimentation with ‘empathetic narrative’. Broken down into themes such as voyeurism, shame, nausea, space and place, Zhang argues that such literature pushes the reader to critically reflect upon their reading expectations, strategies, and their wider ethical responsibilities.

UK April 2022 • US April 2022 • 224 pages • 3 bw illus HB 9781350135598 • £85.00 / $115.00 ePub 9781350135611 • £76.50 / $100.32 ePdf 9781350135604 • £76.50 / $100.32 Bloomsbury Academic

Noir in the North

Genre, Politics and Place

Edited by Stacy Gillis, Newcastle University, UK & Gunnthorunn Gudmundsdottir, University of Iceland, Iceland What is often termed 'Nordic Noir' has dominated detective fiction, film and television internationally for over two decades. But what are the parameters of this genre, both historically and geographically? What is noirish and what is northern about Nordic noir? Divided into 4 sections – Gender and Sexuality, Space and Place, Politics and Crime, and Genre and Genealogy – the essays in this book deepen our critical understanding of noir by demonstrating, for example, Nordic noir's connection to fin-de-siècle literatures and to mid-century interior design by considering the function of landscape and aesthetics, and by investigating the function of the state in crime fiction.

UK April 2022 • US April 2022 • 280 pages PB 9781501369285 • £28.99 / $39.95 Previously published in HB 9781501342868 ePub 9781501342875 • £83.60 / $108.00 ePdf 9781501342882 • £83.60 / $108.00 Bloomsbury Academic