DRAMA & PERFORMANCE STUDIES - THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE
COLLECTIONS
UK September 2026 US September 2026
256 Pages
PB 9781350400696 £28 99 / $39 95
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The Arden Shakespeare
COLLECTIONS
Arden Studies in Early Modern Drama
UK August 2026 • US August 2026
304 Pages • 15 bw illus
HB 9781350272392 • £80 00 / $110 00
PB 9781350272446 • £28 99 / $39 95
ePDF 9781350272422 • £72 00 / $99 00
ePub 9781350272415 • £72 00 / $99 00
The Arden Shakespeare
COLLECTIONS
Arden Early Modern Drama Guides
UK August 2026 • US August 2026
296 Pages • 10 bw illus
HB 9781350439252 • £85 00 / $115 00
PB 9781350439290 • £28 99 / $39 95
ePDF 9781350439269 • £76 50 / $103 50
ePub 9781350439276 • £76 50 / $103 50
The Arden Shakespeare
Popular Romance in Early Modern Amateur and Regional Drama
The Age of Mucedorus
Kim
Gilchrist, Cardiff University, UK
As one of the most popular early modern plays, Mucedorus provides new insights into romance narratives and the understudied history of amateur and regional performance. A story of a disguised prince and a rebellious princess surviving various perils in a pastoral forest, Kim Gilchrist highlights how this anonymous play encompasses the common themes through which early modern performance was most widely experienced
He explores the rich landscape of regional performance that existed after the play’s original performance in London playhouses and its later revival by Shakespeare’s King’s Men before the Stuart court As the play was widely performed outside of London by non-professionals, the book draws attention to theatrical culture independent of the capital with distinct dramaturgical characteristics This expands our understanding of the relationships between commercial, literary and elite drama, and wider national traditions of playing Gilchrist corrects the play’s critical neglect by situating its value to early modern performers and audiences The reasons for this neglect focus on the class and gendered aspects of the romance genre, which we learn was vital for so many, even as it endured literary derision
NEW IN PB
Atrocity and Early Modern Drama
Edited by Sarah Johnson, Royal Military College
of Canada & Georgina Lucas, Independent
scholar
Extreme violence scarred the early modern period Contemporary commentators grappled to find language to categorize the massacres, genocides, assassinations, enslavements, sacks, rapes, riots and regicides that characterized the period Some used ‘outrages’, others ‘cruelties’, but, significantly, the term ‘atrocity’ that we use today gained the most currency
Atrocity and Early Modern Drama intervenes in the broad field of violence and early modern drama by placing acts of atrocity at its centre In doing so, this essay collection offers the first book-length examination of atrocities and early modern English drama The volume considers atrocity in early theatre, its varied representations in contemporary Shakespeare performance, and strategies for teaching early modern atrocity drama Contributors introduce us to atrocity in the works of Shakespeare, John Fletcher, William Rowley, Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton across a range of forms including comedy, tragedy, revenge, cinematic adaptation, documentary film and contemporary theatre The collection addresses the intersections of atrocities through class, crime, gender, race and the natural world Together, the chapters interrogate how early modern English drama reflects upon and shapes understandings of the historically contingent, politically loaded and culturally contentious phenomena of atrocity
The Winter's Tale A Critical Reader
Edited by Peter Kirwan, Mary Baldwin University, USA & Todd Borlik, Purdue University,
USA
An international group of scholars reappraise The Winter ’s Tale through a series of research essays covering performance history, critical history, and new interpretations
Navigating the play’s fluctuating genre conventions, onstage spectacle and leaps across time, scholars consider how ecomateriality, radical hospitality, childhood, gender, and critical race studies shape contemporary understandings and staging of a play that defies easy definition
By charting these changing interpretive trends, readers are introduced to a rich body of scholarship which shows how the play can be used to confront the experiences of those marginalized by race, age, gender, and nationality, to place fresh attention on the economic and material structures that define the dramatic plot of the play As The Winter ’s Tale’s depictions of patriarchal violence, vulnerability, economic disparity, border crossings and exploitation continue to draw attention, this guide serves as an invaluable resource for scholars, students and audiences alike Complete with pedagogical tools including resources and strategies for approaching the play in the classroom, this Critical Reader is an essential collection of scholarship on one of Shakespeare’s most audacious experiments
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UK August 2026 US August 2026
280 Pages • 13 bw illus
HB 9781350580008 £20 00 / $27 00
ePDF 9781350580022 • £18 00 / $24 30
ePub 9781350580015 £18 00 / $24 30
Bloomsbury Academic
Vonnegut’s War
The Making of Slaughterhouse-Five
Susan Farrell, College of Charleston, USA
Banned, burned, and censored, Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five is widely regarded as one of the greatest (and most controversial) novels of the twentieth century Fusing vivid biography with popular history and close textual analysis, Vonnegut's War tells the fascinating story of the making of a modern classic and the writer that created it
New archival discoveries and recently released oral histories give us the fullest account yet published of Vonnegut's real-life prisoner-of-war experiences at Stalag IV-B and Dresden, which heavily influenced Slaughterhouse-Five A recently discovered trove of letters introduces us to his first wife, Jane Cox Vonnegut, and her influence on his writing Along the way, we also encounter UFOs and aliens, grapple with the shadow cast by the Vietnam war, and unearth the stranger-than-fiction tale of David Irving’s The Destruction of Dresden, the historical reference behind Vonnegut's writing about the Dresden firebombing This book sheds light on one of America’s most beloved writers and explores how cultural forces helped to shape a modern masterpiece of storytelling
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UK August 2026 • US August 2026
456 Pages • 15 bw illus
HB 9781350446014
• £75 00 / $100 00
PB 9781350446007 • £24 99 / $34 95
ePDF 9781350446021 • £22 49 / $31 45
ePub 9781350446038 £22 49 / $31 45
Bloomsbury Academic
Black Feminist Theories Transnational Approaches
Edited by Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, Cassava Republic Press, Carole Boyce Davies, Cornell University, New York, Janell Hobson, University at Albany, State University of New York, USA , Angelique V Nixon, The University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago, Christen A Smith, University of Texas at Austin, USA & Carole Boyce Davies, Cornell University, New York
An innovative contribution to the field of Black Feminist Studies, this landmark collection brings together the most influential historical and contemporary thinkers in Black feminist theories across transnational contexts Featuring ground-breaking new work alongside canonical essays from key thinkers, this book adopts a truly global approach to its subject In doing so, it looks beyond North America to showcase a diverse range of continents and perspectives The collection includes not only standard academic essays, but also vital statements, interviews, manifestoes, and creative work, which transmit and embody Black feminist thought
The book is broken up into five carefully curated sections: Black Feminist Foundations; Statements and Manifestos; Cultures and Aesthetics; Bodies, Genders, and Sexualities; Black Feminist Futures
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UK July 2026 • US July 2026
176 Pages
HB 9798216367222 • £60 00 / $80 00
PB 9798216367239 £17 99 / $24 95
ePDF 9798216367253 • £16 19 / $22 45
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Bloomsbury Academic
Reclamations
Essays on Neglected Novels and Endangered Ideas
Julia Prewitt Brown, Independent Scholar, USA
These provocative essays offer a bold vision of the benefits of reading that challenges contemporary trends, reintroducing neglected works of fiction and memoir
For readers curious to learn about both novels that have been neglected and ideas that are becoming endangered –because they challenge contemporary tastes and values – Reclamations provides fresh readings of a curated selection of books from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries Reading a wide range of authors, such as Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde, D H Lawrence, James Baldwin, Philip Roth, Kamala Shamsie and Celeste Ng, Julia Prewitt Brown brings together her years of teaching experience and razor-sharp commentary to open up new ways of looking at the past and present, interrogating how people today see the world and literature’s place in it
Rather than a chronological progression, these nine essays aim to guide readers through a series of questions concerning contemporary tastes, morality, character building, and philosophical thought in literature The neglected novels and ideas highlighted in Reclamations deserve attention today not only because of their distinctiveness, but also because the fact of their neglect helps us understand the cultural present
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Psychoanalytic Horizons
UK August 2026
• US August 2026
240 Pages 1 bw illus
HB 9798216197799 • £60 00 / $90 00
PB 9798216197782 • £19 99 / $26 95
ePDF 9798216197812 • £17 99 / $24 25
ePub 9798216197805 • £17 99 / $24 25
Bloomsbury Academic
Seriality
Media and the Psychic Form of Everyday Life
Ryan Engley, Pomona College, USA
This material and theoretical history of seriality shows it to be the dominant form of culture since its inception within 19th-century print culture, as both a media structure and a psychic one
The serial is everywhere Commonly identified by the segmented release structure of an ongoing narrative – from installments of Victorian novels to TV episodes to comic books – seriality names the spread of installment-based storytelling across a range of media However, Ryan Engley argues that seriality is not only a narrative structure but also a psychic structure Seriality – in its dependence on gaps, delay, and constraint – names the fundamental trauma of contemporary life: that there exists an intrinsic relation between self and other, a relation that is often difficult to see and difficult to bear
Through formal readings of media texts alongside Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, the dialectical method of G W F Hegel, and Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism, Seriality: Media and the Psychic Form of Everyday Life shifts the focus of seriality studies In so doing, Engley presents a rebuttal to the common refrain that our lives, like contemporary media, have become endlessly fragmented Rather, Engley finds, we have become radically – serially – connected
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UK September 2026 • US September 2026
224 Pages
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ePDF 9798216367369 • £81 00 / $108 00
ePub 9798216367345 • £81 00 / $108 00
Bloomsbury Academic
The Experience of Fiction Literature, Language, Interpretation
Thomas Jurkiewicz, The University of Sydney, Australia
Argues that our experience of becoming engrossed in the fictional world of a novel is connected to the fundamental condition of human being: our capacity for language in all its broadest shapes.
Unlocking the subtle riches of Gadamer ’s philosophical hermeneutics and working across phenomenology, analytic philosophy, and literary criticism, The Experience of Fiction argues that our capacity for language is the bedrock of fiction and of our experience of its worlds
Charting the worlds of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Thomas Jurkiewicz explores the pressures and opportunities that the impulse for coherence places on interpretive experience, arguing that it is finally left to each individual to commit themselves to the actual world
The Experience of Fiction injects new verve into the burgeoning conversation between literary scholars and philosophers of art and language, bringing hermeneutic philosophy decisively to bear on literary studies It clears a way between critics invested in critique and those looking for new modes of thinking, appreciating, and taking works of literary fiction seriously, by showcasing how an attitude of openness to experience lays bare both our capacity to reach out towards alterity and to dominate it
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UK July 2026 US July 2026
248 Pages
HB 9798765122761
£90 00 / $120 00
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ePDF 9798765122785 £81 00 / $108 00
ePub 9798765122778 • £81 00 / $108 00
Bloomsbury Academic
Literary Transactions in South Africa A Politics of Interpretation
Michael Chapman, Durban University of Technology, South Africa
A representative overview of some of the most pressing concerns in contemporary literary criticism in South Africa, demonstrating literary form's shaping power in the interpretation of politically contentious content Rather than pressing literature into the service of a political cause or programme, this study's purpose – its politics of interpretation – is to open literature to the potential of human experience in both the personal and the public life The society of focus – South Africa – is a society of political contestation Instead of prioritizing the what of contestation, however, Michael Chapman explores contestation through the how of the literary work
In sharp transactions between an intransitivity of form and a compulsion to communicate, the book elucidates an ethics of aesthetics in J M Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer, and the best of modernism and the worst of modernism in Roy Campbell’s poetry It also asks: Can Themba’s ‘style’ of the shebeens in the 1950s be re-visited in a contemporary context of genderbased abuse? Why or how are Ellen Kuzwayo and Mtutuzeli Matshoba, writing in the ‘struggle’ years of the 1970s, simultaneously less than artists and more than artists? Has the interpretative frame of the ‘postcolonial’ best served fiction after apartheid? What language of interpretation best releases the voices of contemporary women’s poetry: a poetry which in its play on identities and identifications looks both inwards to its locality and outwards to the globe?
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UK August 2026 • US August 2026
264 Pages • 3 bw illus
PB 9781350536470 • £28 99 / $39 95
HB 9781350536432 • £85 00 / $115 00
ePDF 9781350536449 • £76 50 / $103 50
ePub 9781350536456 £76 50 / $103 50
Bloomsbury Academic
Beyond Modernism
Noncanonicity and Early-Twentieth-Century British Literature
Edited by Andrew Frayn, Edinburgh Napier University, UK & Katie Jones, Swansea University, UK
Underlining (and undermining) the notion of literary merit, this book focuses on noncanonical works and asks: what happens when we look away from modernism?
Seeking an alternative history of British literature from 1890 to 1945, this book reflects on the processes by which canonicity happens by studying less familiar authors, othered by genre, gender and form This book deliberately looks away from the British modernist canon of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, bringing into sharp relief the problematic nature of discussions about literary merit
Engaging with topics such as politics, nation and identity in bestsellers, work straddling art and literature, the complex relationships between conservatism and progressive movements such as suffragism, and the importance of popular science writing, in authors such as Stella Benson, Dorothy Edwards, Violet Hunt and Hugh Walpole, it brings to bear valuable new perspectives on the cultural history of this period
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UK August 2026 • US July 2026
304 Pages 3 bw figures
PB 9781501392795 • £28 99 / $39 95
HB 9781501392757 £95 00 / $130 00
ePDF 9781501392764 • £85 50 / $117 00
ePub 9781501392771 • £85 50 / $117 00
Bloomsbury Academic
Apathy in Scandinavian Literature The Paradoxical Power of Disengagement
Jens Lohfert Jørgensen, Aalborg University
A thought-provoking and timely analysis of the historical and conceptual development of the notion of apathy in Scandinavian literature from the Renaissance to the present day Literature is an extensive archive of emotions, providing a privileged source for the study of them Jens Lohfert Jørgensen uses this archive to analyze the development of apathy in Scandinavian literature, including in-depth discussion of the variety of forms it takes in contemporary texts, such as the paradoxical form of 'engaged disengagement'
Although apathy is understood in unambiguously negative terms in the 21st century – as an absence of will power, emotion and engagement – ancient thinkers such as Epictetus and Seneca, advancing the Stoic theory of the passions, described apatheia as being actively and positively in command of one’s emotions, in contrast to being manipulated by them Situating analyses of apathy in the theoretical landscapes of affect studies and the history of emotions, Jørgensen reads apathy in relation to Scandinavian literary texts This includes those concerned with passion, reason and decadence, as well as social concerns such as the welfare state and the very pressing issue of the climate crisis
Apathy in Scandinavian Literature looks at three periods in particular – the renaissance and enlightenment; decadence; and the contemporary period – to illuminate shifting contingencies in our understanding of apathy By identifying five distinct forms of the apathy, it nuances our understanding of an often-overlooked emotion that nevertheless has deep philosophical and psychological roots in Western culture
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Studies in Metamodernism: Theory and Criticism across the Disciplines
UK June 2026 • US June 2026
208 Pages
PB 9798216276296 • £28 99 / $39 95
HB 9798216276265 • £80 00 / $110 00
ePDF 9798216276289 • £72 00 / $99 00
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Bloomsbury Academic
COLLECTIONS
UK September 2026
256 Pages
HB 9798765122112
• US September 2026
• £90 00 / $120 00
PB 9798765122129 • £28 99 / $39 95
ePDF 9798765122143 • £81 00 / $108 00
ePub 9798765122136 £81 00 / $108 00
Bloomsbury Academic
COLLECTIONS
Bloomsbury Studies in Global Women’s Writing
UK July 2026 • US July 2026
192 Pages
HB 9781350429109 • £85 00 / $115 00
PB 9781350429147 • £28 99 / $39 95
ePDF 9781350429116 • £76 50 / $103 50
ePub 9781350429123 • £76 50 / $103 50
Bloomsbury Academic
Glocal Metamodernisms
European Fiction after Postmodernism
Edited by Dennis Kersten, Paula Romero Polo & Usha Wilbers
This volume explores how the contemporary European novel reflects the tensions between local and global conceptualizations of Metamodernism
Each chapter explicitly addresses metamodern novels’ “glocality” in relation to international Metamodernism theory from a variety of perspectives including Dutch, English, Finnish, French, Italian, Spanish and Ukrainian By bringing together insights into the manifestations of Metamodernism in such a variety of cultural contexts, this volume furthers our understanding of the concept of Metamodernism and contextualizes the enduring influence of the legacies of Modernism and Postmodernism in European literature
NEW IN PB
Proust's Snobs, Inverts, and Jews
Performing and Subverting Identity in La Recherche
Adeline Soldin, Dickinson College, USA
An intersectional investigation of identity formation in Marcel Proust’s magnum opus
As metonyms for broader categories such as class, sexuality, and ethnicity, the three most discussed identity groups in Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu – snobs, inverts, and Jews – prove to be deeply intertwined and perplexing representations Attentive to these interwoven complexities, Proust's Snobs, Inverts, and Jews examines the novelist’s exploitation of classification systems as a means to subvert the notion of a fixed identity
To illustrate Proust’s challenges to a social order that restricts our perceptions of identity, Adeline Soldin addresses the inconsistencies and friction surrounding the portrayal of these key figures in his seven-volume novel Many scholars have recognized that the narrator ’s formative journey in La Recherche leads to disillusionment and increased mockery of his fellow characters Soldin contends, however, that Proust does not merely deride characters’ behavior, but rather interrogates their diverse motivations and tendencies, thereby exposing the performative nature of identity
Proust's Snobs, Inverts, and Jews draws on Judith Butler's theories of performativity to illustrate Proust’s precocious portrayal of identity in La Recherche as an elusive, unattainable idea that characters pursue yet consistently fail to establish Ultimately, the enigmatic and anonymous narrator models fluidity and promotes fantasy and imagination to compensate for the limitations imposed on individuals by social and linguistic conventions
NEW IN PB
Body Politics in Contemporary Irish Women’s Fiction
The Literary Legacy of Mother Ireland
Ellen Scheible, Bridgewater State University, USA
Exploring twentieth- and twenty-first century texts that wrestle with the Irish domestic interior as a sexualized and commodified space, this book provides readings of the power and authority of the feminized body in Ireland
Scheible dissects the ways that ‘the woman-as-symbol’ remains consistent in Irish literary representations of national experience in Irish fiction and shows how this problematizes the role of women in Ireland by underscoring the oppression of sexuality and gender that characterized Irish culture during the twentieth century
Examining works by Elizabeth Bowen, Pamela Hinkson, Emma Donoghue, Tana French, Sally Rooney and James Joyce, this book demonstrates that the definition of Irish nationhood in our contemporary experience of capitalism and biopolitics is dependent on the intertwining and paradoxical tropes of a traditional, yet equally sexual, feminine identity which has been quelled by violence and reproduction
COLLECTIONS
UK September 2026 US September 2026
256 Pages • 10 tables
PB 9781666926897 £28 99 / $39 95
HB 9781666926873 • £80 00 / $110 00
ePDF 9798216258292 £72 00 / $99 00
ePub 9781978765740 • £72 00 / $99 00
Bloomsbury Academic
Metaphors of Illness in Chinese North American Literature The Body Speaks
Fang Tang
By exploring various representations of illness and disability in Chinese American literature, Fang Tang argues that narratives of ailments transcend the boundaries of medical therapy to become essential metaphors that help reconstruct identity formations for Chinese Americans.
Moving beyond medical interpretations, Tang demonstrates how conditions such as madness, infertility, amnesia, anorexia, insomnia, leprosy, and epidemic disease serve as symbolic expressions of displacement, marginalization, and resilience in the Chinese North American experience With a focus on key works published between 1970 and 2020 by writers including Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Yan Geling, Ma Ling, Zhang Ling, and others, this book uncovers how illness metaphors illuminate the intersections of race, gender, and culture in diasporic life By weaving literary analysis with insights from cultural studies, trauma theory, and postcolonial thought, Metaphors of Illness and Disability in Chinese American Literature argues that illness metaphors provide unique access to the struggles and strategies of Chinese North American communities
COLLECTIONS
UK September 2026
208 Pages
PB 9798765163573
HB 9798765163566
• US September 2026
• £28 99 / $39 95
• £75 00 / $100 00
ePDF 9798765163559
• £67 50 / $90 00
ePub 9798765163580 £67 50 / $90 00
Bloomsbury Academic
The Making of Thoreau's Excursions
Disturbance Ecologies in Antebellum U S Travel Writing
Jake McGinnis, Graceland University, USA
Explores Thoreau’s excursions as a method of travel writing, showing a literary process grounded in the emergent instability of the Anthropocene
In the final years of his life, Henry David Thoreau outlined a unique method of writing about lived experience which touched at the fundamental nature of human life on a changing planet The Making of Thoreau's Excursions examines the development of this literary method, the excursion, which veers away from more mainstream United States travel writing toward an ecological worldview and emerges as a dominant form in later American environmental writing
For some 19th-century travelers, experiences beyond home presented a disturbance to more settled ways of understanding the planet Jake McGinnis shows how authors, such as Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Ojibwe minister George Copway, and George William Curtis, attended to these disruptions In the excursion, the actual conditions of complex natural-cultural systems come to directly shape the ways in which a story is told Nonfiction narrative offered a site of experimentation and adaptation, a place in which literature could respond to ecological ruptures ranging from deforestation and increased agricultural production to the disruption of Indigenous ways of living in the world These patterns of disturbance and adaptation, or disturbance ecologies, suggest a new form of resilience in which literary texts engage with and draw from the dynamic earthly conditions in which they are enmeshed
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UK September 2026
• US September 2026
240 Pages 8 b/w images
PB 9798216444169 • £28 99 / $39 95
HB 9798216444152 £90 00 / $120 00
ePDF 9798216444121 • £81 00 / $108 00
ePub 9798216444138 • £81 00 / $108 00
Bloomsbury Academic
The Red Christ
The Dangerous Memory of Christianity in Modern U S Literatures of Social Protest
Anthony Dawahare
Offers a (re)consideration of the impact of radical conceptions of Christ on modern U.S. literature, its critique of inegalitarian social relations, and its visions for a just society
The Red Christ argues that some of the most popular left social protest literature published in the U S between 1890 and 1940 was inseparable from "Social Christianity," a historically important movement deeply concerned with issues of social justice As this study shows, various images and iterations of the "red" Christ, including the trope of Jesus the carpenter, were used to critique unjust power structures, through representations of self-sacrifice, rebirth, and hope, as well as compassion for the socialist figure This Red Christ is traceable to late 19th-century U S literature and shapes the protest literatures of the Harlem Renaissance and the Proletarian Literary Movement of the 1930s
Anthony Dawahare reads a broad range of writers – including Albion Tourgée, Charles Monroe Sheldon, Upton Sinclair, W E B Du Bois, Richard Wright, and Dorothy Day – to demonstrate that this radical tradition of Christianity is woven into the fabric of U S literature The influence of Social Christianity on U S writers did not expire with the movement’s demise during World War I, and post-war writers who were by no means Christian appropriated the radical message, vision, and tropes of Social Christianity, as other radical Christian writers, like Dorothy Day, emerged from the secular left
COLLECTIONS
UK September 2026 US September 2026
316 Pages
PB 9781666931037
£28 99 / $39 95
HB 9781666931013 • £95 00 / $130 00
ePDF 9798216260097 £85 50 / $117 00
ePub 9781978764606 • £85 50 / $117 00
Bloomsbury Academic
COLLECTIONS
Social Imaginaries
UK April 2026 • US April 2026
252 Pages
HB 9781538178676 • £85 00 / $115 00
PB 9781538178690 • £28 99 / $39 95
ePub 9781538178683 • £76 50 / $103 50
Rowman & Littlefield
COLLECTIONS
UK August 2026 • US August 2026
304 Pages 38 bw illus
HB 9781350406926 • £75 00 / $100 00
PB 9781350406919 £24 99 / $34 95
ePDF 9781350406933 • £0 00 / $0 00
ePub 9781350406940 • £0 00 / $0 00
Bloomsbury Academic
Québec's Broken Futures History, Speculative Fiction, and Identity, 1970–2015
Caroline-Isabelle Caron
Caroline-Isabelle Caron explores how Speculative Fiction from Québec from the 1970s to 2015 has eerily echoed alarmist thoughts concerning Québec independence and Québec’s place in the space-time continuum of history, from the first explorers to Turtle Island to the present and well into the future.
Speculative fiction, no matter how fictional, is an inherently historical literary genre With this in mind, this book presents an in-depth analysis of Québec’s identity question as viewed through the prism of Speculative Fiction It proposes innumerable configurations of a future that is, more often than not, fractured and bleak Caron argues that these works both fictionalize and amplify broader collective fears and social anxieties around long term survival, language, ethnicity, race, religion, fascism, oppression and colonialism, while projecting the contemporary interpretations of Québec’s past into the future In doing so, Québec's Broken Futures reveals a constant preoccupation with the meanings of agency, individuality, collectivity, nationality, and territory in the same period
NEW IN PB
Chaos and Cosmos
The Imaginary and the Political in Jorge Luis Borges Martín Plot, California Institute of the Arts, USA
Choice 2025 Outstanding Academic Title
This book offers a new and unique interpretation of Argentine essayist and fiction writer Jorge Luis Borges as a thinker of what continental twentieth century political theory called the political While not a political writer in the traditional sense, Borges was indeed an author whose response to the advent of totalitarianism, in particular in its Nazi form, generated the most experimental, insightful, and rigorous short fiction and non-fiction political interrogation As is well known, Borges’ writing went beyond originality; it created a genre of its own, and the Borgesian style is not limited to form
Chaos and Cosmos introduces the reader to Borges as an experimental writer, as an Argentine citizen, as a thinker of global political phenomena, and as a South American Pragmatist The book also makes incursions in a political theorizing of its own, intertwining an interpretation of Borges’ essays and fiction pieces from the 1930s and 1940s with the central concerns of philosophers and political thinkers such as William James, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hannah Arendt, Claude Lefort, Michael Foucault, Richard Rorty, and Judith Butler
Literary Treason
Authors on Trial in the Wake of the Second World War
Marius Hentea, University of Poitiers, France
This open access book tells the fascinating story of how prominent authors and intellectuals found themselves singled out by national courts in the wake of the Second World War, for the crime of expressing opinions, both in print or over the radio
This book examines cases of authors such as Ezra Pound, P G Wodehouse and Robert Brasillach, who were suspected or tried for treason in the wake of the Second World War Bringing to light never-before-seen trial transcripts alongside a wealth of archival material, it considers how writing and speech was considered treasonous by bureaucracies and courts in the UK, US, France, Ireland, Norway and Romania It touches on issues such as the political responsibility of authors, the position of national and international author ’s organizations, and emerging literary theories Six chapters provide a forensic examination of how “mere words” were cast as treason and explore what writing was deemed “acceptable” in the postwar period
The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4 0 licence on bloomsburycollections com Open access was funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (SAB23-0029) / University of Gothenburg
COLLECTIONS
UK August 2026 US August 2026
272 Pages
PB 9798765133828
£28 99 / $39 95
HB 9798765133835 • £90 00 / $120 00
ePDF 9798765133859 £81 00 / $108 00
ePub 9798765133866 • £81 00 / $108 00
Bloomsbury Academic
Revolution, She Wrote
Historical Fiction and Radical Knowledge in Interwar Europe
Ksenia Shmydkaya, Tallinn University, Estonia
This intellectual and literary history explores the entanglement of historical imagination and left-wing politics in interwar Europe
Contrary to the popular perception of historical continuity and revolutionary action as incompatible, the connections between the two phenomena prove to be as vital and productive as they are messy and complicated Revolution, She Wrote offers a novel way of studying these phenomena by focussing on three cases from interwar Europe whence the revolutions and revolutionary figures of the past became the subject of historical fiction authored by women It argues that these works, despite their fictional status, functioned as carriers of radical knowledge
Stanislawa Przybyszewska (1901–1935) wrote plays about the French Revolution of 1789 that caused unexpected agitation in Poland’s theatrical world and beyond Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893–1978) made a transgressive contribution to the British Cultural Front with her novel set in 1848 Paris And Olga Forsh (1873–1961) carved out her place among the cultural workers of the new Soviet state by writing histories of the Bolshevik revolution’s ancestors All three authors belonged on the left side of the political spectrum and remained at the periphery to the cultural markets and intellectual milieus in their countries Their fictionalized revolutions are thus marked, on the one hand, by sympathy and engagement, and on the other, by their ex-centric positions
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Literatures as World Literature
UK July 2026 • US July 2026
304 Pages • 9 bw figures
PB 9781501393167 • £28 99 / $39 95
HB 9781501393129 • £95 00 / $130 00
ePDF 9781501393136 • £85 50 / $117 00
ePub 9781501393143 • £85 50 / $117 00
Bloomsbury Academic
COLLECTIONS
Literatures as World Literature
UK July 2026 • US July 2026
296 Pages
HB 9798765108659 • £95 00 / $130 00
PB 9798765108666 • £28 99 / $39 95
ePDF 9798765108680 • £85 50 / $117 00
ePub 9798765108673 • £85 50 / $117 00
Bloomsbury Academic
Hungarian Literature as World Literature
Edited by Péter Hajdu, Shenzhen University, China & Zoltán Z Varga, University of Pécs/Institute for Literary Studies, Research Centre for Humanities
Synthesizes contemporary research on world literature while introducing Hungarian literature’s 'worldliness' to an international readership
Hungarian Literature as World Literature provides readers less familiar with the Hungarian national context with new access to local variations on an already familiar comparative or historical problem Rather than reducing the project of situating Hungarian literature as world literature to a search for causal, mechanical and hierarchical types of influence exerted by world literature on Hungarian literature, or investigating the latter ’s sporadic occurrences on the 'great stage' of literature in the major languages, the volume offers a more complex and nuanced way to reveal the multimodal relationships they form Authors in this volume consider the Hungarian national literature as an open geo-poetical and geopolitical space, which is at once wider and smaller than the monolingual, nation-state oriented, territorially closed frame of observation that characterizes most national literary historiography In this intersectional space, the geopolitical reading discloses local transformations of broader poetical or ideological movements and their feedback into the world system, the geopolitical contexts behind poetic forms and narrative constructions Hungarian Literature as World Literature draws a vital link between the collecting and curating practices that preserve and disseminate Hungarian literature and a theoretical conversation that is being held in English, on an international level, about the future of the concept of 'world literature'
Theory as World Literature
Edited by Jeffrey R Di Leo, Texas A&M University-Victoria, USA
The first collection to consider what it means for theory to be considered as a species of world literature – and vice versa This volume offers a wide range of accounts of how the “worlding” of literature both problematizes the national categorizing of theory (e g , French theory), and brings new meanings and challenges to the coming together of theory and literature In sum, it presents theory as world literature as a viable alternative to more commonplace approaches to theory
Under such an approach to theory, what it means to be an African, American, or Asian “theorist” – let alone a French, German, or Spanish one – in the new millennium is as complicated (or simple) as what means to be “African,” “American,” or “Asian “Worlded literature is not considered here as only the world literature of nations and nationalities Rather, it is also the worlded literature of individuals crossing borders, mixing stories, and speaking in dialect So too is it the worlded literature of the multinational corporate publishing industry wherein success in the global market is a major determinate of aesthetic and literary value
Offering accounts of what it means to consider theory as world literature, the authors in this pioneering collection explore the ways in which we might regard theory as connected and reconnected through global literary networks of increasing complexity and precarity By approaching theory from this perspective, Theory as World Literature demonstrates how and why theory is more worldly now than ever
COLLECTIONS
Bloomsbury Perspectives on Children's Literature
UK August 2026
• US August 2026
• 4 BW illus
248 Pages
HB 9781350361560
• £85 00 / $115 00
PB 9781350361607
• £28 99 / $39 95
ePDF 9781350361577
• £0 00 / $0 00
ePub 9781350361584 • £0 00 / $0 00
Bloomsbury Academic
COLLECTIONS
Bloomsbury Perspectives on Children's Literature
UK August 2026 • US August 2026
232 Pages • 37 bw illus
HB 9781350434103 • £85 00 / $115 00
PB 9781350434141 • £28 99 / $39 95
ePDF 9781350434110 • £76 50 / $103 50
ePub 9781350434127 • £76 50 / $103 50 Bloomsbury Academic
COLLECTIONS
UK September 2026 • US September 2026
256 Pages
HB 9781350253629 • £60 00 / $80 00
PB 9781350253612 £18 99 / $24 95
ePDF 9781350253636 • £17 09 / $22 45
ePub 9781350253643 • £17 09 / $22 45
Bloomsbury Academic
Children’s Publishing in Cold War France
Hachette in the Age of Surveillance and Control
Sophie Heywood, University of Reading, UK
Exploring the history of Cold War censorship legislation and its impact on the French publishing industry for children, this open access book focuses on the publisher Hachette to detail how it dominated the country’s new context of surveillance and control.
Using extensive new multilingual archive material including legal and business records and US State Department files, Sophie Heywood traces both the history of the French Communist Party’s (PCF) and anti-comics activists’ efforts to prevent American ‘propaganda’ reaching the hands of children, and Hachette’s strategic and editorial responses Children’s Publishing in Cold War France covers such events as the campaign waged against the global multi-media phenomenon Tarzan; the impact of Cold War tensions on Hachette’s publishing of Disney books and comics in French; and studies the translation of series fiction from Nancy Drew to The Famous Five, where self-censorship could be a radical and creative process Children’s Publishing in Cold War France presents a timely historical study of how states and political campaigners seek to control children’s access to culture, and the legacies of such conflicts
The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4 0 license on bloomsburycollections com Open access was funded by the University of Reading
Serialization, Commercialization and the Children’s Classics
British Series from the 20th Century
Amy Webster, Bishop Grossette University, UK
An exploration of the serialization of children's classics by contemporary publishers, this book digs into the impact of the practice and provides new ways of reading the corpus of British children's literature from the 20th century Amy Webster demonstrates how publishers select texts for their series, which texts they omit, which outliers are sometimes included and how a core group of works from the golden age of children's literature emerged The text also examines how texts are abridged and transformed from publisher to publisher through close readings of The Wind in the Willows and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; and how the repackaging of works within a series highlight issues and choices tied to key paratextual elements Analysing data through distant reading and close reading of series from Ladybird, Longman, Puffin and Walker Illustrated editions, this book sheds light on how modern classics series are marked by variation and instability but also a reductive homogeneity
Through her use of quantitative and text-focused research, Webster reveals how commercial motivations have created a gulf between the canonical concepts of the classic and how the term functions as a marketing tool in British children’s publishing
Readings Between Animal Studies and the Environmental Humanities
Aesthetics, Ethics and Sustainable Transition
John Miller, University of Sheffield
The relationship between animal studies and the environmental humanities is both intimate and tense It makes little sense to examine the representation of environments without thinking about the animals that shape them, or, conversely, to think about animals without exploring the ecologies they live in Yet, animal studies and the environmental humanities often appear to have divergent ethical, political and intellectual emphases
This book examines the relationship between animal studies and the environmental humanities through three interlinked topics – meat, oil and conservation – each of which has given rise to an emerging sub-field of academic enquiry: vegan studies, the energy humanities, and extinction studies Exploring these themes and perspectives through readings of literary texts from the nineteenth century to the present, the book argues that the contradictions and cross-fertilisations between ecological and animal critical perspectives provide a compelling perspective on the failure of mainstream discourses of sustainability to address our current global emergency
COLLECTIONS
Environmental Cultures
UK September 2026
• US September 2026
320 Pages
• 52 colour illus
PB 9781350502659
• £28 99 / $39 95
HB 9781350502611
• £90 00 / $120 00
ePDF 9781350502628 • £81 00 / $108 00
ePub 9781350502635 • £81 00 / $108 00
Bloomsbury Academic
COLLECTIONS
Politics, Literature, & Film
UK July 2026
• US May 2026
• 4 b/w illus
216 Pages
PB 9781666960631 • £28 99 / $39 95
HB 9781666960617 • £80 00 / $110 00
ePDF 9798216264262 • £72 00 / $99 00
ePub 9781978763074 • £72 00 / $99 00
Bloomsbury Academic
COLLECTIONS
Global Challenges in the Environmental Humanities
UK August 2026
• US August 2026
280 Pages • 30 bw illus
HB 9781350417618
• £90 00 / $120 00
PB 9781350417656 • £28 99 / $39 95
ePDF 9781350417625 • £81 00 / $108 00
ePub 9781350417632 • £81 00 / $108 00
Bloomsbury Academic
Images of the Plant Humanities Theory, Art and the Botanic Gaze
Edited by Danielle Sands, Royal Holloway, University of London & Daniel Whistler, University of Liverpool, UK
Confronting the relationship between words and images in the representation of plant life in Western modernity, this interdisciplinary book examines the ways in which plants have been theorised both in contemporary plant humanities and modern thinking about plants more generally
Focusing on the various ways that the vegetal has been represented or hidden during modernity, it studies how philosophical, scientific and environmental theories, as well as colonial histories, have determined these representations, as well as the ways in which these representations have themselves influenced theory
Situating itself within the plant-humanities, a developing field of research which draws upon the environmental humanities to rectify the traditional neglect of plants as a model for thinking, it examines aesthetic representations of plant life, and philosophical and scientific thinking about the vegetal, so as to challenge traditional assumptions regarding plant intelligence, agency and communication
The Politics of Violence against Women in Climate Fiction
Mona Ashour
Mona Ashour offers an interdisciplinary exploration of how climate change and gender-based violence intersect in contemporary literature
Bridging together literary studies, environmental humanities, and gender studies, this book examines how climate fiction not only reflects ecological and social anxieties but critiques power, privilege, and systemic violence Ashour draws upon narratives from both the Global North and Global South, including Margaret Atwood’s "Oryx and Crake," Arundhati Roy’s "The Ministry of Utmost Happiness," Octavia Butler ’s "Parable of the Sower," and Nnedi Okorafor ’s "Who Fears Death" to trace how women’s bodies and lives become contested sites of vulnerability and resilience in times of environmental crisis Through the framework of ecofeminism, posthumanism, and critical fabulation, it demonstrates how cli-fi narratives reimagine survival, reverse traditional othering, and highlight women’s agency in apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic settings Ultimately, The Politics of Violence Against Women in Climate Fiction positions climate fiction as a critical cultural force that not only registers the layered violence of climate collapse but also envisions alternative futures rooted in equity, care, and feminist resistance
River Delta Futures
Endangered Communities in Audiovisual Media
Edited by Francisco-J Hernández Adrián, Durham University, UK & Angelos Theocharis, Durham University, UK
How are climate change, weather-related disasters, food and water insecurity, and energetic and infrastructural collapse narrated audiovisually in the most environmentally vulnerable areas of the Planet? This book addresses this and related questions by adopting a local and transdisciplinary perspective on river deltas from different areas of the world
River deltas have historically been hotspots for human civilizations, as populations settled in their fertile grounds seeking resources and opportunities for prosperity Despite this, the terrains and livelihoods of those who rely on them are under threat from human exploitation, environmental degradation, and rapidly accelerating climate change Inspired by the UN Sustainable Development Goals, this book provides a range of focused audiovisual analyses of deltaic spaces Ranging across a variety of media, including documentary filmmaking, animation, photography, collaborative comic making, participatory visual art practices, soundwalking, and film analysis, it examines the role that contemporary audiovisual media play in forging global environmental imaginaries In doing so, it adopts a transdisciplinary approach to the Blue Humanities from countries across the world, including Canada, Bolivia, Brazil, Greece, Nigeria, Senegal, India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam
COLLECTIONS
UK July 2026 US July 2026
240 Pages
PB 9781350522909
£28 99 / $39 95
HB 9781350522862 • £85 00 / $115 00
ePDF 9781350522879 £76 50 / $103 50
ePub 9781350522886 • £76 50 / $103 50 Bloomsbury Academic
Cosmic Humour and Philosophical Pessimism in Contemporary Culture
Oliver Rendle, Independent Scholar, UK
An in-depth look at the concept of cosmic humour, a politically influential, philosophically pessimistic form of humour, exploring the popularity of this comedic form across Anglophone culture since 1969 in literature, film and television Cosmic Humour uses a cultural materialist approach to demonstrate the existence and significance of an as-yetoverlooked turn in popular culture, connecting intergalactic hitchhikers to discworlds and Black segregationists by explaining how such absurd images spring from the rise of neoliberalism and political despondency
Oliver Rendle examines the development and political value of cosmic humour through novels by Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, Jason Pargin and Paul Beatty as well as the work of Monty Python and the Daniels' Everything Everywhere All at Once Along the way, he demonstrates how this form of humour is reflective of and reproduces an increasingly pervasive loss of faith in established ideological and political institutions Charting cosmic humour ’s evolution from post-war British satire to more diverse and politically proactive developments after the millennium, this book brings to the fore the increasingly widespread and insistent anxieties that link Oxbridge dons to parodic cosmic horror and the satirical potential of Afropessimism Addressing overlooked intersections between horror, humour and contemporary politics, Cosmic Humour reveals how and why a form of humour that articulates a pessimistic outlook has become increasingly prevalent since 1969
COLLECTIONS
2ND EDITION
Historical Dictionary of Gothic Literature
William Hughes, University of East Anglia
The gothic is far more than a genre preoccupied with ghosts, vampires and the supernatural. It is a phenomenon that has influenced the expression of unease and fear across many cultures
Comprehending gothic textuality from the 18th century to the present, the Historical Dictionary of Gothic Literature, Second Edition addresses not merely supernatural fiction but also film, television, graphic works and the subtle influence of the genre upon global popular culture Containing a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography, the dictionary section contains cross-referenced entries on African American gothic, cyberpunk and steampunk, dark academia, folk horror and Japanese gothic This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about gothic literature
Historical Dictionaries of Literature and the Arts
UK September 2026
• US September 2026
428 Pages
PB 9798216443063 • £39 99 / $54 95
HB 9798216443025 • £110 00 / $150 00
ePDF 9798216443049 • £99 00 / $135 00
ePub 9798216443032 • £99 00 / $135 00
Bloomsbury Academic
COLLECTIONS
UK August 2026 • US August 2026
256 Pages
HB 9798765119426 • £90 00 / $120 00
PB 9798765119433 £28 99 / $39 95
ePDF 9798765119440 • £81 00 / $108 00
ePub 9798765119457 • £81 00 / $108 00
Bloomsbury Academic
John Cowper Powys and the Afterlife of Romanticism
Re-imagining William Wordsworth and John Keats
Kim Wheatley, William & Mary, USA
This study bridges the chronological divide between the Romantic era and the first six decades of the 20th century, interpreting John Cowper Powys (1872–1963) as a major, under-recognized contributor to the cultural transmission of Romanticism
Kim Wheatley’s John Cowper Powys and the Afterlife of Romanticism uncovers the surprising extent to which this multifaceted Modernist-era author reworked key concerns of the Romantic poets Wheatley shows how Powys’s prose rewritings of Romantic poetry contribute to the story of the posthumous life of Romanticism, especially its environmental legacy In particular, the book expands our understanding of the early 20th-century reception of William Wordsworth and John Keats Wheatley argues that Powys anticipates and presciently interrogates recent revisionary critical approaches to the Romantics, primarily materialist eco-critical approaches, and therefore invites a fresh environmentalist criticism open to the transcendental and the supernatural Chapters range across Powys’s extensive oeuvre, investigating his treatment of Wordsworth and Keats in his works of fiction, autobiographical writings, popular philosophical books, and essays of literary appreciation Wheatley demonstrates how Powys uniquely combines sense-based nature-worship, the leveling of animate and inanimate, and care for disabled human beings, along with mystical and magical themes, into an all-encompassing ecological vision more capacious than any imagined by the Romantics themselves
COLLECTIONS
Explorations in Science and Literature
UK August 2026 • US August 2026
• 25 bw illus
240 Pages
PB 9781350626348
• £28 99 / $39 95
HB 9781350010727
• £85 00 / $80 00
ePDF 9781350010741 • £76 50 / $72 00
ePub 9781350010734 • £76 50 / $72 00
Bloomsbury Academic
COLLECTIONS
UK September 2026 • US September 2026
224 Pages • 10 bw illus
HB 9798765159132
• £90 00 / $120 00
PB 9798765159149 • £21 99 / $29 95
ePDF 9798765159170 • £19 79 / $26 95
ePub 9798765159156 £19 79 / $26 95
Bloomsbury Academic
COLLECTIONS
The Social Dinosaur
The Life of the Mesozoic in the Popular Imagination
Will Tattersdill, University of Birmingham, UK
Since first they emerged into the Victorian limelight, dinosaurs have fascinated generations of artists, scientists, and general readers This book approaches their history from a literary-critical perspective, arguing that the enormous and enduring popularity of Mesozoic fauna offers a fresh way to understand the relationship between the arts and sciences We tend to treat those two as opposites -- but dinosaurs, Will Tattersdill argues, cannot exist without an entanglement of both evidence and imagination Tracing these entanglements across scientific works, literary texts, artworks, and museum displays of all kinds from the nineteenth century to the present day, this book suggests that the history of dinosaurs is one in which the boundaries between categories of knowledge, genre, and species are constantly being renegotiated
One Black Writer at a Time How Literary Coverage Shapes Reception
Howard Rambsy II, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, USA & Kenton Rambsy, Howard University, USA
Explores the recurring pattern in media, academia, and publishing to elevate one Black writer at a time, often at the expense of hundreds of others whose works go underrecognized
Starting in the 1960s, African American writers and commentators began raising concerns that white media outlets consistently elevated only one Black writer at a time, thus limiting the broader success of multiple Black authors Drawing on literary data work and analyzing sources like The New York Times, major anthologies, and scholarly publishing, One Black Writer at a Time finally quantifies this claim by mapping patterns of visibility disparity across genres, generations, and platforms Exploring a dataset of 1,000 Black writers across multiple platforms, Howard and Kenton Rambsy chart the mentions, selections, and coverage of African American writers across the 20th and 21st centuries to demonstrate how the “one Black writer at a time” idea is supported by verifiable data
This book merges textual interpretations and computational methods, enabling new discoveries in the study of American literature Ultimately, One Black Writer at a Time calls for more inclusive approaches to studying, curating, and teaching African American literature that account for the full breadth of Black literary production
AI Afterlives
Digital Memory and Synthetic Pasts
Jenny Kidd, Cardiff University, UK & Eva Nieto McAvoy, Cardiff University, UK
AI Afterlives offers the first empirically informed investigation of how algorithms and automation are being used to ‘revive’ media fragments from the past, from animating old photographs of our ancestors, to creating deathbots, or using the likeness of deceased actors in films It draws on a series of unique and innovatively designed datasets to trace the ethical, emotional, mnemonic and political dimensions of creating synthetic pasts
Situated at the intersection of Digital Memory, New Media and Critical Algorithm Studies, the book speaks to a range of pressing concerns about what futures our uses of AI will facilitate, what ethical challenges these systems suggest in the present, and how our relationship to the past is oriented and experienced Bloomsbury Studies in Digital Cultures
UK August 2026 • US August 2026
256 Pages • 15 bw illus, 7 tables
PB 9781350437562 • £28 99 / $39 95
HB 9781350437524 • £85 00 / $115 00
ePDF 9781350437531 • £76 50 / $103 50
ePub 9781350437548 • £76 50 / $103 50
Bloomsbury Academic
COLLECTIONS
UK August 2026 US August 2026
176 Pages
PB 9798765128800 £24 99 / $34 95
HB 9798765128817 • £75 00 / $100 00
ePDF 9798765128831 £67 50 / $90 00
ePub 9798765128824 • £67 50 / $90 00
Bloomsbury Academic
COLLECTIONS
Critical Interventions in the Medical and Health Humanities
UK September 2026 • US September 2026
256 Pages • 2 bw illus
PB 9781350587458 • £28 99 / $39 95
HB 9781350587410 • £85 00 / $115 00
ePDF 9781350587427 • £0 00 / $0 00
ePub 9781350587434 • £0 00 / $0 00
Bloomsbury Academic
COLLECTIONS
UK September 2026 • US September 2026
384 Pages 46 illus bw illus
PB 9781350386938 • £39 99 / $54 95
HB 9781350386891 £140 00 / $175 00
ePDF 9781350386907 • £126 00 / $157 50
ePub 9781350386914 • £126 00 / $157 50
Bloomsbury Academic
The Dead Cannot Reply
Suicide in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century English Literature
Aaron Botwick, Hostos Community College, CUNY, USA
An intellectual and literary history of the professionalization of suicidology at the turn of the 20th century which shows that fiction played a significant role in the transformation of the debates on voluntary death
In 19th-century England, the main point of contention around suicide was the punishment Should “self-murderers” still be staked through the heart? Should the crown continue to seize their assets? In the 20th century, the questions shifted to motives: Why does someone commit suicide? What does it feel like to be suicidal? And can these questions, asked about a subject who is no longer present, be answered without their testimony? As The Dead Cannot Reply shows, the emphasis shifted from effects to causes
Fiction, unbound by factual truth, offers an ideal space for these debates The Dead Cannot Reply combines close readings of major Victorian and modernist novels alongside popular and scientific texts on suicide to examine how questions of teleology, causality, and phenomenology were answered in the English imagination
OPEN ACCESS
Neurodiversity and the Contemporary in the 21st-Century Novel
Nicola Simonetti, Durham University, UK
Offering a provocative analysis of neurodivergent and twenty-first-century perspectives on time and some of its cultural expressions, this open access book is the first comparative study of the intersections between neurodiversity and the evolving field of Contemporary Studies
Blending literary close reading and sociological discourse analysis, the book turns to fiction for the strategic insights it can offer into cultural imaginaries of neurodiversity and time With a focus on twenty-first-century novels from authors such as Jonathan Safran Foer, Lisa Genova, John Wray, and Julie Dachez, it interrogates the entanglements between categories of crip time and the contemporary, examines the processes of exclusion governing neurodivergence construction, and advocates for a new vocabulary demonstrating the role of contemporary neuroinclusive perspectives in twenty-first-century epistemological processes
The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4 0 licence on bloomsburycollections com Open access was funded by the Wellcome Trust
Madness in Literature and Visual Culture
Critical Interventions
Edited by anna six, University of Warwick, UK
A wide-ranging, future-focused study from a variety of cultural and academic perspectives, this illustrated book brings together a range of internationally recognised scholars committed to mapping and unpacking the political, historical, affective, and aesthetic dimensions of madness and mental distress in literary and visual cultures
Raising vital questions about the nature of madness and the limits of personhood, the practices of care and politics of reality, this valuable book asks how the various disciplines it represents might shape more radical and tender horizons for those living under the descriptions of mental illness
This is a book for anyone concerned with examining new models of interdependent psychic-sociality Put simply, it asks how we might make life more liveable for ourselves, for each other, and crucially, for strangers we will never meet
COLLECTIONS
Cognition, Poetics, and the Arts
UK August 2026 • US August 2026
240 Pages • 4 bw illus
PB 9798765112113 • £28 99 / $39 95
HB 9798765112120 • £90 00 / $120 00
ePDF 9798765112144 • £81 00 / $108 00
ePub 9798765112137 • £81 00 / $108 00
Bloomsbury Academic
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Cognition, Poetics, and the Arts
UK September 2026 • US September 2026
304 Pages • 9 bw illus
PB 9798216396376 • £28 99 / $39 95
HB 9798216396369 • £95 00 / $130 00
ePDF 9798216396390 • £85 50 / $117 00
ePub 9798216396406 • £85 50 / $117 00
Bloomsbury Academic
COLLECTIONS
UK August 2026
• US August 2026
Thinking Through Poems
Composition, Emotion and Decision-Making in Romantic-Era Women’s Novels
Yasemin Nurcan Hacioglu, Volda University College, Norway
A new cognitive approach to the representation of composition in literature that examines five women novelists of the late 18th century and how they use imaginative poetic practices to attain emotional, practical and political agency.
During a backlash towards feminism in British politics at the turn of the 19th century, popular women’s novels became saturated with heroines in dangerous situations who turn to composing original poetry Thinking through Poems shows how these poems indicate practices of composition that model imaginative decision-making It reveals how these novels provide readers with cognitive tools to re-think how situations might unfold and to realize how patriarchal threats and cultural narratives can be methodically altered
Using both contemporary cognitive philosophy and historical approaches, Yasemin Nurcan Hacioglu uncovers how fictional heroines manipulate the narrative as they craft thoughts and responses not yet socially scripted Re-considered as "works in progress," poems in Ann Radcliffe’s and Charlotte Smith’s influential novels are examined as a space in which heroines redraft experiences into narratives that justify their choices Hacioglu then investigates how the neglected novels of Eleanor Sleath, Charlotte Dacre and Amelia Opie added new arguments, through compositional practices, to the rich philosophical debate on how agency can be constructed
Feeling-Thinking or Embodied Cognition in the Poetry of Rozalie Hirs and Anne Carson
Helena Van Praet, Ghent University, Belgium
A stimulating cross-disciplinary study of how poetry taps into an embodied cognition at its various levels of signification.
Feeling-Thinking or Embodied Cognition in the Poetry of Rozalie Hirs and Anne Carson asks: How can we feel-think in poetry and what are the effects of this embodied cognition for the poetic epistemology that is advanced? Combining a new materialist approach with insights from psychology, philosophy, and cognitive science, Helena Van Praet argues that such poetry is not only about felt knowledge but also invites readers to feel-think on a formal, sensory-material, and discursive level
Using a comparative corpus focused on the contemporary writing of Dutch poet Rozalie Hirs and Canadian poet Anne Carson, this study uses experimental strategies such as situated conceptualizations, word streams, poetic metalepsis, networked configurations, screen thinking, and discursive cues to explore how knowledge and meaning are bodily mediated in poetry It demonstrates that meaning is not just propositional but rather something that you do with your entire body and that poetry is the prime genre to show such an embodied cognition at work While earlier accounts tend to be limited to the physicality of the mind or mainly focus on either feeling or thinking, this book develops a full-bodied theory of embodied cognition in poetry
Lyrical Stirrings from Dynamic Interactions between Prose and Poetry
James J Lu
Exploring the vibrant intersections of two foundational literary forms, James J Lu argues that prose and poetry have continually shaped and enriched one another across cultures and centuries
Drawing on genre theory from Aristotle to Bakhtin, this book examines how poetic language permeates novels and how prose infiltrates verse, enriching traditional forms and creating hybrid forms such as prose poetry and verse novels Considering diverse texts from traditional epics to contemporary verse novels Lu analyzes how authors from around the world blur the boundaries between narrative and lyric It illuminates the impact of culture, craft, and creativity on the writing process and the reading experience Lyrical Stirrings from Dynamic Interactions between Prose and Poetry invites readers to rethink rigid genre definitions and appreciate the fluidity of literary expression
192 Pages
PB 9781666927702 • £28 99 / $39 95
HB 9781666927689 £80 00 / $110 00
ePDF 9798216264156 • £72 00 / $99 00
ePub 9781978762961 • £72 00 / $99 00
Bloomsbury Academic
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UK July 2026 US July 2026
192 Pages • 5 b/w illus
PB 9781666961928
£28 99 / $39 95
HB 9781666961904 • £75 00 / $100 00
ePDF 9798216255130 £67 50 / $90 00
ePub 9781978771369 • £67 50 / $90 00
Bloomsbury Academic
Religious Culture in Modernist Verse Form, Belief, and Twentieth-Century Poetics
Annarose F Steinke
Annarose F Steinke offers a look into the nuanced treatments of religion in modernism and modernist poetry by pairing T.S. Eliot with Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, Basil Bunting, and Thom Gunn.
Steinke explores how these five poets, who subscribe to a range of personal beliefs from atheism to orthodox Christianity, display a fascination with religious iconography, ritual, and liturgy Each places religious and poetic forms into dialogue in order to test the limits of the other Some poems afford a space to think through the problems and failings inherent to religious belief and practice in modern life Yet others engage religious language, ritual, and iconography to expose, negotiate, and parse out the terms under which poetic language can make spiritual life possible and sustainable in modernity In all cases, the poetry focuses intensely on the texts, cultures, and objects of religious practice to ultimately question what makes poetic form itself believable
COLLECTIONS
Bloomsbury Studies in Critical Poetics
UK August 2026
• US August 2026
168 Pages
HB 9781350414884
• £85 00 / $115 00
PB 9781350414921
• £28 99 / $39 95
ePDF 9781350414891 • £76 50 / $103 50
ePub 9781350414907 • £76 50 / $103 50
Bloomsbury Academic
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Bloomsbury Studies in Critical Poetics
UK August 2026
• US August 2026
264 Pages • 15 bw illus
HB 9781350421776 • £85 00 / $115 00
PB 9781350421813 • £28 99 / $39 95
ePDF 9781350421783 • £76 50 / $103 50
ePub 9781350421790 • £76 50 / $103 50
Bloomsbury Academic
NEW IN PB
Experimental American Poetry and the New Organic Form
João Paulo Guimarães, University of Porto, Portugal
Arguing that the 19th century concept of “living form” (the idea that, like an organism, a poem develops itself from within, according to an internal logic) is not, as some critics have argued, anathema to avant-garde writing, this book contends that the concept survived and flourished in the work of a number of contemporary experimental poets
Indebted to 19th century science, the notion of a “living form” endured throughout the 20th century and the poetic vanguard’s word games and collages mirrored the disjunctive frameworks that redefined how scientists made sense of life in the age of networks and non-linear systems
Featuring readings of texts from poets including Ed Dorn, A M J Crawford, P Inman, Chris Vitiello, and Christian Bök, this book shows how a number of vanguardist poets explores the commonalities they detected between nature’s processes of creation and their own methods of composition In doing so, it highlights devices like punning, paragrammatic play, metamorphic figuration and memetic repetition, mechanisms these poets find at work in the cybernetic, genetic and digital systems they investigate in their poems
Incarceration in the Poetry of Anna Mendelssohn Serve Your Own Sentences
Eleanor Careless, Northumbria University, UK
Shortlisted for the University English Book Prize 2026
The first full-length study of the poet, artist and activist Anna Mendelssohn (1948-2009), this book consolidates Mendelssohn’s reputation as one of the most important avant-garde British poets of her generation and explores her contribution to the powerful tradition of women writing enclosure and escape
Mendelssohn was herself incarcerated in Holloway women’s prison between 1971-76, and her bold and inventive poetry foregrounds and subverts, but does not triumphantly overcome, conditions of constraint Informed by extensive original archival research, this book reads her highly experimental lyric alongside the poetry of her forerunners and contemporaries, including Nancy Cunard, Muriel Rukeyser and Denise Riley, restoring to view a lost network of radical, Jewish and feminist modernism With chapters on the poetry of the Spanish Civil War, the legacy of the Holocaust, the Women’s Liberation Movement, the transformation of HMP Holloway in the 1970s and prison abolitionism, Incarceration in the Poetry of Anna Mendelssohn illuminates the historical, political and literary contexts that shape this work and argues that Mendelssohn advances a poetics not of emancipation, but of abolition
COLLECTIONS
New Directions in Religion and Literature
UK September 2026
• US September 2026
• 2 bw illus
256 Pages
PB 9781350568983
• £28 99 / $39 95
HB 9781350568945 • £85 00 / $115 00
ePDF 9781350568952 • £76 50 / $103 50
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Bloomsbury Academic
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New Directions in Religion and Literature
UK August 2026
• US August 2026
184 Pages
HB 9781350452893 • £85 00 / $115 00
PB 9781350454057 • £28 99 / $39 95
ePDF 9781350452909 • £76 50 / $103 50
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Bloomsbury Academic
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New Directions in Religion and Literature
UK August 2026 • US August 2026
136 Pages
HB 9781350375703 • £75 00 / $100 00
PB 9781350375741 • £28 99 / $39 95
ePDF 9781350375710 • £67 50 / $90 00
ePub 9781350375727 • £67 50 / $90 00
Bloomsbury Academic
Creation and Apocalypse in Feminist Speculative Fiction
Lois
W McFarland, University of Edinburgh, UK
Exploring nine works of contemporary feminist speculative fiction by Rhoda Lerman, Angela Carter, Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood and Naomi Alderman, this book asks how biblical myths of creation and apocalypse can intensify characters’ emotions or distract them from dealing with the more immediate problems presented by climate crisis, conflict, social inequality and other distressing realities
Engaging with affect theory – the study of emotion – across feminist, womanist and queer biblical reception history, this book argues that certain myths can become, in the words of Sara Ahmed, "sticky", attaching themselves (and their associated emotions) to certain people, stories or ideas It asks how and why these stories "stick", and how this can shine a light on the societies reflected in the novels as they respond to debates within the feminism(s) of their time The book takes negative emotions such as rage, loneliness, depression and disgust, and explores how these operate on and through fictional characters, who in many cases cannot escape the pull of Eden or the push of apocalypse These novels impel the reader to identify moments in which such characters may (or may not) "stay with the trouble", as Donna Haraway would put it, rather than giving in to the seductive dream of beginning afresh
Early Modern Literature and the Bodies of a Reformed
Eucharist
Julianne Sandberg
Choice 2025 Outstanding Academic Title
Examining what the eucharist taught early modern writers about their bodies and how it shaped the bodies they wrote about, this book shows how the exegetical roots of the Eucharistic controversy in 16th century England had very material and embodied consequences
To apprehend the nature of Christ’s body its nature, presence, closeness, and efficacy for these writers, was also to understand one’s own And conversely, to know one’s own body was to know something particular about Christ’s
Sandberg provides new insights into how Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Donne, and Aemilia Lanyer use the reformed eucharistic paradigm to imagine the embodied significance of the sacrament for their own bodies, the bodies of their narrative subjects, and the body of their literary work She shows the significance of this paradigm was for poets and playwrights at this time to represent the embodied self and negotiate how the body was read, interpreted and understood
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Activism and the Literary Self in 20th- and 21st-Century Literature Poetics of Justice
Jeffrey F Keuss, Huntington University, USA
Exploring how Shusaku Endo, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Thomas Merton, Marilynne Robinson, Cormac McCarthy, and Octavia E Butler engage with social justice and activism, this book explores the significant role that literature plays in the formation of justice
Jeff Keuss foregrounds literature and the role of poetics as both a method and a frame by which justice can not only be understood but uniquely positioned to transform and redeem the moral call on individuals in ways that some recent philosophical and ethical projects do not He examines how these authors are representative of a theme in literature which is the “turn to justice” as a literary form and discusses how these authors’ engagement with activism challenges isolated and anxious models of contemporary selfhood
Demonstrating how these writers utilize fiction, across different contexts of race, gender, culture, and theological denominations, to present themes of justice in communion with others, Keuss provides new insights into “communal selfhood” and shows how we can use this idea to shape our ideas of ethics, morality, activism, and justice
COLLECTIONS NEW IN PB
New Directions in Religion and Literature
UK August 2026
• US August 2026
216 Pages
HB 9781350356191
• £85 00 / $115 00
PB 9781350356238
• £28 99 / $39 95
ePDF 9781350356207 • £76 50 / $103 50
ePub 9781350356214 • £76 50 / $103 50
Bloomsbury Academic
COLLECTIONS
UK August 2026 • US August 2026
232 Pages • 2 bw illus
PB 9781350560192 • £28 99 / $39 95
HB 9781350560154 • £85 00 / $115 00
ePDF 9781350560161 • £76 50 / $103 50
ePub 9781350560178 £76 50 / $103 50
Bloomsbury Academic
Prayer and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing
Elizabeth Ludlow, Anglia Ruskin University, UK
In the 19th century, an era that saw a reconfiguration of the relationship between the self, the world and the divine, women writers probed the theological depths of embodied faith in new ways through poetry, fiction, devotional prose and life writing
Elizabeth Ludlow explores how, through this process, they articulated what it means to pray, and thereby understand one’s place in a world of individual and communal bodies The eight women writers discussed – Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Josephine Butler, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Dora Greenwell, Felicia Hemans, Adelaide Procter and Christina Rossetti – provide accounts of prayer that stress that the only way to experience and respond to something of the transcendent is through embracing lived experience and through a recognition of the connectedness of all bodies
In detailing how these writers engage with new ways of thinking about faith, desire and the material world, Ludlow argues that they offer models for ethical modes of being in the world and pave the way for later theologies of embodiment
Reading with Hannah Arendt Literature, Criticism, Theory
Andrea Timár, Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary
One of the first books to examine Hannah Arendt's work by putting it in conversation with a series of literary works from writers such as Melville, Brecht, and Sarraute, this book addresses the main puzzles of Arendt’s work and offers nuanced and innovative analyses of her strengths and shortcomings
Hannah Arendt is one of the major political thinkers of the last century, and recently, scholars have started to engage with her relevance for the humanities To date, though, her work has not been theoretically explored with a particular focus on literary and cultural studies This book fills this gap by examining the relevance of Arendt’s writings for 21st-century literary studies It asks questions like: What could an Arendtian approach to literature mean? Can we establish a dialogue between Arendt’s engagements with literature and her political thought? Can a rereading of Arendt’s writings and imagined conversations between Arendt and her 21st-century interpreters inspire new, Arendtian readings of literary texts? Revisiting some of Arendt’s own discussions of literature, this book explores her own engagements with the practice of storytelling to extend, complicate, and challenge some of the contemporary arguments on the significance of narratives At the same time, placing Arendt’s works in the context of literary texts unexplored by Arendt and contemporary critical theory, it also reads Arendt against Arendt, demonstrating her enduring relevance for 21st-century literary scholarship
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COLLECTIONS
UK July 2026 • US July 2026
240 Pages 14 bw illus
HB 9781350465954 • £85 00 / $115 00
PB 9781350465992 £28 99 / $39 95
ePDF 9781350465961 • £76 50 / $103 50
ePub 9781350465978 • £76 50 / $103 50
Bloomsbury Academic
Science Fiction and Posthumanism in the Anthropocene
Jonathan Hay, University of Chester, UK
With science fiction stories imagining futures and worlds vastly different from our own, and posthuman philosophies radically reconceptualising our species’ place within our own world, this book is a deep dive into the similarities between science fiction studies and critical posthumanism and how they can be read together Both fields fantasise about future technologies, envisage alienness through conversation with everyday life and both anticipate the Anthropocene as a dire source of rupture from the present Drawing inspiration from these and other consonances, this book establishes a common theoretical ground between the two fields, upon which the two currents of future-oriented thought can meet and begin to share a common language
An investigation that draws critical currency from the everyday condition of our species in relation to technology and our perilous situation in the Anthropocene, the book observes posthumanism not just as a theoretical framework that may be applied to science fictional ideas, but also as an integral part of how it is that science fiction is generated Featuring case studies of the work of prominent authors Isaac Asimov, Ursula K Le Guin and Kim Stanley Robinson, alongside the BBC television series Doctor Who and the cult videogame Outer Wilds, this book formulates a new critical paradigm which recognises the value of such works to posthumanist thought Addressing those with an interest in either academic discipline, it demonstrates that urgent discourses around our shared future are more imperative now than ever before
NEW IN PB
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New Horizons in Contemporary Writing
UK August 2026 • US August 2026
240 Pages • 10 b/w illus
HB 9781350202429 • £85 00 / $115 00
PB 9781350202436 • £28 99 / $39 95
ePDF 9781350202467 • £76 50 / $103 50
ePub 9781350202474 • £76 50 / $103 50
Bloomsbury Academic
COLLECTIONS
UK August 2026 • US August 2026
232 Pages
HB 9781350318854 • £85 00 / $115 00
PB 9781350318908 • £28 99 / $39 95
ePDF 9781350318861 • £76 50 / $103 50
ePub 9781350318878 £76 50 / $103 50 Bloomsbury Academic
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UK September 2026 • US September 2026
240 Pages 10 bw illus
PB 9781350557369 • £28 99 / $39 95
HB 9781350557321 £85 00 / $115 00
ePDF 9781350557338 • £76 50 / $103 50
ePub 9781350557345 • £76 50 / $103 50
Bloomsbury Academic
Encyclopaedism and Totality in Contemporary Fiction
Kiron Ward, University of East Anglia, UK
Taking as key examples work by Don DeLillo, Leslie Marmon Silko, Roberto Bolaño, and Karen Tei Yamashita, this book looks at engagements with encyclopaedic thought and practice in contemporary fiction Chapters provide important new insights into the new ways that authors approach, reclaim, and use ’totality’ as a method for approaching the contemporary, rather than an object to be represented In this, we find some of the most radical and challenging attempts in recent fiction to reimagine our world on the back of a contested history and in the face of an unstable future
Where major studies of literary encyclopaedism have historically tended to draw from the canon, this book looks to move beyond this tradition, and pays particular attention to work from Indigenous, Asian American, and Latin American contexts In doing so, it looks to address the challenges of reading world literature in the contemporary
Witness Literature
Culture, Memory and Contested Truths
Minoli Salgado, Manchester Metropolitan Univeristy, UK
This is the first critical monograph to explore and delineate the emergent field of witness literature across fiction, nonfiction, memoir, journalism and survivor testimony from the Global South Witness Literature examines writing from three sites of exceptional violence and fluid justice: the Cambodian Genocide, the Sri Lankan civil war and the borderscapes of honour-based violence in Jordan, Pakistan, Turkey/Türkiye, the UK and beyond It explores the place of the fictive in writings of traumatic events; takes up the call to expand Western understanding of the normatively human by focusing on work that bears witness from sites of compromised belonging; and shows how witness literature by migrant subjects marks an important intervention in Western readings of trauma Witness Literature invokes a wide range of texts These include: eyewitness accounts and survivor stories gathered in Children of Cambodia's Killing Fields; memoirs and autobiographies like François Bizot’s The Gate, Loung Ung's First They Killed My Father and Ajith Boyagoda's re-told memoir, A Long Watch; Sanam Maher ’s biography of the internet star Qandeel Baloch; pseudonymous work that reconfigures the authorising identity of the witness; novels by diasporic writers such as Michael Ondaatje, Vaddey Ratner, Madeleine Thien and Anuk Arudpragasam; the posthumously published editorial of an assassinated journalist who anticipated his death; fabricated testimony and fictive reconstructions of real events including Shehan Karunatilaka’s phantasmagoric novel, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida; and such works as Elif Shafak's Honour, Salman Rushdie's Shame and Shalimar the Clown
D H Lawrence and Black Modernism Transatlantic Influence and Confluence
Laura Ryan, University of Limerick, Ireland
The first book-length study of D H Lawrence and Black writers, Laura Ryan examines connections between Lawrence and four key Black and mixed-race modernist writers – Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, and Zora Neale Hurston – positioning all five as co-creators of modernism
Ryan investigates both the responses of these writers to Lawrence’s writing and the ways in which Black modernist writers were frequently engaging in their work with the same themes, problems and questions as the English author Their concerns converge with Lawrence’s, for example, on themes and issues including primitivism, individualism, religion, vitalism, and sexuality, all while critiquing modernity, seeking new modes of expression, and forging forward to find new identities In doing this, this book not only sheds new light on these particular writers; it pushes toward new ways of figuring literary connectedness more widely, and across barriers of race and nation
COLLECTIONS
Historicizing Modernism
UK August 2026 • US August 2026
240 Pages
PB 9781350470118
• £28 99 / $39 95
HB 9781350470071 • £85 00 / $115 00
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Bloomsbury Academic
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Historicizing Modernism
UK July 2026 • US July 2026
264 Pages
HB 9781350466975
• £90 00 / $120 00
PB 9781350467019 • £28 99 / $39 95
ePDF 9781350466982 • £81 00 / $108 00
ePub 9781350466999 • £81 00 / $108 00
Bloomsbury Academic
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UK November 2026 • US November 2026
432 Pages 3 b/w illus
PB 9781666941777 • £28 99 / $39 95
HB 9781666941753 £80 00 / $110 00
ePDF 9798216262367 • £72 00 / $99 00
ePub 9781978760653 • £72 00 / $99 00
Bloomsbury Academic
Intergenerational Modernism
The Literary Networks of E M Forster, T S Eliot and Virginia Woolf
Bárbara Gallego Larrarte, Institute of English Studies, University of London, UK
A study of cross-generational literary networks in interwar Britain, this book investigates how writers in the 1930s emerged from the shadow of their older modernist contemporaries such as E. M. Forster, T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, and even ended up shaping their public engagement
What happens when well-established writers are exposed to a new generation arriving in their wake? How do they respond to the shifting landscape new writers represent? This book reassesses the cultural context of late interwar Britain, focusing on the intergenerational networks of E M Forster, T S Eliot and Virginia Woolf, networks which put them directly in touch with the new writers of the 1930s, such as W H Auden, Stephen Spender, Julian Bell and William Plomer
This book sheds light on the ways in which these canonical modernists were challenged by their younger peers and impelled to take public stands, emphasizing the potential impact younger generations can have on the development of individuals born decades before them
Adrienne Rich’s Later Poetry
Raya Dunayevskaya and Marxist-Humanism
Alec Marsh, Muhlenberg College, USA
Reorienting understandings of Adrienne Rich’s later work through her interest in Marx and Marxist politics, this book engages with this overlooked part of her oeuvre through considerations of issues such as race, nationhood, and gender
From 1983 onward, after she visited revolutionary Nicaragua until the end of her life, Rich’s political vision can best be described as Marxist-Humanist Until recently, very little attention has been paid to Rich’s “interest” in Marx; there is no indepth treatment of the effect of Marx’s humanistic philosophy on Rich’s later work, or even on her unwavering, but altered dedication to Women’s Liberation This book fills this gap, showing how Rich’s discovery of Marx’s humanism affected her poetry In doing so, it makes a significant intervention into debates about the direction of American poetics and argues powerfully for a greater consciousness of political engagement through poetry
The Cyborg Modernism of William Carlos Williams Technoscience and the Arts
Tony Barnstone
Ranging from ancient Greece to the atom bomb, Tony Barnstone reveals how modernist poet and physician William Carlos Williams pioneered "cyborg modernism" a fusion of technoscience and the humanities that anticipates contemporary posthumanist theory
Barnstone argues that Williams, a true "poet of reality," deployed revolutionary cyborg esthetics that merged organic and mechanical elements, portraying humans as biomechanical hybrids while challenging traditional dualisms between mind and matter, human and machine The study reveals how Williams transcended C P Snow's "Two Cultures" divide, forging a synthetic approach that collapsed the artificial barriers between scientific and humanistic inquiry
Through four interconnected sections God Machines, Art Machines, Mind Machines, and War Machines this book explores how Williams transformed the creative process itself, analogizing it to scientific method while fashioning art objects into "machines made out of words" that manifest geometric forms, machine motion, and probable outcomes The Cyborg Modernism of William Carlos Williams unveils Williams' cyborg ideology that reimagined empathy as utility, seeking new forms of integrated thinking to counter the technoscientific horrors of world wars, death camps, and atomic bombs
NEW IN PB
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UK July 2026 US July 2026
256 Pages • 10 bw illus
HB 9781350420182 £85 00 / $115 00
PB 9781350420458 • £28 99 / $39 95
ePDF 9781350420427 £76 50 / $103 50
ePub 9781350420434 • £76 50 / $103 50 Bloomsbury Academic
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Bloomsbury Handbooks
UK July 2026
• US July 2026
384 Pages • 5 bw illus
HB 9781350450554 • £140 00 / $190 00
PB 9781350450547 • £39 99 / $54 95
ePDF 9781350450592 • £126 00 / $171 00
ePub 9781350450561 • £126 00 / $171 00
Bloomsbury Academic
Microscopy, Magnification and Modernist Fiction Micro-Modernism from Hardy to Beckett
Patrick Armstrong, University of Cambridge, UK
Exploring how modernism registered shock experiences of the microscopic and extended vision in prose fiction through the work of four modernist writers – D. H. Lawrence, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Beckett –this book is the first substantial study of the interrelations between microscopy and modernist fiction
Illustrating ways in which optical instruments had the capacity to change, displace and reframe ideas of what the world is like, this book argues that encounters with the microscopic are often depicted as thresholds between the human and the non-human, in ways that reverberate through modernist fiction
Exploring a period of significant developments in microscopical tools and techniques, from the light microscope to the electron microscope, this book traces a shift that reconfigured the limits of the observable
NEW IN PB
The Bloomsbury Handbook of Modernist Archives
Edited by Jamie Callison, Nord University, Norway, Matthew Feldman, University of York, UK, Anna Svendsen & Erik Tonning, University of Bergen, Norway
Providing a broad, definitive account of how the 'archival turn' in humanities scholarship has shaped modernist studies, this book also functions as an ongoing ‘practitioner ’s toolkit’ (including useful bibliographical resources) and a guide to avenues for future work
Archival work in modernist studies has revolutionised the discipline in the past two decades Several theoretical trends have prompted this development, including the focus on compositional process within genetic manuscript studies, the emphasis on book history, little magazines, and wider publishing contexts, and the emphasis on new material evidence and global and ‘non-canonical’ authors and networks within the ‘New Modernist Studies’
This book provides a guide to the variety of new archival research that will point to fresh avenues and connect the methodologies and resources being developed across modernist studies Offering a variety of single-author case studies on recent archival developments and editing projects, including Samuel Beckett, Hart Crane, H D , James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair and Virginia Woolf, it also offers a range of thematic essays that examine an array of underused sources as well as the challenges facing archival researchers of modernism
