Product Description: This study offers a comprehensive overview of Indian writing in English in the 21st century. Through ten exemplary analyses in which canonical authors stand next to less well-known and diasporic ones Christoph Senft provides deep insights into India's complex literary world and develops an argumentative framework in which narrative texts are interpreted as transmodern re-readings of history, historicity and memory...read more

Remaking History considers the ways that historical fictions of all kinds enable a complex engagement with the past. Popular historical texts including films, television and novels, along with cultural phenomena such as superheroes and vampires, broker relationships to ‘history’, while also enabling audiences to understand the ways in which the past is written, structured and ordered. Jerome de Groot uses examples from contemporary popular culture to show the relationship between fiction and history in two key ways. Firstly, the texts pedagogically contribute to the historical imaginary and secondly they allow reflection upon how the past is constructed as ‘history’. In doing so, they provide an accessible and engaging means to critique, conceptualize and reject the processes of historical representation. The book looks at the use of the past in fiction from sources including Mad Men, Downton Abbey and Howard Brenton’s Anne Boleyn, along with the work of directors such as Terence Malick, Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese, to show that fictional representations enable a comprehension of the fundamental strangeness of the past and the ways in which this foreign, exotic other is constructed. Drawing from popular films, novels and TV series of recent years, and engaging with key thinkers from Marx to Derrida, Remaking History is a must for all students interested in the meaning that history has for fiction, and vice versa.

Product Description: This book opens with a crisis of recollection. In the early modern period, real political traumas like civil war and regicide exacerbated what were already perceived ruptures in myths of English descent. William Camden and other scholars had revealed that the facts of history could not justify the Arthurian myths, nor could history itself guarantee any moment of collective origin for the English people...read more

Product Description: This book explores how recollections and traces of the reign of Richard III survived a century and more to influence the world and work of William Shakespeare. In Richard III, Shakespeare depicts an era that had only recently passed beyond the horizon of living memory...read more

Product Description: Representing Imperial Rivalry in the Early Modern Mediterranean explores representations of national, racial, and religious identities within a region dominated by the clash of empires. Bringing together studies of English, Spanish, Italian, and Ottoman literature and cultural artifacts, the volume moves from the broadest issues of representation in the Mediterranean to a case study – early modern England – where the “Mediterranean turn” has radically changed the field...read more

Product Description: To what extent can imaginative events be situated in time and history? From the medieval to the early modern period, this question is intriguingly explored in the expansive literary genre of romance. This collective study, edited by Jon Whitman, is the first systematic investigation of that formative process during more than four hundred years...read more

Product Description: This book explores the performance of Irish collective memories and forgotten histories. It proposes an alternative and more comprehensive criterion of Irish theatre practices. These practices can be defined as the 'rejected', contested and undervalued plays and performativities that are integral to Ireland's political and cultural landscapes...read more

Product Description: Can literature make it possible to represent histories that are otherwise ineffable? Making use of the Deleuzian concept of “the powers of the false,” Doro Wiese offers readings of three novels that deal with the Shoah, with colonialism, and with racialized identities...read more

Product Description: Critics argue that contemporary western societies are immersed in a "culture of memory," devoting resources to national histories and heritage, commemoration, public re-enactments, etc. We use these recollections of our national past to maintain a collective identity in the present, among other uses...read more

Product Description: Since 1945, authors and scholars have intensely debated what form literary fiction about the Holocaust should take. The works of H. G. Adler (1910-1988) and W. G. Sebald (1944-2001), two modernist scholar-poets who settled in England but never met, present new ways of reconceptualizing the nature of witnessing, literary testimony, and the possibility of a ""poetics"" after Auschwitz...read more

Product Description: Ezra Pound’s definition of an epic as “a poem containing history” raises questions: how can a poem “contain” history? And if it can, does it help us to think about history in ways that conventional historiography cannot? Poems Containing History: Twentieth-Century American Poetry’s Engagement with the Past, by Gary Grieve-Carlson, argues that twentieth-century American poetry has “contained” and helped its readers to think about history in a variety of provocative and powerful ways...read more

Product Description: Scholarly accounts of Joyce's early work have traditionally resorted to two historical keys to try to unlock it: a concept of the Dublin and Ireland in which he grew to adulthood as stagnant and backward, and an emphasis on 1904, the year of the supposedly crucial break in which Joyce quit Ireland for continental Europe and could begin his great modernist literary project...read more

Product Description: Law and History in Cervantes’ Don Quixote is a deep consideration of the intellectual environment that gave rise to Cervantes’ seminal work. Susan Byrne demonstrates how Cervantes synthesized the debates surrounding the two most authoritative discourses of his era – those of law and history – into a new aesthetic product, the modern novel...read more

Product Description: In Liberal Epic, Edward Adams examines the liberal imagination’s centuries-long dependence on contradictory, and mutually constitutive, attitudes toward violent domination. Adams centers his ambitious analysis on a series of major epic poems, histories, and historical novels, including Dryden’s Aeneid, Pope’s Iliad, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Byron’s Don Juan, Scott’s Life of Napoleon, Napier’s History of the War in the Peninsula, Macaulay’s History of England, Hardy’s Dynasts, and Churchill’s military histories―works that rank among the most important publishing events of the past three centuries yet that have seldom received critical attention relative to their importance...read more

Product Description: The book is a study of the most recent American fiction, published at the turn of the 21th century, which demonstrates a renewed interest in the matters of history. Using the concepts of memory and experience, the author points at the ways in which subjective history has been created in the new «novel about history», written by such authors as William Gass, Richard Powers, Marilynne Robinson, Nicholson Baker, Aleksandar Hemon, and Jeffrey Eugenides...read more

Product Description: When looking at how trauma is represented in literature and the arts, we tend to focus on the weight of the past. In this book, Amir Eshel suggests that this retrospective gaze has trapped us in a search for reason in the madness of the twentieth century’s catastrophes at the expense of literature’s prospective vision...read more

Product Description: This collection examines the intersection of historical recollection, strategies of representation, and reading practices in historical fiction from the eighteenth century to today. In shifting focus to the agency of the reader and taking a long historical view, the collection brings a new perspective to the field of historical representation...read more

Product Description: The archeological and source-critical research of ancient history in the 19th century confronted its aesthetic realization with a general problem: literary and visual art imaginations cannot ignore the scientific findings yet the fragmentary evidence of the past can only be given a voice by means of aesthetic forms of organization...read more

Product Description: Following German writer Christa Wolf's death in December of 2011, the scholarly interest that her work had generated over four decades now culminates in the question of her literary and cultural legacy. Throughout her long writing career, Christa Wolf often pointed to generational differences, and asked questions about historical experiences specific to the period's contemporaries...read more