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180 results in English literature after 1945

Page 1 of 9

Pablo Neruda in Context
  • Edited by Ignacio López-Calvo
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    October 2025
    Print publication:
    31 October 2025
  • Pablo Neruda in Context includes forty-two essays by some of the main experts on Pablo Neruda's oeuvre that focus on how his places of residence and travel (Mexico, Argentina, Spain, France, Asia), the landmark event of the Cold War, as well as literary and political influences affected his poetic evolution. It also considers the other genres of his writing, including memoirs, letters, translation, and drama, as well as the musical and film adaptions of his work throughout the world. Other essays study his anti-colonial and ecocritical messages, his complicated relationships with women and other writers, as well as his take on race and the significance of his plausible assassination by Augusto Pinochet's military junta. The last section explores Neruda's poetry as world literature as well as his impressive reception in India, Japan, China, the Arab world, the Anglophone world, Russia and Eastern Europe, and his overall lasting legacy.

A History of the Bloomsbury Group
  • Edited by Derek Ryan
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    October 2025
    Print publication:
    30 September 2025

Photography and Film in the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee
  • Hermann Wittenberg
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    September 2025
    Print publication:
    30 September 2025
  • Speaking about his early experiments with the camera, the Nobel Prize winning novelist J. M. Coetzee acknowledged the seminal influence of images on his writing: 'The marks of photography and of the cinema are all over my work, from the beginning.' This book presents an archivally grounded examination of the influence of the camera on Coetzee's creative practice, providing insights that can help us read the novels in new ways. In this comprehensive examination of the formative role that photographic images play in Coetzee's oeuvre, Wittenberg offers evidence from biographical and archival sources, Coetzee's own critical writings, and the whole range of fictions themselves to gauge the extent of Coetzee's visual imagination. This book argues that the images that Coetzee writes into his fictions are charged with an affective and ethical force that connects them to larger questions relating to the truth, a relationship in which the autobiographical self is implicated.

Contemporary American Fiction and Cultures of Self-Help
  • Gillian Moore
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2025
    Print publication:
    31 July 2025
  • This is a book about the encounters that contemporary North American fiction stages with distinct strands of self-help. Its central argument is that the varied practices of ever-expanding and diversifying self-help cultures are generatively elastic sites of inspiration as well as antagonism for contemporary authors: spaces where they can explore what it means to be better on personal, ethical, and societal terms. It offers new perspectives on the work of nine very different writers by exploring how they play different forms of self-help off against one another. This book shows how in the clashes between practices ranging from commencement speeches and grassroots communitarian self-help to time-management productivity manuals, trauma recovery theories, pop-neuroscience, and makeover cultures, contemporary writers try to find ways of reimagining authority and agency beyond individualism, asking how - and if - it is possible to live and write 'better' in our compromised neoliberal world.

Auerbach's Renaissance
  • Rebirths of an Aesthetic from Shakespeare to Ferrante
  • Chris Warley
  • Published online:
    24 April 2025
    Print publication:
    24 April 2025
  • Erich Auerbach's Mimesis is among the most admired works of literary criticism of the last hundred years. Amidst the horrors of the Second World War, Auerbach's prodigious learning managed – almost miraculously – to give voice to a delicate, subtle optimism. Focusing on Auerbach's account of Renaissance literature, Christopher Warley rediscovers the powerful beauty of Mimesis and shows its vitality for contemporary literary criticism. Analysing Auerbach's account of Renaissance love lyric alongside Woolf's To the Lighthouse, fifteenth-century Burgundian writing alongside Ferrante, and Shakespeare alongside Michelet, Ruskin and Burckhardt, Auerbach's Renaissance traces an aesthetic that celebrates the diversity of human life. Simultaneously it locates in Auerbach's reading of Renaissance writing a challenge to the pessimism of today, the sense that we live in an endless present where the future looms only as a threat. Auerbach's scholarship, the art he learns from Dante, Rabelais, Montaigne, and Shakespeare, is a Renaissance offering democratic possibility.

Seamus Heaney and Catholicism
  • Gary Wade
  • Published online:
    20 February 2025
    Print publication:
    27 February 2025
  • Seamus Heaney and Catholicism makes extensive use of unpublished material to offer fresh insights into Heaney's complex engagement with Catholicism. Gary Wade explores how Catholicism operates in ways other than social and political, which have largely been the focus of critics up until now. Using extensive unpublished material, including early drafts of some familiar poems, it offers close readings which explore how Catholicism operates at the level of feeling, and how it continued to have an emotional purchase on Heaney long after he had left behind orthodox practice. It also engages with Heaney's increasing concern, in his later work, with the loss of a metaphysical sensibility, and his turning to the Roman poet Virgil to deal with questions of death and post-mortem existence. The book concludes by arguing that Heaney's Catholicism is displaced rather than rejected, and that his vision expands to accommodate both the Christian and the Classical worlds.

Twentieth-Century Literature and the Aftermath of War
  • Rachel Bryan
  • Published online:
    20 December 2024
    Print publication:
    09 January 2025
  • Students of twentieth-century literature are familiar with narratives that associate devastating wars with conceptual, societal, and aesthetic upheavals. What these accounts overlook, however, is a body of psychologically attuned modern writing that was less interested in this shattering of faith and form than in those counterfactual modes of resistance deployed by individuals and nations in response to mass violence and profound change. Twentieth-Century Literature and the Aftermath of War is an innovative study of the attention paid to such reparative, stabilising impulses in post-war writings from across the last century. Focusing on works by Henry James, Elizabeth Bowen, and Kazuo Ishiguro as case studies, it argues that to fully understand the relationship between modern warfare and literary art, we must learn to engage with texts whose modernity lies in their acknowledgement of the draw felt towards, and contested ethics of, consolatory counterfactuals.

The British Novel of Ideas
  • George Eliot to Zadie Smith
  • Edited by Rachel Potter, Matthew Taunton
  • Published online:
    05 December 2024
    Print publication:
    12 December 2024
  • The novel of ideas is an important form that is both under-theorised and largely neglected in accounts of the development of the novel in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This book sets out the history of this critical hostility, which took hold as the aesthetic protocols of literary modernism became established among key literary tastemakers in Britain. It then proposes a revaluation and a critical reclamation of the novel of ideas, showcasing a range of perceptive, sympathetic, and sensitive ways of reading novels in which discursive argumentation is foregrounded and where the clash of ideas is vital to the novelistic effect. Through thematic chapters as well as new accounts of key novelists in the British tradition-including George Eliot, H. G. Wells, Doris Lessing and Kamila Shamsie-this book repositions the novel of ideas as a major form in modern British literature.

The Cambridge Introduction to Literary Posthumanism
  • Joseph Tabbi
  • Published online:
    04 December 2024
    Print publication:
    14 November 2024
  • At a time when scholars in both literary and scientific disciplines are advancing the term posthumanism, this book offers a through-line. Beginning with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and continuing into the post-print, born-digital excursions of Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl, this literary introduction defines posthumanism and provides a summary account of the key literary and cultural theorists in the field. It embraces humanist refusals from Melville's Bartelby to Thomas Pynchon's authorial surrogation, and more recent evasions and avoidances in the writing of William Gibson, Tom McCarthy, Coleson Whitehead, Jeanette Winterson, and Claire-Louise Bennett. This book also provides close readings of key posthuman fiction, poetry, and conceptual approaches that help ground the discipline.

The Cambridge Companion to Literature in a Digital Age
  • Edited by Adam Hammond
  • Published online:
    29 November 2024
    Print publication:
    14 November 2024
  • Literature has experienced two great medium shifts, each with profound implications for its forms, genres, and cultures: that from orality to writing, and that from writing to printing. Today we are experiencing a third shift, from printed to digital forms. As with the previous shifts, this transformation is reconfiguring literature and literary culture. The Cambridge Companion to Literature in the Digital Age is organized around the question of what is at stake for literary studies in this latest transition. Rather than dividing its chapters by methodology or approach, this volume proceeds by exploring the major categories of literary investigation that are coming under pressure in the digital age: concepts such as the canon, periodization, authorship, and narrative. With chapters written by leading experts in all facets of literary studies, this book shows why all those who read, study, and teach literature today ought to attend to the digital.

The Cambridge Companion to Jack Kerouac
  • Edited by Steven Belletto
  • Published online:
    31 October 2024
    Print publication:
    27 June 2024
  • Jack Kerouac is among the most important and influential writers to emerge from mid-twentieth century America. Founder of the Beat Generation literary movement, Kerouac's most famous novel, On the Road, was known as the bible of this generation, and inspired untold people to question the rigid social and cultural expectations of 1950s America. And yet despite its undeniable influence, On the Road is only a small piece of Kerouac's literary achievement, and there are now well over forty Kerouac books published. The centerpiece to this work is Kerouac's multi-volume Duluoz Legend, named for his fictional alter-ego, Jack Duluoz, and comprising numerous books written over decades that together tell the story of Duluoz's life and times. This volume offers fresh perspectives on his multifaceted body of work, ranging from detailed analyses of his most significant books to wide-angle perspectives that place Kerouac in key literary, theoretical, and cultural contexts.

The Possibility of Literature
  • The Novel and the Politics of Form
  • Peter Boxall
  • Published online:
    10 October 2024
    Print publication:
    05 September 2024
  • The Possibility of Literature is an essential collection from one of the most powerful and distinctive voices in contemporary literary studies. Bringing together key compositions from the last twenty-five years, as well as several new pieces, the book demonstrates the changing fate of literary thinking over the first decades of the twenty-first century. Peter Boxall traces here the profound shifts in the global conditions that make literature possible as these have occurred in the historical passage from 9/11 to Covid 19. Exploring questions such as 'The Idea of Beauty', the nature of 'Mere Being', or the possibilities of Rereading, the author anatomises the myriad forces that shape the literary imagination. At the same time, he gives vivid critical expression to the imaginative possibilities of literature itself – those unique forms of communal life that literature makes possible in a dramatically changing world, and that lead us towards a new shared future.

The Cambridge Companion to American Utopian Literature and Culture since 1945
  • Edited by Sherryl Vint
  • Published online:
    09 May 2024
    Print publication:
    16 May 2024
  • Providing a comprehensive overview of American thought in the period following World War II, after which the US became a global military and economic leader, this book explores the origins of American utopianism and provides a trenchant critique from the point of view of those left out of the hegemonic ideal. Centring the voices of those oppressed by or omitted from the consumerist American Dream, this book celebrates alternative ways of thinking about how to create a better world through daily practices of generosity, justice, and care. The chapters collected here emphasize utopianism as a practice of social transformation, not as a literary genre depicting a putatively perfect society, and urgently make the case for why we need utopian thought today. With chapters on climate change, economic justice, technology, and more, alongside chapters exploring utopian traditions outside Western frameworks, this book opens a new discussion in utopian thought and theory.

Robert Lowell In Context
  • Edited by Thomas Austenfeld, Grzegorz Kość
  • Published online:
    28 March 2024
    Print publication:
    04 April 2024
  • Robert Lowell was one of the most influential American poets of the 20th century. This volume explores the various contexts of Lowell's life and work and evaluates his oeuvre from new perspectives. Individual chapters address his relation to the South, his religious evolution, aspects of his marriages and private life, his bipolar disorder seen through new theories of mental illness, his work as a letter writer and a connoisseur of art and photography. The book also introduces new parameters for a contemporary study of Lowell, commenting on current debates about race and privilege, feminism, ecoconsciousness, his engagement with the natural environment as well as his friendships with Randall Jarrell and Robert Penn Warren.

The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre since 1945
  • Edited by Jen Harvie, Dan Rebellato
  • Published online:
    14 March 2024
    Print publication:
    21 March 2024
  • British theatre underwent a vast transformation and expansion in the decades after World War II. This Companion explores the historical, political, and social contexts and conditions that not only allowed it to expand but, crucially, shaped it. Resisting a critical tendency to focus on plays alone, the collection expands understanding of British theatre by illuminating contexts such as funding, unionisation, devolution, immigration, and changes to legislation. Divided into four parts, it guides readers through changing attitudes to theatre-making (acting, directing, writing), theatre sectors (West End, subsidised, Fringe), theatre communities (audiences, Black theatre, queer theatre), and theatre's relationship to the state (government, infrastructure, nationhood). Supplemented by a valuable Chronology and Guide to Further Reading, it presents up-to-date approaches informed by critical race theory, queer studies, audience studies, and archival research to demonstrate important new ways of conceptualising post-war British theatre's history, practices and potential futures.

The Cambridge Companion to the American Graphic Novel
  • Edited by Jan Baetens, Hugo Frey, Fabrice Leroy
  • Published online:
    10 January 2024
    Print publication:
    28 September 2023
  • The Cambridge Companion to the American Graphic Novel explores the important role of the graphic novel in reflecting American society and in the shaping of the American imagination. Using key examples, this volume reviews the historical development of various subgenres within the graphic novel tradition and examines how graphic novelists have created multiple and different accounts of the American experience, including that of African American, Asian American, Jewish, Latinx, and LGBTQ+ communities. Reading the American graphic novel opens a debate on how major works have changed the idea of America from that once found in the quintessential action or superhero comics to show new, different, intimate accounts of historical change as well as social and individual, personal experience. It guides readers through the theoretical text-image scholarship to explain the meaning of the complex borderlines between graphic novels, comics, newspaper strips, caricature, literature, and art.

The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Novel and Politics
  • Edited by Bryan M. Santin
  • Published online:
    07 October 2023
    Print publication:
    12 October 2023
  • Surveying the relationship between American politics and the twentieth-century novel, this volume analyzes how political movements, ideas, and events shaped the American novel. It also shows how those political phenomena were shaped in turn by long-form prose fiction. The book is made up of three major sections. The first section considers philosophical ideologies and broad political movements that were both politically and literarily significant in the twentieth-century United States, including progressive liberalism, conservatism, socialism and communism, feminism, and Black liberation movements. The second section analyzes the evolving political valences of key popular genres and literary forms in the twentieth-century American novel, focusing on crime fiction, science fiction, postmodern metafiction and immigrant fiction. The third section examines ten diverse politically-minded novels that serve as exemplary case studies across the century. Combining detailed literary analysis with innovative political theory, this Companion provides a groundbreaking study of the politics of twentieth-century American fiction.

W. G. Sebald in Context
  • Edited by Uwe Schütte
  • Published online:
    24 August 2023
    Print publication:
    07 September 2023
  • The German academic and writer W. G. Sebald made an astounding ascent into the canon of world literature. In this volume, leading experts from both the English- and the German-speaking worlds explore his celebrated prose works published in the short span from 1996 to his premature death in 2001. Special attention is paid to Sebald's unpublished texts and books awaiting translation into English. The volume – illustrated with many unpublished archive images – scrutinizes the dual nature of Sebald's life and work, located between Germany and England, academic and literary writing, vilification and idolization. Through nearly forty essays on a broad range of topics, W. G. Sebald in Context achieves a revision of our understanding of Sebald, defying many clichés about him. Particular attention is paid to the manifold ways in which Sebald's writings exerted a legacy far beyond literature, especially in the areas of art, cinema, and popular music.

Planetary Pynchon
  • History, Modernity, and the Anthropocene
  • Tore Rye Andersen
  • Published online:
    24 August 2023
    Print publication:
    24 August 2023
  • While Thomas Pynchon is usually described as an American author who primarily writes about American reality, Planetary Pynchon: History, Modernity, and the Anthropocene argues that his major novels, Gravity's Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day, can profitably be read as a global trilogy that presents a coherent historical account of how the emergence and spread of European modernity across the world have had devastating consequences for the planet and its inhabitants. This book sets a new agenda in Pynchon studies, charting his early anticipation of anthropocenic and planetary ideas, including globalization's demand for constant growth. It combines close textual readings with broad perspectives on large thematic arcs and stylistic developments across Pynchon's entire career as well as an extensive dialogue with the rich reception of his work.

The Near Future in Twenty-First-Century Fiction
  • Climate, Retreat and Revolution
  • David Sergeant
  • Published online:
    07 August 2023
    Print publication:
    22 December 2022
  • A growing awareness of climate change and looming planetary crisis has put unprecedented pressure on the near future, leading to an increasing amount of fiction being set there. But what do these disparate works have in common, other than their temporal setting? And what can the imagination of the near future tell us about where we live now? The Near Future in 21st Century Fiction ranges across novels and films to reveal how our contemporary near future splits between two divergent paths. One seeks to retreat from climate change and the disruption it threatens to affluent lifestyles; the other tries to imagine new forms of community, and radical change, but struggles to locate a genre adequate to the task. It in this struggle, however, that we begin to glimpse the outlines of an emergent near future form: a revolution fit for the Anthropocene.

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