Bücher der Reihe Cambridge Critical Concepts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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