Bücher der Reihe Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature

What can literary theory reveal about discourses and practices of human rights, and how can human rights frameworks help to make sense of literature? How have human rights concerns shaped the literary marketplace, and how can literature impact human rights concerns? Essays in this volume theorize how both literature and reading literarily can shape understanding of human rights in productive ways. Contributors to Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature provide a shared history of modern literature and rights; theorize how trauma, ethics, subjectivity, and witnessing shape representations of human rights violations and claims in literary texts across a range of genres (including poetry, the novel, graphic narrative, short story, testimonial, and religious fables); and consider a range of civil, political, social, economic, and cultural rights and their representations. The authors reflect on the imperial and colonial histories of human rights as well as the cynical mobilization of human rights discourses in the name of war, violence, and repression; at the same time, they take seriously Gayatri Spivak's exhortation that human rights is something that we "cannot not want," exploring the central function of storytelling at the heart of all human rights claims, discourses, and policies.

Exploring the shifting semiotics and symbolism of shipwreck, the interdisciplinary essays in this volume provide a history of the shipwreck motif in literature and art as they consider how depictions have varied over time, and across genres and cultures.

This volume engages with the recent and ongoing consolidation of "world literature" as a paradigm of study, noting that literature is never simply a given, but is always performatively and materially instituted by translators, publishers, academics, critics, readers, and authors. It substantiates, refines, and interrogates current approaches to world literature, focusing on the poetics of writers themselves, market dynamics, postcolonial negotiations, and translation, engaging a range of related disciplines. This book explores how singular literary works become inserted in transnational systems, and how transnational and institutional dimensions of literature are inflected in literary works.

This interdisciplinary volume discusses whether the increasing salience of the Anthropocene concept in the humanities and the social sciences constitutes an "Anthropocenic turn."

Prison Writing and the Literary World offers scholarly essays exploring international prison writings in relation to wartime internment, political imprisonment, resistance and independence-creation, regimes of terror, and personal narratives of development grappling with race, class and gender.

Following the spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences, Spatial Literary Studies draw upon diverse critical and theoretical traditions in disclosing, analyzing, and exploring the significance of space, place, and mapping in literature and in the world, thus making possible new textual geographies and literary cartographies.

In our image-mediated era, this book tries to raise awareness about the importance of dialogue between art and literature. Offering an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary perspective, the book provides an inspiring overview of the literary and visual department both in Europe and America from the Renaissance to the twentieth century.

War, migration, and refugeehood are inextricably linked and the complex nature of all three phenomena offers profound opportunities for representation and misrepresentation. This volume brings together international contributors and practitioners from a wide range of fields and backgrounds to explore and problematize textual and visual inscriptions of war and migration in the arts, the media, academic, public, and political discourses. The essays in this collection address the academic and political interest in representations of the migrant and the refugee, and examine the constructed nature of concepts such as 'war,' 'refuge(e),' 'victim,' 'border,' 'home,' 'non-place,' and 'dis/location.'

Providing new openings for transdisciplinary narrative theory, this book investigates storyworlds and minds in narratives across media, visiting literature, digital games, TV, music, and more. It addresses interdisciplinary approaches to contemporary narrative theory, inspired by recent cognitive-scientific developments. Minds and worlds become essential facets of making sense and interpreting narratives as essays ask how story-internal minds relate to the mind external to the storyworld. Promoting knowledge on the latest forms of cultural and social meaning-making through narrative, this book contributes to fields including literary studies, social sciences, art, media, and communication.

This study examines the representation of illness, disability, and cultural pathologies in modern Iberian and Latin American literature. Investigating how writers reflect on the personal, social, and cultural effects of illness, it raises central questions about how medical discourses, cultural pathologies, and the art of healing in general are represented. Addressing subjects including bioethics, neuroscience, psychosurgery, medical technologies, Darwinian evolution, indigenous herbal medicine, the pathography, and the `illness as metaphor¿ trope, this collection engages with cultural studies, gender studies, disability studies, comparative literature, and the medical humanities.

Moving beyond the representational and historically based aspects of literature and film that have dominated Gothic studies, this book acknowledges the contemporary diversification of Gothic scholarship and maps its changing and mutating incarnations. Visiting areas such as the Gothic and digital realities, uncanny food experiences, representations of death and the public media, Gothic creatures and their popular legacies, new approaches to contemporary Gothic literature, and re-evaluations of the Gothic mode through regional narratives, essays reveal the multifaceted nature of Gothic studies in the 21st Century. This volume provides exciting new insights into the Gothic and related fields.

This book is a study of the short story, one of the widest taught genres in English literature, from an innovative methodological perspective. Both liminality and the short story are well-researched phenomena, but the combination of both is not frequent. This innovative collection discusses the relevance of the concept of liminality for the short story genre and for short story cycles, emphasizing theoretical perspectives, methodological relevance and applicability. It focuses on both the liminality of the short story and on liminality in the short story.

This book is a ground-breaking transnational study of representations of the environment in Asian American literature. Extending and renewing Asian American studies and ecocriticism by drawing the two fields into deeper dialogue, it brings Asian American writers to the center of ecocritical studies. Contributors apply a diversity of critical frameworks, including radical race studies, counter-memory studies, ecofeminism, and geomantic criticism. The book presents a compelling and timely `green¿ perspective through which to understand key works of Asian American literature and leads the field of ecocriticism into previously neglected terrain.

In our image-mediated era, this book tries to raise awareness about the importance of dialogue between art and literature. Offering an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary perspective, the book provides an inspiring overview of the literary and visual department both in Europe and America from the Renaissance to the twentieth century.

Celebrating the anniversary of Testimony, this collection joins leading academics from a range of fields to explore the meaning, use, and value of testimony in law and politics, its relationship to other forms of writing, and its place in society. These issues are necessarily inflected by the question of witnessing violence, pain, and suffering at both the local and global level, across cultures, and in postcolonial contexts. It presents an interdisciplinary concern over the current and future nature of witnessing as it plays out through a `new¿ Europe, post-9/11 US, war-torn Africa, and in countless refugee and detention centers, and as it is worked out by lawyers, journalists, medics, and novelists.

Contemporary Trauma Narratives: Liminality and the Ethics of Form gives an insight into the relationship between the difficulty of putting traumatic events or experiences into words and the subsequent ethicality of aesthetic forms used to represent trauma. It is an excellent resource for scholars of contemporary literature, trauma studies and literary theory.

This book refocuses current understandings of American Literature from the revolutionary period to the present-day through an analytical accounting of class, reestablishing a foundation for discussions of class in American culture. American Studies scholars have explored the ways in which American society operates through inequality and modes of social control, focusing primarily on issues of status group identities involving race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and disability. The essays in this volume focus on both the historically changing experience of class and its continuing hold on American life. The collection visits popular as well as canonical literature, recognizing that class is constructed in and mediated by the affective and the sensational. It analyzes class division, class difference, and class identity in American culture, enabling readers to grasp why class matters, as well as the economic, social, and political matter of class. Redefining the field of American literary cultural studies and asking it to rethink its preoccupation with race and gender as primary determinants of identity, contributors explore the disciplining of the laboring body and of the emotions, the political role of the novel in contesting the limits of class power and authority, and the role of the modern consumer culture in both blurring and sharpening class divisions.

The book¿s main focus is on the development of an awareness of speech pathology in the literary imaginary from the late-eighteenth century to the present, studying the novel, drama, epic poetry, lyric poetry, children¿s literature, autobiography and autopathography, and clinical case studies and guidebooks on speech therapy. The volume addresses a growing interest, both in popular culture and the humanities, regarding the portrayal of conditions such as stuttering, aphasia and mutism, along with the status of the Self in relation to those conditions. Since speech pathologies are neither illnesses nor outwardly physical disabilities, critical studies of their representation have tended to occupy a liminal position in relation to other discourses such as literary and cultural theory, and even disability studies. One of the primary aims of this collection is to address this marginalization, and to position a cultural criticism of speech pathology within literary studies.