Alex Murray - Böcker

British Decadent literature was a radical attack on conventional morality and middle-class taste, its insistence on the autonomy of art and its exploration of sexuality, dissipation, and depravity at odds with the literary and social establishment. Yet this counter-cultural narrative has obscured the often reactionary and elitist tendencies of Decadent writers and artists of the fin de siècle. Decadent Conservatism offers the first in-depth examination of the intersection of Decadence and conservatism, arguing that underpinning both was the desire to find alternatives to liberal modernity. Both Decadents and conservatives turned to the past to uncover values and models of social organisation that could offer stability in a chaotic world. From well-known figures such as Oscar Wilde and W.B. Yeats, through to the forgotten editors of short-lived periodicals, important female aesthetes such as Michael Field, and politicians such as Arthur Balfour, Decadent Conservatism challenges conventional understandings of the relationship between aesthetics, politics, and the past in late-Victorian Britain. Through a series of thematic chapters exploring the alternative communities created by little magazines, the politics of Individualism, investments in monarchy and religion, Folk Decadence, and jingoistic and nationalist responses to the Second Anglo-Boer war, this study offers a new, and much messier, picture of fin-de-siècle literary politics. It will be of interest to those working on Victorian literature and modernism, as well as social, political, and cultural history of the period 1880-1920.

The Oxford Handbook of Oscar Wilde puts Wilde the Icon into an expansive literary and dramatic context. It offers a readable guide to Wilde studies for the early twenty-first century. Its chapters reflect Wilde's status as a queer writer while filling in the gaps that this focus have left and looking forward to the next generation of critical studies on Wilde. It is designed to appeal to students and those with a general interest in Wilde, as well as professional academics. Its comprehensive discussions of his writings show how these interact with, and transfigure, both their age and his life, while providing readers with clear and extensive suggestions on approaches to reading, thinking, and writing about them. It is organized in four sections: Places, Works, Intellectual Contexts, and Reception. The first section on Places tells the story of Wilde's life and intellectual evolution through the places that defined its contours: Dublin, Oxford, London, America, France, and Italy. The second section on Wilde's Works provides new and in-depth directions to close reading Wilde's writing, with generative ideas on the development, style, structure, and significance of each of his major works. The section on Intellectual Contexts brings together chapters on the main ideas and cultures of thought that shaped Wilde's thinking, from late-nineteenth century sexuality and fashion to the ancient world and Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. The final section on Reception focuses on the central categories in which Wilde's works and life have been read and influenced cultural movements since his death. Wilde's afterlife has been vibrant and chapters in this section include discussions of how he influenced camp and pop, alongside the contentious textual history of his works.

Giorgio Agamben is one of the most important and controversial figures in contemporary continental philosophy and critical theory. His work covers a broad array of topics from biblical criticism to Guantanamo Bay and the ‘war on terror’. Alex Murray explains Agamben’s key ideas, including: an overview of his work from first publication to the present clear analysis of Agamben’s philosophy of language and life theories of ethics and ‘witnessing’the relationship between Agamben’s political writing and his work on aesthetics and poetics. Investigating the relationship between politics, language, literature, aesthetics and ethics, this guide is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the complex nature of modern political and cultural formations.

Giorgio Agamben is one of the most important and controversial figures in contemporary continental philosophy and critical theory. His work covers a broad array of topics from biblical criticism to Guantanamo Bay and the ‘war on terror’. Alex Murray explains Agamben’s key ideas, including: an overview of his work from first publication to the present clear analysis of Agamben’s philosophy of language and life theories of ethics and ‘witnessing’the relationship between Agamben’s political writing and his work on aesthetics and poetics. Investigating the relationship between politics, language, literature, aesthetics and ethics, this guide is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the complex nature of modern political and cultural formations.

In recent years Agamben's work has gained prominence for its incisive critique of the Western political tradition. Yet this has often resulted in a selective reading of his broad body of work, rather than one that addresses it as a complex whole. The Agamben Dictionary has brought together leading and emerging scholars from across the world to provide this essential overview of his work.

More than any other thinker, Giorgio Agamben shows us that philosophy is also a matter of style, and politics a matter of poetics. This book explores the unexpected and illuminating paths that his work traces across the territories of law and literature, linguistics, dance or cinema, in search of a new idea and practice of the community. It offers an irreplaceable introduction to one of the most fascinating thinkers of our time.Jacques Rancière12 new essays, with a contribution by Agamben himselfGathering established and emerging scholars, this collection explores Agamben's thought from broad philosophical and literary concerns, underpinning its place within larger debates in continental philosophy. Contributors include Alexander García Düttmann, Deborah Levitt and Thanos Zartaloudis.

This collection of essays, including one by Simondon himself, outlines the central tenets of Simondon's thought, the implication of his thought for numerous disciplines and his relationship to other thinkers such as Heidegger, Deleuze and Canguilhem. Complete with a contextualising introduction and a glossary of technical terms, it offers an entry point to this important thinker and will appeal to people working in philosophy, philosophy of science, media studies, social theory and political philosophy. Contributors include: Miguel de Beistegui, University of Warwick; Elizabeth Grosz, Rutgers University, New Jersey; Anne Sauvagnargues, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Lyon and Bernard Stiegler, Pompidou Centre, Paris.

This is a one-stop resource containing introductory material through to practical case studies in reading primary and secondary texts to introducing criticism and new directions in research."The Modernism Handbook" is an accessible and comprehensive introduction to British Modernism as a literary movement, providing a one-stop resource for literature students, with the essential information and guidance needed at the beginning of a course through to developing more advanced knowledge and skills. It includes: introductions to authors, texts and contexts; guides to key critics, concepts and topics; an overview of major critical approaches, changes in the canon and directions of current and future research; case studies in reading primary and secondary texts; and annotated further reading (including websites), timeline, glossary of critical terms.Written in clear language by leading academics, it is an indispensable starting point for anyone beginning their study of Modernism."Literature and Culture Handbooks" are an innovative series of guides to major periods, topics and authors in British and American literature and culture.Designed to provide a comprehensive, one-stop resource for literature students, each handbook provides the essential information and guidance needed from the beginning of a course through to developing more advanced knowledge and skills.

This is a one-stop resource containing introductory material through to practical case studies in reading primary and secondary texts to introducing criticism and new directions in research."The Modernism Handbook" is an accessible and comprehensive introduction to British Modernism as a literary movement, providing a one-stop resource for literature students, with the essential information and guidance needed at the beginning of a course through to developing more advanced knowledge and skills. It includes: introductions to authors, texts and contexts; guides to key critics, concepts and topics; an overview of major critical approaches, changes in the canon and directions of current and future research; case studies in reading primary and secondary texts; and, annotated further reading (including websites), timeline, glossary of critical terms.Written in clear language by leading academics, it is an indispensable starting point for anyone beginning their study of Modernism."Literature and Culture Handbooks" are an innovative series of guides to major periods, topics and authors in British and American literature and culture.Designed to provide a comprehensive, one-stop resource for literature students, each handbook provides the essential information and guidance needed from the beginning of a course through to developing more advanced knowledge and skills.

This monograph undertakes the first extensive comparative analysis of the works of Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd, placing the fiction and non-fiction of both writers in relation to the broader cultural, social and political contexts of London from 1979. It begins by tracing the two different Londons of both writers, arguing that their literary and cultural projects are intrinsically linked, yet have remained under explored in academic criticism. Alex Murray argues that while both Sinclair and Ackroyd attempt to utilise radical narrative practices to challenge the dominant historical discourses within contemporary London, those challenges must be placed in relation to broader issues of cultural history, government appropriation of historical narratives and debates about the relationship between literature and the city. This argument is traced from the 'radical' historical fiction of the 1980s which launched the career of both writers, through to their extensive bodies of work on creating a specifically London form of literary history, to their engagements towards the turn of the millennium with larger questions of historiography and material history.This study then links these issues of narrative and material history, demonstrating the increasingly problematic relationship that both writers have as their fictionally 'radical' recalling of London is transformed into issues of material history, primarily the issues of politics and ethics in historical representation, and the relationship between history and commodification.

The challenges posed by Decadence to Victorian moral conventions - particularly sexual - have been well documented, but this book makes the case for understanding Decadence as a response to the ways in which place was accorded moral value in the period. The book uses landscape as a key trope for exploring Decadent writing's approach to location and identity. Drawing on a wide range of fin-de-siècle literature organised around a series of locations from Naples to New York, Murray argues that Decadent writers developed a form of landscape and place-based writing using a series of stylistic features to challenge the increasing homogenisation of both place and literary culture. Decadence and the literature of the fin de siècle are re-framed as a politically-engaged form of landscape writing. This is an ambitious and richly researched study.

Decadence, that flowering of a mannered literary style in France during the Second Empire, and in the last two decades of the nineteenth century in Britain, holds an endless fascination. Yet the ambiguity of the term 'decadence' and the challenges of identifying its practitioners make grasping its contours difficult. From the obsession with classical cultures, to the responses to the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, this book offers one of the most comprehensive histories of literary Decadence. The essays here interrogate and expand the formal, geographical, and temporal frameworks for understanding Decadent literature, while offering a renewed focus on the role played by women writers. Featuring essays by leading scholars on sexuality, politics, science, translation, the New Woman, Russian and Spanish American Decadence, the influence of cinema on Decadence, and much more, it is essential reading for all those interested in the literature of the 1890s and Oscar Wilde.

The first holistic reappraisal of the significance of the decadent movement, from the 1900s through the 1930s.Decadence in the Age of Modernism begins where the history of the decadent movement all too often ends: in 1895. It argues that the decadent principles and aesthetics of Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, Algernon Swinburne, and others continued to exert a compelling legacy on the next generation of writers, from high modernists and late decadents to writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Writers associated with this decadent counterculture were consciously celebrated but more often blushingly denied, even as they exerted a compelling influence on the early twentieth century. Offering a multifaceted critical revision of how modernism evolved out of, and coexisted with, the decadent movement, the essays in this collection reveal how decadent principles infused twentieth-century prose, poetry, drama, and newspapers. In particular, this book demonstrates the potent impact of decadence on the evolution of queer identity and self-fashioning in the early twentieth century. In close readings of an eclectic range of works by Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence to Ronald Firbank, Bruce Nugent, and Carl Van Vechten, these essays grapple with a range of related issues, including individualism, the end of Empire, the politics of camp, experimentalism, and the critique of modernity. Contributors: Howard J. Booth, Joseph Bristow, Ellen Crowell, Nick Freeman, Ellis Hanson, Kate Hext, Kirsten MacLeod, Kristin Mahoney, Douglas Mao, Michèle Mendelssohn, Alex Murray, Sarah Parker, Vincent Sherry