Anne Collett – författare

This collection brings together a series of essays that combine the public and private nature of dissent, stories of dissent that encapsulate the mood of an historical or cultural period, or of a society. Dissent is most memorable when it is public, explosive, dramatically enacted. Yet quiet dissent is no less effective as a methodical unstitching of social and political mores, rules and regulations. Success depends, perhaps, less on intensity than on determination, on patience as much as courage. Moreover, although many persistent dissenters often gain an iconic status, most live dissent in the fabric of their ordinary lives. Some combine both. Imprisoned at Robben Island for 27 years, his image and voice erased from the print media or airwaves, Nelson Mandela remained even in jail one of the most powerful agents of dissent in South African society until his freedom in 1990. Deep connections, deep commitment, profoundly personal convictions and courageous public dissent are some of the threads that bind together this diverse and exciting collection of essays. Alone, each essay explores dissent and consent in stimulating and distinct ways; together, they speak both of the effects of dissent and consent and of their affective energies and potential.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Life Writing.

This collection brings together a series of essays that combine the public and private nature of dissent, stories of dissent that encapsulate the mood of an historical or cultural period, or of a society. Dissent is most memorable when it is public, explosive, dramatically enacted. Yet quiet dissent is no less effective as a methodical unstitching of social and political mores, rules and regulations. Success depends, perhaps, less on intensity than on determination, on patience as much as courage. Moreover, although many persistent dissenters often gain an iconic status, most live dissent in the fabric of their ordinary lives. Some combine both. Imprisoned at Robben Island for 27 years, his image and voice erased from the print media or airwaves, Nelson Mandela remained even in jail one of the most powerful agents of dissent in South African society until his freedom in 1990. Deep connections, deep commitment, profoundly personal convictions and courageous public dissent are some of the threads that bind together this diverse and exciting collection of essays. Alone, each essay explores dissent and consent in stimulating and distinct ways; together, they speak both of the effects of dissent and consent and of their affective energies and potential.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Life Writing.

This book seeks to uncover how today’s ideas about climate and catastrophe have been formed by the thinking of Romantic poets, novelists and scientists, and how these same ideas might once more be harnessed to assist us in the new climate challenges facing us in the present.

The global climate disaster following Mt Tambora’s eruption in 1815 – the ‘Year without a Summer’ – is a starting point from which to reconsider both how the Romantics responded to the changing climates of their day, and to think about how these climatic events shaped the development of Romanticism itself.

As the contributions to this volume demonstrate, climate is an inescapable aspect of Romantic writing and thinking. Ideologies and experiences of climate inform everything from scientific writing to lyric poetry and novels. The ‘Diodati circle’ that assembled in Geneva in 1816 – Lord Byron, Percy and Mary Shelley, John Polidori and John Cam Hobhouse and the gothic novelist MG ‘Monk’ Lewis – is synonymous with the literature of that dreary, uncanny season. Essays in this collection also consider the work of Jane Austen, John Keats and William Wordsworth, along with less well-known figures such as the scientist Luke Howard, and later responses to Romantic climates by John Ruskin and Virginia Woolf.

This book tracks across history and cultures the ways in which writers have imagined cyclones, hurricanes, and typhoons, collectively understood as “tropical weather.” Historically, literature has drawn upon the natural world for its store of symbolic language and technical device, making use of violent storms in the form of plot, drama, trope, and image in order to highlight their relationship to the political, social, and psychological realms of human affairs. Charting this relationship through writers such as Joseph Conrad, Herman Melville, Gisèle Pineau, and other writers from places like Australia, Japan, Mauritius, the Caribbean, and the Philippines, this ground-breaking collection of essays illuminates the specificities of the ways local, national, and regional communities have made sense and even relied upon the literary to endure the devastation caused by deadly tropical weather.