Jeremy Tambling – författare

This study looks at nineteenth - and early twentieth-century opera as part of a culture which produced fascism as a crisis-state, and threatened to extinguish the genre as an influential and contemporary high form of art altogether. Jeremy Tambling highlights the themes of the cultural crisis through a detailed discussion of some dozen operas and a general overview of the works of Wagner, Verdi, Puccini, Strauss, and others, drawing on the writings of Nietzsche, Adorno, Benjamin, and Heidegger, for an understanding of the ideological background. Reading fascism as a political, intellectual, and psychological phenomenon, the author draws on the works of Bataille, Theweleit, and Kristeva, for discussion of proto-fascist and fascist thought, and for its relation to gender-politics.Resisting the clichés about Wagner or Strauss's relationship to the Third Reich, Tambling takes the opera out the hermetically sealed-off state in which it is normally discussed, and presents it as both complicit in, and in opposition to, the reactionary and regressive pressures that made up the `culture of fascism', and those that tried to make opera part of the `fascism of culture'.

This anthology of essays on E.M. Forster's major novels draws together approaches from many aspects of new critical theory. As well as essays on The Longest Journey, A Room With a View, Maurice, Howards End and A Passage to India, the volume includes a specially-commissioned essay on the recent spate of Forster films. The casebook establishes a new case for Forster as a figure of more than merely conventional interest with a central place in twentieth-century literature.

This study of Nicholas Nickleby takes the Dickens novel which is perhaps the least critically discussed, though it is very popular, and examines its appeal and its significance, and finds it one of the most rewarding and powerful of Dickens’s texts.Nicholas Nickleby deals with the abduction and destruction of children, often with the collusion of their parents. It concentrates on this theme in a way which continues from Oliver Twist, describing such oppression, and the resistance to it, in the language of melodrama, of parody and comedy. With chapters on the school-system that Dickens attacks, and its grotesque embodiment in Squeers, and with discussion of how the novel reshapes eighteenth century literary traditions, and such topics as the novel’s comedy, and the concept of the ‘humorist’; and ‘theatricality’ and its debt to Carlyle,, the book delves into the way that the novel explores madness within the city in those whose lives have been fractured, or ruined, as so many have been, and considers the symptoms of hypocrisy in the lives of the oppressors and the oppressed alike; taking hypocrisy as a Dickensian subject which deserves further examination. Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, and the Dance of Death explores ways in which Dickens draws on medieval and baroque traditions in how he analyses death and its grotesquerie, especially drawing on the visual tradition of the ‘dance of death’ which is referred to here and which is prevalent throughout Dickens’s novels. It shows these traditions to be at the heart of London, and aims to illuminate a strand within Dickens’s thinking from first to last. Drawing on the critical theory of Walter Benjamin, Freud, Nietzsche and Marx, and with close detailed readings of such well-known figures as Mrs Nickleby, Vincent Crummles and his theatrical troupe, and Mr Mantalini, and attention to Dickens’s description, imagery, irony, and sense of the singular, this book is a major study which will help in the revaluation of Dickens’s early novels.

This study of Nicholas Nickleby takes the Dickens novel which is perhaps the least critically discussed, though it is very popular, and examines its appeal and its significance, and finds it one of the most rewarding and powerful of Dickens’s texts.Nicholas Nickleby deals with the abduction and destruction of children, often with the collusion of their parents. It concentrates on this theme in a way which continues from Oliver Twist, describing such oppression, and the resistance to it, in the language of melodrama, of parody and comedy. With chapters on the school-system that Dickens attacks, and its grotesque embodiment in Squeers, and with discussion of how the novel reshapes eighteenth century literary traditions, and such topics as the novel’s comedy, and the concept of the ‘humorist’; and ‘theatricality’ and its debt to Carlyle,, the book delves into the way that the novel explores madness within the city in those whose lives have been fractured, or ruined, as so many have been, and considers the symptoms of hypocrisy in the lives of the oppressors and the oppressed alike; taking hypocrisy as a Dickensian subject which deserves further examination. Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, and the Dance of Death explores ways in which Dickens draws on medieval and baroque traditions in how he analyses death and its grotesquerie, especially drawing on the visual tradition of the ‘dance of death’ which is referred to here and which is prevalent throughout Dickens’s novels. It shows these traditions to be at the heart of London, and aims to illuminate a strand within Dickens’s thinking from first to last. Drawing on the critical theory of Walter Benjamin, Freud, Nietzsche and Marx, and with close detailed readings of such well-known figures as Mrs Nickleby, Vincent Crummles and his theatrical troupe, and Mr Mantalini, and attention to Dickens’s description, imagery, irony, and sense of the singular, this book is a major study which will help in the revaluation of Dickens’s early novels.

Indispensable to an understanding of Medieval and Renaissance texts and a topic of controversy for the Romantic poets, allegory remains a site for debate and controversy in the twenty-first-century.In this useful guide, Jeremy Tambling: presents a concise history of allegory, providing numerous examples from Medieval forms to the present dayconsiders the relationship between allegory and symbolism analyses the use of allegory in modernist debate and deconstruction, looking at critics such as Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man provides a full glossary of technical terms and suggestions for further reading.Allegory offers an accessible, clear introduction to the history and use of this complex literary device. It is the ideal tool for all those seeking a greater understanding of texts that make use of allegory and of the significance of allegorical thinking to literature.

Indispensable to an understanding of Medieval and Renaissance texts and a topic of controversy for the Romantic poets, allegory remains a site for debate and controversy in the twenty-first-century.In this useful guide, Jeremy Tambling: presents a concise history of allegory, providing numerous examples from Medieval forms to the present dayconsiders the relationship between allegory and symbolism analyses the use of allegory in modernist debate and deconstruction, looking at critics such as Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man provides a full glossary of technical terms and suggestions for further reading.Allegory offers an accessible, clear introduction to the history and use of this complex literary device. It is the ideal tool for all those seeking a greater understanding of texts that make use of allegory and of the significance of allegorical thinking to literature.

This book presents an interesting approach to Dante's Divine Comedy, drawing on medieval theories of reading and understanding a text, and comparing them with modern critical theories of hermeneutics and approaches to the text associated with the work of Derrida. Dr Tambling rejects any attempt to identify a fundamental unity of thought in the poem and stresses the importance of opposition and divergence. This leads him to react against reductively 'allegorical' readings, and to ask in what way Christianity can be said to be articulated within the work. This important interpretation will be of value to all students and scholars of Dante, as well as to those whose work lies in the fields of general medieval literature, comparative literature and critical theory.

On Anachronism joins together Shakespeare and Proust as the great writers of love to show that love is always anachronistic, and never more so when it is homosexual. Drawing on Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Derrida, Blanchot and Levinas and Deleuze, difficult but essential theorists of the subject of ‘being and time’ and ‘time and the other’ the book examines why speculation on time has become so crucial within modernity. Through the related term ‘anachorism’, it considers how discussion of time always turns into discussion of space, and how this, too, can never be quite defined. It speculates on chance and thinks of ways in which a quality of difference within time – heterogeneity, anachronicity – is essential to think of what is meant by ‘the other’.The book examines how contemporary theory considers the future and its relation to the past as that which is inescapable in the form of trauma. It considers what is meant by ‘the event’, that which is the theme of all post-Nietzschean theory and which breaks in two conceptions of time as chronological.

Literature and Psychoanalysis is an exciting, and compulsive working through of what Freud really said, and why it is so important, with a chapter on Melanie Klein and object relations theory, and two chapters on Lacan, and his work on the unconscious as structured like a language. Investigating different forms of literature through a careful examination of Shakespeare, Blake, the Sherlock Holmes stories, and many other examples from literature, the book makes the argument for taking literature and psychoanalysis together, and essential to each other. The book places both literature and psychoanalysis into the context of all that has been said about these subjects in recent debates in the theory of Derrida and Foucault and Žižek, and into the context of gender studies and queer theory.

Literature and Psychoanalysis is an exciting, and compulsive working through of what Freud really said, and why it is so important, with a chapter on Melanie Klein and object relations theory, and two chapters on Lacan, and his work on the unconscious as structured like a language. Investigating different forms of literature through a careful examination of Shakespeare, Blake, the Sherlock Holmes stories, and many other examples from literature, the book makes the argument for taking literature and psychoanalysis together, and essential to each other. The book places both literature and psychoanalysis into the context of all that has been said about these subjects in recent debates in the theory of Derrida and Foucault and Žižek, and into the context of gender studies and queer theory.

Dickens says he concentrates on 'the romantic side of familiar things', and so highlights the visionary, non-realist, uncanny nature of his writing. This book delves into the sources of that through Shakespeare, and Fuseli, the great artist who imagined scenes from Shakespeare and who created the 'Nightmare', and Blake, friend of Fuseli, and a silent underpresence in nineteenth-century writing. It provides readings of the Christmas Books, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend in the light of Shakespeare, Fuseli, and Blake. While concentrating on the figure of the marginalised beggar, and the criminal, and the vagrant, so finding a social history between Shakespeare and Dickens's time, it reads literary texts in the light of critical theory, using Blanchot, and Derrida, and Deleuze to illuminate the text and the power of writing within Shakespeare, Blake, and Dickens.

This book is about representations of the devil in English and European literature. Tracing the fascination in literature, philosophy, and theology with the irreducible presence of what may be called evil, or comedy, or the carnivalesque, this book surveys the parts played by the devil in the texts derived from the Faustus legend, looks at Marlowe and Shakespeare, Rabelais, Milton, Blake, Hoffmann, Baudelaire, Goethe, Dostoevsky, Bulgakov, and Mann, historically, speculatively, and from the standpoint of critical theory. It asks:  Is there a single meaning to be assigned to the idea of the diabolical? What value lies in thinking diabolically? Is it still the definition of a good poet to be of the devil's party, as Blake argued?

This book is about the impact of literature upon cities world-wide, and cities upon literature.

Focusing on the language, style, and poetry of Dickens’ novels, this study breaks new ground in reading Dickens’ novels as a unique form of poetry. Dickens’ writing disallows the statement of single unambiguous truths and shows unconscious processes burrowing within language, disrupting received ideas and modes of living. Arguing that Dickens, within nineteenth-century modernity, sees language as always double, Tambling draws on a wide range of Victorian texts and current critical theory to explore Dickens’ interest in literature and popular song, and what happens in jokes, in caricature, in word-play and punning, and in naming. Working from Dickens’ earliest writings to the latest, deftly combining theory with close analysis of texts, the book examines Dickens’ key novels, such as Pickwick Papers, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend. It considers Dickens as constructing an urban poetry, alert to language coming from sources beyond the individual, and relating that to the dream-life of characters, who both can and cannot awake to fuller, different consciousness. Drawing on Walter Benjamin, Lacan, and Derrida, Tambling shows how Dickens writes a new and comic poetry of the city, and that the language constitutes an unconscious and secret autobiography. This volume takes Dickens scholarship in exciting new directions and will be of interest to all readers of nineteenth-century literary and cultural studies, and more widely, to all readers of literature.

Dickens's relationship to cities is part of his modernity and his enduring fascination. How he thought about, grasped and conceptualised the rapidly expanding and anonymous urban scene are all fascinating aspects of a critical debate which, starting virtually from Dickens's own time, has become more and more active and questioning of the significance of that new thing, the unknown and unknowable, city. Although Dickens was influenced by several European and American cities, the most significant city for Dickens was London, the city he knew as a boy in the 1820s and which developed in his lifetime to become the finance and imperial capital of the nineteenth-century. His sense of London as monumental and fashionable, modern and anachronistic, has generated a large number of writings and critical approaches: Marxist, sociological, psychoanalytic and deconstructive. Dickens looks at the city from several aspects: as a place bringing together poverty and riches; as the place of the new and of chance and coincidence, and of secret lives exposed by the special figure of the detective. Another crucial area of study is the relationship of the city to women, and women's place in the city, as well as the way Dickens's London matches up with other visual representations. This anthology of criticism surveys the field and is a major contribution to the study of cities, city culture, modernity and Dickens. It brings together key previously published articles and essays and features a comprehensive bibliography of work which scholars can continue to explore.

Among the numerous books on Dickenss London, Going Astray is unique in combining detailed topography and biography with close textual analysis and theoretically informed critiques of most of the novelists major works. In Jeremy Tamblings intriguing and illuminating synthesis, the London A-Z meets Nietzsche, Benjamin and Derrida. Rick Allen, author of The Moving Pageant: A Literary Sourcebook on London Street-Life, 1700-1914Dickens wrote so insistently about London its streets, its people, its unknown areas that certain parts of the city are forever haunted by him. Going Astray: Dickens and London looks at the novelists delight in losing the self in the labyrinthine city and maps that interest, onto the compulsion to go astray in writing.Drawing on all Dickens published writings (including the journalism but concentrating on the novels), Jeremy Tambling considers the authors kaleidoscopic characterisations of London: as prison and as legal centre; as the heart of empire and of traumatic memory; as the place of the uncanny; as an old curiosity shop. His study examines the relations between narrative and the city, and explores how the metropolis encapsulates the problems of modernity for Dickens as well as suggesting the limits of representation. Combining contemporary literary and cultural theory with historical maps, photographs and contextual detail, Jeremy Tamblings book is an indispensable guide to Dickens, nineteenth- century literature, and the city itself.

Many people are intimidated by poetry, thinking it difficult and high-brow and not for them. But it is still considered an essential part of art and literature. RE:Verse asks; Why and How should we read poetry? This book, aimed at people just starting with literature, takes nothing for granted but opens poetry up to all in a way that makes it both exciting and fresh. Examples are taken from a balanced combination of traditional writers such as Keats, Wordsworth, Blake and Shakespeare, and modern poets such as Seamus Heaney, Jackie Kay and Benjamin Zephaniah. RE:Verse ranges over all periods of literature, and over the many critical theories that attempt to show why poetry matters. It places poems into their historical context, looks at poetry in translation, and discusses why much poetry is so difficult as to seem almost unreadable. It sets the standard for talking about how to read poetry, and what to do when this seems to be impossibly difficult. Ultimately, it is the essential, easy-to-read guide to the subject.

Focusing on the language, style, and poetry of Dickens’ novels, this study breaks new ground in reading Dickens’ novels as a unique form of poetry. Dickens’ writing disallows the statement of single unambiguous truths and shows unconscious processes burrowing within language, disrupting received ideas and modes of living. Arguing that Dickens, within nineteenth-century modernity, sees language as always double, Tambling draws on a wide range of Victorian texts and current critical theory to explore Dickens’ interest in literature and popular song, and what happens in jokes, in caricature, in word-play and punning, and in naming. Working from Dickens’ earliest writings to the latest, deftly combining theory with close analysis of texts, the book examines Dickens’ key novels, such as Pickwick Papers, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend. It considers Dickens as constructing an urban poetry, alert to language coming from sources beyond the individual, and relating that to the dream-life of characters, who both can and cannot awake to fuller, different consciousness. Drawing on Walter Benjamin, Lacan, and Derrida, Tambling shows how Dickens writes a new and comic poetry of the city, and that the language constitutes an unconscious and secret autobiography. This volume takes Dickens scholarship in exciting new directions and will be of interest to all readers of nineteenth-century literary and cultural studies, and more widely, to all readers of literature.

Providing the most comprehensive examination of the two-way traffic between literature and psychoanalysis to date, this handbook looks at how each defines the other as well as addressing the key thinkers in psychoanalytic theory (Freud, Klein, Lacan, and the schools of thought each of these has generated). It examines the debts that these psychoanalytic traditions have to literature, and offers plentiful case-studies of literature’s influence from psychoanalysis. Engaging with critical issues such as madness, memory, and colonialism, with reference to texts from authors as diverse as Shakespeare, Goethe, and Virginia Woolf, this collection is admirably broad in its scope and wide-ranging in its geographical coverage. It thinks about the impact of psychoanalysis in a wide variety of literatures as well as in film, and critical and cultural theory.

Providing the most comprehensive examination of the two-way traffic between literature and psychoanalysis to date, this handbook looks at how each defines the other as well as addressing the key thinkers in psychoanalytic theory (Freud, Klein, Lacan, and the schools of thought each of these has generated). It examines the debts that these psychoanalytic traditions have to literature, and offers plentiful case-studies of literature’s influence from psychoanalysis. Engaging with critical issues such as madness, memory, and colonialism, with reference to texts from authors as diverse as Shakespeare, Goethe, and Virginia Woolf, this collection is admirably broad in its scope and wide-ranging in its geographical coverage. It thinks about the impact of psychoanalysis in a wide variety of literatures as well as in film, and critical and cultural theory.

In the nineteenth century, Charles Dickens backed the cause of abolition of the death penalty and wrote comprehensively about it, in public letters and in his novels. At the end of the twentieth century, Jacques Derrida ran two years of seminars on the subject, which were published posthumously. What the novelist and the philosopher of deconstruction discussed independently, this book brings into comparison.Tambling examines crime and punishment in Dickens’s novels Barnaby Rudge, A Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist and Bleak House and explores those who influenced Dickens’s work, including Hogarth, Fielding, Godwin and Edgar Allen Poe. This book also looks at those who influenced Derrida – Freud, Nietzsche, Foucault and Blanchot – and considers Derrida’s study on terrorism and the USA as the only major democracy adhering to the death penalty.A comprehensive study of punishment in Dickens, and furthering Derrida’s insights by commenting on Shakespeare and blood, revenge, the French Revolution, and the enduring power of violence and its fascination, this book is a major contribution to literary criticism on Dickens and Derrida. Those interested in literature, criminology, law, gender, and psychoanalysis will find it an essential intervention in a topic still rousing intense argument.

In the nineteenth century, Charles Dickens backed the cause of abolition of the death penalty and wrote comprehensively about it, in public letters and in his novels. At the end of the twentieth century, Jacques Derrida ran two years of seminars on the subject, which were published posthumously. What the novelist and the philosopher of deconstruction discussed independently, this book brings into comparison.Tambling examines crime and punishment in Dickens’s novels Barnaby Rudge, A Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist and Bleak House and explores those who influenced Dickens’s work, including Hogarth, Fielding, Godwin and Edgar Allen Poe. This book also looks at those who influenced Derrida – Freud, Nietzsche, Foucault and Blanchot – and considers Derrida’s study on terrorism and the USA as the only major democracy adhering to the death penalty.A comprehensive study of punishment in Dickens, and furthering Derrida’s insights by commenting on Shakespeare and blood, revenge, the French Revolution, and the enduring power of violence and its fascination, this book is a major contribution to literary criticism on Dickens and Derrida. Those interested in literature, criminology, law, gender, and psychoanalysis will find it an essential intervention in a topic still rousing intense argument.

Dickens's relationship to cities is part of his modernity and his enduring fascination. How he thought about, grasped and conceptualised the rapidly expanding and anonymous urban scene are all fascinating aspects of a critical debate which, starting virtually from Dickens's own time, has become more and more active and questioning of the significance of that new thing, the unknown and unknowable, city. Although Dickens was influenced by several European and American cities, the most significant city for Dickens was London, the city he knew as a boy in the 1820s and which developed in his lifetime to become the finance and imperial capital of the nineteenth-century. His sense of London as monumental and fashionable, modern and anachronistic, has generated a large number of writings and critical approaches: Marxist, sociological, psychoanalytic and deconstructive. Dickens looks at the city from several aspects: as a place bringing together poverty and riches; as the place of the new and of chance and coincidence, and of secret lives exposed by the special figure of the detective. Another crucial area of study is the relationship of the city to women, and women's place in the city, as well as the way Dickens's London matches up with other visual representations. This anthology of criticism surveys the field and is a major contribution to the study of cities, city culture, modernity and Dickens. It brings together key previously published articles and essays and features a comprehensive bibliography of work which scholars can continue to explore.

This book studies the will, will-power and wilfulness, the will to death or to power, and lack of will. It surveys many texts -- from Augustine, Shakespeare, Dickens, George Eliot and D H Lawrence -- in order to analyse the history of its different concepts: rational/irrational drive, sexual appetite, or just testamentary, so asserting identity beyond death. Drawing on philosophies of the will in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, the book studies music as the embodied will in Wagner and Verdi. Considering the law and its prohibitions as a form of the will, it sees how these produce a perverse will. Drawing on Freud and Lacan it studies interrelationships between the law which prohibits and the desire which wills, how desire creates the law, and the law desire. What stands out is that the authors studied are fascinated by the will as unknowable and irresistible, as rational and countermanding rationality, as divided and imperious force. Chapters include how wills motivate plots in Shakespeare and the Victorian novel. Discussion of opera and Nietzsche focuses on the will as an unconscious force. With sustained discussion of texts, and supporting arguments through a range of key thinkers in cultural theory, this book is indispensable for readers of literature, law, music and philosophy.

Hölderlin (1770-1843) is the magnificent writer whom Nietzsche called 'my favourite poet'. His writings and poetry have been formative throughout the twentieth century, and as influential as those of Hegel, his friend. At the same time, his madness has made his poetry infinitely complex as it engages with tragedy, and irreconcilable breakdown, both political and personal, with anger and with mourning. This study gives a detailed approach to Hölderlin's writings on Greek tragedy, especially Sophocles, whom he translated into German, and gives close attention to his poetry, which is never far from an engagement with tragedy. Hölderlin's writings, always fascinating, enable a consideration of the various meanings of tragedy, and provide a new reading of Shakespeare, particularly Julius Caesar, Hamlet and Macbeth; the work proceeds by opening into discussion of Nietzsche, especially The Birth of Tragedy. Since Hölderlin was such a decisive figure for Modernism, to say nothing of modern Germany, he matters intensely to such differing theorists and philosophers as Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida, all of whose views are discussed herein. Drawing upon the insights of Hegelian philosophy and psychoanalysis, this book gives the English-speaking reader ready access to a magnificent body of poetry and to the poet as a theorist of tragedy and of madness. Hölderlin's poetry is quoted freely, with translations and commentary provided. This book is the first major account of Hölderlin in English to offer the student and general reader a critical account of a vital body of work which matters to any study of poetry and to all who are interested in poetry's relationships to madness. It is essential reading in the understanding of how tragedy pervades literature and politics, and how tragedy has been regarded and written about, from Hegel to Walter Benjamin.

Hölderlin (1770-1843) is the magnificent writer whom Nietzsche called 'my favourite poet'. His writings and poetry have been formative throughout the twentieth century, and as influential as those of Hegel, his friend. At the same time, his madness has made his poetry infinitely complex as it engages with tragedy, and irreconcilable breakdown, both political and personal, with anger and with mourning. This study gives a detailed approach to Hölderlin's writings on Greek tragedy, especially Sophocles, whom he translated into German, and gives close attention to his poetry, which is never far from an engagement with tragedy. Hölderlin's writings, always fascinating, enable a consideration of the various meanings of tragedy, and provide a new reading of Shakespeare, particularly Julius Caesar, Hamlet and Macbeth; the work proceeds by opening into discussion of Nietzsche, especially The Birth of Tragedy. Since Hölderlin was such a decisive figure for Modernism, to say nothing of modern Germany, he matters intensely to such differing theorists and philosophers as Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida, all of whose views are discussed herein. Drawing upon the insights of Hegelian philosophy and psychoanalysis, this book gives the English-speaking reader ready access to a magnificent body of poetry and to the poet as a theorist of tragedy and of madness. Hölderlin's poetry is quoted freely, with translations and commentary provided. This book is the first major account of Hölderlin in English to offer the student and general reader a critical account of a vital body of work which matters to any study of poetry and to all who are interested in poetry's relationships to madness. It is essential reading in the understanding of how tragedy pervades literature and politics, and how tragedy has been regarded and written about, from Hegel to Walter Benjamin.

This new volume in Genji studies comprises a collection of six individual essays by leading international scholars addressing the Tale of Genji Scrolls and the Tale of Genji texts in the context of new critical theory relating to cultural studies, narrative painting, narratology, comparative literature and a global view of medieval romance. Uniquely, it also links new critical theory with multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary interests. Increasingly, scholarly research views ‘reading’ The Tale of Genji Scrolls as an inseparable part of ‘reading’ the Tale of Genji itself. Hence this book, which is subdivided into three sections: Reading the Genji Scrolls; Reading the Genji Texts; Reading the Genji Romance. The contributors are Yukio Lippit (Harvard), Sano Midori (Gakushuin), Richard Okada (Princeton), Murakami Fuminobu (Hong Kong), Jeremy Tambling (Manchester) and Richard Stanley-Baker (formerly Hong Kong)

This book argues that Paradiso – Dante’s vision of Heaven – is not simply affirmative. The book highlights and addresses a fundamental problem in reading Dante: the assumption that he writes as a Catholic Christian, which can be off-putting and induces an overly theological and partisan reading in some commentary.