Paul Sheehan – författare

The postmodern condition has delivered us into a world where our humanity can no longer be taken for granted. Whether his place is ceded to nature or technology, man is no longer the measure of all things, rather, he is locked into processes in which the only permanence is change. Becoming Human offers a sustained engagement with these and other paradoxes about human being and its nature in the 21st-century world. Beginning with the notion that the human is not an immutable given but rather an ever-changing entity, this collection of essays considers our multifarious condition through the perspective of a variety of fields, including philosophy, sociology, literature, and film studies.In this book, the authors make coherent and accessible a sprawling field. The diversity of writers and approaches challenges current thinking about humanity, providing material for future scholars and researchers and prompting us to ponder these questions more deeply, while at the same time offering the reader a comprehensive, intelligible survey of recent inquiries into a potentially bewildering field.

In Modernism, Narrative and Humanism, Paul Sheehan attempts to redefine modernist narrative for the twenty-first century. For Sheehan modernism presents a major form of critique of the fundamental presumptions of humanism. By pairing key modernist writers with philosophical critics of the humanist tradition, he shows how modernists sought to discover humanism's inhuman potential. He examines the development of narrative during the modernist period and sets it against, among others, the nineteenth-century philosophical writings of Schopenhauer , Darwin and Nietzsche. Focusing on the major novels and poetics of Conrad, Lawrence, Woolf and Beckett, Sheehan investigates these writers' mistrust of humanist orthodoxy and their consequent transformations and disfigurations of narrative order. He reveals the crucial link between the modernist novel's narrative concerns and its philosophical orientation in a book that will be of compelling interest to scholars of modernism and literary theory.

In Modernism, Narrative and Humanism, Paul Sheehan attempts to redefine modernist narrative for the twenty-first century. For Sheehan modernism presents a major form of critique of the fundamental presumptions of humanism. By pairing key modernist writers with philosophical critics of the humanist tradition, he shows how modernists sought to discover humanism's inhuman potential. He examines the development of narrative during the modernist period and sets it against, among others, the nineteenth-century philosophical writings of Schopenhauer , Darwin and Nietzsche. Focusing on the major novels and poetics of Conrad, Lawrence, Woolf and Beckett, Sheehan investigates these writers' mistrust of humanist orthodoxy and their consequent transformations and disfigurations of narrative order. He reveals the crucial link between the modernist novel's narrative concerns and its philosophical orientation in a book that will be of compelling interest to scholars of modernism and literary theory.

"History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten." (George Santayana)Enquiries into the relationship between literature and history continue to stir up intense critical and scholarly debate. Alongside the new hybrid categories that have emerged out of this ferment―life-writing, ficto-criticism, "history from below", and so on―there has been a welter of new literary histories, new ways of tracking the connections between the written word and the historically bound world. This has resulted in renewed discussion about distinguishing the literary from the non-literary, about dialogues taking place between different national literatures, and about ascertaining the relative status of the literary text in relation to other cultural forms.Remaking Literary History seeks to clarify the diversity of issues and positions that have arisen from these debates. Central to the book's approach is a rigorous and constructive questioning of the past, across disciplinary boundaries. This is carried out through four detailed and engrossing sections that explore the relationship between memory and forgetting; what it means to be 'subject' to history; the upsurge of interest in trauma and redemption; and the question of historical reinvention, which demonstrates how the overwriting of history continues to reinvigorate the literary imagination. As well as readers of literature and history, Remaking Literary History will be of interest to students of literary theory, legal studies and cultural and media studies.

Adapting Television and Literature is an incisive collection of essays that explores the growing sub-category of television adaptations of literature and poetics. Each chapter questions inflexible notions of film / literature and adaptation / intertext, focusing judiciously on emergent or overlooked media and literary forms. These lines of enquiry embrace texts both within and beyond ‘adaptation proper’, to reveal the complex relationships between literary works, television adaptations, and related dialogues of textual interconnectivity. Adapting Television and Literature proposes, in particular, a ‘re-seeing’ of four genres pivotal to television and its history: caustic comedy, which claims for itself more freedoms than other forms of scripted television; auteurist outlaw drama, an offbeat, niche genre that aligns a fixation on lawbreakers with issues of creative control; young adult reinventions that vitalise this popular, yet under-examined area of television studies; and transcultural exchanges, which highlight adaptations beyond the white, Anglo-American programming that dominates ‘peak TV’. Through these genres, Adapting Television and Literature examines the creative resources of adaptation, plotting future paths for enquiries into television, literature and transmedial storytelling.