21st Century Perspectives on British Literature and Society – serie

This book shows how twenty-first-century writing about Northern England imagines alternative democratic futures for the region and the English nation, signalling the growing awareness of England as a distinct and variegated political formation. In 2016, the Brexit vote intensified ongoing constitutional tensions throughout the UK, which have been developing since the devolution of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland in 1997. At the same time, British devolution developed a distinctively cultural registration as a surrogate for parliamentary representation and an attempt to disrupt the status of London as Britain’s cultural epicentre. Rewriting the North shifts this debate in a new direction, examining Northern literary preoccupation with devolution’s constitutional implications. Through close readings of six contemporary authors – Sunjeev Sahota, Sarah Hall, Anthony Cartwright, Adam Thorpe, Fiona Mozley, and Sarah Moss – this book argues that literary engagement with the North emphasises regional devolution's limited constitutional charge, calling instead for an urgent abandonment of the British centralised state form.

This monograph contends that attending to Pratchett’s work could help to save our world. It draws attention to the astonishing capacity of Pratchett’s novels to inspire and argues that Pratchett’s fantasy novels directly address many of the most significant challenges people in the world face: the explosion of weapons technology; the myriad issues involved in the envelopment of human life by corporatized information technology; the destructive human inattention to, and interactions with, the Earth and its life forms; and the problem of devalued labor. Paradoxically, it is Pratchett’s choice of fantasy that lets him address the reality of major issues that humanity and the rest of life confront now. Pratchett’s novels show us how to better understand and confront the problems the world is contending with. The book will interest both scholars and fans.

This monograph contends that attending to Pratchett’s work could help to save our world. It draws attention to the astonishing capacity of Pratchett’s novels to inspire and argues that Pratchett’s fantasy novels directly address many of the most significant challenges people in the world face: the explosion of weapons technology; the myriad issues involved in the envelopment of human life by corporatized information technology; the destructive human inattention to, and interactions with, the Earth and its life forms; and the problem of devalued labor. Paradoxically, it is Pratchett’s choice of fantasy that lets him address the reality of major issues that humanity and the rest of life confront now. Pratchett’s novels show us how to better understand and confront the problems the world is contending with. The book will interest both scholars and fans.

The aim of the book is to propose new interpretations of poets who are among the most valued and discussed in the British Enlightenment. In fulfilling its aim, the book covers English poetry—and intellectual history—from the Restoration to the later eighteenth century. It examines how the myth of the donna angelica (the angelic lady), ancient in origin but given its best-known form within the medieval literature of fin’amor, lives on beyond the Middle Ages and the Renaissance into the Enlightenment. To be more precise, it studies how some major Augustan poets appropriate and recreate what, for convenience, can be called the donna angelica topos (or, the angelic lady motif). They do so for a great many reasons linked with quite diverse circumstances. Nevertheless, the myth’s intellectual richness, emotional intensity, and inherent ambiguities mean that it offers each of them a powerful way for articulating, interpreting, exploring refractions of eros—whether singly or diversely directed, concerned with sexuality or spirituality, informing personal or public experience. The myth has as many faces, so to speak, as does desire; it is one and yet many. Thus, the book pursues a particular fable of eros that appears in a multiplicity of texts in a multiplicity of guises. It studies how some of the most interesting poets from Dryden to Crabbe bring the angelic lady motif into modernity.

The aim of the book is to propose new interpretations of poets who are among the most valued and discussed in the British Enlightenment. In fulfilling its aim, the book covers English poetry—and intellectual history—from the Restoration to the later eighteenth century. It examines how the myth of the donna angelica (the angelic lady), ancient in origin but given its best-known form within the medieval literature of fin’amor, lives on beyond the Middle Ages and the Renaissance into the Enlightenment. To be more precise, it studies how some major Augustan poets appropriate and recreate what, for convenience, can be called the donna angelica topos (or, the angelic lady motif). They do so for a great many reasons linked with quite diverse circumstances. Nevertheless, the myth’s intellectual richness, emotional intensity, and inherent ambiguities mean that it offers each of them a powerful way for articulating, interpreting, exploring refractions of eros—whether singly or diversely directed, concerned with sexuality or spirituality, informing personal or public experience. The myth has as many faces, so to speak, as does desire; it is one and yet many. Thus, the book pursues a particular fable of eros that appears in a multiplicity of texts in a multiplicity of guises. It studies how some of the most interesting poets from Dryden to Crabbe bring the angelic lady motif into modernity.

This book shows how twenty-first-century writing about Northern England imagines alternative democratic futures for the region and the English nation, signalling the growing awareness of England as a distinct and variegated political formation. In 2016, the Brexit vote intensified ongoing constitutional tensions throughout the UK, which have been developing since the devolution of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland in 1997. At the same time, British devolution developed a distinctively cultural registration as a surrogate for parliamentary representation and an attempt to disrupt the status of London as Britain’s cultural epicentre. Rewriting the North shifts this debate in a new direction, examining Northern literary preoccupation with devolution’s constitutional implications. Through close readings of six contemporary authors – Sunjeev Sahota, Sarah Hall, Anthony Cartwright, Adam Thorpe, Fiona Mozley, and Sarah Moss – this book argues that literary engagement with the North emphasises regional devolution's limited constitutional charge, calling instead for an urgent abandonment of the British centralised state form.

George Eliot is a myth rather than a pseudonym. The writer Marian Evans invented the Victorian novelist as a character with a personality, a political view and a style that was received enthusiastically by the expanding mid-century readership, and just as enthusiastically rejected by the new generation of writers who considered her the last Victorian novelist. "The Myth of George Eliot" proposes that the narrative style and structure of Evans’s fiction is the result of her studies, of her reflection on the role of literature in the political and ethical life of a nation, and on the novel as the site of a cooperation between writer and reader in the continuous work on inherited traditions. Neither the last Victorian nor the first Modernist, Evans emerges as an author reflecting on the power of collective narratives in an age of democracy.

This is the first book on Richard III and the Tower of London, shedding new light on the King’s reputation, the Castle’s lore, and early modern literature’s role in building associations between them. It is also one of the first books to integrate conceptual blending theory and spatial literary studies, empowering scholars and students to analyze literature and locations in new ways. This book fills gaps in the existing knowledge about both Richard III and the Tower of London. Neither literary nor historical scholarship has treated the process through which Richard III and the Tower became associated in the cultural and historical imagination and how such representations have shaped the King’s reputation and the Castle’s lore. This study analyzes this process while offering new understandings of Richard III as a literary character in prose, drama, and poetry and extending knowledge about the Tower as an iconic literary and cultural symbol.

This is the first book on Richard III and the Tower of London, shedding new light on the King’s reputation, the Castle’s lore, and early modern literature’s role in building associations between them. It is also one of the first books to integrate conceptual blending theory and spatial literary studies, empowering scholars and students to analyze literature and locations in new ways. This book fills gaps in the existing knowledge about both Richard III and the Tower of London. Neither literary nor historical scholarship has treated the process through which Richard III and the Tower became associated in the cultural and historical imagination and how such representations have shaped the King’s reputation and the Castle’s lore. This study analyzes this process while offering new understandings of Richard III as a literary character in prose, drama, and poetry and extending knowledge about the Tower as an iconic literary and cultural symbol.

This book offers a discussion of seven “canonical” novels by Ian McEwan (The Cement Garden, The Comfort of Strangers, The Child in Time, The Innocent, Black Dogs, Atonement, On Chesil Beach), introducing radical new readings, which are offered not as ultimate and conclusive “solutions” of the textual puzzles, but as possibilities to engage with the text creatively, to enrich the critical consensus and restore interpretative freedom to the readers. This project formulates a strategy of “inclusive reading” – an approach to the text that does not seek to reduce it to a single interpretation, and yet is comprehensively informed through the analysis of the primary text, critical discussion, authorial comments and the context of the composition. Each reading demonstrates the metafictional structure of the texts, indicating that McEwan’s works may be treated as invitations to roam within their worlds, examining the multiple frames of their structure and the meanings generated thereby. All the chapters attend to submerged, repressed, or deliberately masked voices. The Cement Garden is seen as a multi-layered dream, with a shifting hierarchy of dreamers; The Comfort of Strangers is viewed as an inverted metafiction, with insubstantial characters corrupting more complex heroes; The Child in Time is read as Stephen’s book written for his dead daughter; The Innocent as a memory narrative of Leonard who refuses to notice Maria’s role as a spy. In Black Dogs the over-exposure of unreliability is studied as a screen for personal trauma; in the analysis of Atonement Briony’s claim to authorship is questioned and Cecilia is suggested as an alternative narrative agent. Finally, examining On Chesil Beach, both characters’ voices are reconstructed in search of the superior narrative power, which in the end is seen to be elusive, as the text seeks to undermine the hierarchy of voices.

This book offers a discussion of seven “canonical” novels by Ian McEwan (The Cement Garden, The Comfort of Strangers, The Child in Time, The Innocent, Black Dogs, Atonement, On Chesil Beach), introducing radical new readings, which are offered not as ultimate and conclusive “solutions” of the textual puzzles, but as possibilities to engage with the text creatively, to enrich the critical consensus and restore interpretative freedom to the readers. This project formulates a strategy of “inclusive reading” – an approach to the text that does not seek to reduce it to a single interpretation, and yet is comprehensively informed through the analysis of the primary text, critical discussion, authorial comments and the context of the composition. Each reading demonstrates the metafictional structure of the texts, indicating that McEwan’s works may be treated as invitations to roam within their worlds, examining the multiple frames of their structure and the meanings generated thereby. All the chapters attend to submerged, repressed, or deliberately masked voices. The Cement Garden is seen as a multi-layered dream, with a shifting hierarchy of dreamers; The Comfort of Strangers is viewed as an inverted metafiction, with insubstantial characters corrupting more complex heroes; The Child in Time is read as Stephen’s book written for his dead daughter; The Innocent as a memory narrative of Leonard who refuses to notice Maria’s role as a spy. In Black Dogs the over-exposure of unreliability is studied as a screen for personal trauma; in the analysis of Atonement Briony’s claim to authorship is questioned and Cecilia is suggested as an alternative narrative agent. Finally, examining On Chesil Beach, both characters’ voices are reconstructed in search of the superior narrative power, which in the end is seen to be elusive, as the text seeks to undermine the hierarchy of voices.

British author Graham Greene pursued a professional career as a journalist before becoming a full-time writer. After that, he continued taking on reporting assignments as a correspondent for a variety of publications. Greene knew the profession inside out, and the role of the media in shaping the public’s views through information gathering and dissemination—a topic insufficiently researched by criticism—was among his main concerns. Greene’s fictional work features an array of journalists, and the representation of (un)ethical practices of the profession is a constant reference in his narrative. In this book, I intend to fill this research gap in Greenean studies, focusing on three main topics: the author’s reflection on the journalistic practice in connection with the classic paradigm of objectivity versus empathy; his questioning of the misuse of power when gathering and disseminating information by journalists, editors and news corporation owners; and finally, the relationship between journalists and their readership’s expectations, as well as the importance of fostering critical readers that make informed trustworthy decisions regarding journalism performance.

British author Graham Greene pursued a professional career as a journalist before becoming a full-time writer. After that, he continued taking on reporting assignments as a correspondent for a variety of publications. Greene knew the profession inside out, and the role of the media in shaping the public’s views through information gathering and dissemination—a topic insufficiently researched by criticism—was among his main concerns. Greene’s fictional work features an array of journalists, and the representation of (un)ethical practices of the profession is a constant reference in his narrative. In this book, I intend to fill this research gap in Greenean studies, focusing on three main topics: the author’s reflection on the journalistic practice in connection with the classic paradigm of objectivity versus empathy; his questioning of the misuse of power when gathering and disseminating information by journalists, editors and news corporation owners; and finally, the relationship between journalists and their readership’s expectations, as well as the importance of fostering critical readers that make informed trustworthy decisions regarding journalism performance.

The ethical approaches to literature have come into prominence in the twentieth century, calling for a ‘turn to ethics’ in the studies of humanities, in general, and literary studies, in particular. By leading the ethical turn in literature, many theorists proposed a moral-oriented approach to literature, which is still a significant part of literary criticism. The ethical turn in literature has changed the spirit of literary criticism in the direction of virtue and value-based approaches. In this respect, this study scrutinises Doris Lessing’s novels in light of virtue ethics in general and ‘virtue politics,’ ‘care ethics,’ and ‘Sufi virtue ethics’ in particular. Lessing’s connection to virtue ethics, which is implicitly or explicitly reflected in her novels, is examined by giving the panorama of ethical movements whose common point is virtues. This study asserts that Lessing implements an ethical concern in her novels, which is based on her own understanding of virtue ethics.

The ethical approaches to literature have come into prominence in the twentieth century, calling for a ‘turn to ethics’ in the studies of humanities, in general, and literary studies, in particular. By leading the ethical turn in literature, many theorists proposed a moral-oriented approach to literature, which is still a significant part of literary criticism. The ethical turn in literature has changed the spirit of literary criticism in the direction of virtue and value-based approaches. In this respect, this study scrutinises Doris Lessing’s novels in light of virtue ethics in general and ‘virtue politics,’ ‘care ethics,’ and ‘Sufi virtue ethics’ in particular. Lessing’s connection to virtue ethics, which is implicitly or explicitly reflected in her novels, is examined by giving the panorama of ethical movements whose common point is virtues. This study asserts that Lessing implements an ethical concern in her novels, which is based on her own understanding of virtue ethics.

This book reimagines the history of knowledge in 18th-century Britain by exploring how ideas were transmitted and diffused across generations and disciplines. Drawing on innovative digital tools, it uncovers collective patterns in the language of science, philosophy and commerce, revealing how concepts such as ‘system’, ‘sensibility’ and ‘volition’ were shaped and shared by communities rather than individuals. The study examines the commodification of knowledge, tracing its connections with the rise of capitalism and the emergence of knowledge as a storable, transferable asset. By distinguishing between the optimistic project of transmission to posterity and the anxieties surrounding the diffusion of knowledge, this book illuminates the political, social and economic stakes of Enlightenment thought. Blending literary analysis, intellectual history, and digital humanities, it offers new perspectives for scholars and general readers on how knowledge structures persist and evolve, and why their movement matters for modernity.

Harry Potter, Psychoanalysis, and the Unconscious studies the Harry Potter series through the lens of psychoanalysis focusing on the importance of space and play between the Potterverse and its readers. Twenty-five years since the first Harry Potter novel was published the popularity of the series shows little sign of decreasing: theme parks develop around the world, as have interactive websites, and a plethora of academic papers and books have published around the world. Successive generations of children and their parents continue to read and enjoy these novels, their lively storytelling, complicated plots and attractive fictional characters with whom readers identify and for whom they care. From a psychoanalytical standpoint, it seems as though some aspect of this popularity must lie in the unconscious of the reader—which is what this book aims to explore.

Decolonisation in British Muslim Women’s Writing: The Ontology of The Postcolonial Flâneuse introduces the figure of the postcolonial flâneuse through five distinct modes of postcolonial flâneuserie: Activist, Dervish, Cyber, COVID-19 Pandemic, and Punk postcolonial flâneuse. Bringing together postcolonial theory, urban studies, and contemporary British Muslim women’s writing, the author examines how Muslim women writers reconfigure the relationship between gender, movement, spectatorship, and the city from a decolonising perspective. Expanding beyond dominant formulations of the flâneur, postcolonial flâneur, and flâneuse, the study foregrounds marginalised voices and experiences often excluded from discussions of urban modernity and literary mobility. Through close textual analysis’ and interviews, this monograph explores the relationship and experiences between the postcolonial flâneuse and Muslim women in cities and crowds, and how this literary figure becomes an integral part of re-reading the city with a decolonising point of view. It positions the postcolonial flâneuse as a critical figure for re-reading the city through lived experiences of race, gender, faith, and displacement.