Warwick Series in the Humanities – serie

Mood is a phenomenon whose study is inherently interdisciplinary. While it has remained resistant to theorisation, it nonetheless has a substantial influence on art, politics and society. Since its practical omnipresence in every-day life renders it one of the most significant aspects of affect studies, it has garnered an increasing amount of critical attention in a number of disciplines across the humanities, sciences and social sciences in the past two decades. Mood: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, New Theories provides a comprehensive theoretical and empirical exploration of the phenomenon of mood from an interdisciplinary angle. Building on cutting-edge research in this emerging field and bringing together established and new voices, it bridges the existing disciplinary gap in the study of mood and further consolidates this phenomenon as a crucial concept in disciplinary and interdisciplinary study. By combining perspectives and concepts from the literary studies, philosophy, musicology, the social sciences, artistic practice and psychology, the volume does the complexity and richness of mood-related phenomena justice and benefits from the latent connections and synergies in different disciplinary approaches to the study of mood.

This volume is a new contribution to the dynamic scholarly discussion of the control and regulation of psychoactive substances in culture and society. Offering new critical reflections on the reasons prohibitions have historically arisen, the book analyses "prohibitions" as ambivalent and tenuous interactions between the users of psychoactive substances and regulators of their use. This original collection of essays engages with contemporary debates concerning addiction, intoxication and drug regulation, and will be of interest to scholars in the arts, humanities and social sciences interested in narratives of prohibition and their social and cultural meanings.

In reconstructing the birth and development of the notion of ‘unconscious’, historians of ideas have heavily relied on the Freudian concept of Unbewussten, retroactively projecting the psychoanalytic unconscious over a constellation of diverse cultural experiences taking place in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries between France and Germany. Archaeology of the Unconscious aims to challenge this perspective by adopting an unusual and thought-provoking viewpoint as the one offered by the Italian case from the 1770s to the immediate aftermath of WWI, when Italo Svevo’s La coscienza di Zeno provides Italy with the first example of a ‘psychoanalytic novel’. Italy’s vibrant culture of the long nineteenth century, characterised by the sedimentation, circulation, intersection, and synergy of different cultural, philosophical, and literary traditions, proves itself to be a privileged object of inquiry for an archaeological study of the unconscious; a study whose object is not the alleged ‘origin’ of a pre-made theoretical construct, but rather the stratifications by which that specific construct was assembled. In line with Michel Foucault’s Archéologie du savoir (1969), this volume will analyze the formation and the circulation, across different authors and texts, of a network of ideas and discourses on interconnected themes, including dreams, memory, recollection, desire, imagination, fantasy, madness, creativity, inspiration, magnetism, and somnambulism. Alongside questioning pre-given narratives of the ‘history of the unconscious’, this book will employ the Italian ‘difference’ as a powerful perspective from whence to address the undeveloped potentialities of the pre-Freudian unconscious, beyond uniquely psychoanalytical viewpoints.

A Quest for Remembrance: The Underworld in Classical and Modern literature brings together a range of arguments exploring connections between the descent into the underworld, also known as katabasis, and various forms of memory. Its chapters investigate the uses of the descent topos both in antiquity and in the reception of classical literature in the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. In the process, the volume explores how the hero’s quest into the underworld engages with the theme of recovering memories from the past. At the same time, we aim to foreground how the narrative format itself is concerned with forms of commemoration ranging from trans-cultural memory, remembering the literary and intellectual canon, to commemorating important historical events that might otherwise be forgotten. Through highlighting this duality this collection aims to introduce the descent narrative as its own literary genre, a ‘memorious genre’ related to but distinct from the quest narrative.

Interdisciplinary Essays on Cannibalism: Bites Here and There brings together a range of works exploring the evolution of cannibalism, literally and metaphorically, diachronically and across disciplines. This edited collection aims to promote a conversation on the evolution and the different uses of the tropes and figures of cannibalism, in order to understand and deconstruct the fascination with anthropophagy, its continued afterlife and its relation to different disciplines and spaces of discourse. In order to do so, the contributing authors shed a new light not only on the concept, but also propose to explore cannibalism through new optics and theories. Spanning 15 chapters, the collection explores cannibalism across disciplines and fields from Antiquity to contemporary speculative fiction, considering history, anthropology, visual and film studies, philosophy, feminist theories, psychoanalysis and museum practices. This collection of thoughtful and thought-provoking scholarly contributions suggests the importance of cannibalism in understanding human history and social relations.

Allegory Studies: Contemporary Perspectives collects some of the most compelling current work in allegory studies, by an international team of researchers in a range of disciplines and specializations in the humanities and cognitive sciences. The volume tracks the subject across disciplinary, cultural, and period-based divides, from its shadowy origins to its uncertain future, and from the rich variety of its cultural and artistic manifestations to its deep cognitive roots. Allegory is everything we already know it to be: a mode of literary and artistic composition, and a religious as well as secular interpretive practice. As this volume attests, however, it is much more than that—much more than a sum of its parts. Collectively, the phenomena we now subsume under this term comprise a dynamic cultural force which has left a deep imprint on our history, whose full impact we are only beginning to comprehend, and which therefore demands precisely such dedicated cross-disciplinary examination as this book seeks to provide.

Interdisciplinary Essays on Cannibalism: Bites Here and There brings together a range of works exploring the evolution of cannibalism, literally and metaphorically, diachronically and across disciplines. This edited collection aims to promote a conversation on the evolution and the different uses of the tropes and figures of cannibalism, in order to understand and deconstruct the fascination with anthropophagy, its continued afterlife and its relation to different disciplines and spaces of discourse. In order to do so, the contributing authors shed a new light not only on the concept, but also propose to explore cannibalism through new optics and theories. Spanning 15 chapters, the collection explores cannibalism across disciplines and fields from Antiquity to contemporary speculative fiction, considering history, anthropology, visual and film studies, philosophy, feminist theories, psychoanalysis and museum practices. This collection of thoughtful and thought-provoking scholarly contributions suggests the importance of cannibalism in understanding human history and social relations.

If "event" is a proper name we reserve for monumental changes, crises, transitions and ruptures that are by their very nature unnameable or unthinkable, then this volume is an attempt to set up an encounter between such eventhood as it comes to have a bearing on literary works and the work of reading literature. As the event continues to provide a valuable analytical paradigm for work undertaken within the newer subdisciplines of literary and critical theory, including close reading, bio- politics, world literature, and eco- criticism, this volume makes a concerted effort to update the scholarship in this area and foreground the recent resurgence of interest in the concept. The book provides both a retrospective appraisal of the significance of events to literary studies and the literary humanities, as well as contemporary and prospective appraisals of the same, and thus would appeal scholars and instructors in the areas of literary theory, comparative literature and philosophical aesthetics alike. Along with a specialist focus on thinkers such as Derrida, Badiou, Deleuze and Malabou, the essays in this volume read a wide corpus of literature ranging from Han Kang, Homer, Renee Gladman, Proust and Flaubert to Yoruba ideophones, Browning, Anne Carson, Jenichiro Oyabe and Ben Lerner.

The essays in this collection examine women in diverse roles; mother, socialite, prostitute, celebrity, medical practitioner and patient. The wide range of commentators allows a diverse picture of women’s health in this period.

Today we are used to clear divisions between science and the arts. But early modern thinkers had no such distinctions, with ‘knowledge’ being a truly interdisciplinary pursuit. Each chapter of this collection presents a case study from a different area of knowledge.

This volume explores the intersection between culinary history and literature across a period of profound social and cultural change. Split into four parts, essays focus on the relationships between eating and childhood reading in the Victorian era, the role of hunger in depicting social instability and reform, the cultivation of taste through advertising and the formation of cultural legacies through imaginative and emotional experiences of food and drink. Contributors show that studying consumption is necessary for a full understanding of class, gender, national identity and the body. The works of writers such as Elizabeth Gaskell, Edward Lear, Isabella Beeton and Bram Stoker are considered alongside advice manuals, Home Front narratives and advertising to provide an innovative work that will be of interest to scholars of social, cultural and medical history as well as literary studies.

New Jazz Conceptions: History, Theory, Practice is an edited collection that captures the cutting edge of British jazz studies in the early twenty-first century, highlighting the developing methodologies and growing interdisciplinary nature of the field. In particular, the collection breaks down barriers previously maintained between jazz historians, theorists and practitioners with an emphasis on interrogating binaries of national/local and professional/amateur. Each of these essays questions popular narratives of jazz, casting fresh light on the cultural processes and economic circumstances which create the music. Subjects covered include Duke Ellington’s relationship with the BBC, the impact of social media on jazz, a new view of the ban on visiting jazz musicians in interwar Britain, a study of Dave Brubeck as a transitional figure in the pages of Melody Maker and BBC2’s Jazz 625, the issue of ‘liveness’ in Columbia’s Ellington at Newport album, a musician and promoter's views of the relationship with audiences, a reflection on Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis and Eric Hobsbawm as jazz critics, a musician’s perspective on the oral and generational tradition of jazz in a British context, and a meditation on Alan Lomax’s Mr. Jelly Roll, and what it tells us about cultural memory and historical narratives of jazz.

This is the first volume to explore the reception of the Pythagorean doctrine of cosmic harmony within a variety of contexts, ranging chronologically from Plato to 18th-century England. This original collection of essays engages with contemporary debates concerning the relationship between music, philosophy, and science, and challenges the view that Renaissance discussions on cosmic harmony are either mere repetitions of ancient music theory or pre-figurations of the ‘Scientific Revolution’. Utilizing this interdisciplinary approach, Renaissance Conceptions of Cosmic Harmony offers a new perspective on the reception of an important classical theme in various cultural, sequential and geographical contexts, underlying the continuities and changes between Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. This project will be of particular interest within these emerging disciplines as they continue to explore the ideological significance of the various ways in which we appropriate the past.

Allegory Studies: Contemporary Perspectives collects some of the most compelling current work in allegory studies, by an international team of researchers in a range of disciplines and specializations in the humanities and cognitive sciences. The volume tracks the subject across disciplinary, cultural, and period-based divides, from its shadowy origins to its uncertain future, and from the rich variety of its cultural and artistic manifestations to its deep cognitive roots. Allegory is everything we already know it to be: a mode of literary and artistic composition, and a religious as well as secular interpretive practice. As this volume attests, however, it is much more than that—much more than a sum of its parts. Collectively, the phenomena we now subsume under this term comprise a dynamic cultural force which has left a deep imprint on our history, whose full impact we are only beginning to comprehend, and which therefore demands precisely such dedicated cross-disciplinary examination as this book seeks to provide.

This volume is a new contribution to the dynamic scholarly discussion of the control and regulation of psychoactive substances in culture and society. Offering new critical reflections on the reasons prohibitions have historically arisen, the book analyses "prohibitions" as ambivalent and tenuous interactions between the users of psychoactive substances and regulators of their use. This original collection of essays engages with contemporary debates concerning addiction, intoxication and drug regulation, and will be of interest to scholars in the arts, humanities and social sciences interested in narratives of prohibition and their social and cultural meanings.

Mood is a phenomenon whose study is inherently interdisciplinary. While it has remained resistant to theorisation, it nonetheless has a substantial influence on art, politics and society. Since its practical omnipresence in every-day life renders it one of the most significant aspects of affect studies, it has garnered an increasing amount of critical attention in a number of disciplines across the humanities, sciences and social sciences in the past two decades. Mood: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, New Theories provides a comprehensive theoretical and empirical exploration of the phenomenon of mood from an interdisciplinary angle. Building on cutting-edge research in this emerging field and bringing together established and new voices, it bridges the existing disciplinary gap in the study of mood and further consolidates this phenomenon as a crucial concept in disciplinary and interdisciplinary study. By combining perspectives and concepts from the literary studies, philosophy, musicology, the social sciences, artistic practice and psychology, the volume does the complexity and richness of mood-related phenomena justice and benefits from the latent connections and synergies in different disciplinary approaches to the study of mood.

Beyond the Rhetoric of Pain presents a fresh, interdisciplinary approach to the current research on pain from a variety of scholarly angles within Literature, Film and Media, Game Studies, Art History, Hispanic Studies, Memory Studies, Anthropology, Sociology, Philosophy, and Law. Through the combination of these perspectives, this volume goes beyond the existing structures within and across these disciplines framing new concepts of pain in attitude, practice, language, and ethics of response to pain. Comprised of fourteen unique essays, Beyond the Rhetoric of Pain maintains a common thread of analysis using a historical and cultural lens to explore the rhetoric of pain. Considering various methodologies, this volume questions the ethical, social and political demands pain makes upon those who feel, watch or speak it. Arranged to move from historical cases and relevance of pain in history towards the contemporary movement, topics include pain as a social figure, rhetorical tool, artistic metaphor, and political representation in jurisprudence.

If "event" is a proper name we reserve for monumental changes, crises, transitions and ruptures that are by their very nature unnameable or unthinkable, then this volume is an attempt to set up an encounter between such eventhood as it comes to have a bearing on literary works and the work of reading literature. As the event continues to provide a valuable analytical paradigm for work undertaken within the newer subdisciplines of literary and critical theory, including close reading, bio- politics, world literature, and eco- criticism, this volume makes a concerted effort to update the scholarship in this area and foreground the recent resurgence of interest in the concept. The book provides both a retrospective appraisal of the significance of events to literary studies and the literary humanities, as well as contemporary and prospective appraisals of the same, and thus would appeal scholars and instructors in the areas of literary theory, comparative literature and philosophical aesthetics alike. Along with a specialist focus on thinkers such as Derrida, Badiou, Deleuze and Malabou, the essays in this volume read a wide corpus of literature ranging from Han Kang, Homer, Renee Gladman, Proust and Flaubert to Yoruba ideophones, Browning, Anne Carson, Jenichiro Oyabe and Ben Lerner.

A Quest for Remembrance: The Underworld in Classical and Modern literature brings together a range of arguments exploring connections between the descent into the underworld, also known as katabasis, and various forms of memory. Its chapters investigate the uses of the descent topos both in antiquity and in the reception of classical literature in the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. In the process, the volume explores how the hero’s quest into the underworld engages with the theme of recovering memories from the past. At the same time, we aim to foreground how the narrative format itself is concerned with forms of commemoration ranging from trans-cultural memory, remembering the literary and intellectual canon, to commemorating important historical events that might otherwise be forgotten. Through highlighting this duality this collection aims to introduce the descent narrative as its own literary genre, a ‘memorious genre’ related to but distinct from the quest narrative.

In reconstructing the birth and development of the notion of ‘unconscious’, historians of ideas have heavily relied on the Freudian concept of Unbewussten, retroactively projecting the psychoanalytic unconscious over a constellation of diverse cultural experiences taking place in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries between France and Germany. Archaeology of the Unconscious aims to challenge this perspective by adopting an unusual and thought-provoking viewpoint as the one offered by the Italian case from the 1770s to the immediate aftermath of WWI, when Italo Svevo’s La coscienza di Zeno provides Italy with the first example of a ‘psychoanalytic novel’. Italy’s vibrant culture of the long nineteenth century, characterised by the sedimentation, circulation, intersection, and synergy of different cultural, philosophical, and literary traditions, proves itself to be a privileged object of inquiry for an archaeological study of the unconscious; a study whose object is not the alleged ‘origin’ of a pre-made theoretical construct, but rather the stratifications by which that specific construct was assembled. In line with Michel Foucault’s Archéologie du savoir (1969), this volume will analyze the formation and the circulation, across different authors and texts, of a network of ideas and discourses on interconnected themes, including dreams, memory, recollection, desire, imagination, fantasy, madness, creativity, inspiration, magnetism, and somnambulism. Alongside questioning pre-given narratives of the ‘history of the unconscious’, this book will employ the Italian ‘difference’ as a powerful perspective from whence to address the undeveloped potentialities of the pre-Freudian unconscious, beyond uniquely psychoanalytical viewpoints.

What does ‘autonomy’ mean today? Is the Enlightenment understanding of autonomy still relevant for contemporary challenges? How have the limits and possibilities of autonomy been transformed by recent developments in artificial intelligence and big data, political pressures, intersecting oppressions and the climate emergency? The challenges to autonomy today reach across society with unprecedented complexity, and in this book leading scholars from philosophy, economics, linguistics, literature and politics examine the role of autonomy in key areas of contemporary life, forcefully defending a range of different views about the nature and extent of resistance to autonomy today. These essays are essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the predicament and prospects of one of modernity’s foundational concepts and one of our most widely cherished values.Chapter 5.6 and 9 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

What does ‘autonomy’ mean today? Is the Enlightenment understanding of autonomy still relevant for contemporary challenges? How have the limits and possibilities of autonomy been transformed by recent developments in artificial intelligence and big data, political pressures, intersecting oppressions and the climate emergency? The challenges to autonomy today reach across society with unprecedented complexity, and in this book leading scholars from philosophy, economics, linguistics, literature and politics examine the role of autonomy in key areas of contemporary life, forcefully defending a range of different views about the nature and extent of resistance to autonomy today. These essays are essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the predicament and prospects of one of modernity’s foundational concepts and one of our most widely cherished values.Chapter 5.6 and 9 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

The twenty-first century has been deemed the “Age of Crisis”. We are witnessing the catastrophic unfolding of environmental crisis, financial crisis, pandemic and conflict. But are we to understand these crises as new phenomena? Is their seemingly simultaneous existence purely coincidental? Or rather do they instead form part of a singular, historically produced, unfolding crisis, which only today has reached a generalised consciousness? And perhaps most urgently, how far can we separate the crises of human experience from those exacted upon the land?The chapters collected in Crisis and Body Politics in Twenty-First Century Cultural Production: Territorial Bodies deploy the framework of “Territorial Bodies” to address urgent social, ecological and political challenges. Examining themes such as (inter)national bodily governance, racialised bodies, eco-feminist movements, spatial justice and bodily displacement, this collection provides a deeper analysis of the interconnected forms of violence perpetrated against marginalised human and non-human bodies, taking this combined violence as the defining feature of contemporary crisis.The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

The twenty-first century has been deemed the “Age of Crisis”. We are witnessing the catastrophic unfolding of environmental crisis, financial crisis, pandemic and conflict. But are we to understand these crises as new phenomena? Is their seemingly simultaneous existence purely coincidental? Or rather do they instead form part of a singular, historically produced, unfolding crisis, which only today has reached a generalised consciousness? And perhaps most urgently, how far can we separate the crises of human experience from those exacted upon the land?The chapters collected in Crisis and Body Politics in Twenty-First Century Cultural Production: Territorial Bodies deploy the framework of “Territorial Bodies” to address urgent social, ecological and political challenges. Examining themes such as (inter)national bodily governance, racialised bodies, eco-feminist movements, spatial justice and bodily displacement, this collection provides a deeper analysis of the interconnected forms of violence perpetrated against marginalised human and non-human bodies, taking this combined violence as the defining feature of contemporary crisis.The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

From Homer’s Odyssey itself, the return of the veteran to his or her home has been a central trope of the literary canon. Huge bureaucracies and a panoply of global organisations are deeply concerned with facilitating a painless return to stable homes. This book presents ‘homecoming’ as an analytical lens to better understand veterans' return and reintegration after conflict. Home is held to be multidimensional, a concept encapsulating the physical and the social, particularly disrupted by experiences of violence. Homecoming is, therefore, not a mere moment but a process that can unfold over years and decades as old and new bonds of familiarity are forged. Struggles over the home and homecoming are, moreover, endlessly political, bound up in questions of identity and the nation. Looking across times, places, and disciplines, the collection centres both historical and representational approaches to veterancy.

From Homer’s Odyssey itself, the return of the veteran to his or her home has been a central trope of the literary canon. Huge bureaucracies and a panoply of global organisations are deeply concerned with facilitating a painless return to stable homes. This book presents ‘homecoming’ as an analytical lens to better understand veterans' return and reintegration after conflict. Home is held to be multidimensional, a concept encapsulating the physical and the social, particularly disrupted by experiences of violence. Homecoming is, therefore, not a mere moment but a process that can unfold over years and decades as old and new bonds of familiarity are forged. Struggles over the home and homecoming are, moreover, endlessly political, bound up in questions of identity and the nation. Looking across times, places, and disciplines, the collection centres both historical and representational approaches to veterancy.

This is the first volume to explore the reception of the Pythagorean doctrine of cosmic harmony within a variety of contexts, ranging chronologically from Plato to 18th-century England. This original collection of essays engages with contemporary debates concerning the relationship between music, philosophy, and science, and challenges the view that Renaissance discussions on cosmic harmony are either mere repetitions of ancient music theory or pre-figurations of the ‘Scientific Revolution’. Utilizing this interdisciplinary approach, Renaissance Conceptions of Cosmic Harmony offers a new perspective on the reception of an important classical theme in various cultural, sequential and geographical contexts, underlying the continuities and changes between Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. This project will be of particular interest within these emerging disciplines as they continue to explore the ideological significance of the various ways in which we appropriate the past.

Beyond the Rhetoric of Pain presents a fresh, interdisciplinary approach to the current research on pain from a variety of scholarly angles within Literature, Film and Media, Game Studies, Art History, Hispanic Studies, Memory Studies, Anthropology, Sociology, Philosophy, and Law. Through the combination of these perspectives, this volume goes beyond the existing structures within and across these disciplines framing new concepts of pain in attitude, practice, language, and ethics of response to pain. Comprised of fourteen unique essays, Beyond the Rhetoric of Pain maintains a common thread of analysis using a historical and cultural lens to explore the rhetoric of pain. Considering various methodologies, this volume questions the ethical, social and political demands pain makes upon those who feel, watch or speak it. Arranged to move from historical cases and relevance of pain in history towards the contemporary movement, topics include pain as a social figure, rhetorical tool, artistic metaphor, and political representation in jurisprudence.

Until the mid-twentieth century the Western imagination seemed intent on viewing Rome purely in terms of its classical past or as a stop on the Grand Tour. This collection of essays looks at Rome from a postmodern perspective, including analysis of the city's 'unmappability', its fragmented narratives and its iconic status in literature and film.