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This edited volume explores new engagements with the life sciences in contemporary fiction, poetry, comics and performance. The gathered case studies investigate how recent creative work reframes the human within microscopic or macroscopic scales, from cellular biology to systems ecology, and engages with the ethical, philosophical, and political issues raised by the twenty-first century's shifting views of life. The collection thus examines literature and performance as spaces that shape our contemporary biological imagination. Comprised of thirteen chapters by an international group of academics, Life, Re-Scaled: The Biological Imagination in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Performance engages with four main areas of biological study: 'Invisible scales: cells, microbes and mycelium', 'Neuro-medical imaging and diagnosis', 'Pandemic imaginaries', and 'Ecological scales'. The authors examine these concepts in emerging forms such as plant theatre, climate change art, ecofiction and pandemic fiction, including the work of Jeff Vandermeer, Jon McGregor, Jeff Lemire, and Extinction Rebellion's Red Rebel Brigade performances. This valuable resource moves beyond the biological paradigms that were central to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to outline the specificity of a contemporary imagination. Life, Re-Scaled is crucial reading for academics, scholars, and authors alike, as it proposes an unprecedented overview of the relationship between literature, performance and the life sciences in the twenty-first century.
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Shedding fresh light on the life and work of William Butler Yeats--widely acclaimed as the major English-language poet of the twentieth century--this new study by leading scholar Patrick J. Keane questions established understandings of the Irish poet's long fascination with the occult: a fixation that repelled literary contemporaries T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden, but which enhanced Yeats's vision of life and death. Through close reading of selected poems, the first section of Making the Void Fruitful assesses Yeats's spiritualised treatment of corporeal themes, exploring sex and eroticism as the expression of a duality inherent to his ontological and supernatural convictions. The power-producing tension in Yeats's work is not only intellectual but emotional. At its vital centre is his Muse: the beautiful political firebrand, Maud Gonne, whose activist Republican politics he considered his one real rival. Through close engagement with the poems and plays she inspired, the second section explores Yeats's complex relationship with Maud, an obsessive and unrequited love which he sublimated and transformed into the greatest body of Muse poetry since Petrarch, in whose tradition of spiritualized eroticism Yeats, perhaps the last of the great Romantics, was consciously writing. Shaped by the conviction that no modern poet exceeded Yeats in animating the enduring themes of love and spirituality through poetry, this book emphasises the influence, of Blake, Nietzsche, and John Donne, on what Yeats called 'the thinking of the body'. Grounded firmly in the textual materiality of Yeats's oeuvre, this book will be of interest to researchers and students of W.B. Yeats, as well as to those in the fields of Anglophone literatures and cultures, and philosophy.
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"Memory loss is not always viewed purely as a contingent neurobiological process present in an ageing population; rather, it is frequently related to larger societal issues and political debates. This edited volume examines how different media and genres - novels, auto/biographical writings, documentary as well as fictional films and graphic memoirs - represent dementia for the sake of critical explorations of memory, trauma and contested truths. In ten analytical chapters and one piece of graphic art, the contributors examine the ways in which what might seem to be the individual, ahistorical diseases of dementia are used in contemporary cultural texts to represent and respond to violent historical and political events - ranging from the Holocaust to postcolonial conditions - all of which can prove difficult to remember. Combining approaches from literary studies with insights from memory studies, trauma studies, anthropology, the critical medical humanities and media, film and comics studies, this volume explores the politics of dementia and incites new debates on cultures of remembrance, while remaining attentive to the lived reality of dementia." -- Publisher's website.
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"Metaphor in Illness Writing argues that even when a metaphor appears problematic and limiting, it need not be dropped or dismissed. Metaphors are not inherently harmful or beneficial; instead, they can be used in unexpected and creative ways. This book analyses the illness writing of contemporary North American writers who reimagine and reappropriate the supposedly harmful metaphor 'illness is a fight' and shows how Susan Sontag, Audre Lorde, Anatole Broyard, David Foster Wallace and other writers turn the fight metaphor into a space of agency, resistance, self-knowledge and aesthetic pleasure. It joins a conversation in Medical Humanities about alternatives to the predominance of narrative and responds to the call for more metaphor literacy and metaphor competence"--
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What is honour, and how does it affect our lives? In contemporary Western cultures, honour seems to have lost its dominant role as a key concept for denoting central dynamics of human life, both individually and socially. In the Scandinavian countries, a slow revolution has taken place throughout history from the strong Norse honour culture to the post-war egalitarian and equality-oriented welfare society which appears to be an after-honour culture. What are the reasons for this weakening, and what are its consequences? Are we living with new forms of honour, and what does it mean to live in an after-honour culture? The focal point and chief target of the discussions is literature, primarily Scandinavian, but also other textual expressions. The book is aimed at readers interested in literature, but the topic is interdisciplinary and should therefore appeal to a wider audience. This volume emanates from the project After Honour, initiated by the research group Literature and Affect at Institute of Scandinavian Studies, University of Oslo. The 15 articles are written by scholars from Norway, Denmark and Iceland: Per Thomas Andersen, Aasta Marie Bjorvand Bjørkøy, Mads B. Claudi, Johanne Walle Jomisko de Figueiredo, Jon Gunnar Jørgensen, Anne-Marie Mai, Thorstein Norheim, Nasim Karim, Jan Erik Rekdal, Peter Simonsen, Simen Syvertsen, Cecilie Takle, Torfi H. Tulinius and Mikkel Bruun Zangenberg.
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"The Afterlife of the Shoah in Central and Eastern European Cultures is a collection of essays by literary scholars from Germany and Central Eastern Europe offering insight into the specific ways of representing the Shoah and its aftereffects as well as its entanglement with other catastrophic events in the region. Introducing the conceptual frame of postcatastrophe, the collected essays explore the discursive and artistic space the Shoah occupies in the countries between Moscow and Berlin. Postcatastrophe is informed by the knowledge of other concepts of "post" and shares their insight into forms of transmission and latency; in contrast to them, explores the after-effects of extreme events on a collective, aesthetic, and political rather than a personal level. The articles use the concept of postcatastrophe as a key to understanding the entangled and conflicted cultures of remembrance in postsocialist literatures and the arts dealing with events, phenomena and developments that refuse to remain in the past and still continue to shape perceptions of today's societies in Eastern Europe. As a contribution to memory studies as well as to literary criticism with a special focus on Shoah remembrance after socialism, this book is of great interest to students and scholars of European history, and those interested in historical memory more broadly".
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In Open Book in Ways of Water, poet and artist Adam Wolfond explores the synaesthetic quality of autistic perception, the way in which water in its different materializations shapes and channels language. Building on notions such as "wetness," "streams," and "currents," Wolfond constructs a linguistic universe in which writing and perception merge, move, and "pace to gether" - echoing both the togetherness of the senses and the gathering rhythms of water. Open Book in Ways of Water is as much a book of poetry and a book about poetry, a self-reflection in an endlessly moving and transforming element. As the author himself explains: Language is a way to understand each other but it is also reductive in the ways that it is abstracted and non-sensuous, and open writing as movement tends to be ignored as autistics are forced into neurotypical ways of seeing, and the thinking around artistic practices feels of a pace that intensifies the use of forms forming, and similarities with open processes are languaging the way of water, making language about artful relations with the more than human. Water is a game of ways and patterns that wave and ripple and can pull us under, the talk is about surfacing but languaging is about feeling, moving the ways that it makes are having variances moving the thresholds in thinking feeling of a rally that comes from cutting the grammars out and that is the way of perception that is cut by grammar and people need art to dance this dance of relation. A man of autism answers the ways of the body much of the time and that means my body rallies the artful atmospheres that are dancing me and the real feeling can dance the atmospheres as my body presence and pace shifts other bodies to be free. Having a ticcing body is making the dance about disorder but really it is about a different and diverse way of languaging with many feelings and bathing and immersing and I don't have any other way.
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