Faculty Publications

Time, Literature, and Cartography after the Spatial Turn

Palgrave, 2016

Time, Literature, and Cartography after the Spatial Turn argues that the spatial turn in literary studies has the unexplored potential to reinvigorate the ways in which we understand time in literature.  Drawing on new readings of time in a range of literary narratives, including Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Adam Barrows explores literature’s ability to cartographically represent the dense and tangled rhythmic processes that constitute lived spaces.  Applying the insights of ecological resilience studies, as well as Henri Lefebvre’s late work on rhythm to literary representations of time, this book offers a sustained examination of literature’s “chronometric imaginary”: its capacity to map the temporal relationships between the human and the non-human, the local and the global.

The Cosmic Time of Empire: Modern Britain and World Literature

University of California Press, 2010

Combining original historical research with literary analysis, Adam Barrows takes a provocative look at the creation of world standard time in 1884 and rethinks the significance of this remarkable moment in modernism for both the processes of imperialism and for modern literature. As representatives from twenty-four nations argued over adopting the Prime Meridian, and thereby measuring time in relation to Greenwich, England, writers began experimenting with new ways of representing human temporality. Barrows finds this experimentation in works as varied as Victorian adventure novels, high modernist texts, and South Asian novels—including the work of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, H. Rider Haggard, Bram Stoker, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad. Demonstrating the investment of modernist writing in the problems of geopolitics and in the public discourse of time, Barrows argues that it is possible, and productive, to rethink the politics of modernism through the politics of time.

A Year In Canada

Canadian Poetry, 2004

Mrs. Fleming (Ann Cuthbert)

Susan Birkwood (ed.)

A Year in Canada is one of the earliest published English-language texts by women concerning this country. Written by Ann Cuthbert Knight, this collection of poems was published in Scotland and is made available for the first time in a new edition.

Saracens and the Making of English Identity: The Auchinleck Manuscript

Routledge, 2005

This book explores the ways in which discourses of religious, racial, and national identity blur and engage each other in the medieval West. Specifically, the book studies depictions of Muslims in England during the 1330s and argues that these depictions, although historically inaccurate, served to enhance and advance assertions of English national identity at this time. The book examines Saracen characters in a manuscript renowned for the variety of its texts, and discusses hagiographic legends, elaborations of chronicle entries, and popular romances about Charlemagne, Arthur, and various English knights. In these texts, Saracens engage issues such as the demarcation of communal borders, the place of gender norms and religion in communities’ self-definitions, and the roles of violence and history in assertions of group identity. Texts involving Saracens thus serve both to assert an English identity, and to explore the challenges involved in making such an assertion in the early fourteenth century when the English language was regaining its cultural prestige, when the English people were increasingly at odds with their French cousins, and when English, Welsh, and Scottish sovereignty were pressing matters.

Underdevelopment and African Literature

Cambridge UP, 2020

People looking for works in cities are immersed in English as the lingua franca of the mobile phone and the urban hustle – more effective instigations to reading than decades of work by traditional publishers and development agencies. The legal publishing industry campaigns to convince people to scorn pirates and plagiarists as a criminal underclass, and to instead purchase copyrighted, barcoded works that have the look of legitimacy about them. They work with development industry officials to ‘foster literacy’ – meaning to grow the legal book trade as a contributor to national economic health, and police what and how the newly literate read. But harried cash-strapped audiences will read what and how they can, often outside of formal economies, and are increasingly turning to mobile phone platforms that sell texts at a fraction of the price of legally printed books.

UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary

Stanford University Press, 2019

A case study of one of the most important global institutions of cultural policy formation, UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary demonstrates the relationship between such policy-making and transformations in the economy. Focusing on UNESCO’s use of books, Sarah Brouillette identifies three phases in the agency’s history and explores the literary and cultural programming of each. In the immediate postwar period, healthy economies made possible the funding of an infrastructure in support of a liberal cosmopolitanism and the spread of capitalist democracy. In the decolonizing 1960s and ’70s, illiteracy and lack of access to literature were lamented as a “book hunger” in the developing world, and reading was touted as a universal humanizing value to argue for a more balanced communications industry and copyright regime. Most recently, literature has become instrumental in city and nation branding that drive tourism and the heritage industry. Today, the agency largely treats high literature as a commercially self-sustaining product for wealthy aging publics, and fundamental policy reform to address the uneven relations that characterize global intellectual property creation is off the table. UNESCO’s literary programming is in this way highly suggestive. A trajectory that might appear to be one of triumphant success—literary tourism and festival programming can be quite lucrative for some people—is also, under a different light, a story of decline.

Literature and the Creative Economy

Stanford University Press, 2014

For nearly twenty years, social scientists and policy makers have been highly interested in the idea of the creative economy. This book contends that mainstream considerations of the economic and social force of culture, including theories of the creative class and of cognitive and immaterial labor, are indebted to historic conceptions of the art of literary authorship. What’s more, it shows how contemporary literature has been involved in and has responded to creative-economy phenomena, including the presentation of artists as models of contentedly flexible and self-managed work, the treatment of training in and exposure to art as a pathway to social inclusion, the use of culture and cultural institutions to increase property values, and support for cultural diversity as a means of growing cultural markets.

Contemporary writers have not straightforwardly bemoaned these phenomena in a classic rejection of the instrumental application of art. Rather, they have tended to explore how their own critical capacities have become compatible with or even essential to a neoliberal economy that has embraced art’s autonomous gestures as proof that authentic self-articulation and social engagement can and should occur within capitalism. Taking a sociological approach to literary criticism, Brouillette interprets major works of contemporary fiction by Monica Ali, Aravind Adiga, Daljit Nagra, and Ian McEwan alongside government policy, social science, and theoretical explorations of creative work and immaterial labor.

Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace

Palgrave Macmillan, 2007; paperback edition 2011

Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace, now in paperback and with a new Preface, considers some of the market conditions that have framed the emergence of English-language postcolonial literatures, and suggests modifications to existing accounts of how a writer’s marginality is experienced by consumers of postcolonial texts. Arguing that the incorporation of writers who are marketed as postcolonial has been crucial to global expansion and consolidation in the publishing industry, Sarah Brouillette connects market incorporation to the self-consciousness of a set of postcolonial writers. She situates their attempts at self-definition, self-critique, and self-defence within the general history of literary authorship, and argues for new ways of understanding authorship in light of the experiences of figures like Derek Walcott and Salman Rushdie. Combining explorations of existing theory with wide-scale market analysis and close attention to writers’ careers and texts, the study makes an exciting contribution to globalization studies and to the emerging history of the postcolonial book.

Black Lives Under Nazism: Making History Visible in Literature and Art

Columbia UP, 2024

In a little-known chapter of World War II, Black people living in Nazi Germany and occupied Europe were subjected to ostracization, forced sterilization, and incarceration in internment and concentration camps. In the absence of public commemoration, African diaspora writers and artists have preserved the stories of these forgotten victims of the Third Reich. Their works illuminate the relationship between creative expression and wartime survival and the role of art in the formation of collective memory.

This groundbreaking book explores a range of largely overlooked literary and artistic works that challenge the invisibility of Black wartime history. Emphasizing Black agency, Sarah Phillips Casteel examines both testimonial art by victims of the Nazi regime and creative works that imaginatively reconstruct the wartime period. Among these are the internment art of Caribbean painter Josef Nassy, the survivor memoir of Black German journalist Hans J. Massaquoi, the jazz fiction of African American novelist John A. Williams and Black Canadian novelist Esi Edugyan, and the photomontages of Scottish Ghanaian visual artist Maud Sulter. Bridging Black and Jewish studies, this book identifies the significance of African diaspora experiences and artistic expression for Holocaust history, memory, and representation.

Caribbean Jewish Crossings

University of Virginia Press, 2019

Sarah Phillips Casteel and Heidi Kaufman (eds.)

Caribbean Jewish Crossings is the first essay collection to consider the Caribbean’s relationship to Jewishness through a literary lens. Although Caribbean novelists and poets regularly incorporate Jewish motifs in their work, scholars have neglected this strain in studies of Caribbean literature.

The book takes a pan-Caribbean approach, with chapters addressing the Anglophone, Francophone, Hispanophone, and Dutch-speaking Caribbean. Part I traces the emergence of a Caribbean-Jewish literary culture in Suriname, St. Thomas, Jamaica, and Cuba from the late eighteenth century through the early twentieth century. Part II brings into focus Sephardic and crypto-Jewish motifs in contemporary Caribbean literature, while Part III turns to the question of colonialism and its relationship to Holocaust memory. The volume concludes with the compelling voices of contemporary Caribbean creative writers.

Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary Imagination

Columbia University Press, 2016

In original and insightful ways, Caribbean writers have turned to Jewish experiences of exodus and reinvention, from the Sephardim expelled from Iberia in the 1490s to the “Calypso Jews” who fled Europe for Trinidad in the 1930s. Examining these historical migrations through the lens of postwar Caribbean fiction and poetry, Sarah Phillips Casteel presents the first major study of representations of Jewishness in Caribbean literature. Bridging the gap between postcolonial and Jewish studies, Calypso Jews enriches cross-cultural investigations of Caribbean creolization.

Caribbean writers invoke both the 1492 expulsion and the Holocaust as part of their literary archaeology of slavery and its legacies. Despite the unequal and sometimes fraught relations between Blacks and Jews in the Caribbean before and after emancipation, Black-Jewish literary encounters reflect sympathy and identification more than antagonism and competition. Providing an alternative to U.S.-based critical narratives of Black-Jewish relations, Casteel reads Derek Walcott, Maryse Condé, Michelle Cliff, Jamaica Kincaid, Caryl Phillips, David Dabydeen, and Paul Gilroy, among others, to reveal a distinctive interdiasporic literature.

Canada and Its Americas: Transnational Navigations

McGill-Queen’s UP, 2010

Sarah Phillips Casteel and Winfried Siemerling

In the last few decades Canadian and Québécois literatures have been catapulted onto the global stage, gaining international readership and recognition. Canada and Its Americas challenges the convention that study of this literature should be limited to its place within national borders, arguing that these works should be examined from the perspective of their place and influence within the Americas as a whole. The chapters in this volume, a groundbreaking work in the burgeoning field of hemispheric American studies, expand the horizons of Canadian and Québécois literatures, suggest alternative approaches to models centred on the United States, and analyze the risks and benefits of hemispheric approaches to Canada and Quebec. Revealing the connections among a broad range of Canadian, Québécois, American, Caribbean, Latin American, and diasporic literatures, the contributors critique the neglect of Canadian works in Hemispheric studies and show how such writing can be successfully integrated into an emerging area of literary inquiry. An important development in understanding the diversity of literatures throughout the western hemisphere, Canada and Its Americas reveals exciting new ways for thinking about transnationalism, regionalism, border cultures, and the literatures they produce.

Second Arrivals: Landscape and Belonging in Contemporary Writing of the Americas

University of Virginia Press, 2007

Diaspora studies have tended to privilege urban landscapes over rural ones, wanting to avoid the racial homogeneity, conservatism, and xenophobia usually associated with the latter. In Second Arrivals: Landscape and Belonging in Contemporary Writing of the Americas, Sarah Phillips Casteel examines the work of writers such as Derek Walcott, V. S. Naipaul, Jamaica Kincaid, Philip Roth, and Joy Kogawa, among others, to show how it expresses the appeal that rural and wilderness spaces can hold for the diasporic imagination.

Casteel proposes an alternative to postmodern celebrations of rootlessness, bringing together writers from the Caribbean and North America who uniquely reimagine the New World landscape from the vantage point of cultural and geographical dislocation. As represented in a range of genres and media—fiction, poetry, garden writing, and installation art—these alternative forms of belonging reinterpret New World nature as infused with history and as subject to competing claims, generating a new poetics of American place. The author’s transnational approach also gives significant attention to Canadian material, which has largely been overlooked in hemispheric studies of the literature of the Americas.

Contributing to the growing movement of comparative American studies, Second Arrivals will appeal to scholars and students of inter-American studies, Caribbean studies, Canadian studies, diaspora studies, postcolonial studies, and ecocriticism.

The Origins of the Bible and Early Modern Political Thought

Cambridge University Press, 2021

In this book, Travis DeCook explores the theological and political innovations found in early modern accounts of the Bible’s origins. In the charged climate produced by the Reformation and humanist historicism, writers grappled with the tension between the Bible’s divine and human aspects, and they produced innovative narratives regarding the agencies and processes through which the Bible came into existence and was transmitted. DeCook investigates how these accounts of Scripture’s production were taken up beyond the expected boundaries of biblical study, and were redeployed as the theological basis for wide-reaching arguments about the proper ordering of human life.

DeCook provides a new, critical perspective on ideas regarding secularity, secularization, and modernity, challenging the dominant narratives regarding the Bible’s role in these processes. He shows how these engagements with the Bible’s origins prompt a rethinking of formulations of secularity and secularization in our own time.

Shakespeare, the Bible, and the Form of the Book: Contested Scriptures

Routledge, 2011

Travis DeCook and Alan Galey (eds.)

Why do Shakespeare and the English Bible seem to have an inherent relationship with each other? How have these two monumental traditions in the history of the book functioned as mutually reinforcing sources of cultural authority? How do material books and related reading practices serve as specific sites of intersection between these two textual traditions? This collection makes a significant intervention in our understanding of Shakespeare, the Bible, and the role of textual materiality in the construction of cultural authority. Departing from conventional source study, it questions the often naturalized links between the Shakespearean and biblical corpora, examining instead the historically contingent ways these links have been forged. The volume brings together leading scholars in Shakespeare, book history, and the Bible as literature, whose essays converge on the question of Scripture as source versus Scripture as process—whether that scripture is biblical or Shakespearean—and in turn explore themes such as cultural authority, pedagogy, secularism, textual scholarship, and the materiality of texts. Covering an historical span from Shakespeare’s post-Reformation era to present-day Northern Ireland, the volume uncovers how Shakespeare and the Bible’s intertwined histories illuminate the enduring tensions between materiality and transcendence in the history of the book.

Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Moral Acts

Northwestern UP, 2021

This book shows how ethics and aesthetics interact in the works of one of the most celebrated literary stylists of the twentieth century: the Russian American novelist Vladimir Nabokov. Dragunoiu reads Nabokov’s fictional worlds as battlegrounds between an autonomous will and heteronomous passions, demonstrating Nabokov’s insistence that genuinely moral acts occur when the will triumphs over the passions by answering the call of duty. Dragunoiu puts Nabokov’s novels into dialogue with the work of writers such as Alexander Pushkin, William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy, and Marcel Proust; with Kantian moral philosophy; with the institution of the modern duel of honor; and with the European traditions of chivalric literature that Nabokov studied as an undergraduate at Cambridge University. This configuration of literary influences and philosophical contexts allows Dragunoiu to advance an original and provocative argument about the formation, career, and legacies of an author who viewed moral activity as an art, and for whom artistic and moral acts served as testaments to the freedom of the will.

Vladimir Nabokov and the Poetics of Liberalism

Northwestern University Press, 2011

Alongside the puzzles contained in Nabokov’s fiction, scholars have been unable to untangle the seemingly contradictory relationship between, on one hand, the fiction and the beliefs and principles suggested by Nabokov’s biography and, on the other hand, the statements he made outside of his work. Through a close examination of Nabokov’s father’s political, moral, and aesthetic values and, more generally, Russian liberalism as it existed in the first few decades of the twentieth century, Dragunoiu provides persuasive answers to many long-standing questions in this deeply researched, innovative study. Showing the particular influence of the thought of Kant and Berkeley, she focuses on what she calls Nabokov’s “most deceptively apolitical novels”: The Gift, Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada. In bringing to them a more extensive context than previous Nabokov scholars, Dragunoiu argues that their treatment of various moral and political subjects can be more clearly understood in the light of ideas inherited by Nabokov from his father and his father’s generation.

Utopian Effects, Dystopian Pleasures

Peter Lang, 2021

Peter Fitting

Brian Greenspan (ed.)

This collection brings together for the first time Peter Fitting’s writings about the utopian impulse as expressed in science fiction, fantasy, cinema, architecture, and cultural theory. These wide-ranging essays trace the constant reconsideration of the utopian project itself over the past four decades, from its mid-twentieth century period of decline to its revival in counter-cultural science fiction of the 1960s and ‘70s, its second decline with the «dystopian turn» in film, and the rise of feminist pessimism in the 1980s.

The Eye of the Master: Figures of the Québécois Colonial Imaginary

McGill-Queen’s UP, 2023

Dalie Giroux

Jennifer Henderson (trans.)

In the Québécois political vision of the twentieth century, sovereignty became synonymous with mastery. French Canadians sometimes claimed solidarity with racialized and Indigenous peoples, yet they saw their liberation as a matter of taking their rightful place in the seat of the oppressors. The idea of mastery has prevented the Québécois from seeing that their liberation is bound up with that of other groups oppressed by colonial powers.

The Eye of the Master confronts the missed opportunities for a decolonial version of indépendance in Quebec by examining the quest for mastery that has been at the root of every version of independence offered to the people of Quebec since the mid-twentieth century. Exploring political discourse, popular culture, and the family photo album, Dalie Giroux revisits the mythology of being “masters in our own house” and identifies the obstacles blocking a more comprehensive version of liberation based on solidarity. Drawing from the living forces of Indigenous thought and anti-racist, ecological, and feminist movements, Giroux envisions life without conquest, domination, exploitation, and surveillance. Making the case for a different future, beginning in the here and now, The Eye of the Master offers a major new intervention in contemporary political thought to Canadian readers and all those who imagine a different North America.

Reconciling Canada: Critical Perspectives on the Culture of Redress

University of Toronto Press, 2013

Jennifer Henderson and Pauline Wakeham (eds.)

Truth and reconciliation commissions and official governmental apologies continue to surface worldwide as mechanisms for coming to terms with human rights violations and social atrocities. As the first scholarly collection to explore the intersections and differences between a range of redress cases that have emerged in Canada in recent decades, Reconciling Canada provides readers with the contexts for understanding the phenomenon of reconciliation as it has played out in this multicultural settler state.

In this volume, leading scholars in the humanities and social sciences relate contemporary political and social efforts to redress wrongs to the fraught history of government relations with Aboriginal and diasporic populations. The contributors offer ground-breaking perspectives on Canada’s ‘culture of redress,’ broaching questions of law and constitutional change, political coalitions, commemoration, testimony, and literatures of injury and its aftermath. Also assembled together for the first time is a collection of primary documents – including government reports, parliamentary debates, and redress movement statements – prefaced with contextual information. Reconciling Canada provides a vital and immensely relevant illumination of the dynamics of reconciliation, apology, and redress in contemporary Canada.

Trans/acting Culture, Writing, and Memory: Essays in Honour of Barbara Godard

WLU Press, 2013

Eva C. Karpinski, Jennifer Henderson, Ian Sowton, and Ray Ellenwood (eds.)

Trans/acting Culture, Writing, and Memory is a collection of essays written in honour of Barbara Godard, one of the most original and wide-ranging literary critics, theorists, teachers, translators, and public intellectuals Canada has ever produced. The contributors, both established and emerging scholars, extend Godard’s work through engagements with her published texts in the spirit of creative interchange and intergenerational relay of ideas. Their essays resonate with Godard’s innovative scholarship, situated at the intersection of such fields as literary studies, cultural studies, translation studies, feminist theory, arts criticism, social activism, institutional analysis, and public memory. In pursuit of unexpected linkages and connections, the essays venture beyond generic and disciplinary borders, zeroing in on Godard’s transdisciplinary practice which has been extremely influential in the way it framed questions and modelled interventions for the study of Canadian, Québécois, and Acadian literatures and cultures. The authors work with the materials ranging from Canadian government policies and documents to publications concerning white-supremacist organizations in Southern Ontario, online materials from a Toronto-based transgender arts festival, a photographic mural installation commemorating the Montreal Massacre, and the works of such writers and artists as Marie Clements, Nicole Brossard, France Daigle, Nancy Huston, Yvette Nolan, Gail Scott, Denise Desautels, Louise Warren, Rebecca Belmore, Vera Frenkel, Robert Lepage, and Janet Cardiff.

Settler Feminism and Race Making in Canada

University of Toronto Press, 2003

Settler Feminism and Race Making in Canada engages in a discursive analysis of three ‘texts’: the narratives of Anna Jameson (Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada), Theresa Gowanlock and Theresa Delaney (Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear), and the ‘Janey Canuck’ books of Emily Murphy in order to examine how, in the context of a settler colony, white women have been part of the project of its governance, its racial constitution, and its role in British imperialism. Using Foucauldian theories of governmentality to connect these first-person narratives to wider strategies of race making, Jennifer Henderson develops a feminist critique of the ostensible freedom that Anglo-Protestant women found within nineteenth-century liberal projects of rule.

Henderson’s interdisciplinary approach including critical studies in law, literature, and political history offers a new perspective on these women that detaches them from the dominant colony-to-nation narrative and shows their importance in a tradition of moral regulation. This project not only redresses problems in Canadian literary history, it also responds to the limits of postcolonial, nationalist, and feminist projects that search for authentic voices and resistant agency without sufficient attention to the layers of historical sedimentation through which these voices speak.

The Humanities in a Utilitarian Age: Imagining What We Know, 1800-1850

Palgrave Macmillan, 2020

This book explores the ways that critics writing in the early nineteenth century developed arguments in favour of the humanities in the face of utilitarian pressures. Its focus reflects the ways that similar pressures today have renewed the question of how to make the case for the public value of the humanities. The good news is that in many ways, this self-reflexive challenge is precisely what the humanities have always done best: highlight the nature and the force of the narratives that have helped to define how we understand our society – its various pasts and its possible futures – and to suggest the larger contexts within which these issues must ultimately be situated.

Mary Wollstonecraft in Context

Cambridge University Press, 2020

Paul Keen and Nancy E. Johnson (eds.)

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) was one of the most influential and controversial women of her age. No writer, except perhaps her political foe, Edmund Burke, and her fellow reformer, Thomas Paine, inspired more intense reactions. In her brief literary career before her untimely death in 1797, Wollstonecraft achieved remarkable success in an unusually wide range of genres: from education tracts and political polemics, to novels and travel writing. Just as impressive as her expansive range was the profound evolution of her thinking in the decade when she flourished as an author. In this collection of essays, leading international scholars reveal the intricate biographical, critical, cultural, and historical context crucial for understanding Mary Wollstonecraft’s oeuvre. Chapters on British radicalism and conservatism, French philosophes and English Dissenters, constitutional law and domestic law, sentimental literature, eighteenth-century periodicals and more elucidate Wollstonecraft’s social and political thought, historical writings, moral tales for children, and novels.

Interacting with Print: Keywords for the Era of Media Saturation

Chicago University Press, 2018

Paul Keen, one of 24 equal authors

A thorough rethinking of a field deserves to take a shape that is in itself new. Interacting with Print delivers on this premise, reworking the history of print through a unique effort in authorial collaboration. The book itself is not a typical monograph—rather, it is a “multigraph,” the collective work of twenty-two scholars who together have assembled an alphabetically arranged tour of key concepts for the study of print culture, from Anthologies and Binding to Publicity and Taste.

Each entry builds on its term in order to resituate print and book history within a broader media ecology throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The central theme is interactivity, in three senses: people interacting with print; print interacting with the non-print media that it has long been thought, erroneously, to have displaced; and people interacting with each other through print. The resulting book will introduce new energy to the field of print studies and lead to considerable new avenues of investigation.

The Age of Authors: An Anthology of Eighteenth-Century Print Culture

Broadview Press, 2013

Eighteenth-century critics differed about almost everything, but if there was one point on which they almost universally agreed, it was that they were living through an age of extraordinary change. The texts in this collection respond to a series of fundamental questions about the changing nature of the literary field during a tumultuous age: What types of writing mattered in a thriving commercial nation? What kinds of knowledge ought literature to offer, if it was to continue to be relevant? What did it mean to be an author in this busy modern world, and what sorts of social distinction should authors expect to enjoy?

The Age of Authors explores the complexity, sophistication, and creativity with which the eighteenth century literary community (or “republic of letters”) responded to the challenges of the time.

Literature, Commerce, and the Spectacle of Modernity, 1750-1800

Cambridge University Press, 2012

Paul Keen explores how a consumer revolution which reached its peak in the second half of the eighteenth century shaped debates about the role of literature in a polite modern nation, and tells the story of the resourcefulness with which many writers responded to these pressures. From dream reveries which mocked their own entrepreneurial commitments, such as Oliver Goldsmith’s account of selling his work at a ‘Fashion Fair’ on the frozen Thames, to the Microcosm’s mock plan to establish ‘a licensed warehouse for wit,’ writers insistently tied their literary achievements to a sophisticated understanding of the uncertain complexities of a modern transnational society. This book combines a new understanding of late eighteenth-century literature with the materialist and sociological imperatives of book history and theoretically inflected approaches to cultural history.

Bookish Histories: Books, Literature and Commercial Modernity, 1700-1900

Palgrave Macmillan, 2009

Ina Ferris and Paul Keen (eds.)

Bookish Histories presents a new ‘bookish’ approach to the literary history of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Britain. Concentrating on overlooked dimensions of literary practice and production during the period when printed matter became incorporated into everyday life, the essays in the volume bring together book history, cultural history, and literary studies to expand our understanding of books in modernity. Gathering together leading scholars, the volume represents a collective rethinking of the making of the modern literary field as they reflect on topics such as the repositioning of authors in the literary market, the development of intimate reading routines, changing book practices, transformations in print genres, and experiments in publishing.

Revolutions in Romantic Literature: An Anthology of Print Culture, 1780-1832

Broadview Press, 2004

This concise Broadview anthology of primary source materials is unique in its focus on Romantic literature and the ways in which the period itself was characterized by wide-ranging, self-conscious debates about the meaning of literature. It includes materials that are not available in other Romantic literature anthologies.

The anthology is organized into thirteen sections that highlight the intensity and sophistication with which a variety of related literary issues were debated in the Romantic period. These debates posed fundamental questions about the very nature of literature as a cultural phenomenon, the extent and role of the reading public, literature’s relation to the sciences and the aesthetic, the influence of contemporary commercial pressures, and the impact of perceived excesses in consumer fashions. The anthology foregrounds the ways that these literary debates converged with broader social and political controversies such as the French Revolution, the struggle for women’s rights, colonialism, and the anti-slave trade campaign.

This anthology includes an impressive range of writings from the period (including literary criticism and philosophical, political, scientific, and travel writing) which embodies the collection’s broad approach to Romantic literature. Both lesser-known and more canonical writings are included, and the selections are organized by topic in such a way as to dramatize the debates and exchanges which characterize the Romantic period.

The Popular Radical Press in Britain, 1811-1821: A Reprint of Early Nineteenth-Century Radical Periodicals

Pickering & Chatto Publishers, 2003

Paul Keen (ed.)

The radical weekly newspaper or pamphlet was the leading print organ of popular radical expression during what has been called the “heroic age of popular Radicalism”; the years of public agitation for parliamentary reform between 1815 and 1820. This work reprints the original runs of the rarest periodicals. Following the model of the radical weekly paper established by William Corbett’s “Political Register” (1803) and John and Leigh Hunt’s “examiner” (1808), and spurred on by a difficult period of post-war economic dislocation, and by Corbett’s invention of an unstamped, two-penny format that managed to evade newspaper taxes designed to keep political information out of the hands of the poor, these newspapers flourished in the period leading up to the Six Acts of 1819, which closed the legal loophole exploited by Cobbett and his imitators, and effectively suppressed popular radical expression in periodical form until its revival in the Chartist period. These weekly periodicals had a social, cultural and political impact far beyond what their brief period of circulation might suggest, and they have been the subject of revived interest in recent times by historians and literary scholars alike. Emerging under extraordinary conditions of social and political crisis, and in some cases produced from prison by editors found guilty of blasphemy and sedition, these periodicals occupy a critical nexus of rapid social and literary transformation in an age of revolution. With the exception of the longer periodicals, this edition includes nearly all of the London-based radical periodicals of the period, and allows researchers and students to appreciate the full range of a confident radical culture, from the more traditional, constitutionalist protest of the “Cap of Liberty” and the “Radical Reformer” to the progressive, infidel arguments of “The Theological Comet”; from the more middle-class premises of John Hunt’s “Reformists’ Register” to the plebian “Cap of Liberty” and “White Hat”; from the high seriousness of Richard Carlile’s “Deist” to the festive language of the celebrated satirist William Hone; and from the self-consciously literary tenor of the “Radical Magazine” and “The Yellow Dwarf”, for which William Hazlitt produced some of his most brilliant political essays, to the more rational discourse of John Wade’s “Gorgon”, patronized by Jeremy Bentham and a crucial medium for the transmission of utilitarian principles to the working class.

The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s: Print Culture and the Public Sphere

Cambridge University Press, 1999; paperback edition 2006

This book offers an original study of debates that arose in the 1790s about the nature and social role of literature and the new class of readers produced by the revolution in information and literacy in eighteenth-century England. The first part concentrates on the dominant arguments about the role of literature and the status of the author; the second shifts its focus to the debates about working-class activists and radical women authors, and examines the growth of a Romantic ideology within this context of political and cultural turmoil.

Climate Change, Interrupted
Representation and the Remaking of Time

Stanford University Press, 2022

In this moment of climate precarity, Victorian studies scholar Barbara Leckie considers the climate crisis as a problem of time. Spanning the long nineteenth century through our current moment, her interdisciplinary treatment of climate change at once rethinks time and illustrates that the time for climate action is now.

Climate Change, Interrupted argues that linear, progress-inflected temporalities are not adequate to a crisis that defies their terms. Instead, this book advances a theory and practice of interruption to rethink prevailing temporal frameworks. At the same time, it models the anachronistic, time-blending, and time-layering temporality it advances. In a series of experimental chapters informed by the unlikely trio of Walter Benjamin, Donna Haraway, and Virginia Woolf, Leckie reinflects and cowrites the traditions and knowledges of the long nineteenth century and the current period in the spirit of climate action collaboration.

The current moment demands as many approaches as possible, invites us to take risks, and asks scholars and activists adept at storytelling to participate in the conversation. Climate Change, Interrupted, accordingly, invests in interruption to tell a different story of the climate crisis.

London Labour and the London Poor

Broadview Press, 2019

Henry Mayhew

Barbara Leckie and Janice Schroeder (eds.)

Produced between 1850 and 1862, London Labour and the London Poor is one of the most significant examples of nineteenth-century oral history. The collection teems with the minute particulars of the everyday—bits and pieces of London lives assembled into a precarious whole by the author, editor, and principal investigator, Henry Mayhew. Mayhew was interested in the social fabric of people’s lives, their labour and earnings, but also their families, education, leisure time, and religious beliefs. What gives his “case studies” such immediacy is that they seem to flow unprompted and uninterrupted from the mouths of his subjects: street sellers, dock labourers, musicians, rat catchers, vagrants, chimney sweeps, thieves, and prostitutes. All are captured in this newly annotated and selected edition of Mayhew’s four-volume work. Historical appendices include a contemporary map of London, reviews of London Labour, and other slum journalism from the period.

Open Houses: Poverty, the Novel, and the Architectural Idea in Nineteenth-Century Britain.

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018

Open Houses addresses nineteenth-century documentary and print culture dedicated to convincing the reader of the wretchedness of housing of the poor and its urgent need for reform. It illustrates the ways in which “looking into” these houses animated new models for social critique in tandem with new forms for the novel.

Sanitary Reform in Victorian Britain, Vol. II

Pickering & Chatto Publishers, 2013

Tom Crook and Barbara Leckie (eds.)

Sanitary reform was one of the great debates of the nineteenth century. Unprecedented urban growth significantly increased the spread of disease. This presented new challenges to public health not least because the relationship between sanitary conditions and disease was not universally acknowledged. Opinions from those involved in medicine, engineering, civic development, architecture and politics are all represented, providing a wide overview of Victorian society. This six volume edition, published in two parts, makes available for the first time a modern, edited collection of rare nineteenth-century documents specifically addressing sanitary reform.

The collection includes material on Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester, Dublin and London, giving a nationwide perspective on the conditions of British urban life. It covers burial, sewerage, water supply, public baths, housing and inspection. The material comes from newspapers and journals, reports of Medical Health Officers and government agencies, architectural guides and promotional literature from sanitary communities. This unique resource is an invaluable tool for researchers of the History of Science and Medicine and Victorian Studies.

Culture and Adultery: The Novel, the Newspaper, and the Law, 1857-1914

University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999

Adultery, it is often assumed, was not a major concern of English culture during the Victorian age, and the apparent absence of adultery–indeed, of all explicit representations of sexuality–in turn made censorship for obscene libel unnecessary. Very few writers, conventional wisdom has it, were bold enough to defy the powerful implicit constraints imposed upon literary production.

If we find no English Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary, Barbara Leckie nevertheless demonstrates that adultery preoccupied English culture during this period. After the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 was passed, adultery was prominently discussed in the Divorce Court. Transcriptions of divorce trials were an immensely popular front-page feature of almost all daily newspapers for more than fifty years. At the same time as narratives of adultery stood at the center of sensation novels such as Mary Elizabeth Bradden’s The Doctor’s Wife, literary reviews and cultural debates strongly encouraged serious novelists to avoid the topic.

In Culture and Adultery, Leckie mines novels, newspapers, court and Parliamentary records to explore several related sets of issues. How, first, did adultery become “visible” in the public sphere in the second half of the nineteenth century? Why, conversely, has the discursive history of adultery been deemphasized in the English critical tradition? And how is the history of the Victorian and early twentieth-century English novel revised when the culture’s concern with adultery and censorship are reintroduced?

Rohinton Mistry and His Works

ECW Press, 1996

Home Feelings: Liberal Citizenship and the Canadian Reading Camp Movement

McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019

Literature, literacy, and citizenship took on new and contested meanings in early twentieth-century Canada, particularly in frontier work camps. In this critical history of the reading camp movement, Jody Mason undertakes the first sustained analysis of the organization that became Frontier College in 1919.

Employing an interdisciplinary approach, Home Feelings investigates how the reading camp movement used fiction, poetry, songs, newspapers, magazines, school readers, and English-as-a-second-language and citizenship manuals to encourage ideas of selfhood that were individual and intimate rather than collective. Mason shows that British-Canadian settlers’ desire to define themselves in relation to an expanding non-British immigrant population, as well as a need for immigrant labour, put new pressure on the concept of citizenship in the first decades of the twentieth century. Through the Frontier College, one of the nation’s earliest citizenship education programs emerged, drawing on literature’s potential to nourish “home feelings” as a means of engaging socialist and communist print cultures and the non-British immigrant communities with which these were associated.

Shifting the focus away from urban centres and postwar state narratives of citizenship, Home Feelings tracks the importance of reading projects and conceptions of literacy to the emergence of liberal citizenship in Canada prior to the Second World War.

Writing Unemployment: Worklessness, Mobility, and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century Canadian Literatures

University of Toronto Press, 2013

This landmark study explores the cultural and literary history of unemployment in Canada from the 1920s to the 1970s, which were crucial decades in the formation of our current conception of Canada as a nation. Writing Unemployment asks how writers with diverse political affiliations participated in and protested against the discursive framing of unemployment. It argues that Depression-era conceptions of unemployment shaped later twentieth-century understandings of both worklessness and citizenship.

By examining novels, short stories, poetry, manifestos, and agitprop, Jody Mason situates the literary history of the cultural left in a broader context, challenges the dominant literary-historical narrative of the pioneer settler, and contributes to new scholarship on Canada’s modern period. By bridging close textual readings with book and publishing history, economic and sociological analysis, and original archival research, Writing Unemployment offers new ideas on work by many of Canada’s most important writers.

The Cambridge Companion to Lesbian Literature

Cambridge University Press, 2015

Jodie Medd (ed.)

Edited by Jodie Medd, The Cambridge Companion to Lesbian Literature examines literary representations of lesbian sexuality, identities, and communities, from the medieval period to the present. In addition to providing a helpful orientation to key literary-historical periods, critical concepts, theoretical debates and literary genres, this Companion considers the work of such well-known authors as Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Alison Bechdel and Sarah Waters. Written by a host of leading critics and covering subjects as diverse as lesbian desire in the long eighteenth century and same-sex love in a postcolonial context, this Companion delivers insight into the variety of traditions that have shaped the present landscape of lesbian literature.

Lesbian Scandal and the Culture of Modernism

Cambridge University Press, 2012

Before lesbianism became a specific identity category in the West, its mere suggestion functioned as a powerful source of scandal in early twentieth-century British and Anglo-American culture. Reconsidering notions of the ‘invisible’ or ‘apparitional’ lesbian, Jodie Medd argues that lesbianism’s representational instability, and the scandals it generated, rendered it an influential force within modern politics, law, art and the literature of modernist writers like James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Virginia Woolf. Medd’s analysis draws on legal proceedings and parliamentary debates as well as crises within modern literary production – patronage relations, literary obscenity and cultural authority – to reveal how lesbian suggestion forced modern political, cultural and literary institutions to negotiate their own identities, ideals and limits. Medd’s text will be of great interest to scholars and graduate students in gender and women’s studies, modernist literary studies and English literature.

The Living and the Dead: Disaffirming Biopolitics

Penn State UP, 2022

Arguing that biopower can be fully exposed only through an analysis of those whom society has “let die,” Stuart J. Murray employs a series of transdisciplinary case studies to uncover the structural and rhetorical conditions through which biopower works. These case studies include the concept of “sacrifice” in the “war” against COVID-19, where emergent cultures of pandemic “resistance” are explored alongside suicide bombings and military suicides; the California mass hunger strikes of 2013; legal cases involving “preventable” and “untimely” childhood deaths, exposing the irreconcilable claims of anti-vaxxers and Indigenous peoples; and the videorecording of the death of a disabled Black man. Murray demonstrates that active resistance to biopower inevitably reproduces tropes of “making live” and “letting die.” His counter to this fact is a critical stance of disaffirmation, one in which death disrupts the politics politics of life itself.

Radical Sex Between Men

Routledge, 2018

Dave Holmes, Stuart J. Murray, Thomas Foth (eds.)

Bringing together theory and public health practice, this interdisciplinary collection analyses three forms of nonconventional or radical sexualities: bareback sex, BDSM practices, and public sex. Drawing together the latest empirical research from Brazil, Canada, Spain, and the USA, it mobilizes queer theory and poststructuralism, engaging the work of theorists such as Bataille, Butler, Deleuze and Guattari, and Foucault, among others. While the collection contributes to current research in gender and sexuality studies, it does so distinctly in the context of empirical investigations and discourses on critical public health. Radical Sex Between Men: Assembling Desiring-Machineswill be of interest to advanced undergraduate students, postgraduate students, and researchers in gender and sexuality studies, sexology, social work, anthropology, and sociology, as well as practitioners in nursing, medicine, allied health professions, and psychology.

The Ethics of Care

Routledge, 2017

Alan Blum and Stuart J. Murray (eds.)

Beginning with a focus on the ethical foundations of caregiving in health and expanding towards problems of ethics and justice implicated in a range of issues, this book develops and expands the notion of care itself and its connection to practice.

Organised around the themes of culture as a restraint on caregiving in different social contexts and situations, innovative methods in healthcare, and the way in which culture works to position care as part of a rhetorical approach to dependency, responsibility, and justice, The Ethics of Care presents case studies examining institutional responses to end-of-life issues, the notion of informed consent, biomedicine, indigenous rights and postcolonialism in care and theoretical approaches to the concept of care.

Offering discussions from a variety of disciplinary approaches, including sociology, communication, and social theory, as well as hermeneutics, phenomenology, and deconstruction, this book will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in healthcare, medicine, justice and the question of how we think about care as a notion and social form, and how this is related to practice.

“The Document” (an essay on British photojournalist Tim Hetherington)

in A Concise Companion to Visual Culture

Wiley Blackwell, 2021

Aubrey Anable, Joan Saab, Catherine Zuromskis (eds.)

Fighting Sleep: The War for the Mind and the US Military

Verso Books, 2019

How the military used sleep as a weapon—and how soldiers fought back

Remaking Reality: U.S. Documentary After 1945

University of North Carolina Press, 2018

Sara Blair, Joseph B. Entin, and Franny Nudelman (eds.)

After World War II, U.S. documentarians engaged in a rigorous rethinking of established documentary practices and histories. Responding to the tumultuous transformations of the postwar era–the atomic age, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the emergence of the environmental movement, immigration and refugee crises, student activism, the globalization of labor, and the financial collapse of 2008–documentary makers increasingly reconceived reality as the site of social conflict and saw their work as instrumental to struggles for justice. Examining a wide range of forms and media, including sound recording, narrative journalism, drawing, photography, film, and video, this book is a daring interdisciplinary study of documentary culture and practice from 1945 to the present. Essays by leading scholars across disciplines collectively explore the activist impulse of documentarians who not only record reality but also challenge their audiences to take part in reality’s remaking.

John Brown’s Body: Slavery, Violence, and the Culture of War

UNC Press, 2004

Singing “John Brown’s Body” as they marched to war, Union soldiers sought to steel themselves in the face of impending death. As the bodies of these soldiers accumulated in the wake of battle, writers, artists, and politicians extolled their deaths as a means to national unity and rebirth. Many scholars have followed suit, and the Civil War is often remembered as an inaugural moment in the development of national identity.

Revisiting the culture of the Civil War, Franny Nudelman analyzes the idealization of mass death and explores alternative ways of depicting the violence of war. Considering martyred soldiers in relation to suffering slaves, she argues that responses to wartime death cannot be fully understood without attention to the brutality directed against African Americans during the antebellum era.

Throughout, Nudelman focuses not only on representations of the dead but also on practical methods for handling, studying, and commemorating corpses. She narrates heated conflicts over the political significance of the dead: whether in the anatomy classroom or the Army Medical Museum, at the military scaffold or the national cemetery, the corpse was prized as a source of authority. Integrating the study of death, oppression, and war, John Brown’s Body makes an important contribution to a growing body of scholarship that meditates on the relationship between violence and culture.

London Labour and the London Poor

Broadview Press, 2019.

Henry Mayhew

Barbara Leckie and Janice Schroeder (eds.)

Produced between 1850 and 1862, London Labour and the London Poor is one of the most significant examples of nineteenth-century oral history. The collection teems with the minute particulars of the everyday—bits and pieces of London lives assembled into a precarious whole by the author, editor, and principal investigator, Henry Mayhew. Mayhew was interested in the social fabric of people’s lives, their labour and earnings, but also their families, education, leisure time, and religious beliefs. What gives his “case studies” such immediacy is that they seem to flow unprompted and uninterrupted from the mouths of his subjects: street sellers, dock labourers, musicians, rat catchers, vagrants, chimney sweeps, thieves, and prostitutes. All are captured in this newly annotated and selected edition of Mayhew’s four-volume work. Historical appendices include a contemporary map of London, reviews of London Labour, and other slum journalism from the period.

Nineteenth Century British Women’s Education, 1840-1900

Routledge, 2007

Susan Hamilton and Janice Schroeder (eds.)

This six-volume collection from Routledge and Edition Synapse brings together key documents from the Victorian feminist campaign to establish and improve girls’ and women’s education. The set is divided into two sections, both of which incorporate materials that argue for the improvement of girls’ and women’s education as well as arguments made against education for girls and women. The first section focuses on the debate surrounding the quality of women’s education and the question of access to higher education for women. This section also brings together documents from the feminist campaign with writing from the established press on the question of women’s higher education, and writings from the Social Sciences Association where many education reformers aired their views. The second section concentrates on the strengths and successes of Victorian women as educators, and highlights some of the most influential women in the field of education during this era.

Drawing widely on articles from the feminist and established press, government papers, newspapers, professional and association journals, as well as memoirs, addresses, pamphlets, and reviews, this essential collection gives researchers excellent and comprehensive access to nineteenth-century debates on improving girls’ and women’s education, and women’s work as educators.

The Presence of Rome in Medieval and Early Modern Britain: Texts, Artefacts and Beliefs

Cambridge University Press, 2020

This book explores the cultural and intellectual stakes of medieval and Renaissance Britain’s sense of itself as living in the shadow of Rome, a city whose name could designate the ancient, fallen, quintessentially human power that had conquered and colonized Britain, and also the alternately sanctifed and demonized Roman Church. Wallace presses medieval texts in a range of languages (including Latin, medieval Welsh, Old English and Old French) into conversation with early modern English and humanistic Latin texts (including works by Gildas, Bede, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Bacon, St. Augustine, Dante, Erasmus, Luther and Montaigne). ‘The Ordinary’, ‘The Self’, ‘The Word’, and ‘The Dead’ are taken as compass points by which individuals lived out their orientations to, and against, Rome, isolating important dimensions of Rome’s enduring ability to shape and complicate the effort to come to terms with the nature of the self and the structure of human community.

Virgil’s Schoolboys: The Poetics of Pedagogy in Renaissance England

Oxford University Press, 2010

Virgil’s Schoolboys adds a new layer of complexity to the story of Virgil’s pedagogical afterlife. Reading the ancient Roman poet as an adventurous theorist of instruction, Andrew Wallace examines the relationship between serial meditations on teaching in the Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid, and the pedagogical theories and practices that dominated the spaces in which those poems came to be taught in the grammar schools of Renaissance England. Wallace argues not only that Virgil was a keen student of the elusive operations of instruction, but that vitae and scholia from antiquity to the Renaissance preserve a range of fractured acknowledgements that pedagogical questions supply Virgil’s poems with one of their characteristic preoccupations. In grammar schools across Renaissance England ‘the book of Maro’ was a gateway to upper-form studies of the auctores. More significantly, it was a gateway to some of humanist pedagogy’s most self-conscious meditations on the promise and fragility of the educational project.