Welcome to the subject guide for Comparative Literature and Modern Culture
In this guide you will find links to important databases and reference material that are relevant to this specific subject, along with links to international literary and cultural fora. Please browse through the top menu to learn more
The Book of Literary Terms by The much-anticipated second edition of The Book of Literary Terms features new examples and terms to enhance Turco's classic guide that students and scholars have relied on over the years as a definitive resource for the definitions of the major terms, forms, and styles of literature. Chapters covering fiction, drama, nonfiction, and literary criticism and scholarship offer readers a comprehensive guide to all forms of prose and their many sub-genres.From "Utopian novel", "videotape", and "yellow journalism", to "kabuki play", "Personalism", and "Poststructuralism", this book is a valuable reference offering an extensive world of knowledge. Every teacher, student, critic, and general lover of literature should be sure to add The Book of Literary Terms to their library.
Literary Twinship from Shakespeare to the Age of Cloning by Unlike previous efforts that have only addressed literary twinship as a footnote to the doppelganger motif, this book makes a case for the complexity of literary twinship across the literary spectrum. It shows how twins have been instrumental to the formation of comedies of mistaken identity, the detective genre, and dystopian science fiction. The individual chapters trace the development of the category of twinship over time, demonstrating how the twin was repeatedly (re-)invented as a cultural and pathological type when other discursive fields constituted themselves, and how its literary treatment served as the battleground for ideological disputes: by setting the stage for debates regarding kinship and reproduction, or by partaking in discussions of criminality, eugenic greatness, and 'monstrous births'. The book addresses nearly 100 primary texts, including works of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Priest, William Shakespeare, and Zadie Smith.
Knots : post-lacanian psychoanalysis, literature and film by This collection of specially commissioned essays offers a wide array of new psychoanalytic approaches impacted by Lacanian theory, queer studies, post-colonial studies, feminism, and deconstruction in the domains of film and literature. We have witnessed a remarkable return to psychoanalysis in those fields, fields from which it had been excluded or discredited for a while. This has changed recently, and we need to understand why. The fourteen essays make use a freshly minted psychoanalytic concepts to read diverse texts, films and social practices. The distinguished authors gathered here, an international group of scholars coming from Japan, China, Korea, India, Belgium, Greece, France, Australia, and the USA, are all cognizant of the advances of theory under the form of deconstruction, feminism, post-colonial studies and trauma studies. These essays take into account the latest developments in Lacanian theory and never bracket off subjective agency when dealing with literature or film. The authors make sense of changes brought to psychoanalytical theory by redefinitions of the Oedipus complex, reconsiderations of the death drive, applications of Lacan's symptom and the concept of the Real, reassessments of the links between affect and trauma, insights into the resilience of Romantic excess and jouissance, awareness of the role of transference in classical and modernist texts, and pedagogical techniques aimed at teaching difficult texts, all the while testifying to the influence on Lacanian theory of thinkers like Maurice Blanchot, Roland Barthes, Melanie Klein, Didier Anzieu, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Zizek. Chapter 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003002727
Queer Defamiliarisation by Helen Palmer examines the Russian formalist concept of defamiliarisation from a contemporary critical perspective, bringing together new materialist feminisms, experimental linguistic formalism and queer theory. She explores how we might radically restructure this gesture of 'making-strange' to create a dialogue with the affirmations of 'deviant', 'errant', 'alternative' and 'multiple' modes of being which have become synonymous with queer theory. Queer theory harnesses the creative potential of indeterminacy in order to celebrate and affirm infinite dimensions of sexuality and gender, creating space for all human beings to express themselves without the classification or judgement of prescriptive terminologies. Linguistic at its source, but going beyond this limit just like defamiliarisation, the liberating force of queer theory is derived from the removal of terminological boundaries. Palmer asks what a 21st-century queer defamiliarisation might look like and examines the extent to which these affirmative or emancipatory discourses escape the paradoxes of normativity or historicisation.
The New Feminist Literary Studies by The New Feminist Literary Studies presents sixteen essays by leading and emerging scholars that examine contemporary feminism and the most pressing issues of today. The book is divided into three sections. This first section , 'Frontiers', contains essays on issues and phenomena that may be considered, if not new, then newly and sometimes uneasily prominent in the public eye: transfeminism, the sexual violence highlighted by #MeToo, Black motherhood, migration, sex worker rights, and celebrity feminism. Essays in the second section, 'Fields', specifically intervene into long-constituted or relatively new academic fields and areas of theory: disability studies, eco-theory, queer studies, and Marxist feminism. Finally, the third section, 'Forms', is dedicated to literary genres and tackles novels of domesticity, feminist dystopias, young adult fiction, feminist manuals and manifestos, memoir, and poetry. Together these essays provide new interventions into the thinking and theorising of contemporary feminism.
Charting Literary Urban Studies by "Guided by the multifaceted relations between city and text, Charting Literary Urban Studies: Texts as Models of and for the City attempts to chart the burgeoning field of literary urban studies by outlining how texts in varying degrees function as both representation of the city and as blueprints for its future development. The study addresses questions such as these: How do literary texts represent urban complexities - and how can they capture the uniqueness of a given city? How do literary texts simulate layers of urban memory - and how can they reinforce or help dissolve path dependencies in urban development? What role can literary studies play in interdisciplinary urban research? Are the blueprints or "recipes" for urban development that most quickly travel around the globe - such as "the creative city", "the green city" or "the smart city" - really always the ones that best solve a given problem? Or is the global spread of such travelling urban models not least a matter of their narrative packaging? In answering these key questions, this book also advances a literary studies contribution to the general theory of models, tracing a heuristic trajectory from the analysis of literary texts as representations of urban developments to an analysis of literary strategies in planning documents and other pragmatic, non-literary texts"--
Context in Literary and Cultural Studies by Context in Literary and Cultural Studies is an interdisciplinary volume that deals with the challenges of studying works of art and literature in their historical context today. The relationship between artworks and context has long been a central concern for aesthetic and cultural disciplines, and the question of context has been asked anew in all eras. Developments in contemporary culture and technology, as well as new theoretical and methodological orientations in the humanities, once again prompt us to rethink context in literary and cultural studies. This volume takes up that challenge. Introducing readers to new developments in literary and cultural theory, Context in Literary and Cultural Studies connects all disciplines related to these areas to provide an interdisciplinary overview of the challenges different scholarly fields today meet in their studies of artworks in context. Spanning a number of countries and covering subjects from nineteenth-century novels to rave culture, the chapters together constitute an informed, diverse and wide-ranging discussion. The volume is written for scholarly readers at all levels in the fields of literary studies, comparative literature, cultural studies, art history, film, theater studies, and digital humanities. 
