Literary Criticism
Systems from Hell
Examines how contemporary novels document and define social problems using a variety of narrative techniques to focus attention on systemic failure.
Freedom Is Not Enough
Shows the surprising ways T. S. Eliot's work sheds light on—and proves useful to—the contemporary struggle for a freer and more just world.
Laughing on the Brink of Humanity
Stretching from antiquity to AI, a provocative study of the joyless laughter that emerges at the boundary of the human and the inhuman.
Killing Children in British Fiction
Investigates how British fiction and film use dangerous and endangered children to explore conflicts over the future, from the Thatcher to Brexit eras.
Common Scents
Attends to the much-neglected sense of smell in and around modern poetry to suggest the possibility of a revolution of the senses.
Novel Pedagogy
Explores Victorian writers’ conception of the novel’s potential to become serious knowledge and differentiate itself from other educational genres.
Emporialism
A comparative study of iconographic and fictional representations of department stores in France and Egypt, as sites of imperial and Mediterranean cultural memory, from 1859 to the present.
How Close Reading Made Us
Shows how the method of close reading traveled from the United States to Brazil and Israel, revealing its profound impact on global modernisms and reframing the lasting significance of New Criticism.
Machado de Assis, Blackness, and the Americas
Examines the reception of Brazil’s most-canonized writer in the United States to shed light on questions of Blackness and hemispheric American experience.
Sounding Bodies
Shows how nineteenth-century discoveries in acoustical science shaped Victorian literary representations of gender, sexuality, and intimacy.
Empire of Culture
Shows how Britain's trans-imperial engagements in the long nineteenth century have come to shape global cultural commodity flows today.
The Serpent's Plumes
Draws on Nahua concepts to explore Nahua literary production and contributions to cultural activism from the 1980s to the present.
Soundings in Context
Renowned poets and scholars address the question of how poetry sounds and signifies in different contexts.
The Recursive Frontier
Shows how the myth of the American frontier persists as an ever-present, oppressive set of ideas about space, mobility, and race in the mid-twentieth-century literature of Los Angeles.
Through a Nuclear Lens
Examines the increasingly reciprocal nature of Franco-Japanese cultural exchange through films that center on nuclear issues.
Tracking Capital
Offers new ways to read the relationship between culture, ecology, and capitalism.
Apparitions, Daemons, and Emanations
A study of non-representational art and poetry in the work of Bataille, Klossowski, and Michaux.
Knausgård and the Autofictional Novel
A probing, generative analysis of Knausgård’s My Struggle, with implications for our understanding of the novel form more broadly in the twenty-first century.
Psychoanalysis
Assesses the contributions of six major psychoanalytic thinkers in the light of current academic and clinical trends in psychoanalysis.
Masculine Pregnancies
Examines literary depictions of “mannish” pregnant women and metaphors of male pregnancy to reframe the relationship between creativity and gender in modernism.
The Promise of Friendship
Argues that friendship is the gift of a world that is not one's own and that transforms one's world in unforseeable ways.
Romantic Immanence
Offers a new, Spinozist framework for understanding encounters with otherness in Romantic literature as experiences of immanence.
Struck by Apollo
Retraces Hölderlin's journeys to Bordeaux and back in 1801–02, explaining why they are turning points in the great poet's life.
Thresholds, Encounters
Explores the various ways in which poetic and philosophical writing meet in texts by, and on, Paul Celan.
Spanish American Literature in the Age of Machines and Other Essays
Brings together and makes available in English for the first time some of Ángel Rama’s most important essays.