2008-2012

Paul March-Russell, The Short Story: An Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009)
This new general introduction emphasizes the importance of the short story to an understanding of modern fiction. In twenty succinct chapters, the study paints a complete portrait of the short story - its history, culture, aesthetics and economics. European innovators such as Chekhov, Flaubert and Kafka are compared to Irish, New Zealand and British practitioners such as Joyce, Mansfield and Carter as well as writers in the American tradition, from Hawthorne and Poe to Barthelme and Carver. Fresh attention is paid to experimental, postcolonial and popular fiction alongside developments in Anglo-American, Hispanic, and European literature. Critical approaches to the short story are debated and reassessed, while discussion of the short story is related to contemporary critical theory. In what promises to be essential reading for students and academics, the study sets out to prove that the short story remains vital to the emerging culture of the twenty-first century.

Elizabeth Schächter, The Jews of Italy, 1848-1915: Between Tradition and Transformation (London: Vallentine-Mitchell, 2010)
Drawing on contemporary Jewish journals, memoirs, autobiographies, oral testimony, private correspondence and archival material, Elizabeth Schächter challenges the widely held view that the integration of the Jews in Italy from the second emancipation (1848) to the First World War was an unqualified success and thus an anomaly in European Jewish history. Schächter examines the pivotal role of the Roman Catholic Church in disseminating anti-semitism through its publications; Catholic antipathy towards the Jews fed into and was nourished by political anti-semitism within the Liberal party and became integral to the Italian Nationalists’ ideology. The Racial Laws of 1938 in Italy were not a break with the past, as many have argued, but a continuation of a tradition of discrimination arising from the consequences of emancipation. The book explores the issues that the Jews of Italy considered to be the principal areas of concern: the tensions and pressures of acceptance in the host society, ‘the anguish of assimilation’; the complex relationship between Jewish identity and nascent national identity; the erosion of the traditional bonds that bound the individual Jew to his community; the abandonment of religious practices, leading, in some cases, to mixed marriages and conversion.

Anna Katharina Schaffner, Modernism and Perversion: Sexual Deviance in Sexology and Literature, 1850–1930 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)
The second half of the nineteenth and the early years of the twentieth century saw a growing preoccupation with sexual perversion: in particular homosexuality, sadism, masochism, fetishism, voyeurism and exhibitionism. Charting the intellectual history of the construction of the perversions in German, French and English sexology in this period,Anna Schaffnerexplores the decisive role played by literary representations of deviant sexualities in the formation of sexological knowledge. Just as sexologists, including Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Alfred Binet, Havelock Ellis, Magnus Hirschfeld, Iwan Bloch and Sigmund Freud, relied upon the literary, so major modernist writers such as Georges Bataille, Franz Kafka, D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann and Marcel Proust were in turn influenced by sexological conceptions. Focusing on the interdisciplinary exchanges between literature and sexology, Schaffner illuminates the pivotal role these modernists played in re-evaluating the perversions and paving the way for the transformation of the idea of sexual deviance into that of sexual difference.

Axel Stähler, Literarische Konstruktionen jüdischer Postkolonialität. Das britische Palästinamandat in der anglophonen jüdischen Literatur [Literary Constructions of Jewish Postcoloniality: The British Mandate for Palestine in Anglophone Jewish Literature] (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2009)
This study enquires for the first time into the significance of the British Mandate for Palestine as a liminal period in literary constructions of Jewish postcoloniality and draws attention to an as yet largely ignored dimension of the ‘Jewish imaginary’. Combining approaches and methods of literary, cultural, and comparative studies, it demonstrates that, against the background of the dichotomy of Diaspora and Israel, the historical movement of Zionism and the post-Zionism debates, the Mandate is turned into a metonymy for Jewish postcoloniality in some recent Anglophone Jewish fiction. Returning to German-Jewish pre-texts from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it reads these texts in relation to the emergence of a postcolonial Jewish imaginary whose shifting contours develop from the interaction with different production and reception contexts in the Anglophone diaspora. It understands in particular those texts by British Jewish writers which engage with the Palestine Mandate as participating in the formation of a counter-literature which is determined by the ambivalence of Jewish existence between anticolonialism and colonialism and which enters into a creative dialogue with postcolonial patterns of interpretation.

Axel Stähler (co-ed. with Klaus Stierstorfer), Writing Fundamentalism (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009)
Based on a number of theoretical frameworks and debates, the essays gathered in this volume open up a historical perspective which engages critically with received notions of fundamentalism. By exploring literary representations of fundamentalisms and the function of literature in fundamentalism, they enquire into the underlying generic differences and incompatibilities as well as - perhaps more unexpected - the similarities and affinities between fundamentalism and literature. Concepts of fundamentalism as a response to exclusively modernist tendencies since the beginning of the twentieth century are challenged in this volume, and several contributors explore the rise of fundamentalisms at various points in history characterized by the crisis experience of cultural change. While taking this conceptual base as a point of departure, the articles collected here then spread out on a plurality of theoretical frameworks.

Shane Weller, Modernism and Nihilism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)
At the heart of some of the most influential strands of philosophical, political, and aesthetic modernism lies the conviction that modernity is fundamentally nihilistic. This book offers a wide-ranging critical history of the concept of nihilism from its origins in French Revolutionary discourse to its place in recent theorizations of the postmodern. Key moments in that history include the concept’s appropriation by political activists in mid-nineteenth-century Russia, by Nietzsche in the 1880s, by the European avant-garde and ‘high’ modernists in the early decades of the twentieth century, by conservative revolutionaries in Germany in the interwar years, and by major theorists in the post-Holocaust period. Focusing in particular on the abiding impact of Nietzsche’s claim that art is the ‘only superior counterforce’ to nihilism, I argue that an understanding of modernism (and, indeed, of postmodernism) is impossible without a reflection upon the decisive role played by the concept of nihilism therein.

Shane Weller (ed.), Samuel Beckett, Molloy (London: Faber & Faber, 2009)
Molloy (1951) is Samuel Beckett's best-known novel, and his first published work to be written in French, ushering in a period of concentrated creativity in the late 1940s which included the companion novels Malone Dies (1951) and The Unnamable (1953). The narrative of Molloy, old and ill, remembering and forgetting, scarcely human, begets a parallel tale of the spinsterish Moran, a private detective sent in search of him, whose own deterioration during the quest joins in with the catalogue of Molloy's woes. Molloy brings a world into existence with finicking certainties, at the tip of whoever is holding the pencil, and trades larger uncertainties with the reader. This new edition includes a corrected text, a preface, a table of dates, and an appendix containing earlier published versions of parts of Part I of the novel.

Shane Weller, Literature, Philosophy, Nihilism: The Uncanniest of Guests (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)
Since Nietzsche’s appropriation of the term in his later work, the concept of nihilism hasplayed a decisive role in the thinking of both modernity and postmodernity. This book charts the deployment of that concept by some of the most influential philosophers and literary theorists of the modern period, including Heidegger, Adorno, Blanchot, Derrida, Agamben, Vattimo, and Badiou. Focusing in particular on the ways in which each of these deployments involves both a countering redetermination of nihilism and a privileging of a certain concept of the literary for what is taken to be its power of resistance to it, this book proposes neither a critique nor a revalorization of nihilism; rather, it explores through an historical, conceptual, and philological anaysis the various ways in which nihilism, as what Nietzsche terms the ‘uncanniest of all guests’, returns to haunt the thought of those who would counter it.

2000-2007

Anna Katharina Schaffner, Sprachzerlegung in historischer Avantgardelyrik und konkreter Poesie [Language Dissection in Historical Avant-Garde and Concrete Poetry] (Berlin: Editio Cortis Aquilae, 2007)
The present study posits language dissection, the act of taking language apart on different levels of linguistic organization, as a crucial avant-garde technique, and explores the implications of and motivations for language dissection in historical avant-garde and concrete poetry. In both stages of the avant-garde, the communicative function of language is programmatically neglected for the sake of the exploration of its material dimension. Often, however, the intervention in the order of signs is not just a poetic device, but also represents a cultural strategy motivated by critical agendas. In the most radical poetic frameworks, language dissection is a symbolic gesture of protest, the manifestation of a fundamental cultural critique which questions and withdraws the most basic form of social consensus: the adherence to a given set of linguistic laws.

Axel Stähler (ed.), Anglophone Jewish Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 2007)
This collection of essays proposes that the Anglophone segment of Jewish literature constitutes, to some extent, a discrete, if widely diverse, body of literary achievement. It initiates the scholarly exploration of transnational and transcultural Anglophone Jewish literature as one of the so-called new or emerging English literatures. Without attempting to impose what would seem to be a misguided conceptual unity on the many-faceted field of Jewish writing in English, the collection is based on a plurality of theoretical frameworks. Alert to the productive friction between these discourses, which it aims to elicit, it confronts Jewish literary studies with postcolonial studies, cultural studies and other contemporary theoretical approaches.

Shane Weller (co-ed. with Thomas Baldwin and James Fowler), The Flesh in the Text (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007)
The impetus behind this collection of essays was a curiosity shared by the editors concerning the relation between the flesh and the text in French and francophone literature. This curiosity took the form of a number of specific questions. For which writers has the flesh been a central concern? Might one distinguish between those writers who attempt to represent the flesh textually and those who emphasise the difficulty or even the impossibility of such a project? How is the subject’s relation to his/her own flesh, and to the flesh of others, determined? In which ways do psychoanalysis and other influential theoretical approaches such as phenomenology and deconstruction address the flesh as distinct from the body? These questions are explored here in readings of works by, among others, Rabelais, Diderot, Sade, Proust, Beckett, Djebar, Nothomb, Delvig and Nobécourt. The principal philosophers and theorists upon whom the contributors draw include Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, Foucault, Deleuze, Agamben, Nancy and Anzieu. The essays will be of interest to readers from a wide range of disciplines, including literary studies, philosophy, psychoanalysis, gender studies, aesthetics and religious studies.

Paul March-Russell (co-ed. with Carmen Casaliggi), Ruskin in Perspective: Contemporary Essays (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007)
Moving laterally across John Ruskin's complete work, this collection draws his ideas together around the common theme of perspective. Grouped into three parts (Art and Literature, Aesthetics and Politics, Geography and Landscape), the essays examine Ruskin’s critical intervention both within its own period and in relation to its contemporary legacy. Drawing upon literary theory, art criticism, political, social and cultural history and biographical studies, the essays offer a new and exciting interdisciplinary approach to understanding the scale and relevance of Ruskin’s thought. Topics include the role of the reader in Ruskin’s work, Anglo-European encounters, Ruskin’s style and political influence, national and cultural heritage, the aesthetics of painting, perspective and the sublime, and the impact of geology and evolutionary theory upon Ruskin and nineteenth-century culture. Illustrated throughout with examples from Ruskin’s own art-work as well as the artists admired by him (such as J. M. W. Turner), the collection will be invaluable for readers interested not only in Ruskin as writer, critic and commentator but also in his position within the changing currents of nineteenth- and twentieth-century thought.

Anna Katharina Schaffner (ed. assistant), Neo-Avant-Garde (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006)
The neo-avant-garde of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, is due for a thoroughgoing reassessment. This collection of essays represents the first full-scale attempt to deal with the concept from an interdisciplinary standpoint. A number of essays in this book concentrate on fine art, particularly painting and sculpture, thereby adding significantly to the growing art historical literature in the field, but a number of the contributions also focus on poetry, performance, theatre, film, architecture and music. Given that there are also major essays here dealing with geographical blindspots in current neo-avant-garde studies, with thematic issues such as art's entanglement with gender, mass culture and politics, with key neo-avant-garde publications, and with the purely theoretical problems attaching to the theorisation of the topic, this collection offers a multi-dimensional approach to the subject which is noticeably lacking elsewhere. Taken together these essays represent a consolidated attempt at re-thinking the 'cultural logic' of the immediate post-World War II period.

Shane Weller, Beckett, Literature, and the Ethics of Alterity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)
If there is one key trait common to many of the most influential post-Holocaust theories of literature, it is arguably that the literary event constitutes the affirmation of an alterity that resists all dialectical mastery and that lies at the heart of a post-metaphysical ethics. Surprising as it might seem, the works of Samuel Beckett in particular have, for all their apparent negativity, repeatedly been deployed as exemplary of just such an affirmation. In Beckett, Literature and the Ethics of Alterity, Weller reflects critically on this powerful tradition and, through an analysis of the three, interrelated topics of translation, comedy and gender in the works of Beckett and others, including Baudelaire, Bergson, Freud, Benjamin, Adorno, Blanchot, Derrida, Cixous, Kristeva and Judith Butler, he proposes a new conception of the relation between literature and alterity in what he terms its 'anethicality'.

Shane Weller, A Taste for the Negative: Beckett and Nihilism (Oxford: Legenda, 2005)
Since the mid-1950s, when the works of Samuel Beckett began to attract sustained critical attention, commentators have tended either to dismiss his Oeuvre as nihilist or defend it as anti-nihilist. On the one side are figures such as Georg Lukács; on the other, some of the most influential philosophers and literary theorists of the post-war era, from Theodor Adorno to Alain Badiou. Taking as his point of departure Nietzsche's description of nihilism as the 'uncanniest of all guests', Weller calls this critical tradition into question, arguing that the relationship between Beckett's texts and nihilism is one that will always be missed by those who are simply for or against Beckett.

Axel Stähler (co-ed. with Alexandra Pontzen), Das Gelobte Land. Erez Israel von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart in Quellen und Darstellungen [The Promised Land: Eretz Israel from Antiquity to the Present: Documents and Analyses] (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2003)
The debate about the conditions of the existence and the territorial definition of the State of Israel has been at the heart of the Middle East conflict for decades. Fundamental for the question of the Land is the tradition of 'Eretz Israel', the 'Land of Israel', as the land promised to the Jews by God: the very same tradition, which has proven to be crucial to the religion, history and culture of the Jews, is invoked by the modern Jewish State. The State of Israel is conceived of as the fulfilment of the dream of the 'Redemption of Israel'. The 1948 declaration of its establishment proclaims 'the natural and historic right' of the 'Jewish people' to establish the Jewish State 'in its own country' – in Palestine. In this collection of articles, texts of miscellaneous provenance and diverse genres of the period between 600 BCE and 2000 CE document the notion of the Promised Land and the amalgamation of religion and land in the tradition of 'Eretz Israel'. Commentaries and explanations from scholars of diverse disciplines provide background information and a historical overview. They enable the non-specialist and the specialist reader alike to form their own opinions.

Shane Weller (ed.), Voltaire, Candide: A Dual-Language Book, a new translation with introduction and notes (New York: Dover, 2003)
In Candide, first published in 1759, Voltaire offers a bitingly satirical vision of human naivety and of the optimistic outlook that would see ours as 'the best of all possible worlds'. The work addresses in the most direct and uncompromising fashion, but also with considerable humour, an issue that has remained as pertinent and as unresolved today as it was in the mid-eighteenth century: the origin and place of evil in the world, and how a world view based on reason can account for, if not neutralize, irrationality. Candide reveals a Voltaire who is deeply suspicious of the traditional Christian doctrine of the Fall and the Leibnizian contention that evil is only evil when seen from the partial, erring human perspective. This edition contains both the original French text and a new English translation on opposing pages, plus an introduction that places the work in its historical and philosophical context.

Agnès Cardinal (co-ed.), Women's Writing on the First World War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000)
The First World War inspired a huge outpouring of writing, including many classic accounts of the horrors of the trenches, written by men. What has been less visible until now is the War's impact upon women writers, whose experience was often very different from that of their male counterparts. This anthology brings together women's writing from across the world, covering every genre of writing about the War from the period 1914 to 1930. Letters, diary entries, reportage, and essays, as well as polemical texts in favour of, or in opposition to, the hostilities, offer an interesting counterpoint to the novels and short stories through which women sought to encompass the extremes of wartime life as they saw it. This anthology demonstrates how the Great War acted as a catalyst for women writers, enabling them to find a public voice and to assert their own attitude to social and moral issues.

Elizabeth Schächter, Origin and Identity: Essays on Svevo and Trieste (Northern Universities Press, 2000)
Although neglected until the last few years of his life, Italo Svevo is now acknowledged as a writer of international stature alongside his contemporaries Kafka, Proust and Joyce. These essays focus on his three novels, Una Vita, Senilità and La coscienza di Zeno. Drawing on new biographical and critical research, key issues are explored such as Svevo's Jewishness; his debt to psychoanalysis; sexuality and love; structure and irony; and time and narration. The opening chapter is devoted to Trieste, which features so prominently in his oeuvre. This book provides both the general reader and the student with a valuable re-evaluation of a unique writer of genius.

Axel Stähler, ‘Perpetuall Monuments': Die Repräsentation von Architektur in der italienischen Festdokumentation (ca. 1515-1640) und der englischen court masque (1604-1640) ['Perpetuall Monuments': The Representation of Architecture in Italian Festival Books (c. 1515–1640) and the English Court Masque (1604–1640)] (Münster: LIT, 2000)
In the courtly festivals of the Renaissance and early Baroque periods, architecture – of triumphal arches, hall decorations or proscenium arches, but also in scenic designs, etc. – achieved crucial significance in that it defined the space of princely representation and served as a variable and complex signifier. In particular, Italian festivals and festival books emerged as a system of reference which gained currency in all of Europe. This interdisciplinary study focuses in a comparative manner on the representation of architecture in printed descriptions of Italian festivals between 1515 and 1640 and in the English court masque of the early Stuart period (1603–1649), whose design and published texts frequently alluded to the Italian models. The study’s epistemological interest is less in what is represented than in different modes of representation: it is therefore concerned less with the reconstruction of festival architecture than with the festival books themselves, which are examined with respect to their function of creating a new, fictional, reality and are considered as a genre with distinctive features and with a literary, artistic and aesthetic quality of their own.