Author Archives: Bloomsbury Admin

Doing Animal Studies with Androids, Aliens, and Ghosts

By | May 30, 2023

Androids, aliens, and ghosts: No longer solely the territory of science fiction, the Gothic, and horror, these creatures increasingly cross literary genres as humans renegotiate and rework our conceptualizations of humanity, animality, and life itself in response to ongoing challenges posed by technology, environmental crises, and alterity. Doing Animal Studies with Androids, Aliens, and Ghosts borrows from the strangeness, creativity, and freshness of these emerging and imaginary creatures in contemporary novels, comic book series, and children’s books to reconceptualize often intractable views of nonhuman animals. Because these liminal figures confront anthropocentrism, or human-centeredness, in ways that necessarily push against all forms of species dominance, the android, the alien, and the ghost are literary devices that help us to see nonhuman animals afresh and to fruitfully reimagine the terms of our relationships with them.

Letters and Lives of the Tennyson Women

By | May 24, 2023

Guest post by Marion Sherwood The Tennyson women were Alfred Tennyson’s forebears – the poet’s paternal grandmother, Mary Tennyson (1753-1825), her daughters Elizabeth Russell (1776-1865) and Mary Bourne (1777-1864), and her daughter-in-law Frances Tennyson, later Tennyson d’Eyncourt (1787-1878). The women were an inseparable and influential part of the poet’s early life until he left Lincolnshire… Read More »

Relating suicide: bringing the body back in

By | February 23, 2023

Guest post by Anne Whitehead Suicide is a subject that is still not often talked about. When it is, we tend to focus the conversation on mental health. This is both understandable and important; a better understanding of mental health can help us to prevent further deaths. But having lost my sister to suicide twenty… Read More »

A-Z of Jane Austen

By | November 21, 2022

Much of The A-Z of Jane Austen pays attention to what you might call the ‘surface’ of Austen’s writings – to activities such as dance or matchmaking, for example, whose centrality in her storylines might seem to go without saying. In so doing I’m making the case that readings of Austen don’t necessarily have to… Read More »

How to write a blog post for the Bloomsbury Literary Studies blog

By | November 7, 2022

On the Bloomsbury Literary Studies blog, we love to feature guest posts from our authors to help convey the impressive depth of research and knowledge contained within each of the books we publish. Contributing a blog post offers you an opportunity to help promote your book and share your research with a wider general-interest online… Read More »

Glitter and the Fishing Lure

By | September 19, 2022

While researching my Object Lessons series book on glitter, I learned the surprising fact that one of the major commercial uses for this substance is in fishing lures. After finishing the book, I decided to investigate this phenomenon a bit deeper—and fell down what can only be described as a rabbit hole into another world.

Biofiction’s Antidotes to Post-Truth Contagions

By | September 14, 2022

Biofictions have become increasingly popular with writers and readers in the past three decades or so. The book Derivative Lives points to the prolific market of biofictional works in Spain and beyond to ask: How do we know who to believe, what to trust, what is true?

The Medical Environmental Humanities and Public Health

By | August 31, 2022

We’re celebrating the publication of the Bloomsbury Handbook to the Medical-Environmental Humanities with this adapted excerpt from the introduction, which explains why we need to bring medical and environmental humanities into conversation with each other now more than ever.

Escapism in contemporary American fiction

By | August 24, 2022

We’re celebrating the publication of Escape, Escapism, Escapology: American Novels of the Early Twenty-First Century, in which John Limon traces the central theme of 21st-century United States fiction: the desire to escape at a time of inescapable globalization. This is an extract from the first chapter, Notes from Neverland.

In the Cold War, was world literature English?

By | August 16, 2022

What is “Cold War literature”? Does the term merely refer to novels and poems and plays that explicitly touch on nuclear war, spying, and fear of Communism, works like Nevil Shute’s On The Beach or Eugene Lederer’s The Ugly American