Category Archives: Contemporary Literature
Escapism in contemporary American fiction
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.
Embracing Ecological Uncertainty through Fiction
Guest post by Marco Caracciolo The future has always been uncertain, but the ecological crisis presents us with an unprecedented degree of uncertainty in thinking about the future. Scientists who model the effects of global warming typically distinguish between pessimistic and optimistic scenarios. The gap between them is significant: concretely, it could mean the difference… Read More »
The war against animals: Dominic O’Key on Creaturely Forms in Contemporary Literature
Creaturely Forms in Contemporary Literature, by Dominic O’Key, is out now Thank you for joining us today, Dominic. Tell us, how would you describe your book in just one sentence? Reading literature can help us think and rethink our relationships with animals; here’s how. Could you unpack this a bit and explain the main topics… Read More »
‘I always suspected that he was more influenced by Jungian psychology than he likes to let on’: Jonathan Dil on Haruki Murakami
Haruki Murakami and the Search for Self-Therapy, by Jonathan Dil, is out now How would you describe your book in one sentence? This books looks at how Haruki Murakami started writing fiction as a means of self-therapy and how he transformed this therapeutic impulse into a literary career of global acclaim. What drew to you… Read More »
Opening a Window on a Literary Giant: On Writing Wole Soyinka: Literature, Activism, and African Transformation
This post was originally published at the LSE Review of Books and is reproduced here with permission. As Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka publishes his first novel in 48 years, Bola Dauda and Toyin Falola offer a window on the literary giant, reflecting on their new book, Wole Soyinka: Literature, Activism, and African Transformation. There are twice as many works on… Read More »
Response to Matthew Gannon: “Adorno as a Reader: Writing the Mediation of Literature and Philosophy”
“Not a Story To Pass On By: Sapphire’s The Kid”
This week, in a series of blog takeovers, we’re looking at #MeToo and Literary Studies with posts from the collection’s contributors. Guest post by Robin E. Field Precious Jones was introduced to readers 25 years ago, when Sapphire’s debut novel Push was released in June 1996. Almost immediately Precious became as beloved a figure as her inspiration,… Read More »
Finding the Experimentalists
After pouring over dozens of conference papers and journal articles, public lectures, a PhD thesis, a Fellowship, and spending hundreds of hours in archives around the world, I carefully constructed the case for the Experimentalists not only being a movement but perhaps being one of the most important British literary movements of the twentieth century.
Remembering Diane di Prima
Diane di Prima was born on August 6, 1934 in Brooklyn and passed on in San Francisco on October 25, 2020. Di Prima was a true national treasure, having chronicled throughout her astonishing career a momentous period of American history. Although for over six decades an indomitable force in ourcultural life, Di Prima remains unfamiliar to many readers. Because she was the major female identified with the Beat movement and author of the hip-language-inflected book This Bird Flies Backward (1958) who lounged in slacks sitting atop a piano—as a famous photograph from the fifties depicted her during a poetry reading— and due to the appearance a decade later of Memoirs of a Beatnik (1968), she has been misperceived as a “Beat chick.”