With the pressing work of decolonising our reading lists gaining traction in UK higher educational contexts, Decolonising the Conrad Canon shows how those author-Gods most associated with the colonial literary canon can also be retooled through decolonial, queer, feminist readings. This book finds pockets of powerful anti-colonial resistance and queer dissonance in Joseph Conrad’s lesser-known works – breathing spaces from the colonial rhetoric that dominates his novels – and traces the female characters who voice them off the page and into their transmedia (digital/illustrative/cinematic) afterlives. From Immada and Edith’s queer gaze in The Rescue and the periodical illustrations that accompanied its initial serialization, to Aïssa’s sustained critique of imperialism in An Outcast of the Islands and her portrayal on mass-market paperback book covers, to the structural female bonds of Almayer’s Folly and Nina’s embodiment in Chantal Akerman’s adaptation La Folie Almayer, this book centres Conrad’s female characters as viable, meaning-making citizens of the canon. Through this intervention, Decolonising the Conrad Canon proposes an innovative model for teaching, reading and studying not just Joseph Conrad’s work but the colonial literary canon more broadly.

For every hero, there is a villain, and for every villain there is a story. But how much do we really know about the villain? Filling a gap in the field of gender representation and character evolution, the chapters in this edited collection focus on female villains in the fairy tale narratives of 21st Century media.

Exploring the phenomenon of Femslash fanfiction (fan narratives that bring together heterosexual female characters from mainstream media and fiction), this book analyses fan-authored works as forms of literature worthy of studying at length. It examines the anti-racist, feminist, sapphic fan works produced in response to white supremacist, heteronormative, queerbaiting mainstream fantasy and argues that they represent a significant site of queer healing for marginalised audience members. Focusing on the 'Swan Queen' fandom, where fans pair the 'white trash' heroine, Emma Swan and the villainous Latina Evil Queen (Regina Mills) from ABC's hit show Once Upon a Time, Alice Kelly redresses the widespread academic neglect of queer female fandoms and responds to urgent calls to diversify fan and fantasy scholarship. With reference to complex theoretical subjects such as ethnography, sociology, psychology and decolonial, queer, film and media studies, the book also delves into the alternative timescales on which queer female and genderqueer fan authorship runs; offers intriguing insights into fanfiction narrative structures; and tackles the issues of broader fandom representation and contextualization. Making the case that fan texts deserve attention in the academy, Kelly shows how some of the most prolific fan works have the ability to enact colour reparation and a reclamation of memory, fantasy, romance, maternity, childhood, parenting and magic. These fictions serve fan communities as a whole through intersectional challenges to the power dynamics of the source text and within the fandom itself and, as the book demonstrates, offer attendant validation to fantasy fans who have been repeatedly told that the genre is not for them.

The Short Story after Apartheid offers the first major study of the anglophone short story in South Africa since apartheid’s end. By focusing on the short story this book complicates models of South African literature dominated by the novel and contributes to a much-needed generic and formalist turn in postcolonial studies. Literary texts are sites of productive struggle between formal and extra-formal concerns, and these brief, fragmentary, elliptical, formally innovative stories offer perspectives that reframe or revise important concerns of post-apartheid literature: the aesthetics of engaged writing, the politics of the past, class and race, the legacies of violence, and the struggle over the land. Through an analysis of key texts from the period by Nadine Gordimer, Ivan Vladislavić, Zoë Wicomb, Phaswane Mpe, and Henrietta Rose-Innes, this book assesses the place of the short story in post-apartheid writing and develops a fuller model of how artworks allow and disallow forms of social thought.

This book is about the intertextual relationships between the works of the Shelleys and the Brownings. While a lot of research has been done on the relationship between Percy Bysshe Shelley and Robert Browning, virtually nothing has been said about the links between Mary Shelley and Robert Browning, and very little on the connections between the Shelleys and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Rieko Suzuki seeks to address this blind spot by focusing on three areas in particular: firstly, the way that Browning’s later poems reflect back on and re-engage with Shelley’s work; secondly, Mary Shelley’s influence on Browning’s early poems; and thirdly, Shelley’s presence in and influence on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s writing. In mapping out the various ways in which texts relate to other texts, the book also identifies a number of important thematic threads that run throughout the work of all four writers. These include theories of history and historical consciousness, providing a further dimension to the question of ‘influence’. They also include ideas about exile, gender, liberal politics and cultural heritage, central to almost all the texts discussed here, as the Shelleys and the Brownings, in different ways and in varying contexts, tried to negotiate the possibility of a more tolerant and resilient social, political and cultural environment.

Reimagining Urban Nature questions some of the underlying imaginaries which have for so long allowed us humans to develop technologically at great cost to the more-than-human world and ourselves. In urban places, cultural and more-than-human entities are in frequent contact; however, the non-human is often seen as expendable in these human-centric places. While much important work has been done on improving care for the more rural and wild areas of the globe, to really address environmental damage we must work towards reimagining the city. These are places where the majority of people live and work, and where the majority of decisions are made about the care and protection of many environments within and beyond the city. This book contributes to the still under-developed field of urban ecocriticism by adding a posthumanist perspective, as well as expanding current discussions within urban studies and environmental activism that seek to shift political and cultural imaginaries of urban nature. Importantly, this investigation is grounded in the Australian (and more broadly, the Australasian) context to allow for the analysis of a more diverse set of voices, texts and ecologies in an area still dominated by the northern hemisphere and the Global North.

This book investigates how decolonising the curriculum might work in English studies — one of the fields that bears the most robust traces of its imperial and colonial roots — from the perspective of the semi-periphery of the academic world- system. It takes the University of Lisbon as a point of departure to explore broader questions of how the field can be rethought from within, through Anglophone (post)coloniality and an institutional location in a department of English, while also considering forces from without, as the arguments in this book issue from a specific, liminal positionality outside the Anglosphere. The first half of the book examines the critical practice of and the political push for decolonising the university and the curriculum, advancing existing scholarship with this focus on semi-peripheral perspectives. The second half comprises two theoretically-informed and classroom-oriented case studies of adaptation of the literary canon, a part of model syllabi that are designed to raise awareness of and encourage an understanding of a global, pluriversal literary history.

This incredibly useful volume offers an introduction to the history of literary criticism and theory from ancient Greece to the present. Grounded in the close reading of landmark theoretical texts, while seeking to encourage the reader's critical response, Pelagia Goulimari examines: major thinkers and critics from Plato and Aristotle to Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, Said and Butler; key concepts, themes and schools in the history of literary theory: mimesis, inspiration, reason and emotion, the self, the relation of literature to history, society, culture and ethics, feminism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, queer theory; genres and movements in literary history: epic, tragedy, comedy, the novel; Romanticism, realism, modernism and postmodernism. Historical connections between theorists and theories are traced and the book is generously cross-referenced. With useful features such as key-point conclusions, further reading sections, descriptive text boxes, detailed headings, and with a comprehensive index, this book is the ideal introduction to anyone approaching literary theory for the first time or unfamiliar with the scope of its history.

What is English as a school subject for? What does knowledge look like in English and what should be taught? Making Meaning in English examines the broader purpose and reasons for teaching English and explores what knowledge looks like in a subject concerned with judgement, interpretation and value. David Didau argues that the content of English is best explored through distinct disciplinary lenses – metaphor, story, argument, pattern, grammar and context – and considers the knowledge that needs to be explicitly taught so students can recognise, transfer, build and extend their knowledge of English. He discusses the principles and tools we can use to make decisions about what to teach and offers a curriculum framework that draws these strands together to allow students to make sense of the knowledge they encounter. If students are going to enjoy English as a subject and do well in it, they not only need to be knowledgeable, but understand how to use their knowledge to create meaning. This insightful text offers a practical way for teachers to construct a curriculum in which the mastery of English can be planned, taught and assessed.