Literature and Materialisms sheds light on the current new wave of materialisms and assesses the impact on literary theory and criticism. It maps the similarities and differences between speculative realism, object-oriented philosophy, and vitalism. A genealogy of materialisms, vitalisms, empiricisms, and realist approaches - from Heraclitus to Badiou, including Lucretius, Spinoza, Marx, Althusser, Barad, Spivak, Deleuze, Bennett, Harman, and other contemporary thinkers - puts these new trends into perspective. This book investigates the relations between literature – from Marquis de Sade to objectivist poetry - and materialism and analyses the material aspects of literature, its structure and texture, its commodification and its capacity to resist market imperatives. It explores how literary style might be understood as a mediation between the ‘immaterial’ and the concrete features of a text. This volume provides students and academics with an accessible overview of the study of literature and materialism.

Anticipatory Materialisms explores nineteenth and early twentieth-century literature thatanticipates and pre-empts the recent philosophical ‘turn’ to materiality and affect. Critical volumes that approach literature via the prism of New Materialism are in the ascendence. This collection stakes a different claim: by engaging with neglected theories of materiality in literary and philosophical works that antedate the twenty-first century ‘turn’ to New Materialism and theories of affect, the project aims to establish a dialogue between recent theoretical considerations of people-world relations in literature and that which has gone before. This project seeks to demonstrate the particular and meaningful ways in which interactions between people and the physical world were being considered in literature between the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The project does not propose an air of finality; indeed, it is our hope that offering provocative and challenging chapters, which approach the subject from various critical and thematic perspectives, the collection will establish a broader dialogue regarding the ways in philosophy and literature have intersected and informed each other over the course of the long nineteenth century.

Irish Materialisms: The Nonhuman and the Making of Colonial Ireland, 1690-1830, is the first book to apply recent trends in new materialist criticism to Ireland. It radically shifts familiar colonial stereotypes of the feminized, racialized cottier according to the Irish peasantry's subversive entanglement with nonhuman materiality. Each of the chapters engages a focused case study of an everyday object in colonial Ireland (coins, flax, spinning wheels, mud, and pigs) to examine how each object's unique materiality contributed to the colonial ideology of British paternalism and afforded creative Irish expression. The main argument of Irish Materialisms is its methodology: of reading literature through the agency of materiality and nonhuman narrative in order to gain a more egalitarian and varied understanding of colonial experience. Irish Materialisms proves that new materialism holds powerful postcolonial potential. Through an intimate understanding of the materiality Irish peasants handled on a daily basis, this book presents a new portrait of Irish character that reflects greater empowerment, resistance, and expression in the oppressed Irish than has been previously recognized.

"This essay is revised and enlarged from the text of a lecture delivered, under the title Literature and fascism, before the John Reed club of New York."--Page [4].