This study offers a detailed analysis of the fiction of J. M. Coetzee, including the novels of the South African and Australian periods, to demonstrate the development of Coetzee's engagement with the complexities of non-normative embodiment. In this illuminating monograph, Pawel Wojtas demonstrates the extent to which Coetzee's multifaceted depictions of disability offer a sustained critique of the ableist implications of political violence and neoliberal inclusionism alike. Exploring a wide range of notions, such as ocularnormativism, mute speech, eco-disability, disability Gothic, dismodernism, autogerontography, and bibliotherapy, Wojtas shows how Coetzee's 'disabled textuality' provokes a sustained meditation on various forms of cultural denigration of disability experience.

This study offers a detailed analysis of the fiction of J. M. Coetzee, including the novels of the South African and Australian periods, to demonstrate the development of Coetzee's engagement with the complexities of non-normative embodiment. In this illuminating monograph, Pawel Wojtas demonstrates the extent to which Coetzee's multifaceted depictions of disability offer a sustained critique of the ableist implications of political violence and neoliberal inclusionism alike. Exploring a wide range of notions, such as ocularnormativism, mute speech, eco-disability, disability Gothic, dismodernism, autogerontography, and bibliotherapy, Wojtas shows how Coetzee's 'disabled textuality' provokes a sustained meditation on various forms of cultural denigration of disability experience.

Max Porter is amongst the most exciting British writers of the twenty-first century. His striking books straddle the divide between poetry and prose as deftly as they combine literary experimentation with mainstream success. This book is the first study of his works to date, which encompass Grief Is the Thing with Feathers (2015), Lanny (2019), The Death of Francis Bacon (2021) and Shy (2023). It features a broad interdisciplinary array of essays (by poets, novelists, literary critics, art historians and educationalists), which collectively place Porter’s works in their contexts, shed light on his artistic vision and interpret his texts from a range of critical perspectives. The volume’s 12 chapters combine readings of the literary, formal, intertextual and experimental aspects of Porter’s works with discussions of their relation to social, political and ethical questions, whilst placing them in dialogue with highly topical critical and cultural debates, such as Englishness in the aftermath of Brexit, ecocriticism, affectivity and posthumanism.

Literature and Disability introduces readers to the field of disability studies and the ways in which a focus on issues of impairment and the representation of disability can provide new approaches to reading and writing about literary texts. Disability plays a central role in much of the most celebrated literature, yet it is only in recent years that literary criticism has begun to consider the aesthetic, ethical and literary challenges that this poses. The author explores: key debates and issues in disability studies today different forms of impairment, with the aim of showing the diversity and ambiguity of the term "disability" the intersection between literary critical approaches to disability and feminist, post-colonial, and autobiographical writing genre and representations of disability in relation to literary forms including novels, short stories, poems, plays and life writing This volume provides students and academics with an accessible overview of literary critical approaches to disability representation.

Mobility and Corporeality in 19th and 21st Century Anglophone Literature: Bodies in Motion aims at exploring the intersection of literary, mobility and body studies in Anglophone literature from the 19th century to the 21st century. Corporeal mobility includes a variety of mobile bodies that have long been othered and marginalised due to issues pertaining to gender, disability, race, and class. Yet there is a relative lack of academic work on it, despite the fact that Anglophone literature has increasingly portrayed the circulation of characters, objects, and information since the 19th century, echoing the many types of mobility that have occurred through processes of colonisation, decolonisation and globalisation. This book, therefore, discusses the ways in which literatures produced in the English-speaking world challenge normative depictions of bodies on the move and reconceptualise them by making corporeality an essential feature of movement across the world.

Since David Hume, the interpretation of miracle stories has been dominated in the West by the binary distinction of fact vs. fiction. The form-critical method added another restriction to the interpretation of miracles by neglecting the context of its macrotexts. Last but not least the hermeneutics of demythologizing was interested in the self-understanding of individuals and not in political perspectives. The book revisits miracle stories with regard to these dimensions: 1. It demands to connect the interpretation of Miracle Stories to concepts of reality. 2. It criticizes the restrictions of the form critical method. 3. It emphasizes the political implications of Miracle Stories and their interpretations. Even the latest research accepts this modern opposition of fact and fiction as self-evident. This book will examine critically these concepts of reality with interpretations of miracles. The book will address how concepts of reality, always complex, came to expression in stories of miraculous healings and their reception in medicine, art, literature, theology and philosophy, from classic antiquity to the Middle Ages. Only through such bygone concepts, contemporary interpretations of ancient healings can gain plausibility.

Do depictions of crazy cat ladies obscure more sinister structural violence against animals hoarded in factory farms? Highlighting the frequent pathologization of animal lovers and animal rights activists, this book examines how the “madness” of our relationships with animals intersects with the “madness” of taking animals seriously. The essays collected in this volume argue that “animaladies” are expressive of political and psychological discontent, and the characterization of animal advocacy as mad or “crazy” distracts attention from broader social unease regarding human exploitation of animal life. While allusions to madness are both subtle and overt, they are also very often gendered, thought to be overly sentimental with an added sense that emotions are being directed at the wrong species. Animaladies are obstacles for the political uptake of interest in animal issues-as the intersections between this volume and established feminist scholarship show, the fear of being labeled unreasonable or mad still has political currency.

“I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train” (Oscar Wilde). Literature has always treated the sensational: crime, passion, violence, trauma, catastrophe. It has frequently caused, or been at the centre of scandal, censorship and moral outrage. But literature is also intricately connected with sensation in ways that are less well understood. It mediates between the sensory world, perception and cognition through rich modes of thought allied with perceptions and emotions and makes sense of profound questions that transcend the merely rational. And at its boundaries, literature engages with the uncanny realm in which knowledge, presentiment or feeling is prior to articulation in words. This book reviews the sensational dimension of literature according to themes that have too often been left to one side. Literary theory has often privileged perception over sensation, cognition over raw experience, in focusing on semantics rather than sense. The essays in this volume cover literature and sensation in all its facets, drawing upon a range of approaches from evolutionary theory, theories of mind, perception, philosophy and aesthetics. The works considered are drawn from various literary periods and genres, from the nineteenth century to contemporary prose and poetry, including experiments in new media. Literature and Sensation offers detailed and subtle readings of literature according to the sensations they represent, incite, or evoke in us, and will be of interest to readers of literary theory, ethics and aesthetics, and theorists of new media art.

This timely collection of essays by leading international scholars across religious studies and the environmental humanities advances a lively discussion on materialism in its many forms. While there is little agreement on what ‘materialism’ means, it is evident that there is a resurgence in thinking about matter in more animated and active ways. The volume explores how debates concerning the new materialisms impinge on religious traditions and the extent to which religions, with their material culture and beliefs in the Divine within the material, can make a creative contribution to debates about ecological materialisms. Spanning a broad range of themes, including politics, architecture, hermeneutics, literature and religion, the book brings together a series of discussions on materialism in the context of diverse methodologies and approaches. The volume investigates a range of issues including space and place, hierarchy and relationality, the relationship between nature and society, human and other agencies, and worldviews and cultural values. Drawing on literary and critical theory, and queer, philosophical, theological and social theoretical approaches, this ground-breaking book will make an important contribution to the environmental humanities. It will be a key read for postgraduate students, researchers and scholars in religious studies, cultural anthropology, literary studies, philosophy and environmental studies.

This book explores 21st-century uses of the second- and third-person perspective in Anglophone autobiographical narratives by canonical male writers. Through detailed readings of contemporary autobiographical works by Paul Auster, Julian Barnes, J.M. Coetzee, and Salman Rushdie, the study demonstrates the multiple aesthetic, rhetorical, and un/ethical implications of the choice of narrative perspective as well as the uncommon step of articulating the self from a perspective which is not I. Drawing on (rhetorical) narratology and autobiography theory, the book engages with questions and tensions of subjectivity and relationality, the interplay of distance and proximity resulting from the narrative perspective, and its effects on the relationship between autobiographer, text, and reader. In addition, the book traces relevant guiding principles that the authors use to navigate their self-narratives in relation to others, such as questions of embodiment, visuality, grief, ethics, and politics. Situating the narratives in their socio-political and cultural context, the book uncovers to what extent these autobiographical narratives reflect the authors’ position between self-withdrawal and self-promotion as well as their response to questions of male agency, self-stylisation, and celebrity status.