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Publishing Africa in French provides a critical analysis of the global dynamics and cultural and publishing history of French and African literature. It focuses on French readership and the French literary-political sphere, and engages with issues of authorial authenticity, literary value, and author autonomy. The study is built on careful documentations of the pre- and post-publication process, and explores the relentless interweaving of ideas expressed in literary form, their institutional contexts and underlying human relationships, and asks: Who writes about Africa and who is Africa written for? The book is split into two sections, ‘Institutions’ and ‘Mediations’. The first part of the book, ‘Institutions’, situates three institutions of particular significance, the publishing houses of Le Seuil and Présence Africaine, and the Association nationale des écrivains de la mer et de l’outre-mer. ‘Mediations’, the second section of the book, concludes with a consideration on how institutional structures work into or against the literary texture of selected publications, and examines readers’ reports and editorial revision; the use of pseudonyms; the development of named collections and the process of literary translation from English. Publishing Africa in French aims to bring book-historical principles to bear on a decisive period in French literary history and foregrounds the influencing factors on literary expression and its material impressions in the period of decolonization.

Construction of identity has constituted a vigorous source of debate in the Caribbean from the early days of colonization to the present, and under the varying guises of independence, departmentalization, dictatorship, overseas collectivity and occupation. Given the strictures and structures of colonialism long imposed upon the colonized subject, the (re)makings of identity have proven anything but evident when it comes to determining authentic expressions and perceptions of the postcolonial self. By way of close readings of both constructions in literature and the construction of literature, Architextual Authenticity: Constructing Literature and Literary Identity in the French Caribbean proposes an original, informative frame of reference for understanding the long and ever-evolving struggle for social, cultural, historical and political autonomy in the region. Taking as its point of focus diverse canonical and lesser-known texts from Guadeloupe, Martinique and Haiti published between 1958 and 2013, this book examines the trope of the house (architecture) and the meta-textual construction of texts (architexture) as a means of conceptualizing and articulating how authentic means of expression are and have been created in French-Caribbean literature over the greater part of the past half-century—whether it be in the context of the years leading up to or following the departmentalization of France’s overseas colonies in the 1940’s, the wrath of Hurricane Hugo in 1989, or the devastating Haiti earthquake of 2010.

Assia Djebar: Out of Algeria is a book about expatriation, and the constant, necessary revisiting that follows. In the book, Hiddleston seeks to conceptualise Djebar’s progressive struggle and dissatisfaction with the notion of Algerian identity by referring to a number of contemporary theoretical concepts. Hiddleston’s analysis of the Djebar’s gradual and partial ‘expatriation’ is shaped heavily by the writer’s participation in crossroads between French philosophy, multiple Algerian traditions, and Anglo-American postcolonial theory. The study also situates Djebar’s thinking in recent French philosophy, making connections between her understanding of subjectivity and individuation and those produced by contemporary thinkers working in France.

The Thing About Roy Fisher, edited by John Kerrigan and Peter Robinson, brings together critical essays that aim to increase the awareness of the literature produced by Roy Fisher during his forty year writing career. The following studies offer analytical research that focus on the historical context and influences surrounding Fisher’s writing, including the writer’s block he experienced in the late 1960s and his personal relationship to the city of Birmingham. The text also makes a comment on the work’s reception from both critical and public opinion and measures how well Fisher’s poetry is considered today. As well as providing contextual and factual detail, the book also concentrates on an assessment of Fisher’s varied poetic style, a manner of writing that only highlights the poet’s decision to reject the constraints of British lyrical poetry of the time, and outlines the recurring motifs and crossed boundaries present in his poetry.

The Sense of Community in French Caribbean Fiction seeks to better understand the concept of community as a central and problematic issue in French Caribbean literature. The study examines representations of community in seven French Caribbean novels, including Jacques Roumain’s Gouverneurs de la rosée, Edouard Glissant’s Le Quatrième Siècle, Simone Schwarz-Bart’s Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle, Vincent Placoly’s L’Eau-de-mort guildive, Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco, Daniel Maximin’s L’Ile et une nuit, and Maryse Condé’s Desirada. Each novel is discussed in chronological order, demonstrating a progressive move away from the ‘closed’ community towards a newer sense of an ‘open’ community. In this study, Britton offers an understanding of the postcolonial societies of the Caribbean by looking at French Caribbean literature’s role in the creation of community. The seven novels analysed reveal a correlation between a tightly knit, purposeful community and a linear narrative that ends in definitive resolution, and, conversely, between a dispersed or heterogeneous community and a narrative structure that avoids linearity and closure.

This study discusses how the ways in which Chamoiseau’s work attempts to recover (bring back) the memory of the past have contributed to a collective and individual coming to terms with, and, potentially, a recovery from its effects. In bringing the theme of memory to the forefront of her analysis, and in considering this highly memorial writing alongside work done in a wider context, McCusker generates insights which have resonance in the broader field of postcolonial literary studies. The first and last chapters focus on a single work, Chronique des sept misères and Biblique des derniers gestes respectively, with the chapters in-between counterpointing several texts, so as to suggest recurring and significant themes and issues on Chamoiseau’s literature.

Francophone Jewish Writers: Imagining Israel explores autobiographies, memoirs, and novels written by French-language Jewish writers in order to get an idea of Francophone Jewish imaginings of Israel. Cairns contextualises her analysis of the texts in this book by drawing on social and political history as well as ideas of philosophy, journalism, psychoanalysis and sociology. The book foregrounds the differing emotional investments in Israel coming from both Francophone Jews physically situated in Israel and from diasporic Jews in France, thus investigating the ‘special’ Jewish relationship between the two countries.

John McGahern was acknowledged as one of the greatest Irish writers of the twentieth century. This study of his work, John McGahern: Authority and vision, is a unique collection that brings together essays by experts from a variety of disciplines that include history, sociology, education, journalism, creative writing and literary criticism, to offer fresh perspectives and new insights into the writer, his work and his legacy. Comprising essays from a range of distinguished contributors that includes Roy Foster, Paula Meehan, Frank McGuinness and Melvyn Bragg, along with a previously unpublished interview by Stanley van der Ziel, this collection extends the existing body of criticism into new areas to deepen our appreciation of the McGahern’s considerable achievements. This volume, which also features an original poem by Paula Meehan written in honour of McGahern, will stimulate the interest of students, researchers and general readers of Irish literature and Irish studies.

Being Contemporary emerges from a sense of critical urgency to probe the notion of ‘the contemporary’, and the place of the contemporary critic, in French literary and cultural studies today. Consisting of twenty-two critical essays written by scholars in the field of French studies, the volume offers a sustained reflection on the status of the contemporary in French culture and takes a close look at the contemporary moment itself, as well as its concomitant discourse of crisis. The volume is split into four sections. The first section, ‘Conceptualizing the Contemporary’, offers distinct disciplinary approaches to broader questions about time, period, and categorization. The second section, ‘Contemporary Politics and French Thought’, brings broader theoretical inquiries to bear on the political sphere. The third section, ‘The Second World War and Vichy: Present Perspectives’, rearticulates the concern that the difficult negotiation of the past continues to haunt the present. The fourth section, ‘Writing the Contemporary Self’, features essays that probe the limits of autobiographical writing and self-representation. The fifth section, ‘Novel Rereadings’, offers new interpretations of monumental works of French fiction by literary giants such as Flaubert, Colette, Proust, Beckett. The sixth and final section, ‘Memory: Past and Future’, concludes with three different approaches to memory and representation. The essays in this volume, organised by theme rather than by definitions or denotations, encourage an expansive and elastic theoretical framework that charts a broad conceptual course and attempts to define what it means to ‘be contemporary’ both broadly and in terms of practice.

This book provides a synopsis and analysis of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. In her close reading, Molly Hoff collects the literary fragments scattered in the novel and gathers them into a discussion of style, narrative and intertextual references. The author supplements her breakdown of individual lines and words in the novel with her own knowledge of the city of London and the idioms used by its residents, therefore providing a useful context on place and language. Hoff also draws on poetic convention from Classical and modern literature, including Greek myth and Alexandrian poetry, to supplement her discussion of the novel’s use of characterisation, recurring motifs and imagery. Hoff’s annotations are organised according to the novel’s twelve unnumbered ‘section’ breaks, indicated by Woolf with vertical spacing.

Gwyneth Jones’s Deconstructing the Starships: Science Fiction and Reality is a collection of critical essays, speeches and reviews, split into three sections: ‘All Science is Description’, ‘Science, Fiction and Reality’, and ‘The Reviews’. The book looks at 20^th century science fiction through a feminist lens and explores the evolution of science fiction and fantasy writing during an era of scientific and technological development. From a feminist point of view, Jones discusses the relationships between men and women in science fiction and unpacks the significance of the power imbalances that come out of those relationships. Jones also addresses the increasing closeness in the barriers between science fiction and reality and offers insightful predictions towards the future.

This book provides an in-depth analysis of fictional responses written in response to the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Through the course of the book, the reader is taken on a journey from the events leading up to the genocide, the horrific massacres that were carried out against the Tutsi population, and finally to modern-day Rwanda, where the country comes to terms with a brutal episode in its recent past. Nicki Hitchcott focuses her analytic study on a group of African authors, including Rwandans, who were brought together as part of the Rwanda: écrire par devoir de mémoire initiative in 1998 to write a variety of works to commemorate and reflect on the genocide. Hitchcott organises her analysis of each imagined work in to the context of tourists, witnesses, survivors, victims and perpetrators, whilst carefully examining the effects that an author’s positionality has on their response to the genocide. In addition to this, Hitchcott calls in to question the ethical issues raised when writing fiction based on the genocide, and how the reader becomes implicated by studying the works of fiction based on it. Above all, this work serves as a testimony to the range and diversity of genocide fiction written by African authors, and how the works they have produced enables a country to move forward.

In Passionate Intellect: The Poetry of Charles Tomlinson, Michael Kirkham provides a critical reading of the poetry of Charles Tomlinson. Within the text, Kirkham addresses readers already interested in Tomlinson’s poetry, but also those who are unfamiliar with it. Kirkham aims to open up the understanding of the poet’s work by providing a contextual commentary on the poems and by advising ways to read them. The text is split into six chapters that follow the progression of Tomlinson’s poetry from his early career to the his work in the 1980s, and make a comment on the historical context as well as the meaning, quality and value contained in each poem. The text also goes to great length to explain the distinction between a ‘nature’ poem and a ‘human’ poem, and uses Tomlinson’s work as examples of each.

Sounding/Silence charts Heidegger's deep engagement with poetry, situating it within the internal dynamics of his thought and within the domains of poetics and literary criticism. Heidegger viewed poetics and literary criticism with notorious disdain: he claimed that his Erläuterungen (“soundings”) of Hölderlin's poetry were not “contributions to aesthetics and literary history” but rather stemmed “from a necessity for thought.” And yet, the questions he poses—the value of significance of prosody and trope, the concept of “poetic language,” the relation between language and body, the “truth” of poetry—reach to the very heart of poetics as a discipline, and indeed situate Heidegger within a wider history of thinking on poetry and poetics. Opening up points of contact between Heidegger's discussions of poetry and technical and critical analyses of these poems, David Nowell Smith addresses a lacuna within Heidegger scholarship and sets off from Heidegger's thought to sketch a philosophical “poetics of limit”.