Ruins in the Literary and Cultural Imagination

ISBN-13: 9783030269074 / Angielski / Miękka / 2021 / 306 str.

Efterpi Mitsi; Anna Despotopoulou; Stamatina Dimakopoulou

Spis treści

Chapter 1 Introduction 

The editors

PART I  

Allegory – Animation – Appropriation

Chapter 2. Amongst the Ruins of a European Gothic Phantasmagoria in Athens

  Maria Vara

Chapter 3. Dickens’s Animate Ruins 

Michael Hollington

Chapter 4. The Indifference of Fragments: Untimely Ruin in Tess of the d’Urbervilles 

Claire Potter 

Chapter 5. Rising from Ruins: Isabel Archer at the Roman Campagna

Chryssa Marinou 

Chapter 6. Untimely Returns: Shoring Fragments against Ruins in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca

  Sheila Teahan 

Chapter 7. “There must be no ruins”: Ruinophobia and Urban Morphology in Turn-of-the-Century New York

 Theodora Tsimpouki 

PART II  Re-collection – Trauma – Aftermath

Chapter 8. “Ruins True Refuge”: Beckett and Pinter

David Tucker 

Chapter 9. Out of the Ruins of Dresden: Destructive Plasticity in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five

  Giorgos Giannakopoulos 

Chapter 10. Melancholia and the Bomb: Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton and the Fragmented Atomic Psyche

  Adam Beardsworth 

Chapter 11. The Fractured World of Leonard Cohen 

Jeffrey L. Spear 

Chapter 12. Springtime for Defaults: The Producers as the Ruin of History and the Triumph of Hystery 

Christina Dokou 

Chapter 13. In the Absence of Ruins: The “Non-Sites of Memory” in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and Daniel Mendelsohn’s Lost: The Search for Six of Six Million 

Angeliki Tseti

PART III  Contemplation – Preservation – Resistance

Chapter 14. Destruction Preservation, or the Edifying Ruin in Benjamin and Brecht

 Vassiliki Kolocotroni 

Chapter 15. Thinking Like a Ruin 

  Carl Lavery and Simon Murray 

Chapter 16. Contemporary Ruins, Fragments of the Lives of Others, Critical Intimacies in and out of Comfort Zones 

Apostolos Lampropoulos 

Chapter 17: Afterword: The Consolations of Ruins: From the Acropolis to Epidaurus

  Jyotsna Singh 

O autorze

Efterpi Mitsi is Professor in English Literature and Culture at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece.

Anna Despotopoulou is Professor in English Literature and Culture at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece.

Stamatina Dimakopoulou is Assistant Professor in American Literature and Culture at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece.

Emmanouil Aretoulakis is tenured Associate Lecturer in English Literature and Culture at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece.

Blurb

This book focuses on literal and metaphorical ruins, as they are appropriated and imagined in different forms of writing. Examining British and American literature and culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the book begins in the era of industrial modernity with studies of Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Henry James and Daphne Du Maurier. It then moves on to the significance of ruins in the twentieth century, against the backdrop of conflict, waste and destruction, analyzing authors such as Beckett and Pinter, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton and Leonard Cohen. The collection concludes with current debates on ruins, through discussions of Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht, as well as reflections on the refugee crisis that take the ruin beyond the text, offering new perspectives on its diverse legacies and conceptual resources.