Examining representations of speech disorders in works of literature, this first collection of its kind founds a new multidisciplinary subfield related but not limited to the emerging fields of disability studies and medical humanities. The scope is wide-ranging both in terms of national literatures and historical periods considered, engaging with theoretical discussions in poststructuralism, disability studies, cultural studies, new historicism, gender studies, sociolinguistics, trauma studies, and medical humanities. The book's main focus is on the development of an awareness of speech...

This book visits the 'Thing' in its various manifestations as an unnameable monster in literature and film, reinforcing the idea that the very essence of the monster is its excess and its indeterminacy. Tied primarily to the artistic modes of the gothic, science fiction, and horror, the unnameable monster retains a persistent presence in literary forms as a reminder of the sublime object that exceeds our worst fears. Beville examines various representations of this elusive monster and argues that we must looks at the monster, rather than through it, at ourselves. As such, this book...

Space is a central topic in cultural and narrative theory today, although in most cases theory assumes Newtonian absolute space. However, the idea of a universal homogeneous space is now obsolete. Black holes, multiple dimensions, quantum entanglement, and spatio-temporal distortions of relativity have passed into culture at large. This book examines whether narrative can be used to represent these "impossible" spaces.

Impossible topologies abound in ancient mythologies, from the Australian Aborigines "dream-time" to the multiple-layer universe of the Sumerians. More recently, from...

Trauma in Contemporary Literature analyzes contemporary narrative texts in English in the light of trauma theory, including essays by scholars of different countries who approach trauma from a variety of perspectives. The book analyzes and applies the most relevant concepts and themes discussed in trauma theory, such as the relationship between individual and collective trauma, historical trauma, absence vs. loss, the roles of perpetrator and victim, dissociation, "nachtraglichkeit," transgenerational trauma, the process of acting out and working through, introjection and incorporation,...

This volume seeks to understand the cartographical imperative inherent in exile, investigating the relationship between exile understood broadly to include external and internal exile, diaspora, deterritorialization, reterritorialization, expatriation, migrants, refugees, nomads, and the forcibly disappeared and map-making. Mapping is a certain science that enables emplacement and facilitates movement; yet it is also an aesthetic project that draws on a heightened awareness of space and place, memory, and political and historical imaginaries.

This collection explores a number of key...

This book refocuses current understandings of American Literature from the revolutionary period to the present-day through an analytical accounting of class, reestablishing a foundation for discussions of class in American culture. American Studies scholars have explored the ways in which American society operates through inequality and modes of social control, focusing primarily on issues of status group identities involving race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and disability. The essays in this volume focus on both the historically changing experience of class and its continuing hold on...

Celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the groundbreaking Testimony, this collection brings together the leading academics from a range of scholarly fields to explore the meaning, use, and value of testimony in law and politics, its relationship to other forms of writing like literature and poetry, and its place in society. It visits testimony in relation to a range of critical developments, including the rise of Truth Commissions and the explosion and radical extension of human rights discourse; renewed cultural interest in perpetrators of violence alongside the phenomenal...

Building on the psychological insights and theorizing of the fathers of trauma studies (Janet, Freud, Ferenczi) and of contemporary trauma critics and theorists,...