This comprehensive critical survey introduces readers to the principal themes and styles of literature in England since 1945. John Brannigan examines the complex nature of the relationship between literature and history, society, and place, and argues that postwar literature is especially concerned with themes of social and cultural change. Covering drama, fiction and poetry, this book combines original readings of a wide range of familiar texts with an exploration of the historical and cultural context of literature since World War II.

The French Connections of Jacques Derrida offers stimulating and accessible essays that address, for the first time, the issue of Derrida's relation to French poetics, writing, thought, and culture. In addition to offering considerations of Derrida through studies of such significant French authors as Mallarme, Baudelaire, Valery, Laporte, Ponge, Perec, Blanchot, and Barthes, the book also reassesses the development of Derrida's work in the context of structuralism, biology, and linguistics in the 1960s, and looks at the possible relationships between Derrida's writing and that of the...

New historicism and cultural materialism emerged in the early 1980s as prominent literary theories and came to represent a revival of interest in history and in historicising literature. Their proponents rejected both formalist criticism and earlier attempts to read literature in its historical context and defined new ways of thinking about literature in relation to history. This study explains the development of these theories and demonstrates both their uses and weaknesses as critical practices. The potential future direction for the theories is explored and the controversial debates about...

For decades Ireland presented itself as the land of hospitality, until the 1990s, when the 'Celtic Tiger' exposed its racist underbelly. In Race in Modern Irish Literature and Culture, John Brannigan argues that race and racism have longer histories in the Irish state, histories which have often been exposed and critiqued by Irish writers and artists. He revisits the role of racial ideologies in the foundation and development of the state, offering original historical insights, and inspired new readings of literary and cultural works ranging from Ulysses to The Commitments.

Offers a new archipelagic history of twentieth-century literature in Britain and Ireland
Archipelagic Modernism examines the anglophone literatures of the archipelago from 1890 to 1970 for what they tell us about changing identities, geographies, and ecologies. The book argues that these literatures constitute an important resource for how we might begin to think about alternative political geographies, and alternative practices of belonging to place and environment. From the height of the British Empire in 1890, to the increasing sense by 1970 of the imminent'break-up' of Britain,...