This book presents an interesting approach to Dante's Divine Comedy, drawing on medieval theories of reading and understanding a text.

Set against a backdrop of debates about the so-called 'end of history', 'the death of the subject' and 'the end of art', as well as the various forms of the 'post' that became prevalent in the late twentieth century, Jeremy Tambling introduces the idea of 'the posthumous' as a means of thinking about our relationship to the past, to death and to history.The trope of the posthumous is played out in a pattern of four deftly argued 'case-chapters' devoted to Shakespeare's Cymbeline (where the hero is Posthumus), Dickens's David Copperfield (a 'posthumous child'), Nietzsche's Ecce Homo (the...

Blake's Night Thoughts discusses Blake as a poet and artist of night, considering night through graveyard poetry and Young in the eighteenth-century, urbanism in the nineteenth and Levinas and Blanchot's writings in the twentieth. Taking 'night' as the breakdown of rational progressive thought and of thought based on concepts of identity, the book reads the lyric poetry, some Prophetic works, including a chapter on The Four Zoas, the illustrations to Young, and Dante, and look's at Blake's writing of madness.

This new volume in Genji studies comprises a collection of six individual essays by leading international scholars addressing the Tale of Genji Scrolls and the Tale of Genji texts in the context of new critical theory relating to cultural studies, narrative painting, narratology, comparative literature and a global view of medieval romance. Uniquely, it also links new critical theory with multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary interests. Increasingly, scholarly research views 'reading' The Tale of Genji Scrolls as an inseparable part of 'reading' the Tale of Genji...

In a radical reassessment of one of the greatest writers of all time, Dickens, Violence and the Modern State draws on the theories of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, in addition to Julia Kristeva and Edward Said, to situate Dickens within the discourses circulating within his society - in particular those associated with modernity. Focussing on Dickens's novels written after 1848, his relationship to modernity can be seen in his treatment of violence, seen in two forms in his writing: that of the state (in the rationalising powers of Victorian bourgeois modernisation), and physical violence,...

Lost in the American City gives a reading of developments in American urban culture, and analyzes the responses of Dickens (in American Notes ) and Henry James (in The American Scene ) to nineteenth-century and Modernist America, looking at both in light of the fear, expressed by Kafka, of the outsider becoming in America "the man who was never heard of again."

Tambling draws on the insights of Adorno, Benjamin, Theweleit, Bataille, Kristeva, and others to read nineteenth- and early twentieth-century opera as part of a culture which produced fascism as a crisis-state, and threatened to extinguish the genre as an influential and contemporary form of high art. Examining over a dozen operas in detail, Tambling discovers an ideology with both reactionary and revolutionary potentials.

On Anachronism argues that anachronism is basic to all literature and all history and further explores it in film and in music, and that it changes perceptions of time.

Literature and Psychoanalysis looks at Freud, Melanie Klein and Lacan, to explain their key concepts, and to suggest why they are essential in the study of literature.
With a range of examples from Shakespeare, Blake, Wordsworth, the Sherlock Holmes stories and Ibsen and from Surrealism, the book traces through the significance of literature in psychoanalysis, and why psychoanalysis is essential reading for those who are interested in literature. It looks fully at Freud on memory, and guilt, and on repression, and narcissism, and traces his key concepts as these morph into Melanie Klein's...

This book is about the impact of literature upon cities world-wide, and cities upon literature.