Loss is the core experience which determines the identity of Kazuo Ishiguro's narrators and shapes their subsequent lives. Whether a traumatic ordeal, an act of social degradation, a failed relationship or a loss of home, the painful event serves as a sharp dividing line between the earlier, meaningful past and the period afterwards, which is infused with a sense of lack, dissatisfaction and nostalgia. Ishiguro's narrators have been unable to confine their loss to the past and remain preoccupied by its legacy, which ranges from suppressed guilt to a keen sense of failure or disappointment....

Despite the vast body of texts inspired by warfare--from The Iliad to Maus--war writing is perpetually haunted by the notions of unrepresentability and inadequacy. War and Words examines the methods, conventions and pitfalls of constructing verbal accounts of military conflict in literature and the media. This multifocal study draws on a wide array of theoretical perspectives, including feminism, posthumanism, masculinity, trauma, spatiality and media studies, and brings together such diverse material as canonical literature, war veterans' testimonies, imaginative fiction, computer games,...

The authors of this volume discuss the tangible need for a revision of the vocabulary of emotion used in literary criticism and culture studies. The articles offer a wide range of interdisciplinary approaches to emotional states such as love, shame, grief, nostalgia and trauma. They demonstrate that the once stable concept of emotion disintegrates in the course of re-evaluation and is replaced by such notions as affects, passions, feelings and emotions. This volume examines the representations of emotion in drama, poetry and prose from the anonymous Court of Love (ca....