Michael Gardiner

Claire Westall

This interdisciplinary collection is a first step in the process of dismantling the imperial and unionist dominance of the discipline of English Literature and building a literary history and national literature of England. The collection brings together some of the best known and most incisive commentators on England, Englishness and English Literature from political and literary fields in order to rethink the relationship between Britain, England and English literary culture. It is premised on the importance of devolution, the uncertainty of the British Union, the place of English Literature within the Union, and the need for England to become a self-determining literary nation. The collection comprises fifteen essays, organised into four parts, moving from political discussions of the form of a devolved or independent England, through a consideration of England in canonical and contemporary literature, to an exploration of the role of the national in English Literature's disciplinary logic.

Revisions of England, Englishness and English Literature

Literature of an Independent England

The Public on the Public argues that in the United Kingdom efforts to resuscitate the public as a popular opposition to global capital's narrowing elite are largely misguided. Tracking Britain's understanding of the public from the inception of its state, this discussion intervenes in longstanding debates about the decline of the public in order to stress the public's ongoing and anti-popular constitutional role as the continuity of financial trust. It follows the fiscal duties of the social and cultural life of the public, and describes how the public protects itself from popular sovereignty through systems of self-reporting within and across politically foreclosing institutions. From the party system to the BBC, and from the imperial remnants of commonwealth heritage through to media, arts and educational efforts to galvanise 'public value', the public has insisted on a mode of compulsory inclusion that recent constitutional fissures have allowed us to look beyond in the search for more substantial bases of popular and political action. Here the contention is that, in Britain's case, the resistance to popular determination enabled by the public has been so successful that the term public must be re-read as politically paralysing. Indeed, the problem, or our problem, is the public – that which we are so often told will bring us together and provide for us.

The British Public as Trust, Reflexivity and Political Foreclosure

The Public on the Public

Rina Kim

This agenda-setting volume of essays interrogates the crossing of gendered voice that occurs in literature and theatre from the 1850s to the present. It investigates male writers' use of female voices and female writers' use of male voices, examining where, how and why such gendered crossings occur and what connections may be found between these crossings and specific psychological, social, historical and political contexts as well as the particular aesthetic ends of individual authors. It establishes new ground in the critical analysis of the way gender switching, transforming or morphing is mobilized in literature and theatre to create and recreate identities which challenge established binaries and boundaries. Featuring essays discussing writers such as Angela Carter, Jeffrey Eugenides, Sarah Waters, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, the collection provides new impetus for further theoretical explorations of the role of the voice and its gendered construction and transformation within literary and gender studies.

Appropriating, Resisting, Embracing

Cross-Gendered Literary Voices

Michelle Kelly

Prison Writing and the Literary World tackles international prison writing and writing about imprisonment in relation to questions of literary representation and formal aesthetics, the “value” or “values” of literature, textual censorship and circulation, institutional networks and literary-critical methodologies. It offers scholarly essays exploring prison writing in relation to wartime internment, political imprisonment, resistance and independence creation, regimes of terror, and personal narratives of development and awakening that grapple with race, class and gender. Cutting across geospatial divides while drawing on nation- and region-specific expertise, it asks readers to connect the questions, examples and challenges arising from prison writing and writing about imprisonment within the UK and the USA, but also across continental Europe, Stalinist Russia, the Americas, Africa and the Middle East. It also includes critical reflection pieces from authors, editors, educators and theatre practitioners with experience of the fraught, testing and potentially inspiring links between prison and the literary world.

Claire Westall

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