Jeremy Tambling

‘Among the numerous books on Dickens’s London, Going Astray is unique in combining detailed topography and biography with close textual analysis and theoretically informed critiques of most of the novelist’s major works. In Jeremy Tambling’s intriguing and illuminating synthesis, the London A-Z meets Nietzsche, Benjamin and Derrida.’ Rick Allen, author of The Moving Pageant: A Literary Sourcebook on London Street-Life, 1700-1914 Dickens wrote so insistently about London – its streets, its people, its unknown areas – that certain parts of the city are forever haunted by him. Going Astray: Dickens and London looks at the novelist’s delight in losing the self in the labyrinthine city and maps that interest, onto the compulsion to ‘go astray’ in writing. Drawing on all Dickens’ published writings (including the journalism but concentrating on the novels), Jeremy Tambling considers the author’s kaleidoscopic characterisations of London: as prison and as legal centre; as the heart of empire and of traumatic memory; as the place of the uncanny; as an old curiosity shop. His study examines the relations between narrative and the city, and explores how the metropolis encapsulates the problems of modernity for Dickens – as well as suggesting the limits of representation. Combining contemporary literary and cultural theory with historical maps, photographs and contextual detail, Jeremy Tambling’s book is an indispensable guide to Dickens, nineteenth- century literature, and the city itself.

Dickens and London

Going Astray

This book shows two Chinese gay men in Buenos Aires and reflects on Hong Kong's past and future by probing masculinity, aggression, identity, and homosexuality. It also gives a reading of Latin America, perhaps as an allegory of Hong Kong as another post-colonial society.

Wong Kar-wai's Happy Together

Opera, Ideology and Film

Reader Department of Comparative Literature Jeremy Tambling

Lectures on environmental aspects of particle-associated chemicals in aquatic systems. They consider assessment methods, transfer processes, environmental impact, dredged material. Tambling is a Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the U. of Hong Kong. Drawing on new critical theory, deconstruction, and psychoanalysis, his study surveys confessional practices running through Western societies, examines confessional literature, and asks about the relationship of confession to strategies of power and control in modern society. Indexed by name only. Distributed in the US and Canada by St. Martin's Press. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Sexuality, Sin, the Subject

Confession

This encyclopaedia will be an indispensable resource and recourse for all who are thinking about cities and the urban, and the relation of cities to literature, and to ways of writing about cities. Covering a vast terrain, this work will include entries on theorists, individual writers, individual cities, countries, cities in relation to the arts, film and music, urban space, pre/early and modern cities, concepts and movements and definitions amongst others. Written by an international team of contributors, this will be the first resource of its kind to pull together such a comprehensive overview of the field.

The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies

Hölderlin (1770-1843) is the magnificent writer whom Nietzsche called 'my favourite poet'. His writings and poetry have been formative throughout the twentieth century, and as influential as those of Hegel, his friend. At the same time, his madness has made his poetry infinitely complex as it engages with tragedy, and irreconcilable breakdown, both political and personal, with anger and with mourning. This study gives a detailed approach to Hölderlin's writings on Greek tragedy, especially Sophocles, whom he translated into German, and gives close attention to his poetry, which is never far from an engagement with tragedy. Hölderlin's writings, always fascinating, enable a consideration of the various meanings of tragedy, and provide a new reading of Shakespeare, particularly Julius Caesar, Hamlet and Macbeth; the work proceeds by opening into discussion of Nietzsche, especially The Birth of Tragedy. Since Hölderlin was such a decisive figure for Modernism, to say nothing of modern Germany, he matters intensely to such differing theorists and philosophers as Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida, all of whose views are discussed herein. Drawing upon the insights of Hegelian philosophy and psychoanalysis, this book gives the English-speaking reader ready access to a magnificent body of poetry and to the poet as a theorist of tragedy and of madness. Hölderlin's poetry is quoted freely, with translations and commentary provided. This book is the first major account of Hölderlin in English to offer the student and general reader a critical account of a vital body of work which matters to any study of poetry and to all who are interested in poetry's relationships to madness. It is essential reading in the understanding of how tragedy pervades literature and politics, and how tragedy has been regarded and written about, from Hegel to Walter Benjamin.

Readings in Sophocles, Shakespeare, Nietzsche and Benjamin

Hölderlin and the Poetry of Tragedy

This book argues that Paradiso – Dante’s vision of Heaven – is not simply affirmative. It posits that Paradiso compensates for disappointment rather than fulfils hopes, and where it moves into joy and vision, this also rationalises the experience of exile and the failure of all Dante’s political hopes. The book highlights and addresses a fundamental problem in reading Dante: the assumption that he writes as a Catholic Christian, which can be off-putting and induces an overly theological and partisan reading in some commentary. Accordingly, the study argues that Dante must be read now in a post-Christian modernity. It discusses Dante's Christianity fully, and takes its details as a source of wonder and beauty which need communicating to a modern reader. Yet, the study also argues that we must read for the alterity of Dante’s world from ours.

Lives Almost Divine, Spirits that Matter

The Poetry of Dante's Paradiso

Written using critical theory, especially by Walter Benjamin, Blanchot and Derrida, Allegory and the Work of Melancholy: The Late Medieval and Shakespeare reads medieval and early modern texts, exploring allegory within texts, allegorical readings of texts, and melancholy in texts. Authors studied are Langland and Chaucer, Hoccleve, on his madness, Lydgate and Henryson. Shakespeare's first tetralogy, the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III conclude this investigation of death, mourning, madness and of complaint. Benjamin's writings on allegory inspire this linking, which also considers Dürer, Baldung and Holbein and the dance of the dead motifs. The study sees subjectivity created as obsessional, paranoid, and links melancholia, madness and allegorical creation, where parts of the subject are split off from each other, and speak as wholes. Allegory and melancholy are two modes - a state of writing and a state of being - where the subject fragments or disappears. These texts are aware of the power of death within writing, which makes them, fascinating. The book will appeal to readers of literature from the medieval to the Baroque, and to those interested in critical theory, and histories of visual culture.

The Late Medieval and Shakespeare

Allegory and the Work of Melancholy

Written using critical theory, especially by Walter Benjamin, Blanchot and Derrida, Allegory and the Work of Melancholy: The Late Medieval and Shakespeare reads medieval and early modern texts, exploring allegory within texts, allegorical readings of texts, and melancholy in texts.Authors studied are Langland and Chaucer, Hoccleve, on his madness, Lydgate and Henryson. Shakespeare's first tetralogy, the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III conclude this investigation of death, mourning, madness and of complaint. Benjamin's writings on allegory inspire this linking, which also considers Dürer, Baldung and Holbein and the dance of the dead motifs.The study sees subjectivity created as obsessional, paranoid, and links melancholia, madness and allegorical creation, where parts of the subject are split off from each other, and speak as wholes. Allegory and melancholy are two modes – a state of writing and a state of being - where the subject fragments or disappears. These texts are aware of the power of death within writing, which makes them, fascinating.The book will appeal to readers of literature from the medieval to the Baroque, and to those interested in critical theory, and histories of visual culture.

This encyclopaedia is an indispensable resource and recourse for all who are thinking about cities and the urban, and the relation of cities to literature, and to ways of writing about cities. Covering a vast terrain, this work includes entries on theorists, individual writers, individual cities, countries, cities in relation to the arts, film and music, urban space, pre/early and modern cities, concepts and movements and definitions amongst others. Written by an international team of contributors, this is the first resource of its kind to pull together such a comprehensive overview of the field

This book presents an interesting approach to Dante's Divine Comedy, drawing on medieval theories of reading and understanding a text, and comparing them with modern critical theories of hermeneutics and approaches to the text associated with the work of Derrida. Dr Tambling rejects any attempt to identify a fundamental unity of thought in the poem and stresses the importance of opposition and divergence. This leads him to react against reductively 'allegorical' readings, and to ask in what way Christianity can be said to be articulated within the work. This important interpretation will be of value to all students and scholars of Dante, as well as to those whose work lies in the fields of general medieval literature, comparative literature and critical theory.

Writing in the 'Commedia'

Dante and Difference

Wong Kar-wai's controversial film, Happy Together, was released in Hong Kong just before the handover of power in 1997. The film shows two Chinese gay men in Buenos Aires and reflects on Hong Kong's past and future by probing masculinity, aggression, identity, and homosexuality. It also gives a reading of Latin America, perhaps as an allegory of Hong Kong as another post-colonial society. Examining one single, memorable, and beautiful film, but placing it in the context of other films by Wong Kar-wai and other Hong Kong directors, this book illustrates the depth, as well as the spectacle and action, that characterizes Hong Kong cinema. Tambling investigates the possibility of seeing Happy Together in terms of 'national allegory', as Fredric Jameson suggests Third World texts should be seen. Alternatively, he emphasizes the fragmentary nature of the film by discussing both its images and its narrative in the light of Borges and Manuel Puig. He also looks at the film's relation to the American road movie and to the history of the tango. He poses questions how emotions are presented in the film (is this a 'nostalgia film'?); whether the masculinity in it should be seen negatively or as signs of a new hopefulness about Hong Kong's future; and whether the film indicates new ways of thinking of gender relationships or sexuality.

Dante's work has fascinated readers for seven hundred years and has provided key reference points for writing as diverse as that of Chaucer, the Renaissance poets, the English Romantics, Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites, American writers from Melville through to Eliot and Pound, Anglo-Irish Modernists from Joyce to Beckett, and contemporary poets such as Heaney and Walcott. In this volume, Jeremy Tambling has selected ten recent essays from the mass of Dante studies, and put the Divine Comedy - Dante's record of a journey to Hell, Purgatory and Paradise - into context for the modern reader. Topics such as Dante's allegory, his relationship to classical and modern poetry, his treatment of love and of sexuality, his attitudes to Florence and to his contemporary Italy, are explored and clarified through a selection of work by some of the best scholars in the field. An introduction and notes help the reader to situate the criticism, and to relate it to contemporary literary theory. In this anthology, Dante's relevance to both English and Italian literature is highlighted, and the significance of Dante for poetry in English is illuminated for the modern reader. This book provides students of English literature and Italian literature with the most comprehensive collection of important critical studies of Dante to date.

Dante

Fuminobu Murakami

Richard Stanley-Baker

Six essays by 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, comparative literature and a global view of medieval romance. It links new critical theory with multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary interests.

Its Picture Scrolls, Texts and Romance

Reading the Tale of Genji

This book is about representations of the devil in English and European literature. Tracing the fascination in literature, philosophy, and theology with the irreducible presence of what may be called evil, or comedy, or the carnivalesque, this book surveys the parts played by the devil in the texts derived from the Faustus legend, looks at Marlowe and Shakespeare, Rabelais, Milton, Blake, Hoffmann, Baudelaire, Goethe, Dostoevsky, Bulgakov, and Mann, historically, speculatively, and from the standpoint of critical theory. It asks: Is there a single meaning to be assigned to the idea of the diabolical? What value lies in thinking diabolically? Is it still the definition of a good poet to be of the devil's party, as Blake argued?

From Marlowe to Mann and the Manichees

Histories of the Devil

This book introduces the idea of the posthumous as a means of thinking about our relationship to the past, to death and to history.

Life and Death in Literary and Cultural Studies

Becoming Posthumous

This study of Nicholas Nickleby takes the Dickens novel which is perhaps the least critically discussed, though it is very popular, and examines its appeal and its significance, and finds it one of the most rewarding and powerful of Dickens’s texts. Nicholas Nickleby deals with the abduction and destruction of children, often with the collusion of their parents. It concentrates on this theme in a way which continues from Oliver Twist, describing such oppression, and the resistance to it, in the language of melodrama, of parody and comedy. With chapters on the school-system that Dickens attacks, and its grotesque embodiment in Squeers, and with discussion of how the novel reshapes eighteenth century literary traditions, and such topics as the novel’s comedy, and the concept of the ‘humorist’; and ‘theatricality’ and its debt to Carlyle,, the book delves into the way that the novel explores madness within the city in those whose lives have been fractured, or ruined, as so many have been, and considers the symptoms of hypocrisy in the lives of the oppressors and the oppressed alike; taking hypocrisy as a Dickensian subject which deserves further examination. Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, and the Dance of Death explores ways in which Dickens draws on medieval and baroque traditions in how he analyses death and its grotesquerie, especially drawing on the visual tradition of the ‘dance of death’ which is referred to here and which is prevalent throughout Dickens’s novels. It shows these traditions to be at the heart of London, and aims to illuminate a strand within Dickens’s thinking from first to last. Drawing on the critical theory of Walter Benjamin, Freud, Nietzsche and Marx, and with close detailed readings of such well-known figures as Mrs Nickleby, Vincent Crummles and his theatrical troupe, and Mr Mantalini, and attention to Dickens’s description, imagery, irony, and sense of the singular, this book is a major study which will help in the revaluation of Dickens’s early novels.

Jeremy Tambling

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