The etymological affinity between ‘criticism’ and ‘crisis’ has never been more resonant than it is today, when social life is increasingly understood as defined by a succession of overlapping global crises: financial and economic crises; environmental crises; geopolitical crises; terrorist crises; public health crises. But what is the role of literary and cultural criticism in conceptualizing this atmosphere of perpetual crisis? If, as Paul de Man maintained, criticism necessarily exists in a state of crisis, in what ways is this condition intensified at a time when the social formations within which criticism operates and the cultural artefacts that it takes as its objects are themselves pervaded by actual and imagined states of emergency? This book, the first sustained response to these questions, demonstrates the capacity of critical thought, working in dialogue with key narrative texts, to provide penetrating insights into a contemporary landscape of global, manufactured risk. Written by an international team of specialist scholars, the essays in the collection draw on a wide variety of contemporary theoretical, fictional, and cinematic sources, ranging from Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, and Fredric Jameson to Cormac McCarthy, Ian McEwan, and Lauren Beukes to Ghost and the James Bond and National Treasure series. Appearing in the midst of a phase of extraordinary turbulence in the fabric of our interconnected and interdependent world, the book makes a landmark intervention in debates concerning the cultural ramifications of globalization.

Introduction: the "crisis of man" as obscurity and re-enlightenment -- Currents through the War -- The end of the War and after -- Transmission -- Criticism and the literary crisis of man -- Studies in fiction -- Saul Bellow and Ralph Ellison: man and history, the questions -- Ralph Ellison and Saul Bellow: history and man, the answers -- Flannery O'Connor and faith -- Thomas Pynchon and technology -- Transmutation -- The Sixties as big bang -- Universal philosophy and antihumanist theory -- Conclusion: moral history and the twentieth century.

"Gives a superb critical and polemical overview of the '70s film theory. Rodowick is particularly good at showing both the political stakes of these influential theories and their blind spots."—Constance Penley, University of California, Santa Barbara

This third edition of Modern Criticism and Theory represents a major expansion on its previous incarnations with some twenty five new pieces or essays included. This expansion has two principal purposes. Firstly, in keeping with the collection’s aim to reflect contemporary preoccupations, the reader has expanded forward to include such newly emergent considerations as ecocriticism and post-theory. Secondly, with the aim of presenting as broad an account of modern theory as possible, the reader expands backwards to to take in exemplary pieces by formative writers and thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries such as Marx, Freud and Virginia Woolf.. This radical expansion of content is prefaced by a wide-ranging introduction, which provides a rationale for the collection and demonstrates how connections can be made between competing theories and critical schools. The purpose of the collection remains that of introducing the reader to the guiding concepts of contemporary literary and cultural debate. It does so by presenting substantial extracts from seminal thinkers and surrounding them with the contextual materials necessary to a full understanding. Each selection has a headnote, which gives biographical details of the author and provides suggestions for further reading, and footnotes that help explain difficult references. The collection is ordered both historically and thematically and readers are encouraged to draw for themselves connections between essays and theories. Modern Criticism and Theory has long been regarded as a necessary collection. Now revised for the twenty first century it goes further and provides students and the general reader with a wide-ranging survey of the complex landscape of modern theory and a critical assessment of the way we think – and live – in the world today.

Maps the complexities of imaginative worldmaking in contemporary culture through an aesthetics of narrative performance.

Three novellas by a black writer. The novella, Atlantis: Model 1924, describes the sense of wonder experienced by a 17-year-old black youth from the South on his arrival in New York, while Citre et Trans is on a black man who is raped in Greece and the effect this has on his life. By the author of Return to Neveryon.

This book analyses the spatial politics of a range of British novelists writing on London since the 1950s, emphasizing spatial representation as an embodied practice at the point where the architectural landscape and the body enter into relation with each other. Colombino visits the city in connection with its boundaries, abstract spaces and natural microcosms, as they stand in for all the conflicting realms of identity; its interstices and ruins are seen as inhabited by bodies that reproduce internally the external conditions of political and social struggle. The study brings into focus the fiction in which London provides not a residual interest but a strong psychic-phenomenological grounding, and where the awareness of the physical reality of buildings and landscape conditions shape the concept of the subject traversing this space. Authors such as J. G. Ballard, Geoff Dyer, Michael Moorcock, Peter Ackroyd, Iain Sinclair, Geoff Ryman, Tom McCarthy, Michael Bracewell and Zadie Smith are considered in order to map the relationship of body, architecture and spatial politics in contemporary creative prose on the city. Through readings that are consistently informed by recent developments in urban studies and reflections formulated by architects, sociologists, anthropologists and art critics, this book offers a substantial contribution to the burgeoning field of literary urban studies.