D. H. Lawrence is renowned for his scathing criticism of the ruling class, industrialisation of the country and wartime patriotism. However, his texts bear the imprint of contemporary dominant ideologies and discourses of the period. Comparing Lawrence’s texts to various major and minor contemporary novels, journal articles, political pamphlets and history books, this book aims to demonstrate that Lawrence’s texts are ambivalent: his texts harbour the dynamism of conflicting power struggles between the subversive and the reactionary. For example, in some apparently apolitical texts such as The White Peacock and Movements in European History, reactionary ideologies and wartime propaganda are embedded. Some texts like Lady Chatterley’s Lover are intended to be a radical critique of the period wherein it was composed, but they also bear discernible traces of the contemporary frame of reference that they intend to subvert. Focusing on Lawrence’s stories and novels set in the mining countryside and the works composed under the impact of the First World War, this book establishes that Lawrence’s texts in fact consist of multiple layers that are often in conflict with each other, serving as a testimony to the age of modernity.

Silent Film Adaptations of Novels by British and American Women Writers, 1903–1929 focuses on fifty-three silent film adaptations of the novels of acclaimed authors George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Mary Shelley, Louisa May Alcott, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Willa Cather, and Edith Wharton. Many of the films are unknown or dismissed, and most of them are degraded, destroyed, or lost—burned in warehouse fires, spontaneously combusted in storage cans, or quietly turned to dust. Their content and production and distribution details are reconstructed through archival resources as individual narratives that, when considered collectively, constitute a broader narrative of lost knowledge—a fragmented and buried early twentieth-century story now reclaimed and retold for the first time to a twenty-first-century audience. This collective narrative also demonstrates the extent to which the adaptations are intertextually and ideologically entangled with concurrently released early “woman’s films” to re-promote and re-instill the norm of idealized white, married, domesticated womanhood during a time of extraordinary cultural change for women. Retelling this lost narrative also allows for a reassessment of the place and function of the adaptations in the development of the silent film industry and as cinematic precedent for the hundreds of sound adaptations of the literary texts of these eight women writers produced from 1931 to the 2020s.

An Analysis of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Plays in Théâtre complet is the first volume to propose a critical analysis of all of Jean-Paul Sartre’s plays as published in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Paris, Gallimard, 2005. Viewing the plays in the context of Sartre’s philosophy, his prose writings and works by other philosophers, novelists, and playwrights, this comprehensive volume is essential reading for students of French literature, theatre, and existentialist philosophy.

This first book-length study of D. H. Lawrence’s lifelong engagement with music surveys his extensive musical interests and how these permeate his writing, while also situating Lawrence within a growing body of work on music and modernism. A twin focus considers the music that shaped Lawrence’s novels and poetry, as well as contemporary developments in music that parallel his quest for new forms of expression. Comparisons are made with the music of Debussy, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Wagner, and British composers, including Bax, Holst and Vaughan Williams, and with the musical writings of Forster, Hardy, Hueffer (Ford), Nietzsche and Pound. Above all, by exploring Lawrence and music in historical context, this study aims to open up new areas for study and a place for Lawrence within the field of music and modernism.

What is at stake in Freud’s enduring preoccupation with a process supposedly diverting sexuality into cultural activity? In this study, a leading scholar of psychoanalysis and literature re-opens the old question of sublimation in a critical reading that explores one of the last remaining puzzles of Freudian thought. Using the rigorous framework provided by Jean Laplanche, Luke Thurston resituates sublimation as an unfinished Freudian concept bound up with a much wider history of philosophical and literary reflection. Exploring the misunderstanding and reinvention of sublimation both in accounts of cultural history and in Lacan’s celebrated reading of Antigone, Thurston challenges some of the prevalent assumptions still seen in contemporary “theory.” Thurston links his critical investigation of psychoanalysis to modernist literature, discovering both parallels and alternatives to Freud’s idea of sublimation in little-known works by May Sinclair and David Jones. The study concludes by arguing that these modernist artists, both of whom were significantly affected by trauma during the First World War, produced work radically at odds with the established canons of representation, and that this “anti-hermeneutic” art can be linked to a “Copernican” sublimation, a process not controlled by the ego but vitalizing it and decentring its habitual structure.

Reading Mohamed Choukri’s Narratives presents an intricate exploration into the life and literary universe of Mohamed Choukri, a towering figure in 20th-century Moroccan literature. Known primarily for his groundbreaking autobiographical work "al-Khubz al-Ḥāfī" (For Bread Alone), Choukri's literary influence extends well beyond this single work. This book seeks to cast a light on his broader body of work, examining the cultural, societal, and personal influences that shaped his unique storytelling style. Through a deep analysis of his narratives, this text aims to unfold how Choukri portrayed the harsh realities he and others encountered, giving voice to the marginalized individuals and communities in Morocco.

In recent years, the field of literary studies at the international level has become more involved in the analysis of the so-called industrial literature, a literary genre that focuses on the literary representation of factory work and workers’ alienation. This book engages in the ongoing debate by offering a narratological analysis of Italian industrial novels in particular, while taking into consideration their paratexts and interrogating the possibility of the presence of a testimonial intent in the text. The study reconstructs the connections between visions of factory utopias and Italian industrial literature, starting with an overview of said visions of utopia and how they came into being in Europe following the industrial revolution. It then proceeds by exploring the relationship between the twentieth-century Italian entrepreneur Adriano Olivetti and Italian industrial authors, and the influence that Olivetti’s visions of factory utopia had on these writers and how they perceived themselves as witnesses of factory life and workers’ alienation. In analyzing these texts, and particularly the novels by Paolo Volponi and Ottiero Ottieri, the book focuses on the previously overlooked representation of the self in industrial literature and on how this self expresses the need for testimony.