The question of the sublime, which links the idea of aesthetic force with rhetorical impact and moral law, has been an important topic in discussion of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art and the shift between them. This book argues that the sublime is equally important in understanding the shift from romanticism to modernism later in the century. The author studies the work of three French authors conventionally considered pivotal figures in the trajectory from romanticism to modernism: Hugo, father of romanticism; Baudelaire, precursor of symbolist modernism; and Lautreamont, hero of (post) modernism. She traces this literary-historical as Hugo's Quatre-vingt-treize and L'Homme qui rit, Baudelaire's Spleen de Paris and Petits poemes en prose, and Lautreamont's Chants de Maldoror and Poesies - all seen from a perspective of the aesthetics of the sublime. This perspective is developed through analyses of the treatises on the sublime by Longinus, Boileau, Burke, and Kant.

Scapeland: Writing the Landscape from Diderot’s Salons to the Postmodern Museum is a comparative, interdisciplinary study tracing theories of the sublime and a history of spectatorship from Diderot’s eighteenth-century French Salons, through art criticism by Baudelaire and Breton, to Jean-François Lyotard’s postmodern exhibition Les Immatériaux. In the Salons, an exploration of the painted landscape becomes an encounter with both the limits of representation and the infinite possibilities of fiction. Baudelaire and Breton explore similar limits in their work, set against the backdrop of the modern city. For them, as for Diderot, the attempt to render visual objects in narrative language leads to the development of new literary forms and concerns. Lyotard’s concept of the “postmodern museum” frames the sublime encounter, once again, in terms that expressly evoke Diderot’s verbal rendering of painted spaces as a personal promenade. According to Lyotard, Diderot “ouvre, par écrit, les surfaces des tableaux comme les portes d’une exposition.. . . [il] abolit . . . l’opposition de la nature et de la culture, de la réalité de l’image, du volume et de la surface.” Reading the literary production of these four writers alongside their art criticism, Scapeland considers narrative responses to art as imaginative assertions of human presence against the impersonal world of objects.

The transition from royal to popular sovereignty during the age of democratic revolutions--from 1776 to 1848--entailed not only the reorganization of institutions of governance and norms of political legitimacy, but also a dramatic transformation in the iconography and symbolism of political power. The personal and external rule of the king, whose body was the physical locus of political authority, was replaced with the impersonal and immanent self-rule of the people, whose power could not be incontestably embodied. This posed representational difficulties that went beyond questions of institutionalization and law, extending into the aesthetic realm of visualization, composition, and form. How to make the people's sovereign will tangible to popular judgment was, and is, a crucial problem of democratic political aesthetics. The Democratic Sublime offers an interdisciplinary exploration of how the revolutionary proliferation of popular assemblies--crowds, demonstrations, gatherings of the "people out of doors"--came to be central to the political aesthetics of democracy during the age of democratic revolutions. Jason Frank argues that popular assemblies allowed the people to manifest as a collective actor capable of enacting dramatic political reforms and change. Moreover, Frank asserts that popular assemblies became privileged sites of democratic representation as they claimed to support the voice of the people while also signaling the material plenitude beyond any single representational claim. Popular assemblies continue to retain this power, in part, because they embody that which escapes representational capture: they disrupt the representational space of appearance and draw their power from the ineffability and resistant materiality of the people's will. Engaging with a wide range of sources, from canonical political theorists (Rousseau, Burke, and Tocqueville) to the novels of Hugo, the visual culture of the barricades, and the memoirs of popular insurgents, The Democratic Sublime demonstrates how making the people's sovereign will tangible to popular judgment became a central dilemma of modern democracy, and how it remains so today.

This volume seeks to develop processual understandings of how novelty emerges in the processes of organizing by drawing on scholarship from a diverse range of perspectives. The volume covers creativity, improvisation, invention, entrepreneurship, and innovation in organizations.

The past few years have witnessed a resurgence in the study of British literary modernism. With recent publications on modernist American poetry and increasingly appreciative attitudes toward modern British novelists like Joseph Conrad and E. M. Forster, many scholars are experiencing a renewed interest in modernism. In The Modernist as Pragmatist, Brian May investigates modernist works that have been, until recently, regarded largely as mere exercises in stale Victorian liberal ideology. Breaking from one current interpretation of Forster as an innovative and perhaps objectionable representative of modernist fictional audacity, May keenly argues that Forster is neither a traditional liberal nor an imperial modernist stylist. He is, rather, a pragmatic liberal critic of both unreconstructed Victorian liberalism and unreckoning modernist aestheticism. May also looks at the debate between two contemporary progressive pragmatists, Richard Rorty and Cornel West, who have turned to the liberalism of the past as an avenue toward the future. First clarifying the terms of the debate, May then tries to resolve it using the writings of E. M. Forster to discuss some of the major political and philosophical statements of Rorty and West. In turn, the works of these two philosophers are used as tools to gain insight into Forster's literary texts and cultural contexts. By bringing British literary history to American neopragmatist philosophy, May allows the reader to understand both more concretely, historically, and imaginatively. Persuasive new readings of A Passage to India, Howards End, and The Longest Journey are used to illustrate how Rorty and West offer a choice between pragmatisms. May's well-argued study offers an exploration of how literature and philososphy can lead to a fruitful dialogue that can complement formalism as well as traditional types of contextualism. It also persuasively connects Forster to the contemporary debates between liberalism and pragmatism, making this an important contribution to all scholars of modernism.

A valuable intervention in Kristevan scholarship and a significant and exciting contribution in its own right to post-structuralist discussions of ethical and political agency and practice. Contributors: Judith Butler, Tina Chanter, Marilyn Edelstein, Jean Graybeal, Suzanne Guerlac, Alice Jardine, Lisa Lowe, Noelle McAfee, Norma Claire Moruzzi, Kelly Oliver, Tilottma Rajan, Jacqueline Rose, Allison Weir, Mary Bittner Wiseman, Ewa Ziarek

Literary scholars largely agree that the Romantic period altered the definition of tragedy, but they have confined their analyses to Western European authors. Maksim Hanukai introduces a new, illuminating figure to this narrative, arguing that Russia’s national poet, Alexander Pushkin, can be understood as a tragic Romantic poet, although in a different mold than his Western counterparts. Many of Pushkin’s works move seamlessly between the closed world of traditional tragedy and the open world of Romantic tragic drama, and yet they follow neither the cathartic program prescribed by Aristotle nor the redemptive mythologies of the Romantics. Instead, the idiosyncratic and artistically mercurial Pushkin seized upon the newly unstable tragic mode to develop multiple, overlapping tragic visions. Providing new, innovative readings of such masterpieces as The Gypsies, Boris Godunov, The Little Tragedies, and The Bronze Horseman, Hanukai sheds light on an unexplored aspect of Pushkin’s work, while also challenging reigning theories about the fate of tragedy in the Romantic period.

This edited collection investigates the kinds of philosophical reflection we can undertake in the imaginative worlds of literature. Opening with a look into the relations between philosophical thought and literary interpretation, the volume proceeds through absorbing discussions of the ways we can see life through the lens of literature, the relations between philosophical saying and literary showing, and some ways we can see the literary past philosophically and assess its significance for the present. Taken as a whole, the volume shows how imagined contexts can be a source of knowledge, a source of conceptual clarification, and a source of insight and understanding. And because philosophical thinking is undertaken, after all, in words, a heightened sensitivity to the precise employments of our words – particularly philosophically central words such as truth, reality, perception, knowledge, selfhood, illusion, understanding, falsehood – can bring a clarity and a refreshed sense of the life that our words take on in fully-described contexts of usage. And in these imagined contexts we can also see more acutely and deeply into the meaning of words about words – metaphor and figurative tropes, verbal coherence, intelligibility, implication, sense, and indeed the word “meaning” itself. Moving from a philosophical issue into a literary world in which the central concepts of that issue are in play can thus enrich our comprehension of those concepts and, in the strongest cases, substantively change the way we see them. With a combination of conceptual acuity and literary sensitivity, this volume maps out some of the territory that philosophical reflection and literary engagement share.

In this book Lutheran theologian Paul Hinlicky makes the deeply conflicted origins of Lutheran theology fruitful for the future. Exploring this intellectual and spiritual tradition of thought through its major historical chapters, Hinlicky rejects essentialist projects, exposing the debilitating binaries such programs engender and perpetuate, to establish an authentic Luther-theology or Lutheran theology. Hinlicky excavates the ways that throughout a five-hundred-year tradition the legacy of Luther texts has been appropriated, retooled, subverted, or developed. Readers of this introduction will thus be critically equipped to make intellectually honest appropriations of the Luther legacy in the plurality of contemporary contexts in which this iteration of Christian theology will continue.

A selection of Repeater authors choose their favourite forgotten horror stories for this new anthology, with each also writing a critical introduction for the story of their choice. A selection of Repeater authors choose their favourite horror stories for this new anthology, with each writing a critical introduction for the story of their choice. Edited by novelist and Repeater publisher Tariq Goddard and "horror philosopher" Eugene Thacker, The Repeater Book of the Occult is a new anthology of horror stories that explores the ever-shifting boundaries between the natural and supernatural, between the real and the unreal. As the editors note, "In the grey zone between what appears and what is, lies horror. But horror writing is also a certain disposition, a way of thinking based on a suspicion regarding the world as it is given to us, and a doubt regarding the accepted ways of explaining that world to us - and for us." The Repeater Book of the Occult includes introductions by Repeater authors such as Leila Taylor, Carl Neville, Rhian E Jones, and Elvia Wilk, and features horror classics by Algernon Blackwood, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Edgar Allan Poe, as well as forgotten gems by authors such as W.W. Jacobs, Mark Twain, and Sheridan Le Fanu.