This book moves beyond conventional conceptions of space and place to explore how the spatial imagination has informed our postmodern mapping of literature, culture, history, geography and politics. In this volume, scholars from different academic fields contest new territories for critical expression, venturing into a geocritical discussion of notions of identity, borders, territory, cognitive geographies, glocal cultural mobility, gendered spaces, (post)colonial cartographies, and spaces of resistance. These brilliant discussions of the postmodern dialectics of space and place invite a reappraisal of the value of space in our social, political and historical realities, thus extending the geographical imagination beyond its physical and territorial manifestations and investigating its hitherto uncharted spiritual, psychic, emotional, literary, and symbolic terrains. Bringing together theoretical and critical contributions in the fields of culture, history, politics, and literature, this engaging work invites readers to think geocritically about the significance of space and place in the postmodern age. It represents essential reading for students, critics, and scholars from various academic fields and disciplines, including history, geography, cultural studies, anthropology, political science, literature and critical theory.

Diaspora studies have tended to privilege urban landscapes over rural ones, wanting to avoid the racial homogeneity, conservatism, and xenophobia usually associated with the latter. This book examines the work of various writers to show how it expresses the appeal that rural and wilderness spaces can hold for the diasporic imagination.

By focusing on Chinese cultural formations and critical discourses of the last decade of the century, the author dissects the intellectual, economic, and political contradictions of a turbulent era. This wide-ranging, deeply interdisciplinary work demarcates the cultural terrain by examining diverse media: film, television, avant-garde art, and literature, as well as critical theory and intellectual history.

This book explores how three Anglo-Irish writers, J.C. Mangan, J.S. Le Fanu and Bram Stoker, use settings in their short fictions to recreate, depict and confront Ireland’s colonial situation in the nineteenth century. This study provides an innovative approach by targeting a genre (the short story) which has not been explored in its entirety— certainly not within nineteenth century Ireland - much less using a postcolonial approach to the short story. Added to this is the fact that it analyses how these writers used settings as an anticolonial tool. To do so, the book is divided into two major sections, an analysis of Irish settings and non-Irish ones. It works on the premise that all three writers used the idea of displacement to target colonialism and its effects on Irish society. In short, this book addresses a gap in scholarship, as the Irish Gothic short story as a decolonizing tool has not been sufficiently and globally studied.

Containing more than fifty essays by major literary scholars, International Postmodernism divides into four main sections. The volume starts off with a section of eight introductory studies dealing with the subject from different points of view followed by a section that deals with postmodernism in other arts than literature, while a third section discusses renovations of narrative genres and other strategies and devices in postmodernist writing. The final and fourth section deals with the reception and processing of postmodernism in different parts of the world. Three important aspects add to the special character of International Postmodernism: The consistent distinction between postmodernity and postmodernism; equal attention to the making and diffusion of postmodernism and the workings of literature in general; and the focus on the text and the reader (i.e., the reader's knowledge, experience, interests, and competence) as crucial factors in text interpretation. This comprehensive study does not expressly focus on American postmodernism, although American interpretations of postmodernism are a major point of reference. The recognition that varying literary and cultural conditions in this world are bound to produce endless varieties of postmodernism made the editors, Hans Bertens and Douwe Fokkema, opt for the title International Postmodernism.

Ecopoetics and the Global Landscape: Critical Essays surveys ecopoetry from a global perspective across different historical epochs. Its comparative approach foregrounds the importance of ecopoetics within the context of distinct national literatures and cultures to reveal the ubiquitous intersection of poetry with ecocriticism. The collection analyzes environmental problems resulting from the legacies of colonialism and focuses on issues of environmental justice and indigenous issues as well as on the intersection of genocide studies and environmentalism. It also examines ecologically-informed modes of relating to the world. In particular, it engages with interactions between the human and nonhuman as well as mind and matter. Finally, it broadens the scope of place to include both the absent land of exiled peoples, and the urban, built environment.

Winner of the 2021 European Society of Modern Greek Studies Book Prize Shortlisted for the 2022 Runciman Award The recent economic crisis in Greece has triggered national self-reflection and prompted a re-examination of the political and cultural developments in the country since 1974. While many other books have investigated the politics and economics of this transition, this study turns its attention to the cultural aspects of post-dictatorship Greece. By problematizing the notion of modernization, it analyzes socio-cultural trends in the years between the fall of the junta and the economic crisis, highlighting the growing diversity and cultural ambivalence of Greek society. With its focus on issues such as identity, antiquity, religion, language, literature, media, cinema, youth, gender and sexuality, this study is one of the first to examine cultural trends in Greece over the last fifty years. Aiming for a more nuanced understanding of recent history, the study offers a fresh perspective on current problems.

Now in paperback, Fredric Jameson’s most wide-ranging work seeks to crystalize a definition of ”postmodernism”. Jameson’s inquiry looks at the postmodern across a wide landscape, from “high” art to “low” from market ideology to architecture, from painting to “punk” film, from video art to literature.

Productive Postmodernism addresses the differing accounts of postmodernism found in the work of Fredric Jameson and Linda Hutcheon, a debate that centers around the two theorists' senses of pastiche and parody. For Jameson, postmodern texts are ahistorical, playing with pastiched images and aesthetic forms, and are therefore unable to provide a critical purchase on culture and capital. For Hutcheon, postmodern fiction and architecture remain political, opening spaces for social critique through a parody that deconstructs official history. Thinking in the space between these two sharply different positions, the essays in this collection investigate a broad range of contemporary fiction, film, and architecture—from such narratives as Don DeLillo's Libra, Toni Morrison's Beloved, and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, to the vastly different spaces of Las Vegas casinos and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum—in order to ask what the cultural work of a postmodern aesthetic might be.

The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms expands the scope of modernism beyond its traditional focus on English and Irish literature to explore the contributions of artists from countries and regions like the US, Cuba, Spain, the Balkans, China, Japan, India, Vietnam, and Nigeria.