Introduces the most important terms for understanding literature, past and present.
Literature Now argues that modern literary history is currently the main site of theoretical and methodological reflection in literary studies. Via 19 key terms, the book takes stock of recent scholarship and demonstrates how analyses of particular historical phenomena have modified our understanding of crucial notions like archive, book, event, media, objects, style and the senses. The book not only reveals a rich diversity of subjects and approaches but also identifies the most salient traits of literature and literary studies today.
Leading literary critics and historians offer thought-provoking arguments as well as authoritative explorations of the key terms of literary studies providing students as well as scholars with a rich resource for exploring theoretical issues from a historically informed perspective.
Key Features
Organised around the key terms used in literary studies today: archive, book, medium, translation, subjects, senses, animals, objects, politics, time, invention, event, generation, period, beauty, mimesis, style, popular and genrePuts literary history at the forefront of theoretical and methodological reflection in literary studiesOriginal chapters by leading literary critics, theorists and historians
Sascha Bru is professor at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Leuven (Belgium). He has produced over a dozen books on European avant-gardes and modernisms, including Democracy, Law and the Modernist Avant-Gardes: Writing in the State of Exception (EUP, 2009) and the co-edited volume The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Europe, 1880-1940 (OUP, 2016).
Ben De Bruyn is an associate professor of comparative literature at Maastricht University. Mainly interested in twentieth and twenty-first century fiction, he has published on three sets of topics, namely theories and histories of reading practices, the representation of space, place and planet and the literary imagination of commodities and various lifestyle practices. He is the author of Wolfgang Iser. A Companion (New York/Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012).
Michel Delville teaches English and American literatures, as well as comparative literature, at the University of Liège. He is the author or co-author of The American Prose Poem, J.G. Ballard, Hamlet & Co, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and the Secret History of Maximalism, Food, Poetry, and the Aesthetics of Consumption: Eating the Avant-Garde and Crossroads Poetics: Text, Image, Music, Film & Beyond. He has also co-edited several volumes of essays on contemporary poetics.
