Randall Stevenson

This is a book on comets – visually stunning dirty space snowballs of mostly ice and dust that formed during the birth of the solar system 4.6 billion years ago. Most comets have stable orbits in the outer reaches of the solar system past the planet Neptune, or in the still-more remote Oort Cloud. But if destabilized by gravitational forces, they may move into the inner solar system – with some risk of collision with the Earth, and some justification for the dread, fear, and awe they have inspired in many different cultures and societies around the world and throughout time. The depiction of comets in popular culture is firmly rooted in the long Western tradition of seeing comets as harbingers of doom and as omens of world-altering change. Comets are thus horrifying and exhilarating, at the same time, with a profound impact on earthly societies and cultures. Comets and other celestials as fictional devices offer, as this collection of essays show, a tremendous opportunity to radically cut up the infectious wounds of our post-industrial society for close inspection and anamnesis. This volume contains fluid examples of how comets, suns, moons, planets all have contributed to creating speculative yet sensitized narratives about some of the most urgent existential, ontological and ecological matters in the modern world. Essays by Terence Meaden, Randall Stevenson, Eric Sandberg, David Rennie, Amanda Silfver, and Niklas Salmose.

Academics, postgraduates, upper level undergraduates in Twentieth-Century Literature, The Novel, Modern Fiction, Narrative Theory / Narratology, Literary Criticism.

A wide-ranging study of shifting temporalities and their literary consequences in twentieth-century fictionFrom the Prime Meridian Conference of 1884 to the celebration of the millennium in 2000; from the fiction of Joseph Conrad to the novels of William Gibson and W. G. Sebald, 'Reading the Times' offers fresh insight into modern narrative. It shows how profoundly the structure and themes of the novel depend on attitudes to the clock and to the sense of history's passage, tracing their origins in technologic, economic and social change. It offers a new and powerful way of understanding the relations of history with narrative form, outlining the development and demonstrating through incisive analyses of a very wide range of literary texts from late nineteenth to early twenty-first century their key role in shaping fictional narrative throughout this period. The result is a highly innovative literary history of twentieth-century fiction, based on an inventive, enabling method of understanding literature in relation to history in terms, in every sense, of its reading of its times. Key FeaturesProvides a detailed history of the role of the clock and temporality in twentieth-century lifeIncludes incisive analyses of this role's shaping of literary imagination traced in a very broad range of twentieth-century novelsProvides a unique, highly original literary history of the period's fiction

Oxford Textual Perspectives is a new series of informative and provocative studies focused upon literary texts (conceived of in the broadest sense of that term) and the technologies, cultures and communities that produce, inform, and receive them. It provides fresh interpretations of fundamental works and of the vital and challenging issues emerging in English literary studies. By engaging with the materiality of the literary text, its production, and reception history, and frequently testing and exploring the boundaries of the notion of text itself, the volumes in the series question familiar frameworks and provide innovative interpretations of both canonical and less well-known works. The Great War shaped the modern world, and much of its literary imagination. Literature and the Great War insightfully reassesses this impact, analysing a wide range of authors, both established and less well-known, and re-examining critical judgements, popular assumptions - even 'myths' - about war writing that have developed in the century or so that has followed. By looking at all genres of Great War writing in a single volume, the study allows reconsideration of the relative merits of the period's much-praised poetry and its generally less celebrated narrative texts. Randall Stevenson looks far beyond the work of soldier-authors, considering also the role of an older generation of writers - ones whose reputations were established before the war began - as well as the impact of war on the modernist imagination developing afterwards, in the 1920s. Literature and the Great War examines the context in which this literature was produced. Taking into consideration military life, the role of newspapers, war correspondents, politicians and propagandists. The unintelligible violence of the Great War placed a huge amount of pressure on the language, imagination, and textual practice of all who attempted to describe it. Incisively reconsidering these fundamental issues, Literature and the Great War challenges and rejuvenates approaches to its subject, redefining the interconnections of history, culture, and literary imagination in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Oxford Textual Perspectives is a new series of informative and provocative studies focused upon literary texts (conceived of in the broadest sense of that term) and the technologies, cultures and communities that produce, inform, and receive them. It provides fresh interpretations of fundamental works and of the vital and challenging issues emerging in English literary studies. By engaging with the materiality of the literary text, its production, and reception history, and frequently testing and exploring the boundaries of the notion of text itself, the volumes in the series question familiar frameworks and provide innovative interpretations of both canonical and less well-known works. The Great War shaped the modern world, and much of its literary imagination. Literature and the Great War insightfully reassesses this impact, analysing a wide range of authors, both established and less well-known, and re-examining critical judgements, popular assumptions - even 'myths' - about war writing that have developed in the century or so that has followed. By looking at all genres of Great War writing in a single volume, the study allows reconsideration of the relative merits of the period's much-praised poetry and its generally less celebrated narrative texts. Randall Stevenson looks far beyond the work of soldier-authors, considering also the role of an older generation of writers - ones whose reputations were established before the war began - as well as the impact of war on the modernist imagination developing afterwards, in the 1920s. Literature and the Great War examines the context in which this literature was produced. Taking into consideration military life, the role of newspapers, war correspondents, politicians and propagandists. The unintelligible violence of the Great War placed a huge amount of pressure on the language, imagination, and textual practice of all who attempted to describe it. Incisively reconsidering these fundamental issues, Literature and the Great War challenges and rejuvenates approaches to its subject, redefining the interconnections of history, culture, and literary imagination in the early decades of the twentieth century.

English Literature in the 1960s soon threw off its post-war weariness and the tepid influences of the previous decade. New voices, new visions, and new commitments profoundly reshaped writing during the sixties, and throughout the rest of the century. Drama thrived on its rapidly rebuilt foundations. New freedoms of style and form revitalised fiction. Poetry, too, gradually recovered the variety and inventiveness of earlier years. As well as comprehensively charting these changes in the literary field, Randall Stevenson persuasively pinpoints their origins in the historical, social, and intellectual pressures of the times. Literary developments are revealingly related to the wider evolution and profound changes in English experience in the late twentieth century - to shadows of war and loss of empire; declining influences of class; shifting relations between the genders; emergent minority and counter-cultures; and the broadening democratization of contemporary life in general. Analyses of the rise of literary theory, of publishing and the book trade, and of the pervasive influences of modernism and postmodernism contribute further to an impressively thorough, insightful description of writing in the later twentieth century - a literary period Stevenson shows to be far more imaginative and exciting than has yet been recognized. Lucid, accessible, and engaging, this volume of the Oxford English Literary History presents a unique illumination of its age - one we have lived through, but are only just beginning to understand. The first full account of its period, it will set the agenda for discussion of late twentieth-century literature for many years to come.

English Literature in the 1960s soon threw off its post-war weariness and the tepid influences of the previous decade. New voices, new visions, and new commitments profoundly reshaped writing during the 60s, and throughout the rest of the century. Drama thrived on its rapidly rebuilt foundations. New freedoms of style and form revitalised fiction. Poetry, too, gradually recovered the variety and inventiveness of earlier years. As well as comprehensively charting these changes in the literary field, Randall Stevenson persuasively pinpoints their origins in the historical, social, and intellectual pressures of the times. Literary developments are revealingly related to the wider evolution and profound changes in English experience in the late twentieth-century to shadows of war and loss of empire; declining influences of class; shifting relations between the genders; emergent minority and counter-cultures; and the broadening democratization of contemporary life in general. Analyses of the rise of literary theory, of publishing and the book trade, and of the pervasive influences of modernism and postmodernism contribute further to an impressively thorough, insightful description of writing in the later twentieth-century a literary period Stevenson shows to be far more imaginative and exciting than has yet been recognised. Lucid, accessible, and engaging, this volume of the Oxford English Literary History presents a unique illumination of its age - one we have lived through, but are only just beginning to understand. The first full account of its period, it will set the agenda for discussion of late twentieth-century literature for many years to come.

The last two decades have seen a new renaissance in Scottish literary culture in which the Scottish novel has attained new heights of maturity, confidence and challenge. The Scottish Novel since the Seventies is the first major critical reassessment of the developments in this period. Ranging from the work of longer-established authors such as Robin Jenkins, Muriel Spark and William McIlvanney to the more recent experiments of Alasdair Gray James Kelman and Janice Galloway, it provides a new critical focus on the intriguing relationship between continuity and innovation which characterises the novel's response to the complex changes in Scottish culture and society during the past twenty years. The contributors assess the work of an extensive number of writers in thecontext of a correspondingly wide range of issues: gender, postmodernism, political identity, archaism and myth, and the theme of disintegration. There are also chapters on the continuing growth of the 'Glasgow novel' and film adaptations of Scottish fiction. A bibliography of Scottish fiction since 1970 completes this critical account.