This volume focuses on the antagonist and collaborative relationship between autonomy and commitment as applied to a vast field of artistic practices, from Modernist sculpture to the contemporary installations of the yBa and others, through the writings on art of Lewis, Fry and Pound, film, drama, music, photography and fashion photography, Art Nouveau style and such experimental forms as the semi-graphic novel and Cummings and Lewandowska's artist pedagogical book. These major art forms are tackled in the light of the autonomy and commitment prism and of aesthetic theories. Benjamin's aura, Adorno's commitment as well as more recent concepts and works by Deleuze, de Bolla, Nancy or Lacoue-Labarthe are brought in together with the aesthetic theories put forward by such artists as Fry to address the interconnections between autonomy and commitment in relation to Modernist and contemporary British arts.

This collection of essays means to explore the interaction between autonomy and commitment in an attempt at revisiting and possibly, revising conventional literary history. Until recently, literary history has indeed tended to present twentieth century British literature as either autonomous or committed, but such a position certainly needs qualification. By addressing the joint issues of autonomy and commitment and basing their arguments on such theoretical writings as those of Adorno, Benjamin, Jameson, Rancière or Attridge, the essays presented here come to question the canonical definitions of modernism as experimental literature, the literature of the 1940s and 1950s as committed and post-modern fiction as self-reflexive and autonomous. Through reflections on experimentation and ideology, narcissism and metafiction, aestheticism and militancy, abstraction and ethical involvement, they flesh out the very definitions of autonomy and commitment, confront the two notions and relentlessly test their interaction, thus bringing out the complexities and subtleties of the various moments and movements that make up the literary landscape of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st.

Introduction -- Contemporary British Poetry and Enigmaticalness -- Continuing 'Poetry Wars' in Twenty-First-Century British Poetry -- Committed and Autonomous Art -- Iconoclasm and Enigmatical Commitment -- The Double Consciousness of Modernism -- Conclusion.

Various art forms inscribe, program or perform the preference of relationship. In so doing, they put otherness high on their aesthetic agenda by caring about the cultural other, the other of gender, race, class or history. Such art forms from different periods promote a mode of sensibility to the other, whether the foreign or the invisible, or both, in their various manifestations. Sensibility to otherness is envisaged through the means of strident or humble art-forms and aesthetic choices, from the overtly experimental, to subdued adaptation. In confronting and welcoming the other art object, the other culture, or the othered citizen, art objects to the tyranny of the same and promotes such values as attentiveness, responsiveness and responsibility to forms of otherness, i.e. to the ways in which art cares about, or even takes care of the other. This implies the practice of an ethic of alterity (as distinct from the formulation of general rules) that is accountable for making the spectator or listener pay attention to social, economic and cultural invisibilities. Such an ethic of alterity joins hands with the political and may help chart the evolution of the objects and forms of engagement from the Victorian period to the present.

A cultural history of the first truly modern art market, Marketing Art in the British Isles, 1700 to the Present furthers the burgeoning exploration of Britain's struggle to carve a niche for itself on the international art scene. Bringing together scholars from the UK, US, Europe, and Asia, this collection sheds new light on such crucial notions as the internationalization of the art market; the emergence of an increasingly complex exhibition culture; issues of national rivalry and emulation; artists' individual and collective strategies for their own promotion and survival; the persistent anti-commercialism of an elite group of art lovers and critics and accusations of philistinism levelled at the middle classes; as well as an unquestionable native British genius at reconciling jarring discourses. Essays explore the unresolved tension between artistic aspirations and commercial interest - a tension that has come to shape Britain's national artistic tradition - from the perspectives of artists, dealers and (super-) collectors, and the upwardly mobile middle classes whose consumerism gave rise to the British art market as it is known today. Specific case studies include Whistler, Roger Fry, Damien Hirst, and Charles Saatchi; essays consider art markets from London and Manchester to Paris and Flanders.

Editors Jean-Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega) have assembled a volume which addresses the relationship between trauma and ethics, and moves one step further to engage with vulnerability studies in their relation to literature and literary form. It consists of an introduction and of twelve articles written by specialists from various European countries and includes an interview with US novelist Jayne Anne Philips, conducted by her translator into French, Marc Amfreville, addressing her latest novel, Quiet Dell, through the victimhood-vulnerability prism. The corpus of primary sources on which the volume is based draws on various literary backgrounds in English, from Britain to India, through the USA. The editors draw on material from the ethics of alterity, trauma studies and the ethics of vulnerability in line with the work of moral philosophers like Emmanuel Levinas, as well as with a more recent and challenging tradition of continental thinkers, virtually unknown so far in the English-speaking world, represented by Guillaume Le Blanc, Nathalie Maillard, and Corinne Pelluchon, among others. Yet another related line of thought followed in the volume is that represented by feminist critics like Catriona McKenzie, Wendy Rogers and Susan Dodds.

The interdisciplinary series “Law & Literature” takes a systematic look at the correlation between literature and the law. The studies presented in this series analyze the complex interrelation between two cultural spheres which are not only at the basis of Western Culture and Society, but share in a common focus on texts. Bringing together contributions by jurists, historians of law, legal philosophers, and specialists in literary and cultural studies, this series reflects a trend in current inter- and transdisciplinary research which has recently shown rapid growth both in Europe and the United States.