This book brings the ideas of French feminist Hélène Cixous to bear on a number of Early Modern English texts. The female characters of Mariam from Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam, Lavinia from William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus as well as John Milton’s Eve in Paradise Lost and the poetic voice of Isabella Whitney are investigated through the application of Cixous’s theories of figurative decapitation and disgorgement. The author examines the creation of a unique discourse through the blending of what is stereotypically referred to as “female text” with “male discourse,” which results in what Cixous would call “bisexual discourse.”

The 'obese' female body has often been portrayed as the 'other' to the slender body. However, this process of 'othering', or viewing as different, has created a repressive discourse, where 'excess' has increasingly come to be studied as a 'physical abnormality' or a signifier of a 'personality defect' in contemporary Western society. This book engages with the multifarious re-imaginings of the 'excessive' embodiment in contemporary women's writing, drawing specifically on the construction of this form of embodiment in the works of Fay Weldon, Jeanette Winterson, Margaret Atwood, Claude Tardat, and Judith Moore, whose texts offer a distinct literary response to the rigidly homogeneous and limiting representations of fatness, while prompting heterogeneous approaches to reading the 'excessive' female embodiment.

This revised and expanded volume examines the intersections of aesthetics and morality and asks what Decadence means to art and society at various moments in British literature. As time passes, the definition of what it takes to be D/decadent changes. The decline from a higher standard, social malaise, aesthetic ennui – all these ideas presume certain facts about the past, the present, and the linear nature of time itself. To reject the past as a given, and to relish the subtleties of present nuance, is the beginning of Decadence. The conflict underlying the contributions to this collection is that of society's moral contempt vis-a-vis the focus on the fleeting present on part of the purportedly decadent artists; who in turn thought the truly decadent to be the stranglehold society maintained on individual interpretation and the interpretation of oneself.

The contributions to this book amply demonstrate the richness, vitality, and complexity of the colonial transactions between Britain and India over the last two centuries, and they do so by approaching the topic from a specific perspective: by interpreting the rubric 'new readings' as broadly, creatively, and productively as possible. They cover a wide range of literary responses and genres: eighteenth-century drama, the gothic novel, verse, autobiography, history, religious writing, journalism, women's memoirs, travel writing, popular fiction, and the modernist novel. Brought together in one volume, these essays offer a small, but representative sample of the multifaceted literary and cultural traffic between Britain and India in the colonial period. In the richness and diversity of the various contributors' strategies and interpretations, these new readings urge us to return once again to texts that we think we know, as well as to explore those that we do not, with a freshly renewed sense of their complexity, immediacy, and relevance.

Ob-scene Spaces in Australian Narrative is an exhaustive survey of Australian literature proposing itself as a journey through time and space. With a careful selection of texts which recount Australian history from the early days of white colonization to the present, this study endeavours to cast light on the process of socio-topographic construction that the settlers imposed upon the continent.As suggested by the title, the textual inquiry conducted in this book is driven by the stimulating ambiguity that lies between physical space and its discursive construction. A selection of canonical and non-canonical texts by authors ranging from Henry Lawson to Christos Tsiolkas aims to reveal the relationship between the space of the city (the scene) and the outback (the ob-scene space beyond the metropolitan area) and its role in the process of spatial construction that, through the last two centuries, has shaped Australia.Pablo Armellino’s distinctive approach to Australian literature makes Ob-scene Spaces in Australian Narrative a very interesting work. Using a carefully selected range of novels, linked together using social and literary theory, it recounts the history of colonization in Australia in a particularly approachable manner. Through the analysis of each text the reader seamlessly learns about the expansion of the frontier, the creation of an ob-scene space beyond it and the use the Discourse makes of this mechanism. These characteristics would appeal to both an academic audience, which would appreciate the detailed text analysis, and a general audience, which would enjoy the historical and thematic aspect of the book.– Professor Carmen Concilio and Professor Pietro Deandrea, Facoltà di Lingue, Università di Torino

The dynamic between the biographer and the subject is, perhaps, one of the most fascinating aspects of biography as a genre. How does the biographer stage the illusion that is the narrative life, the illusion that the subject assumes a living form through words? In contrast to purely fictional forms, biography writing does not allow total freedom to the biographer in this creative act. Ideally, a biography's backbone is structured by accurate historical facts. But its spirit lies elsewhere. The way a biographer captures the spirit of a subject is intriguingly shaped by the historical distance between the two. We find three types of distance in biographical narrative: First, where the biographer and the subject personally know one another; second, where the biographer is a near contemporary of the subject; and third, where biographer and subject are distinctly separated; in some cases, by hundreds of years.In this revised and expanded edition, Rana Tekcan explores how some of the most accomplished biographers manage to recreate "life" across time and space. She looks at their illusionary art through the narrative strategies in Samuel Johnson's Life of Savage, James Boswell's Life of Johnson, Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians, Michael Holroyd's Lytton Strachey, Park Honan's Jane Austen, and Andrew Motion's Keats.