For much of the 20th century the modernist city was articulated in terms of narratives of progress and development. Today the neoliberal city confronts us with all the cultural 'noise' of disorder and excess meaning. As this book demonstrates, for more than 40 years London-based writer, film-maker and 'psychogeographer' Iain Sinclair has proved to be one of the most incisive commentators on the contemporary city: tracing the emerging contours of a metropolis where the meeting of global and local is never without incident. Iain Sinclair: Noise, Neoliberalism and the Matter of London explores Sinclair's investigations into the nature of conflicting urban realities through an examination of the ways in which the noise of neoliberal excess intersects with the noise of literary experiment. In this way, the book casts new light on theorisations of the city in the contemporary era.

For much of the 20th century the modernist city was articulated in terms of narratives of progress and development. Today the neoliberal city confronts us with all the cultural 'noise' of disorder and excess meaning. As this book demonstrates, for more than 40 years London-based writer, film-maker and 'psychogeographer' Iain Sinclair has proved to be one of the most incisive commentators on the contemporary city: tracing the emerging contours of a metropolis where the meeting of global and local is never without incident. Iain Sinclair: Noise, Neoliberalism and the Matter of London explores Sinclair's investigations into the nature of conflicting urban realities through an examination of the ways in which the noise of neoliberal excess intersects with the noise of literary experiment. In this way, the book casts new light on theorisations of the city in the contemporary era.

Contemporary British and American fiction is defined by financial markets' power over the global publishing industry and the global economy.

THE WILEY BLACKWELL COMPANION TO CONTEMPORARY BRITISH AND IRISH LITERATURE An insightful guide to the exploration of modern British and Irish literature The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Literature is a must-have guide for anyone hoping to navigate the world of new British and Irish writing. Including modern authors and poets from the 1960s through to the 21st century, the Companion provides a thorough overview of contemporary poetry, fiction, and drama by some of the most prominent and noteworthy writers. Seventy-three comprehensive chapters focus on individual authors as well as such topics as Englishness and identity, contemporary Science Fiction, Black writing in Britain, crime fiction, and the influence of globalization on British and Irish Literature. Written in four parts, The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Literature includes comprehensive examinations of individual authors, as well as a variety of themes that have come to define the contemporary period: ethnicity, gender, nationality, and more. A thorough guide to the main figures and concepts in contemporary literature from Britain and Ireland, this two-volume set: Includes studies of notable figures such as Seamus Heaney and Angela Carter, as well as more recently influential writers such as Zadie Smith and Sarah Waters. Covers topics such as LGBT fiction, androgyny in contemporary British Literature, and post-Troubles Northern Irish Fiction Features a broad range of writers and topics covered by distinguished academics Includes an analysis of the interplay between individual authors and the major themes of the day, and whether an examination of the latter enables us to appreciate the former. The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Literature provides essential reading for students as well as academics seeking to learn more about the history and future direction of contemporary British and Irish Literature.

This book situates the film-maker Patrick Keiller alongside the writers W.G. Sebald and Iain Sinclair as the three leading voices in 'English psychogeography', offering new insights to key works including London, The Rings of Saturn, and Lights Out for the Territory. Excavating social and political contexts while also providing plentiful close analysis, it examines the cultivation of a distinctive 'affective' mode or sensibility especially attuned to the cultural anxieties of the twentieth century's closing decades. Landscape and Subjectivity explores motifs including essayism, the reconciliation of creativity with market forces, and the foregrounding of an often agonised or melancholic. It asks whether the work can, collectively, be seen to constitute a 'critical theory of contemporary space' and suggests that Keiller, Sebald, and Sinclair's contributions represent a highly significant moment in English culture's engagement with landscape, environment, and itself. The book's analyses are fuelled by archival and topographical research and are responsive to various interdisciplinary contexts, including the tradition of the 'English Journey', the set of ideas associated with the 'spatial turn', critical theory, the so-called 'heritage debate', and more recent theorisation of the 'anthropocene'.

The contributions in this collection offer a wide range of stylistic perspectives on landscape, place and environment, by focusing on a variety of text-types ranging from poetry, the Bible, fictional and non-fictional prose, to newspaper articles, condo names, online texts and exhibitions. Employing both established and cutting-edge methodologies from, among others, corpus linguistics, metaphor studies, Text World Theory and ecostylistics, the eleven chapters in the volume provide an overview of how landscape, place and environment are encoded and can be investigated in literary and non-literary discourse. The studies collected here stand as evidence of the possibility of, and the need for, a “stylistics of landscape”, which emphasises how represented spaces are made manifest linguistically; a “stylistics of place”, which focuses on the discursive and affective qualities of those represented spaces; and a “stylistics of environment”, which reiterates the urgency for environmentally-responsible humanities, able to support a change in the anthropocentric narrative which poses humans as the most important variable in the human-animal and human-environment relationships.

Ancient Egypt has always been a source of fascination to writers, artists and architects in the West. This book is the first study to address representations of Ancient Egypt in the modern imagination, breaking down conventional disciplinary boundaries between fields such as History, Classics, Art History, Fashion, Film, Archaeology, Egyptology, and Literature to further a nuanced understanding of ancient Egypt in cultures stretching from the eighteenth century to the present day, emphasising how some of the various meanings of ancient Egypt to modern people have traversed time and media. Divided into three themes, the chapters scrutinise different aspects of the use of ancient Egypt in a variety of media, looking in particular at the ways in which Egyptology as a discipline has influenced representations of Egypt, ancient Egypt's associations with death and mysticism, as well as connections between ancient Egypt and gendered power. The diversity of this study aims to emphasise both the multiplicity and the patterning of popular responses to ancient Egypt, as well as the longevity of this phenomenon and its relevance today.