Définir de façon univalente la notion de mythe et celle d'utopie semble en soi une entreprise tout à fait utopique. Par ailleurs, jumeler les deux notions, celle du mythe et celle d'utopie, reléve d'un processus de réflexion qui peut facilement être à double tranchant: le mythe, construction par excellende de l'imaginaire humain, ne se situe-t-il pas ailleurs que dans un non-lieu? -- et l'utopie, quant à elle, ne fait-elle pas écho au mythe, à la fois s'en inspirant, le niant et le transformant? Redondance possible, et aussi, parfois, refus des deux domaines à admettre leur interdépendance, cheninement parallèle surtout et création commune de ce qui, en fin de compte, s'avère mythe transformé, utopie revistée. Toutefois, mythes et utopies quels que soient la position choisie, le point de vue défendu, semblent faire bon ménage, à en juger par ce projet, mavec dix-neuf textes couvrant principalement la littérature contemporaine des femmes, mais puisant parfois aux oeuvres antérieures qui ont déjà préparé le terrain, en offrant des visions d'existences idylliques -- ne serait-ce que littéraires.

The conviction that the development and promotion of the arts, humanities and culture through the study of literature and the aesthetic are the fundamental constituents of any progress in society is at the heart of this volume. The essays gathered here explore the role of the imagination and aesthetic awareness in an age when the corporatization of knowledge is in the process of transforming literary studies, and political commitment is in danger of disappearing behind a supposedly post-ideological late-capitalist consensus. The main focus of the volume is the mutual implication of aesthetics and ideology and the status and value of different types of art within the political arena. Challenging issues in contemporary aesthetics are examined within the wider framework of current debates on the disappearance of the real, the crisis in representation, and the use of new media. The wide range of examples collected here, stretching from experimental poetry in post-war Germany, political commitment in twentieth-century French theatre, and countercultural Rumanian theatre under Ceaușescu, to Neo-Victorian fiction, Verbatim theatre in the UK, and political theatre for the masses in Estonia, vouchsafe unique insights into the intersection of aesthetics and ideology and the practical consequences thereof. As such, the volume opens up a space for a meaningful engagement with authentic forms of art from inside and outside the Anglosphere, and, ultimately, uses these examples as a platform from which to imagine some form of “aesthethics”, representing an ideal union of aesthetics and ideology. This concept, first coined by the French philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, will prove to be relevant both within the parameters of the examples discussed here, but also beyond, for the contributors to this volume are unanimous in refusing to believe that aesthetics and ideology can exist one without the other, and in recognizing the centrality of ethics in any discussion of these notions.

More than fifty specialists have contributed to this new edition of volume 1 of The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. The design of the original work has established itself so firmly as a workable solution to the immense problems of analysis, articulation and coordination that it has been retained in all its essentials for the new edition. The task of the new contributors has been to revise and integrate the lists of 1940 and 1957, to add materials of the following decade, to correct and refine the bibliographical details already available, and to re-shape the whole according to a new series of conventions devised to give greater clarity and consistency to the entries.