The Complicit Text: Failures of Witnessing in Postwar Fiction identifies the causes of complicity in the face of unfolding atrocities by examining the works of Albert Camus, Milan Kunera, Kazuo Ishiguro, W. G. Sebald, Thomas Pynchon, and Margaret Atwood. Ivan Stacy argues that complicity often stems from narrative failures to bear witness to wrongdoing. However, literary fiction, he contends, can at once embody and examine forms of complicity on three different levels: as a theme within literary texts, as a narrative form, and also as it implicates readers themselves through empathetic engagement with the text. Furthermore, Stacy questions what forms of non-complicit action are possible and explores the potential for productive forms of compromise. Stacy discusses both individual dilemmas of complicity in the shadow of World War II and collective complicity in the context of contemporary concerns, such as the hegemony of neoliberalism and the climate emergency.

A YALSA 2015 Best Fiction for Young Adults Pick Two years ago, fifteen-year-old Jamie Henry breathed a sigh of relief when a judge sentenced his older sister to juvenile detention for burning down their neighbor's fancy horse barn. The whole town did. Because Crazy Cate Henry used to be a nice girl. Until she did a lot of bad things. Like drinking. And stealing. And lying. Like playing weird mind games in the woods with other children. Like making sure she always got her way. Or else. But today Cate got out. And now she's coming back for Jamie. Because more than anything, Cate Henry needs her little brother to know the truth about their past. A truth she's kept hidden for years. A truth she's not supposed to tell. Trust nothing and no one as you race toward the explosive conclusion of the gripping psychological thriller Complicit from Stephanie Kuehn, the William C. Morris Award--winning author of Charm & Strange.

A startling and superbly researched book demythologizing the North’s role in American slavery “The hardest question is what to do when human rights give way to profits. . . . Complicity is a story of the skeletons that remain in this nation’s closet.”—San Francisco Chronicle The North’s profit from—indeed, dependence on—slavery has mostly been a shameful and well-kept secret . . . until now. Complicity reveals the cruel truth about the lucrative Triangle Trade of molasses, rum, and slaves that linked the North to the West Indies and Africa. It also discloses the reality of Northern empires built on tainted profits—run, in some cases, by abolitionists—and exposes the thousand-acre plantations that existed in towns such as Salem, Connecticut. Here, too, are eye-opening accounts of the individuals who profited directly from slavery far from the Mason-Dixon line. Culled from long-ignored documents and reports—and bolstered by rarely seen photos, publications, maps, and period drawings—Complicity is a fascinating and sobering work that actually does what so many books pretend to do: shed light on America’s past.

Complicity in Fin-de-siècle Literature examines late-nineteenth century French understandings of literature as a morally collusive medium, which implicates readers, writers, and critics in risqué or illicit ideas and behaviour. It considers definitions of complicity from the period's evolving legal statutes, critical debates about literary 'bad influence', and modern theories of reader response, in order to achieve a deeper understanding of how cultural production of the period forged relationships of implication and collusion. While focusing on fin-de-siècle French culture, the book's theoretical discussions provide a new terminology and conceptual framework through which to analyse literary influence and reception, applicable to different historical periods and national settings. Interdisciplinary in nature, the study draws on methods associated with close reading, literary history, law and literature studies, cultural studies, and sociology of literature. Each of the book's chapters highlights how particular literary themes or techniques encouraged readers' identification with transgression and facilitated alternative forms of solidarity. The analysis draws on a range of case studies from different media forms, including: Naturalist, Decadent, and psychological novels, biographically revealing fiction ('romans à clefs'), little magazines ('petites revues'), and saucy magazines ('revues légères'). Texts written by well-known literary figures--such as Émile Zola, Octave Mirbeau, and Rachilde--appear alongside previously overlooked periodical and archival sources. The book's varied corpus reveals the widespread appeal of risqué topics and illicit solidarity across the literary spectrum.

This book explores the concept of complicity with regard to the politics of representation. Over the past decades,complicity critique has evolved and become integral to literary and cultural studies. Nonetheless, the concept of complicityremains fundamentally underresearched. Addressing topical and exigent concerns such as white supremacy, war and displacement, child abuse and mentalism, this timely volume explores how producers, texts, consumers and critics can either intentionally or unwittingly become complicit in the creation and perpetuation of social harm – and how the structures supporting such complicities can be resisted. The contributors aim to raise awareness and lay the groundwork for a utopian ‘radical unfolding’ that enables not just non-complicity, i.e. the refusal to be complicit, but anti-complicity – the active and collective resistance to social harm.

Perpetration and Complicity under Nazism and Beyond analyses perpetration and complicity under National Socialism and beyond. Contributors based in the UK, the USA, Canada, Germany, Israel and Chile reflect on self-understandings, representations and narratives of involvement in collective violence both at the time and later – a topic that remains highly relevant today. Using the notion of 'compromised identities' to think about contentious questions relating to empathy and complicity, this inter-disciplinary collection addresses the complex relationships between people's behaviours and self-understandings through and beyond periods of collective violence. Contributors explore the compromises that individuals, states and societies enter into both during and after such violence. Case studies highlight patterns of complicity and involvement in perpetration, and analyse how people's stories evolve under changing circumstances and through social interaction, using varying strategies of justification, denial and rationalisation. Each chapter also considers the ways in which contemporary responses and scholarly practices may be affected by engagement with perpetrator representations.

Throughout history, women have participated in and sometimes initiated rebellions to defend the welfare of their family, community, class, race or ethnic group. This volume presents original research on women's activism in Asia, Europe, Australia and Latin America. It explores how women have advanced social change and their influence on, and response to, existing transformations in society. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the authors examine women's activities and conditions in diverse social and political contexts, from revolutionary societies, to status quo societies, to societies in decline. With its primary focus on agency and social change, this book deconstructs patriarchal discourses and unearths aspects of female agency in an array of cultural, historical and geopolitical contexts. Chapters on movements in China, Japan, Australia, Croatia, Russia and a range of other countries both contribute to our understanding of change in those societies and seek to locate women at the center of politically aware movements. Although not exclusively a book about feminist activism, this essential collection is motivated by the feminist desire to restore to history a range of women's experiences. This book introduces new ways of thinking across boundaries, identities and complexities in a still essentially patriarchal world. It will be of great interest to students and researchers in the fields of gender studies, activism and comparative politics.