Alan Hollinghurst and the Vitality of Influence proposes a striking approach for reading the influences that interlace twentieth-century gay British writers. Focusing on the role of the textual image in literary influence, this book moves toward a new understanding of the interpenetration of literary and visual culture in the twentieth century.

This groundbreaking, cross-generic collection is the first to consider the entire breadth of Alan Hollinghurst's Booker Prize-winning writing. Focused through the concept of influence, the volume addresses critical issues surrounding the work of Britain's most important contemporary novelist. It encompasses provocative and timely subjects ranging from gay visual cultures and representations, to Victorian, modernist and contemporary literature, as well as race and empire, theatre and cinema, eros and economics. The book reveals the fascinating intellectual and affective matter that lies beneath the polished control and dazzling style of Hollinghurst's work. Alongside contributions by distinguished British and American critics, the book includes an unpublished interview with Hollinghurst. Alan Hollinghurst: Writing under the influence uses a creative range of critical approaches to provide the most authoritative and innovative account available of Hollinghurst's works.

The Wounded Hero in Contemporary Fiction tracks the emergence of a new type of physically and/or spiritually wounded hero(ine) in contemporary fiction. Editors, Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteu bring together some of the top minds in the field to explore the paradoxical lives of these heroes that have embraced, rather than overcome, their suffering, alienation and marginalisation as a form of self-definition.

This is the first book on Naomi Alderman’s literary production, and highlights the writer’s transcultural recasting of British and Jewish traditions. The four novels analysed here prove to be relevant, not only from a literary viewpoint, but also from the fields of ethics, spirituality and politics. The analysis thus focuses on issues such as alterity and respect towards the other in a globalized context. As such, the book will be of interest to literary critics, researchers, and students in the fields of literature, ethics, and social and cultural studies. The reader will find in the text a comprehensive approach to a young writer who undoubtedly deserves attention given her interrogation of varied and socially relevant topics, including gender and sexual orientation in the early twenty-first century, the rewriting of the Sacred Scriptures, and the discourse of feminist posthuman dystopias.

Half a century after his demise, and over a century after the publication of his first novel Where Angels Fear to Tread in 1905, E. M. Forster still remains within the scope of interest of readers and critics. His life and his works continue to stir emotions and raise questions concerning humanity, nationality, and world culture(s). However, the opinions vary as to the continuation of the interest in the writer and his works. Some see him and his novels as old-fashioned, while others, like Zadie Smith, find Forster inspiring and the ‘muddled’ protagonists of his books fascinating. Is the interest in this writer to continue, or is it doomed to gradual oblivion? What is there in his life and his stories that can make new generations want to reach out for his works and writings? To understand the place of the writer in the present world, one must look back to the beginnings of Forster’s career, as well as to the times in which he lived, commented on, and created in. This book discusses the presence and legacy of Forster in English literature and social history. Its double title reflects the duality of its content, with the book exploring Forster’s own works as well as the position of Forster and his oeuvre and the values he stood for within British and world culture(s). The book offers, therefore, a variety of new interpretations of a selection of well-known and culturally established works of the writer viewed against the findings of contemporary perspectives. It demonstrates how Forster’s novel, short stories, and non-fictional writings interfuse, affect, and re-shape the literary pieces of other writers.

Beginning with Somerset Maugham’s innovative, sexually dissident South Seas novel and tales and Alfred Hitchcock’s gay-inflected revisiting of the Jack the Ripper sensation in silent film, this book considers the continuing presence of the past in future-oriented work of the 1930s and the Second World War by Sylvia Townsend Warner, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, and the playwright and novelist, Patrick Hamilton. The final three chapters carry the discussion to the present in analyses of works by lesbian, postcolonial, and gay authors such as Sarah Waters, Amitav Ghosh, and Alan Hollinghurst. Focusing on questions about temporality and changes in gender and sexuality, especially gay and lesbian, straight and queer, following the rejection of the Victorian patriarchal marriage model, this study examines the continuing influence of late Victorian Aestheticist and Decadent culture in Modernist writing and its permutations in England.

The Function of Symptoms in British Literature since Modernism looks at various ways of treating symptoms of psychological disorders in the literature of the long twentieth century. This book shows that literature can, in its questioning of commonly accepted views of this lived experience of psychic symptoms, help engender new theories about the functioning of subjective cases. Modernism emerged at about the same time as Freudian psychoanalysis did and the aim of this book is to also show that to a certain extent, Woolf preceded Freud in her exploration of the symptom and contributed to fashioning another approach that is now more common, especially in writers from the 1990s-onwards.