In sharply original readings of Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Disastrous Subjectivities explores modernity’s failed promise to bring about a just social order under the ongoing threat of climate change. Drawing on Kantian critical philosophy and Lacanian theory, this book traverses aspects of the history of science, the form of the novel, the limits of historicism, and the impasses of moral autonomy. What passes for modernity takes shape not as truly modern or secular, but instead as a mode perpetually haunted by a traumatic sublime. The demand to realize justice within history turns out to require more than history can make possible, and more than the subject can bear.

Certain moments in British Romantic poetry and art depict a state from which the attributes of existence – time and space, subject and object, language and visuality – have fallen away, leaving a domain prior to the world and to thought, the condition of mere existence. As Blank Splendour demonstrates, poems by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and Clare as well as paintings by Turner evoke a condition that transpires in a time without time, a life without life. David Collings argues that these works invite us to move beyond the subtle remnants of ontology that linger in current versions of posthuman thought, such as affect theory and speculative realism, by opening up a domain of affect without affect, a world without objects. Anticipating the philosophers Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot, these works bring into view the mode of a deconstruction that emerged before the linguistic turn, one that meditates on the blank condition underlying modernity. Ultimately, Blank Splendour reveals how these works speak to our own moment, when thought, forced to contemplate its own extinction, enters a new form of mere existence.

Two centuries after Percy Shelley's death, this volume explores his continuing collaborations with audiences across spaces and times.

The Subject of Childhood is a collection of essays on early childhood education/childhood studies that brings critical psychological, psychoanalytic, and cultural studies perspectives to bear on understanding the lives children live. Central concerns running through these essays are the emergence of subjectivity in the child; the complexity of conceptualizing the relationship between external cultural and social forces; and the internal sense of agency that we know that each child possesses. Together, the volume is a blending of interdisciplinary theoretical writing, personal autobiographical inquiry, and concrete examples from the author's work with teachers in schools and from his clinical practice as a child psychoanalyst. Written for advanced undergraduate and graduate students and professionals across the English-speaking world in early childhood education, childhood education, educational foundations, and cultural studies in education, this book functions as a core text for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in child development, child psychology, sociology of education, childhood studies, and early childhood education.

Few twentieth-century writers are as revered as William Faulkner. This collection brings together the best literary criticism on Faulkner from the last six decades, detailing the imaginative and passionate responses to his still-controversial novels. By focusing on the criticism rather than the works, Linda Wagner-Martin shows the primary directions in Faulkner's influence on critics, writers, and students of American literature today. This invaluable volume reveals the patterns of change in literary criticism over time, while exploring the various critical streams--language theory, feminism, deconstruction, and psychoanalysis--that have elevated Faulkner's work to the highest rank of the American literary pantheon.

This comparative study of the work of Colette and Marguerite Duras analyses the complex and intricate links between identity and narrative, and challenges recent theoretical discussion in both literary and psychoanalytic domains.

These essays on postcolonial subjectivities cross the frontiers of critical theory by illuminating the contradictory predicaments Africans confront in strikingly different parts of the continent at the start of the 21st century. The focus is on the making of subjectivities as a process which is political, a matter of subjugation to state authority; moral, reflected in the conscience and agency of subjects who bear rights, duties and obligations; and realised existentially, in the subjects' consciousness of their personal or intimate relations. The notion of agency is interrogated, without lapsing into the new Afro-pessimism. The essays recognise postcolonies troubled by state decline and increasing exploitation, dispossession and marginalisation, but avoid Afro-pessimism's reduction of subjects to mere victims. Even more against the grain of conventional postcolonial studies is the radical questioning of the force of 'modern subjectivism' in struggles for control of identity, autonomy and explicit consciousness, and through artistic self-fashioning in globally driven consumption. With substantial cases based on autobiography, personal experience and long-term scholarly fieldwork in countries as diverse as Madagascar, Kenya, Uganda, Sudan, Botswana and Cameroon, the book opens out a fresh field for comparative research and theory on postcolonial transformations in intersubjectivity. This is to take seriously the people's perception, so widespread in postcolonial Africa, that to live life to the full is to live it in interdependence, in conviviality, if possible; that care and respect for others - indeed, civility - is a precious, and indeed, precarious condition of survival and as such is the object of recognised strategies for its conscious defence; and that because significant others are opaque - never being totally knowable - uncertainty, ambivalence and contingency are inescapable conditions of human existence.