Overview
- Extends understanding of ruins to include current debates on natural and human ruination
- Maps ruin in literature from the Victorian period to the twentieth century
- Focuses on the dialectics of destruction and recovery, drawing from memory studies
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Table of contents (17 chapters)
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Contemplation – Preservation – Resistance
Keywords
About this book
This book focuses on literal and metaphorical ruins, as they are appropriated and imagined in different forms of writing. Examining British and American literature and culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the book begins in the era of industrial modernity with studies of Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Henry James and Daphne Du Maurier. It then moves on to the significance of ruins in the twentieth century, against the backdrop of conflict, waste and destruction, analyzing authors such as Beckett and Pinter, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton and Leonard Cohen. The collection concludes with current debates on ruins, through discussions of Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht, as well as reflections on the refugee crisis that take the ruin beyond the text, offering new perspectives on its diverse legacies and conceptual resources.
Reviews
“The most ambitious, wide-ranging, and humane study of ruins in the literary imagination to date, this book argues strongly for the importance of ruins in understanding our past, the risks we face in the future, and the perennial human capacity to grow beyond disaster.” (Catherine Brown, Senior Lecturer in English, New College of the Humanities, UK)
Editors and Affiliations
About the editors
Efterpi Mitsi is Professor in English Literature and Culture at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece.
Anna Despotopoulou is Professor in English Literature and Culture at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece.
Stamatina Dimakopoulou is Assistant Professor in American Literature and Culture at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece.
Emmanouil Aretoulakis is tenured Associate Lecturer in English Literature and Culture at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Ruins in the Literary and Cultural Imagination
Editors: Efterpi Mitsi, Anna Despotopoulou, Stamatina Dimakopoulou, Emmanouil Aretoulakis
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26905-0
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-26904-3Published: 09 December 2019
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-26907-4Published: 10 January 2021
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-26905-0Published: 28 November 2019
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XVIII, 306
Number of Illustrations: 11 b/w illustrations, 8 illustrations in colour
Topics: British and Irish Literature, North American Literature, Twentieth-Century Literature, Nineteenth-Century Literature