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.
Author(s): Efterpi Mitsi, Anna Despotopoulou, Stamatina Dimakopoulou, Emmanouil Aretoulakis
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2019
Language: English
Pages: 316
Tags: British And Irish Literature
Front Matter ....Pages i-xviii
Introduction (Efterpi Mitsi, Anna Despotopoulou, Stamatina Dimakopoulou, Emmanouil Aretoulakis)....Pages 1-20
Front Matter ....Pages 21-21
Amongst the Ruins of a European Gothic Phantasmagoria in Athens (Maria Vara)....Pages 23-46
Dickens’s Animate Ruins (Michael Hollington)....Pages 47-56
The Indifference of Fragments: Untimely Ruin in Tess of the d’Urbervilles (Claire Potter)....Pages 57-77
Rising from Ruins: Isabel Archer at the Roman Campagna (Chryssa Marinou)....Pages 79-92
Untimely Returns: Shoring Fragments Against Ruins in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (Sheila Teahan)....Pages 93-110
“There Must Be No Ruins”: Ruinophobia and Urban Morphology in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Theodora Tsimpouki)....Pages 111-126
Front Matter ....Pages 127-127
“Ruins True Refuge”: Beckett and Pinter (David Tucker)....Pages 129-143
Out of the Ruins of Dresden: Destructive Plasticity in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (Giorgos Giannakopoulos)....Pages 145-158
Melancholia and the Bomb: Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton and the Fragmented Atomic Psyche (Adam Beardsworth)....Pages 159-175
The Fractured World of Leonard Cohen (Jeffrey L. Spear)....Pages 177-197
Springtime for Defaults: The Producers as the Ruin of History and the Triumph of Hystery (Christina Dokou)....Pages 199-212
In the Absence of Ruins: The “Non-sites of Memory” in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and Daniel Mendelsohn’s Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (Angeliki Tseti)....Pages 213-228
Front Matter ....Pages 229-229
Destruction Preservation, or the Edifying Ruin in Benjamin and Brecht (Vassiliki Kolocotroni)....Pages 231-248
Thinking Like a Ruin (Carl Lavery, Simon Murray)....Pages 249-270
Contemporary Ruins, Fragments of the Lives of Others, Critical Intimacies In and Out of Comfort Zones (Apostolos Lampropoulos)....Pages 271-288
Afterword: The Consolations of Ruins—From the Acropolis to Epidaurus (Jyotsna G. Singh)....Pages 289-300
Back Matter ....Pages 301-306
