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Literature and Sensation
Editor: Anthony Uhlmann, Helen Groth, Paul Sheehan, and Stephen McLaren
Date Of Publication: Jan 2009
Isbn13: 978-1-4438-0116-4
Isbn: 1-4438-0116-X
“I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train” (Oscar Wilde). Literature has always treated the sensational: crime, passion, violence, trauma, catastrophe. It has frequently caused, or been at the centre of scandal, censorship and moral outrage. But literature is also intricately connected with sensation in ways that are less well understood. It mediates between the sensory world, perception and cognition through rich modes of thought allied with perceptions and emotions and makes sense of profound questions that transcend the merely rational. And at its boundaries, literature engages with the uncanny realm in which knowledge, presentiment or feeling is prior to articulation in words. This book reviews the sensational dimension of literature according to themes that have too often been left to one side. Literary theory has often privileged perception over sensation, cognition over raw experience, in focusing on semantics rather than sense. The essays in this volume cover literature and sensation in all its facets, drawing upon a range of approaches from evolutionary theory, theories of mind, perception, philosophy and aesthetics. The works considered are drawn from various literary periods and genres, from the nineteenth century to contemporary prose and poetry, including experiments in new media. Literature and Sensation offers detailed and subtle readings of literature according to the sensations they represent, incite, or evoke in us, and will be of interest to readers of literary theory, ethics and aesthetics, and theorists of new media art.
Anthony Uhlmann is Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and Languages, University of Western Sydney. He is the author of Beckett and Poststructuralism (Cambridge UP) and Samuel Beckett and the Philosophical Image (Cambridge UP, 2006). His most recent project examines Modernist Aesthetics. Helen Groth is a Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University. She is currently completing a monograph titled Optical Illusion and the Victorian Cultural Imagination and is the author of Victorian Photography and Literary Nostalgia. Paul Sheehan is a Senior Lecturer in the English Department at Macquarie University, the author of Modernism, Narrative and Humanism (Cambridge, 2002) and the editor of Becoming Human: New Perspectives on the Inhuman Condition (Praeger, 2003); presently he is finishing a study of violence and aesthetics in literature and the cinema over the last hundred years. Stephen McLaren is a writer and academic with research interests in the writing process, satire and imagination. He has published three textbooks on writing, and his study of the compositional development of James Joyce’s first novel, Reframing A Portrait: Joyce’s Evolution in Design is forthcoming from Sussex Academic Press in 2009.
Price Uk Gbp: 44.99
Price Us Usd: 67.99
Sample pdf (including Table of Contents)
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From Kerouac Ascending: Memorabilia of the Decade of On the Road
“Katherine Burkman, best known for her contributions to Harold Pinter, Samuel Beckett, and modern drama studies in general, now provides an essential reference for students of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and the beats through this memoir by Elbert Lenrow. A beloved teacher at the New School for Social Research, Lenrow met and taught Jack Kerouac in the late forties, befriending him and Allen Ginsberg as well. The book offers unprecedented insight into the beats in general and Kerouac’s development as a writer, thinker, and cultural force in American literature. Howard Cunnell, who introduces the book, notes that through his friendship with Kerouac, ‘Lenrow got to ride in what would become the most famous car in modern American literature.’ And thanks to this book, now readers of Kerouac Ascending do, too.”
—Ann C. Hall, Professor, Ohio Dominican University; President, Harold Pinter Society
“The larger significance of the sustained and sustaining friendship between Elbert Lenrow and Kerouac and Ginsberg in this book is that it exhibits Jack and Allen in ways that are seldom, if ever, represented in accounts of their lives. As a bonus, from this fine, small book, the reader can acquire an enriched and enhanced understanding of the multifarious political, literary, and artistic relationships of virtually all the principal players in the cultural scene in the mid- to late 20th century.”
—James L. Battersby, Professor Emeritus of English, Ohio State University
“Always their affectionate elder, Lenrow presents Kerouac and Ginsberg mostly in their own words, making no broad claim or judgments beyond the recognition that both writers spoke for their time as Walt Whitman did for his and that they have become iconic figures for a literary movement. It is a modest but important work presenting original materials saved by a gentle, sensitive, and literate man.”
—Mark S. Auburn, Professor Emeritus of English, former Senior Vice President and Provost at the University of Akron
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