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R|EVOLUTIONS: Mapping Culture, Community, and Change from Ben Jonson to Angela Carter
Editor: Jennifer Craig and Warren Steele
Date Of Publication: May 2009
Isbn13: 978-1-4438-0508-7
Isbn: 1-4438-0508-4
Can art change the world? Or can art produce new knowledge that facilitates radical change in our slowly-evolving communities? If so, then we must ask: How does cultural transformation, whether super or slight, affect our understanding of culture and the world? Operating under the rubric of resistance and reform, R|EVOLUTIONS: Mapping Culture, Community and Change is a unique scholarly collection that seeks to illuminate current understandings of art, aesthetics, and the revolutionary impulse. The resulting work interrogates intersections between culture and community, revolution and evolution. At the same time, it examines how enduring social issues intertwine with current concerns, such as representations of the body or the book. Multidisciplinary in approach, topics run from subversive uses of the body in Renaissance drama to the effect of the atom bomb on postmodern culture. From Mark Wallinger’s Turner Prize-winning performance in a bear suit, to Angela Carter’s concept of sexual multiplicity in The Passion of New Eve. Cutting-edge and politically engaging, R|Evolutions will appeal to general readers as well as the specialist, and it is designed for scholars not only interested in issues of cultural production, but also in the evolution of politics and perception over time.

Jennifer Craig is a PhD candidate in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. Her work focuses on the use of emblems in Ben Jonson’s masques.

Warren Steele holds a PhD in English Literature from Glasgow. He is currently an Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario.

“In this excellent collection of essays the editors have assembled an international line-up of contributors to debate the parameters and problems of cultural transformations from the early modern period to postmodernity. Collections of this kind which offer such wide historical coverage can sometimes fall between two stools – neither sufficiently focused to fix the attention of scholars or students working in particular historical periods, nor comprehensive enough to satisfy the general reader. This volume manages to avoid both pitfalls, and for two reasons. First, the quality and precision of the contributions allows readers unfamiliar with debates around a specific historical moment access to the archive in a lucid and lively manner. Second, the theme of the collection – or rather, themes – are so expertly handled by the editors and so thoroughly marshalled by the essayists as to offer something serious at the level of theory, so that the individual historical engagements are supported by a series of meditations on the nature of culture, community and change. That holds a great deal of merit for the non-specialist, and is an example of the sort of clarity and comprehensiveness that the best work in cultural studies aspires to. Effectively, what the collection offers – and the editors are to be commended for maintaining such a strong through-line – is a kind of critical cartography of the modes and measures of cultural change across different periods, never losing sight of the big picture, producing finally the effect of an overview that enables close-ups and sidelights as well as snapshots and highlights. Any book of essays that can range from Ben Jonson to Angela Carter, and examine a wealth of material from Jacobean masque to the Atom Bomb, is not short on ambition. A materialist mapping of mindscapes as well as landscapes, I would certainly recommend this text to students as an engaging and energetic encounter with an open and ongoing debate in literary and cultural studies.”

Professor Willy Maley, Dept of English Literature, University of Glasgow

“'R|Evolutions: Mapping Culture, Community, and Change' represents the best kind of cultural history: theoretically informed, conceptually adventurous, and closely attuned to the various interconnections between texts, disciplines and periods. Taken together the contributions cover a wide expanse of theoretical and literary territory, demonstrating the possibilities for literary studies in the twenty-first century. Rarely has the future of field been so energetically presented under one cover.”

Dr. Alex Benchimol, Lecturer in English Literature and Cultural History, University of Glasgow

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Sample pdf (including Table of Contents)

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