Book Reviews by Patricia Mc Manus
Textual Practice , 2007
Review of Franco Moretti (ed), The Novel, Volume 1 and Volume 2.
The most diverse, mobile and en... more Review of Franco Moretti (ed), The Novel, Volume 1 and Volume 2.
The most diverse, mobile and enduringly popular of our literary forms, the novel is an enigmatic thing on many levels but none more so than its capacity to appear not an enigma at all but rather as common and expected as rain.
Papers by Patricia Mc Manus
Transnational Solidarity: Anticolonialism in the Global Sixties. , 2022
A chapter in Transnational solidarity: Anticolonialism in the Global Sixties,
Edited by Zeina Maa... more A chapter in Transnational solidarity: Anticolonialism in the Global Sixties,
Edited by Zeina Maasri, Cathy Bergin and Francesca Burke.
Transnational solidarity excavates the forgotten histories of solidarity that were vital to radical political imaginaries during the 'long' 1960s. It decentres the conventional Western focus of this critical historical moment by foregrounding transnational solidarity with, and across, anticolonial and anti-imperialist liberation struggles. The book traces the ways in which solidarity was conceived, imagined and enacted in the border crossings - of nation, race and class - made by grassroots activists.
This diverse collection draws links between exiled revolutionaries in Uruguay, post-colonial immigrants in Britain, and Greek communist refugees in East Germany who campaigned for their respective causes from afar while identifying and linking up with wider liberation struggles. Meanwhile, Arab immigrants in France, Pakistani volunteers and Iraqi artists found myriad ways to express solidarity with the Palestinian cause. Neglected archives also reveal Tricontinental Cuban-based genealogies of artistic militancy, as well as transnational activist networks against Portuguese colonial rule in Africa.
https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526161567/transnational-solidarity/
Routledge Companion to Literature and Class , 2021
A chapter on dystopian fiction and class relations, in Gloria McMillan (ed.) Routledge Companion ... more A chapter on dystopian fiction and class relations, in Gloria McMillan (ed.) Routledge Companion to Literature and Class.
https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003008354
Critica Sperimentale edited by Stefano Ercolino , Francesco de Cristofaro, 2021
Franco Moretti's literary-historical work does not take the style of a political intervention eve... more Franco Moretti's literary-historical work does not take the style of a political intervention even when the thrust of his argument is polemical - the rewriting of the task of literary history, for example. If his work is addressed to the future, to being part of what creates that future, it addresses itself only to improving the specialised future of literary history itself. Though he responds to his critics - especially when he agrees with them - these responses are rarely long the object of his attention but are treated more as the opportunity for adjustment or refinement, detailed but brief before a return to the main object of enquiry-the past. The gaze of his work is typically turned to the material - to what it throws up to confound extant approaches to itself, to how methods from other fields can lend themselves to the project of making visible or legible new or newly meaningful, reworked or hitherto undiscovered aspects of that material. His own style is not primarily argumentative but inquiring, exploratory and speculative, and explanation.
ISBN (Print) 9788829004454
New Left Review , 2021
There is something utopian about Joseph North's project to reopen a space within literary studies... more There is something utopian about Joseph North's project to reopen a space within literary studies for criticism. His bold reconstruction, Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History (2017), launched a sustained polemic against what he saw as the reigning historicist-contextualist paradigm of the discipline represented by Raymond Williams, Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, Gayatri Spivak, Franco Moretti - in which the assumed goal of literary study was cultural and social analysis. Against this, North called for a renewed programme of left literary criticism that would also be a radical aesthetic education, one which aimed to cultivate modes of sensibility and subjectivity that could contribute directly to the struggle for a better society. He presented this as a radicalized version of I. A. Richards's critical programme from the interwar period, defined by the 'strength and directness of its connection to the world outside the academy'.
MediaZioni: Rivista online di Studi Interdisciplinari su Lingue e Culture , 2021
Picking up on the centrality of “the reader” to definitions of dystopian fiction, this short essa... more Picking up on the centrality of “the reader” to definitions of dystopian fiction, this short essay argues that a dystopian fiction cannot assume its reader but must push and pull against dominant modes of reading to create a space for its own reading. The example is used of Ursula K. Le Guin’s chastisement of anti-utopian reading in “The Ones who Walk Away From Omelas.” N.K. Jemisin’s “The Ones Who Stay and Fight” is then briefly used to historicise the contemporary reader dystopian fiction fights for. Throughout the presentation, dystopian endings are centred as a key formal and political dilemma for dystopian fictions. It is suggested that the reader or desired mode of reading is a pivot between the formal narrative work of dystopias, and the historicity of that work.
https://mediazioni.sitlec.unibo.it/index.php/no30-2021/130-the-dystopia-project/465-the-ones-who-read-to-the-end-.html
Woolf Studies Annual , 2008
A critique of the concept of 'offensiveness' in Woolf scholarship.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/... more A critique of the concept of 'offensiveness' in Woolf scholarship.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24907067
Books by Patricia Mc Manus
Critical Theory and Dystopia , 2022
What is the political meaning of the pervasiveness of dystopian fictions in the twenty-first cent... more What is the political meaning of the pervasiveness of dystopian fictions in the twenty-first century? Do these fictions have the critical energy of the utopian stories they seem to have displaced or are they compensatory forms, extolling the present as preferable to the frightening future?
Critical Theory and Dystopia tracks dystopia as a genre of fiction which occupies the spaces of literature and of politics simultaneously. Using Theodor Adorno’s critique of the situation of writing in the twentieth century, this volume uses the notion of a ‘negative commitment’ to situate the potential and the limits of dystopia. Examining classic dystopias by Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, McManus follows the mutation of the genre in dystopias by Margaret Atwood, J.G. Ballard and William Gibson in the 1980s. Contemporary dystopias are then read for their efforts to break with, and their inability to realise those breaks, the politics of the present. Tracing lines of continuity and of discontinuity within the genre, McManus ends by exploring the dystopias of Michel Houellebecq, Lionel Shriver and Gary Shteyngart.
ISBN (Print)9781526139733
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Book Reviews by Patricia Mc Manus
The most diverse, mobile and enduringly popular of our literary forms, the novel is an enigmatic thing on many levels but none more so than its capacity to appear not an enigma at all but rather as common and expected as rain.
Papers by Patricia Mc Manus
Edited by Zeina Maasri, Cathy Bergin and Francesca Burke.
Transnational solidarity excavates the forgotten histories of solidarity that were vital to radical political imaginaries during the 'long' 1960s. It decentres the conventional Western focus of this critical historical moment by foregrounding transnational solidarity with, and across, anticolonial and anti-imperialist liberation struggles. The book traces the ways in which solidarity was conceived, imagined and enacted in the border crossings - of nation, race and class - made by grassroots activists.
This diverse collection draws links between exiled revolutionaries in Uruguay, post-colonial immigrants in Britain, and Greek communist refugees in East Germany who campaigned for their respective causes from afar while identifying and linking up with wider liberation struggles. Meanwhile, Arab immigrants in France, Pakistani volunteers and Iraqi artists found myriad ways to express solidarity with the Palestinian cause. Neglected archives also reveal Tricontinental Cuban-based genealogies of artistic militancy, as well as transnational activist networks against Portuguese colonial rule in Africa.
https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526161567/transnational-solidarity/
https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003008354
ISBN (Print) 9788829004454
https://mediazioni.sitlec.unibo.it/index.php/no30-2021/130-the-dystopia-project/465-the-ones-who-read-to-the-end-.html
https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii105/articles/patricia-mcmanus-happy-dystopians
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24907067
Books by Patricia Mc Manus
Critical Theory and Dystopia tracks dystopia as a genre of fiction which occupies the spaces of literature and of politics simultaneously. Using Theodor Adorno’s critique of the situation of writing in the twentieth century, this volume uses the notion of a ‘negative commitment’ to situate the potential and the limits of dystopia. Examining classic dystopias by Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, McManus follows the mutation of the genre in dystopias by Margaret Atwood, J.G. Ballard and William Gibson in the 1980s. Contemporary dystopias are then read for their efforts to break with, and their inability to realise those breaks, the politics of the present. Tracing lines of continuity and of discontinuity within the genre, McManus ends by exploring the dystopias of Michel Houellebecq, Lionel Shriver and Gary Shteyngart.
ISBN (Print)9781526139733
The most diverse, mobile and enduringly popular of our literary forms, the novel is an enigmatic thing on many levels but none more so than its capacity to appear not an enigma at all but rather as common and expected as rain.
Edited by Zeina Maasri, Cathy Bergin and Francesca Burke.
Transnational solidarity excavates the forgotten histories of solidarity that were vital to radical political imaginaries during the 'long' 1960s. It decentres the conventional Western focus of this critical historical moment by foregrounding transnational solidarity with, and across, anticolonial and anti-imperialist liberation struggles. The book traces the ways in which solidarity was conceived, imagined and enacted in the border crossings - of nation, race and class - made by grassroots activists.
This diverse collection draws links between exiled revolutionaries in Uruguay, post-colonial immigrants in Britain, and Greek communist refugees in East Germany who campaigned for their respective causes from afar while identifying and linking up with wider liberation struggles. Meanwhile, Arab immigrants in France, Pakistani volunteers and Iraqi artists found myriad ways to express solidarity with the Palestinian cause. Neglected archives also reveal Tricontinental Cuban-based genealogies of artistic militancy, as well as transnational activist networks against Portuguese colonial rule in Africa.
https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526161567/transnational-solidarity/
https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003008354
ISBN (Print) 9788829004454
https://mediazioni.sitlec.unibo.it/index.php/no30-2021/130-the-dystopia-project/465-the-ones-who-read-to-the-end-.html
https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii105/articles/patricia-mcmanus-happy-dystopians
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24907067
Critical Theory and Dystopia tracks dystopia as a genre of fiction which occupies the spaces of literature and of politics simultaneously. Using Theodor Adorno’s critique of the situation of writing in the twentieth century, this volume uses the notion of a ‘negative commitment’ to situate the potential and the limits of dystopia. Examining classic dystopias by Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, McManus follows the mutation of the genre in dystopias by Margaret Atwood, J.G. Ballard and William Gibson in the 1980s. Contemporary dystopias are then read for their efforts to break with, and their inability to realise those breaks, the politics of the present. Tracing lines of continuity and of discontinuity within the genre, McManus ends by exploring the dystopias of Michel Houellebecq, Lionel Shriver and Gary Shteyngart.
ISBN (Print)9781526139733