Towards a New Literary Humanism

ANDY MOUSLEY is Senior Lecturer in English at De Montfort University, UK. Recent publications include Re-Humanising Shakespeare (2007), Critical Humanisms (2003, with Martin Halliwell), and articles on humanism and posthumanism, and on autobiography, in the journals Textual Practice, Shakespeare, and postmedieval. He is series co-editor of Edinburgh Critical Guides to Literature.

• List of Contributors Acknowledgments Introduction: Towards a New Literary Humanism; A.Mousley PART I: LITERATURE AS ERSATZ THEOLOGY: DEEP SELVES Introduction; A.Mousley Faith, Feeling, Reality: Anne Brontë as an Existentialist Poet; R.Styler Virginia Woolf, Sympathy and Feeling for the Human; K.Martin Being Human and being Animal in Twentieth-Century Horse-Whispering Writings: 'Word-Bound Creatures' and 'the Breath of Horses'; E.Graham Judith Butler and the Catachretic Human; I.Arteel PART II: SCEPTICISM, OR HUMANISM AT THE LIMIT Introduction; A.Mousley Shakespeare's Refusers: Humanism at the Limit; R.Chamberlain Why Eliot Killed Lydgate: 'Joyful Cruelty' in Middlemarch; S.Earnshaw Atomised: Mary Midgley and Michel Houellebecq; J.Wallace Humanity without Itself: Robert Musil, Giorgio Agamben and Posthumanism; I.Callus & S.Herbrechter PART III: LITERATURE, DEMOCRACY, HUMANISMS FROM BELOW Introduction; A.Mousley Mobilising Unbribable Life: The Politics of Contemporary Poetry in Bosnia and Herzegovina; D.Arsenijevi? HUM (-an, -ane, -anity, -anities, -anism, -anise); M.Robson Humanising Marx: Theory and Fiction in the Fin de Siècle British Socialist Periodical; D.Mutch Civic Humanism: Said, Brecht and Coriolanus; N.Wood References Index

'This book stands out as an intervention in post-poststructuralist debates, alongside the 'new aesthetics', 'singularities', the 'new ethics', and other efforts to formulate the critical trajectories of the new millennium, and will have a significant impact on the way literary studies will shape its theoretical debates in the near future.' - Tim Woods, Professor in English and American Studies, Aberystwyth University, UK