• Colour drawing of a staged theatrical scene framed by two symmetrical classical structures with niches containing gilded statues, flanked by trees. At the centre, a painted backdrop shows an island within an archipelago, with a visible settlement; in the foreground, a vessel approaches the shore. Four figures stand before the backdrop holding branches and other objects. The composition is enclosed within a thin rectangular gold border.

40 years of Oxford Literary Review

Oxford Literary Review (OLR) founded in 1977 by Ian McLeod, Ann Wordsworth and Robert J. C. Young, is now celebrating its 40th anniversary. To celebrate, in each month of 2017 the Edinburgh University Press blog will highlight an influential article published…

Fredric Jameson

Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious

By Enda Duffy Professor of English, UC Santa Barbara Fredric Jameson may be the world’s most distinguished literary and cultural theorist living today. His influence since the 1980s on materialist, cultural and literary criticism, from the U.S. to China, has…

Kinds of Insight

By Kate McLoughlin This article arose from a paper I gave at the conference on the Long Modernist Novel at Birkbeck, University of London, in April 2014, organised by Scott McCracken and Jo Winning, the editors of this volume of…

Guest Blog – Beckett’s odd things

“What’s wrong with that bed, Joe?” — Samuel Beckett, Eh Joe (1965) There is something conspicuously odd about many of the everyday objects depicted in Samuel Beckett’s work. Items that are typically associated with the mundane, that usually sink into…