CounterText 8.1 – The Mimetic Condition

The articles in this special issue offer powerful transdisciplinary testimony to the rich potential of the contemporary return to mimesis, and in doing so suggest ways in which the mimetic turn and the post-literary turn may be understood as critically supplementing each other. In this short accompanying video Guest Editor Nidesh Lawtoo offers a foretaste of what readers can expect.

A painting of the shrine in Patna where Arzani is buried

When Pashto Became Divine

by William E. B. Sherman O you mangled souls: fear the sigh of the dervish.It’s a sigh exhaled by passioned love for Godthat burns the mountains to ash like straw.…If you see with the eye of your heart,everywhere will you…

Stands Scottish Literature Where It Did? Revisiting Devolution

It’s been fifteen years since the last fat volume of essays on contemporary Scottish writing. Only a blink of historical time, but it’s been quite an eventful period. When the chapters of Berthold Schoene’s brilliant Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature were being written, both the country and its debates looked rather different.

Q&A with Patrick O’Connor

Q. Tell us a bit about your book A. Cormac McCarthy, Philosophy and the Physics of the Damned is really a book about the importance of philosophy for literature. In it, I look at how one writer uses philosophy to…

Arthur Conan Doyle: Writing the Life

by Douglas Kerr There are dozens of biographies of Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes and one of the most popular storytellers in English. But his own account of his life, Memories and Adventures, published in 1924, is…