LANGUAGE ON THE EDGE
Suggestions for Preparatory Reading
Note: in this module, the plan is to explore the relationship between certain literary texts and
the troubled history out of which they emerge and which, in turn, they influence. You are well
advised, therefore, to read up on some of the great world-historical events framing our chosen
literary texts rather than merely reading the primary texts. So, I would advise you to pick from
some of the suggestions under ‘History and Contexts’ and ‘Theory and Reflections’ – according
to your own geo-political interests! – rather than merely concentrating on the primary texts. It is
the interplay between them that will be our focus.
Primary Texts
Novels
Chinua Achebe, Things fall Apart, ed. Francis Abiola Irele (Norton critical edition, 2008).
Banville, John, The Book of Evidence (London: Minerva, 1990).
Bennett, Ronan, The Catastrophist (London: Headline, 1998).
Bolaño, Roberto, By Night in Chile (London: Vintage, 2009).
Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness (Norton critical edition)
Plays
Dorfman, Ariel, Death and the Maiden (London: Nick Hearn Books, 1996).
Shakespeare, William, Henry V, ed. Gary Taylor (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1998).
Webster, John, The White Devil.
Classics
Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, trans. Barbara Reynolds (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975)
Homer, The Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles (London: Penguin, 1990).
Spenser, Edmund, The Faerie Queene, Book V (Penguin or Longman editions).
Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (Vintage Classics, 1990).
Poetry
Spenser, Edmund, The Faerie Queene, Book V (Penguin or Longman editions).
Lorca, Federico Garcia, The Selected Poems of Federico Garcia Lorca (New York: New
Directions, 2005).
Neruda, Pablo, The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems, ed. Mark Eisner (San Francisco: City
Lights Books, 2004).
History and Context
Andy Beckett, Pinochet in Piccadilly: Britain and Chile's Secret History (London: Faber, 2002).
Timothy Brook, Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World
(London: Profile, 2008).
Colin Burrow, Edmund Spenser (London: Northcote House Publishers, 1996).
Susan Brigden, New Worlds, Lost Worlds: The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1603 (London:
Penguin, 2000).
Nicholas Canny ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire: Volume 1, The Origins of
Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism (Cambridge: Canto, 1986).
Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006).
Lauren Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Harvard
University Press, 2004).
Philip Gourevitch, We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families:
Stories from Rwanda (London: Picador, 2000).
David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).
The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism (London: Profile, 2010).
John Hemming, The Conquest of the Incas (London, Macmillan, 1970).
Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in
Colonial Africa (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999).
Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to
Darfur (Yale University Press, 2007).
Rigoberto Menchu, I, Rigoberto Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, ed.
Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, trans. Ann Wright (London: Verso, 1984).
* James Sharpiro, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (London: Faber
2005).
Leslie Stainton, Lorca: A Dream of Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999).
Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (Penguin, 2001).
Ludo de Witte, The Assassination of Lumumba (London: Verso, 2002).
Theory and Reflection
Hannah Arendt, On Violence (London: Allen Lane, 1970).
Marc Augé, Non places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London: Verso,
1995).
Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War did not take Place, trans. Paul Patton (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1995).
Joel Black, The Aesthetics of Murder: A Study in Romantic Literature and Contemporary
Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).
Ernest Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays (Cambridge, Mass:
MIT Press, 1988).
---------------, Aesthetics and Politics (London: NLB, 1977).
Colin Burrow, Epic Romance: Homer to Milton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).
Inga Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
John Fraser, Violence in the Arts (London: Cambridge University Press, 1974).
Friedlander, Saul, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the
‘Final Solution’ (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).
Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare
(London: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
Jana Howlett & Rod Mengham, eds., The Violent Muse: Violence and the Artistic
Imagination, Europe, 1910-39 (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1994).
Derek Hughes, Culture and Sacrifice: Ritual Death in Literature and Opera
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Regina Janes, Losing our Heads: Beheadings in Literature and Culture (London: New York
University Press, 2005).
Lawrence Langer, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (London: Yale
University Press, 1975).
Michael Murrin, History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1994).
Patricia A Parker, Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode (Princeton
University Press, 1979)
David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton
University Press, 1993).
W.G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, trans. Anthea Bell (London: Penguin,
2004).
George Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle (London: Faber, 1971).
Tsvetan Todorov, The Fantastic (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1975).
Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (Columbia University Press, 1983).
The Country and City (London: Chatto and Windus, 2011).