Ruins in the Literary and Cultural Imagination

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xviii

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2. Introduction

   • Efterpi Mitsi, Anna Despotopoulou, Stamatina Dimakopoulou, Emmanouil Aretoulakis

   Pages 1-20

3. Allegory – Animation – Appropriation

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 21-21

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   2. Amongst the Ruins of a European Gothic Phantasmagoria in Athens

      • Maria Vara

      Pages 23-46

   3. Dickens’s Animate Ruins

      • Michael Hollington

      Pages 47-56

   4. The Indifference of Fragments: Untimely Ruin in Tess of the d’Urbervilles

      • Claire Potter

      Pages 57-77

   5. Rising from Ruins: Isabel Archer at the Roman Campagna

      • Chryssa Marinou

      Pages 79-92

   6. Untimely Returns: Shoring Fragments Against Ruins in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca

      • Sheila Teahan

      Pages 93-110

   7. “There Must Be No Ruins”: Ruinophobia and Urban Morphology in Turn-of-the-Century New York

      • Theodora Tsimpouki

      Pages 111-126

4. Re-collection – Trauma – Aftermath

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 127-127

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   2. “Ruins True Refuge”: Beckett and Pinter

      • David Tucker

      Pages 129-143

   3. Out of the Ruins of Dresden: Destructive Plasticity in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five

      • Giorgos Giannakopoulos

      Pages 145-158

   4. Melancholia and the Bomb: Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton and the Fragmented Atomic Psyche

      • Adam Beardsworth

      Pages 159-175

   5. The Fractured World of Leonard Cohen

      • Jeffrey L. Spear

      Pages 177-197

   6. Springtime for Defaults: The Producers as the Ruin of History and the Triumph of Hystery

      • Christina Dokou

      Pages 199-212

   7. In the Absence of Ruins: The “Non-sites of Memory” in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and Daniel Mendelsohn’s Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

      • Angeliki Tseti

      Pages 213-228

5. Contemplation – Preservation – Resistance

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 229-229

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   2. Destruction Preservation, or the Edifying Ruin in Benjamin and Brecht

      • Vassiliki Kolocotroni

      Pages 231-248

   3. Thinking Like a Ruin

      • Carl Lavery, Simon Murray

      Pages 249-270

   4. Contemporary Ruins, Fragments of the Lives of Others, Critical Intimacies In and Out of Comfort Zones

      • Apostolos Lampropoulos

      Pages 271-288

This book focuses on literal and metaphorical ruins, as they are appropriated and imagined in different forms of writing. Examining British and American literature and culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the book begins in the era of industrial modernity with studies of Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Henry James and Daphne Du Maurier. It then moves on to the significance of ruins in the twentieth century, against the backdrop of conflict, waste and destruction, analyzing authors such as Beckett and Pinter, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton and Leonard Cohen. The collection concludes with current debates on ruins, through discussions of Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht, as well as reflections on the refugee crisis that take the ruin beyond the text, offering new perspectives on its diverse legacies and conceptual resources.

• Victorian literature
• twentieth-century literature
• post-war literature
• memory studies
• culture of ruins
• philosophy
• British and Irish Literature

“This rich collection of essays demonstrates the powerful hold that ruins have on the Western imagination. Exploring literal and metaphorical ruins, the authors take us from eighteenth century Athens, as the site where the Gothic originates, to the twenty-first century, when the city’s ruinscape becomes the terrain for timely reflections on Europe’s refugee crisis and the concept of hospitality. Ranging from literary studies to philosophical dialogues, the critical thinking that sustains Ruins in the Literary and Cultural Imagination proves that ruins are not esoteric objects and ruin studies are not an antiquated field. These ruinologists passionately engage with the most pressing political and cultural questions of our moment and demonstrate the continued relevance of the humanities with their fine-grained textual and visual analyses.” (Julia Hell, Professor of German at the University of Michigan, USA, and co-editor of Ruins of Modernity (2010) and author of The Conquest of Ruins: The Third Reich and the Fall of Rome (2019))

“The most ambitious, wide-ranging, and humane study of ruins in the literary imagination to date, this book argues strongly for the importance of ruins in understanding our past, the risks we face in the future, and the perennial human capacity to grow beyond disaster.” (Catherine Brown, Senior Lecturer in English, New College of the Humanities, UK)

• National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens, Greece

  Efterpi Mitsi, Anna Despotopoulou, Stamatina Dimakopoulou, Emmanouil Aretoulakis

Efterpi Mitsi is Professor in English Literature and Culture at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece.

Anna Despotopoulou is Professor in English Literature and Culture at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece.

Stamatina Dimakopoulou is Assistant Professor in American Literature and Culture at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece.

Emmanouil Aretoulakis is tenured Associate Lecturer in English Literature and Culture at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece.

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