The Literature and Theatre Collection is an essential resource for libraries, researchers, and teaching staff at universities. This collection encompasses a wide range of themes, including literary movements, author studies, Shakespeare, the gothic, postcolonialism, literary theory, the Renaissance, theatre and performance, and writing as an act of resistance. Alongside history, literature is Manchester University Press’s fl agship subject, making this collection indispensable for institutions off ering literature and theatre courses.
| Key series |
| Contemporary American and Canadian Writers |
| Contemporary World Writers |
| International Gothic Series |
| Interventions: Rethinking the Nineteenth Century |
| Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture |
| Revels Plays: Companion Library |
| Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies |
| Shakespeare in Performance |
| The Manchester Spenser |
| Theatre: Theory – Practice – Performance |
| Women, Theatre and Performance |
| Collection year | Titles |
| 2025 titles | 31 |
| 2023/4 titles | 65 |
| 2013-2022 titles | 290 |
| Total collection | 416 |
| Keywords |
| Gothic |
| Author studies/biographies |
| Shakespeare |
| Resistance |
| Literary movements |
| Postcolonialism |
| Theory |
| Modernism |
| Theatre and performance |
| Renaissance |
| Literary studies: from c 2000 |
| Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000 |
| Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 |
| Literary studies: c 1600 to c 1800 |
| Literary studies: c 1400 to c 1600 |
| Biography, Literature and Literary studies |
| Theatre studies |
| Shakespeare / Shakespearean |
| Literary studies: ancient, classical & medieval |
| Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers |
SDG coverage
Literature and theatre collection
Here, the author reflects further on the role of risk in academic life. Drawing on Sartre’s characterisation of literary critics as dwellers in the ‘graveyard of literature’ where nothing matters, he argues that there is a need for critics to turn back to life and to risk more. He suggests that one source of academia’s anaemic, risk-free and ludic nature might be the professional personae of scholarship and objectivity, personae behind which the critic herself disappears. Drawing on Bakhtin’s notion of responsibility, he considers the argument that the critic could risk more by putting more of herself into her work and exhibiting more fully her positionality. The author counters this argument with the view that subjectivism of this sort might be self-defeating and obscure as much as it reveals. To illustrate these positions, he analyses two non-fiction texts, both portraits of murderers: Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood where the author erases himself from his writing, and Emmanuel Carrère’s The Adversary where the author places himself within the story. In a section that engages with Clifford Geertz and his conception of “deep play”, he concludes that the critic should throw herself so completely into his work that he is both totally present and also disappears from sight. He gives the example of Walter Benjamin in whose work Benjamin is never present as an ‘I’ but in which every word carries his traces. This chapter also contrasts Bolaño’s satire of literary criticism as mere libidinal babble with Orwell’s conception of writing as self-effacement.
In this very brief conclusion, the author assesses where a book that was written backwards has got him. He restates his case for writing and criticism as deep play: play, not as playing at or playing with, but as a vertiginous activity into which we put all of ourselves and in which we lose ourselves at the same time, making space for others. Given that he conceives play as an open-ended activity, his conclusion and his book—deliberately—do not end. Rather he finishes with the shortest of short stories by Kafka, ‘Wish to become and Indian’: a single unfinished sentence that is an image of vertiginous and unending play.
This book responds to a gameified, post-truth world where play and seriousness are often intertwined. Exploring the relationship between two notionally serious activities—academic criticism and literature—and play and game, at its heart are considerations of risk and responsibility, of power and privilege, of narcissism, hubris and the right to play and the right to seriousness. Part I examines the triviality and ridiculousness of academia as a game, addressing questions such as safe spaces, cultural appropriation and academic activism; it then explores conceptions of criticism that might play more fully and engage more consequentially with life. Part II turns to the relationship between literature, play and life. First, it discusses literary texts that represent games that get out of hand. Second, it turns to non-fiction texts whose writers use the freedom of play and the authority of literature to intervene in real life with serious and problematic consequences. Part III takes French writer, Emmanuel Carrère, and his non-fiction interventions into real life to task in an innovative critical mode that takes risks but that ends of a note of prayer. Drawing on theorists of play like Huizinga, Caillois and Suits, and engaging with thinkers like Derrida, Freud, Benjamin, Bakhtin, Arendt, Bourdieu and Felski, the book makes its arguments in readings of literary texts, films, TV and autofiction in many languages, including Ancient Greek and Polish poets, Flaubert, Dickens, Capote, Kundera, Bolaño, Squid Game, Doubrovsky, Alexeich, and de Vigan. Throughout, it plays with expectations, alternating close reading and conventional criticism with experiments in (sometimes autobiographical) non-fiction.
Here the author explores the way that fiction represent play and games that get out of hand. He argues that narratives of this type include tales of wishes that are fulfilled —Freud is a point of reference here—with unwished for consequences (like the folk-tale ‘The Three Wishes’ or the Edwardian horror story ‘The Monkey’s Paw) and stories of holidays that cannot be escaped from (since holidays are, like games, spaces and times, separate from ordinary life where different rules apply). He examines texts and films that include a fin-de-siecle Hungarian tale of a children’s game that results in a killing; Kundera’s early story of lovers who cannot escape a game of role play; the Purge movie franchise whose premise is that, one day a year, all crime goes unpunished; Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Cervantes’s Quixote who cannot distinguish between the illusions of literature and the realities of life; and Cortázar’s micro-fiction that stages the murder of its reader by a fictional character. He focusses particularly on those moments where games get out of hand to such an extent that a topological inversion occurs: rather than real life being the normal situation from which the situation of game diverges, game becomes the norm and a connection to real life is lost. He concludes with a reading of a text by Delphine de Vigan where games get out of hand on the level of representation but also—give the text’s non-fictional dimension—these games spill out beyond the page and into real life.
Starting from Arendt’s premise that all action—any act that creates something new and releases it into the world—has to content with the conjoined predicaments of irreversibility and unpredictability, here the author turns to consequences that might ensue in the real world from the act of writing. First, it looks at cases of unintended consequences by examining the case of Miss Mowcher, a real life woman who found an accidentally unflattering portrayal of herself as a character David Copperfield. It then looks at various forms of deliberate literary extraction, theft, and abuse that have real-life various degrees of seriousness, all the way up to and reckless intrumentalization of a partner’s suicide by Doubrovsky and the sexual abuse of a minor, Valérie Springora, by Matzneff, all for literary purposes. The author’s argument is that writers err, less by making things up, than by telling truth and by telling stories that they have no right to tell in acts that are narcissistic and hubristic. Other such cases the author explores include Vilikovský use of a fait divers as the basis of short story and Juráňová later literary revenge that attempts to restore voice to his victim, as well as Alexeich’s extractive approach to the victims of the Chernobyl disaster. He concludes with an analysis of two incidents of authorial narcissism in Emmanuel Carrère’s My Life as a Russian novel. Here, Carrère’s hubristic hubristic attempts to manipulate real-life others and the world around him through writing blow up in his face in what the author analyses as nemesis.
Sets out the book’s key premises, making the case for examining these apparently peripheral activities to understand a world where seriousness and play are often problematically confused. The author emphasizes the distance between his position and that of those on the political and cultural Right whose culture wars attack both academic humanities and culture himself, arguing, rather, that academics in literature should be both more modest and honest, more playful and more serious. The author goes on to outline the book’s scope (what it includes, what it excludes, a consideration of its subthemes), its deliberate embrace of hyperbole, satire and playful inconsistency, as well as the book’s unusual generation as a text that was written back to front. He then considers the risks that he is taking in writing a book of this experimental sort, illustrating and reflecting on this with an account of a conference at which he gave a paper—a draft chapter of one of the chapters— that caused it to be called to a halt in unhappiness and upset. He uses these reflections to define two broad categories of play: one (‘playing at’ and ‘playing with’) that is negative and that narcissistically instrumentalizes others, and a second (‘pure’ or ‘deep’ play) that draws on play as ilinx and in which the player loses himself, thereby making space for others. This latter conception of play, he promises, will be the guiding spirit of the book.
This chapter is an auto-biographical sketch of the way that the author’s university education introduced him to the apparently serious and academic study of literature. He starts with an account of his first encounter with high theory in the flesh: his attendance at a public interview with Jacques Derrida in Cambridge in 1992, given to celebrate the award of an honorary doctorate. He remarks on his bemusement (and that of the rest of the audience) at Derrida’s refusal to be pinned down to be either joking or serious, at his embrace of thinking as a form of amphibianism, both serious and playful. He goes on to address the way that his haphazard initiation into literary theory (Saussure, Czech and French Structuralism, Deconstruction) presented literary texts as sites of linguistic play and literary criticism as a ludic act, where play has a liberatory and political dimension. Next, the chapter addresses another element of his university education in literature: his introduction to critical approaches (feminist and Marxist) to cultural phenomena, approaches that identify the structures of power and oppression that lie beneath such phenomena and that cast the work of the critic as a much more serious business, ethically and politically. Drawing on Felski’s work on ‘post-critique’, the author shows that behind the critical scholar’s straight-face and seriousness might also lie an attraction to the ludic pleasures of criticism as detective work and puzzle-solving. In both cases, then, the activity of criticism intertwines seriousness and playfulness in often unacknowledged ways.
In this first chapter of Part II, the author introduces the relationship between game and play and literature. He traces the intellectual tradition from Schiller, Nietzsche, Vygotsky, Piaget, Freud to contemporary Evo-criticism that sees literature as an outgrowth of children’s play and children’s play as a form of fantasy and story-telling. And he traces the literary tradition that runs from the Menippean satire in the Ancient world via Swift, Rabelais to more modern writers and movements (OULIPO, 20th C detective fiction) where literature is conceived of as form of game, play or puzzle. He also considers this relationship more formally, using Suits’s notion of game as freedom within restraints and Caillois’s conception of the polarity between paedia (free-form play) and ludus (rule-bound game) to think about how literature is generated and develops as an interplay of rule-obeying and rule-breaking. The author concludes the chapter, however, with a shift towards literary games that do not stay within the bounds of the literary but rather that get out of hand and have more serious consequences. His first example of such a “game” is the suicide of the early 20th C French poet, Jacques Rigaut: this, he argues, is an aesthetic act that transgresses the boundary of the aesthetic, just as it crosses the border between life and death. En passant, he considers the matter of the tax affairs of TV personality Lorraine Kelly as an example of the use of fictional personae to avoid real-life consequences.
In this chapter, the author develops some theoretical concerns. His central argument (made with reference to selections from Flaubert’s correspondence) is that the game-like separateness of fiction from reality confers on the writer the liberty to do as he wishes, independent of the ethical and other limits that confront him in real life. This—the writer’s authority and power—can be a source of intoxication in a way that received ideas of fiction’s innocence and powerlessness may often obscure. While authorial power does not present any ethical problem where writers restricts themselves to fictions worlds and characters, the chapter argues that genres such as autofiction and creative non-fiction present difficult cases. Here, while writing about real life and real people, writers continue to draw on—and often abuse—the liberties and license of the writer of fiction. To make these arguments, the chapter discusses notions of pacts—explicit and implicit—to which authors subscribe in different genres; fiction, autobiography and auto-fiction. This discussion is informed by the influential work of critic, Phillippe Lejeune. The chapter also discusses Bakhtin’s distinction between monologic and dialogic modes of authorship—more and less authoritarian, respectively. And it includes an extended reading of Assayas’s 2019 film, a satire of Parisian autofictionalists and their bad behaviour, a reading of authorial overreach in Rachel Cusk’s Outline, a discussion of, Chloë Delaume’s slippery defence of the freedom of her autofiction, and the conventions and self-imposed constraints of writers of the early 20C Golden Age of detective fiction.