Chapter 1. Introduction, Efterpi Mitsi, Anna Despotopoulou, Stamatina Dimakopoulou, Emmanouil Aretoulakis.- Chapter 2. Amongst the Ruins of a European Gothic Phantasmagoria in Athens, Maria Vara.- Chapter 3. Dickens’s Animate Ruins, Michael Hollington.- Chapter 4. The Indifference of Fragments: Untimely Ruin in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Claire Potter.- Chapter 5. Rising from Ruins: Isabel Archer at the Roman Campagna, Chryssa Marinou.- Chapter 6. Untimely Returns: Shoring Fragments against Ruins in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, Sheila Teahan.- Chapter 7. “There must be no ruins”: Ruinophobia and Urban Morphology in Turn-of-the-Century New York, Theodora Tsimpouki.- Chapter 8. “Ruins True Refuge”: Beckett and Pinter, David Tucker.- Chapter 9. Out of the Ruins of Dresden: Destructive Plasticity in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Giorgos Giannakopoulos.- Chapter 10. Melancholia and the Bomb: Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton and the Fragmented Atomic Psyche, Adam Beardsworth.- Chapter 11. The Fractured World of Leonard Cohen, Jeffrey L. Spear.- Chapter 12. Springtime for Defaults: The Producers as the Ruin of History and the Triumph of Hystery, Christina Dokou.- Chapter 13. In the Absence of Ruins: The “Non-Sites of Memory” in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and Daniel Mendelsohn’s Lost: The Search for Six of Six Million, Angeliki Tseti.- Chapter 14. Destruction Preservation, or the Edifying Ruin in Benjamin and Brecht, Vassiliki Kolocotroni.- Chapter 15. Thinking Like a Ruin, Carl Lavery and Simon Murray.- Chapter 16. Contemporary Ruins, Fragments of the Lives of Others, Critical Intimacies in and out of Comfort Zones, Apostolos Lampropoulos.- Chapter 17: Afterword: The Consolations of Ruins: From the Acropolis to Epidaurus, Jyotsna Singh.

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. 

“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)

Extends understanding of ruins to include current debates on natural and human ruination Maps ruin in literature from the Victorian period to the twentieth century Focuses on the dialectics of destruction and recovery, drawing from memory studies

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