Literary Materialisations and Interferential Reading: Making Matter Matter on Page, Stage and Screen(Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature)

This book traces literature’s long history of repurposing representational language use for performative, “material” effects. It brings this tradition into dialogue with the recent material turn in literary and cultural theory, which seeks to supplant or at least rethink the foundational influence of the linguistic turn in the field. Drawing on a variety of cutting‑edge new‑materialist theories, this book programmatically outlines the contours of a methodology of Interferential Reading that is then brought to bear on examples ranging from Shakespeare, Donne, Keats and Tennyson to Northern Irish poets Colette Bryce and Sinéad Morrissey and Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie; from British thing essays to J. G. Ballard, John Berger, Nicola Barker, Richard Powers, Colum McCann, Tim Crouch, Hanya Yanagihara and Korean writer Han Kang, winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize for literature, and from the history of theatrical bodies to the intermedial as well as affective textures in very recent experimental theatre, live theatre broadcasting and media art.

List of Contributors

PART I: Method Matters

1 Literary Materialisations and Interferential Reading: How Matter Matters on Page, Stage and Screen

Ingrid Hotz-Davies, Martin Middeke and Christoph Reinfandt

2 From Paper to Pulp: A Report from No Man’s Land

Tom McCarthy

3 In the Blink of an Eye: Sound Matter, Eye-Movement and Poetic Form

Felix Sprang

4 Concrete Structures (in) J. G. Ballard’s Concrete Island

Kylie Crane

PART II: Fictional Materialisations

5 Moral Matters: Power, Coloniality and Narrative in Hanya Yanagihara’s The People in the Trees

Gero Bauer

6 Longing for Matter: Nicola Barker’s Exploration of Transhuman Existence in H(A)PPY

Ingrid Hotz-Davies

7 Invisible Materiality and Suprapersonal Narration in Richard Powers’s The Overstory

Christoph Reinfandt

8 “The Entirety of the Shape Is Complicit”—A Diffractive Reading of Colum McCann’s Apeirogon

Martin Riedelsheimer

PART III: Poetic Materialisations

9 Making Embodiment Matter in John Donne’s "The Cross" and Death’s Duel

Nadine Böhm-Schnitker

10 Here, Hair and History: Keats’s Poetics of Materiality

David Lo

11 Language Matters: Perception and Expression in Herder, Wordsworth and Tennyson

Philipp Erchinger

12 “The Mould Is Blossoming on the Wall”: Assemblages of Vibrant Borders in Northern Irish Poems

Jessica Bundschuh

PART IV: Performing Matter

13 Against the “Myth of Non‑Mediation”: Displacing the Aura and the Materiality of Live Theatre Broadcasting

Heidi Lucja Liedke

14 Theatre as Assemblage: Materiality and/as Texture in Tim Crouch’s Total Immediate Collective Imminent Terrestrial Salvation

Martin Middeke

15 Materiality, Affectivity, and the Female Disabled Body in Contemporary Automedial Art

Katrin Röder

PART V: Emergent Genres

16 Of Broomsticks and Doughnuts: Theorising and Historicising British and Anglo-Irish Thing-Essays from 1701 to 2021

Daniel Schneider

17 Prose for a More-Than-Human World: John Berger, Kathleen Jamie and the Ends of Genre

Christian Schmitt-Kilb

18 The Practice of Colour Writing: Material-Discursive Colourscapes in Han Kang’s The White Book

Mascha Wieland

Name Index
Subject Index

Ingrid Hotz-Davies is a Professor of English Literature and Gender Studies at the University of Tübingen.

Martin Middeke holds the Chair of English Literature at the University of Augsburg and is Visiting Professor at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa.

Christoph Reinfandt holds the Chair of English Literature at the University of Tübingen.