© Columbia University Press
Veering: A Theory of Literature
November, 2011
Cloth, 200 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-7486-3654-9
Edinburgh University Press
$90.00
In this powerful analysis of the perceived demise of theory and the rise of creative writing in literary and cultural studies, one of our most astute and imaginative contemporary literary critics meddles with our ideas about theory, autobiography and literature. Nicholas Royle explores the writings of Montaigne, Dryden, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Nabokov as well as Lucretius, Freud, Bloom, Guy Debord, Cixous, Barthes, Derrida and Nancy. In doing so he looks at the way the notion of 'veering' is bound up with different terms including verse, vertigo, the clinamen, détournement, transversality, environmentalism and the linguistic, the ethical and the political turn. In a suprising move, he puts forward the idea of 'the literary turn' as a new term for understanding post-1960s cultural and intellectual history.