Ruins in the Literary and Cultural Imagination

Chapter 1 Introduction

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

Chapter 3 Dickens’s Animate Ruins

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

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

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

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

Chapter 8 “Ruins True Refuge”: Beckett and Pinter

Chapter 9 Out of the Ruins of Dresden: Destructive Plasticity in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse - Five

Chapter 10 Melancholia and the Bomb: Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton and the Fragmented Atomic Psyche

Chapter 11 The Fractured World of Leonard Cohen

Chapter 12 Springtime for Defaults: The Producers as the Ruin of History and the Triumph of Hystery

Chapter 13 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

Chapter 14 Destruction Preservation, or the Edifying Ruin in Benjamin and Brecht

Chapter 15 Thinking Like a Ruin

Chapter 16 Contemporary Ruins, Fragments of the Lives of Others, Critical Intimacies In and Out of Comfort Zones

Chapter 17 Afterword: The Consolations of Ruins—From the Acropolis to Epidaurus