Shame and Modern Writing seeks to uncover the presence of shame in and across a vast array of modern writing modalities. This interdisciplinary volume includes essays from distinguished and emergent scholars in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and shorter practice-based reflections from poets and clinical writers. It serves as a timely reflection of shame as presented in modern writing, giving added attention to engagements on race, gender, and the question of new media representation.

Acknowledgements

Notes on Contributors

1 Introduction: Shame and Modern Writing

Barry Sheils and Julie Walsh

2 Montaigne's writing: "honteux insolent"?

Elizabeth Guild

3 Shamefulness and Modernity: remarks on Shakespeare's Sonnet 129

Thomas Osborne

4 Lyric Shame

Denise Riley

5 Writing to Spare One's Blushes: Jean Jacques Rousseau's Confessions and the Automation of Confidence

Christopher John Müller

6 Between Shame and Guilt: Lord Jim and the Confounding of Distinctions

James Brown

7 Black and Ashamed: Deconstructing Race in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man

Zlatan Filipovic

8 The Body that Race Built: Shame, Trauma and Lack in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and God Help the Child

Sheldon George

9 'The lyric a form / of shame management'?

John Goodby

10 Vulnerability and Vulgarity: The Uses of Shame in the Work of Dodie Bellamy

Kaye Mitchell

11 Writing Shame and Disgust in Susan Gubar's Memoir of a Debulked Woman

J. Brooks Bouson

12 On Writing-Up: shame and clinical writing

Oliver Sacks and Julie Walsh

13 Shame and Plagiarism

Charles Turner

14 "Dance Like Nobody's Watching": The Mediated Shame of Academic Publishing

Martin Paul Eve

15 Cultural Capital and the Shameful University

Thomas Docherty

Index

Barry Sheils is an Assistant Professor in twentieth and twenty-first century literature at Durham University, where he is also an associate director of the Centre for Cultural Ecologies. He is the author of W.B. Yeats and World Literature: The Subject of Poetry (Routledge), and co-editor of Narcissism, Melancholia and the Subject of Community (Palgrave).

Julie Walsh is a Lecturer in Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex, and a psychoanalyst in private practice. She is the author of Narcissism and Its Discontents (Palgrave), and co-editor of Narcissism, Melancholia and the Subject of Community (Palgrave). She is also a member of The Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis.