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Our Research

Our faculty members are among the leading voices in their fields. Their ground-breaking research and creative works have taken many forms, including novels, works of literary criticism, edited anthologies, public lectures, documentary films, and poems. True to the spirit of interdisciplinary, creative, and politically engaged inquiry that has long been central to York University’s mission, these publications have earned plaudits from audiences around the world. Learn more about some of our recent publications by browsing the book covers below.

Featured Publication

Collage of maps with black title: "Heterotopic World Fiction: Thinking beyond Biopolitics with Woolf, Foucault, Ondaatje"

Heterotopic World Fiction: Thinking Beyond Biopolitics with Woolf, Foucault, Ondaatje

Lesley Higgins and Marie-Christine Leps

After more than a century of genocides and in the midst of a global pandemic, this book focuses on the critique of biopolitics (the government of life through individuals and the general population) and the counterdevelopment of biopoetics (an aesthetics of life elaborating a self as a practice of freedom) realized in texts by Virginia Woolf, Michel Foucault, and Michael Ondaatje. Their world fiction produces transhistorical, transnational experiences offered to the reader for collective responsibility in these critical times. Their books function as heterotopias: spaces and processes that recall and confront regimes of recognized truths to dismantle fixed identities and actualize possibilities for becoming other. Higgins and Leps define and explore a slant, biopoetic perspective that is feminist, materialist, anti-racist, and anti-war.

Search our Publications

eating and ethics in Shakespeare's England book cover

David Goldstein
2013

David B. Goldstein argues for a new understanding of Renaissance England from the perspective of communal eating. Rather than focus ...

Laws of Rest book cover

David Goldstein
2013

Laws of Rest explores a new form, the prose sonnet—an intricate chamber of text enclosed within four quatrains of right-justified prose. ...

shifting the ground of canadian literary studies book cover

Robert Zacharias
2012

Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary Studies is a collection of interdisciplinary essays that examine the various contexts—political, social, and cultural—that ...

the hero; or the adventures of a night book cover

Natalie Neill
2011

The French Revolution is over, and Mr. Dob, a tradesman made rich by the Revolution, has decided to start a ...

austen's oughts book cover

Karen Valihora
2010

The word is all over Austen’s novels: what ought to be done, what one ought to say, how one ought ...

Private Sphere to World Stag from Austen to Eliot book cover

Elizabeth Sabiston
2008

Emily Dickinson's poem, 'This is my letter to the World/ That never wrote to Me --', opens the Introduction, which ...

Book title in red and white text on black background

Brett Zimmerman
2005

Critics have often charged Edgar Allan Poe with sloppy writing. Using stylistics and classical rhetorical theory, Brett Zimmerman demonstrates that ...