Vital Moments: Life, Matter, and Time in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Oxford Studies in American Literary History) - Image 1

£59.00

It has never been this cheap. We have no record of a lower price.

£59 today · cheaper than every other day in the last 3 months

Oxford University Press Vital Moments: Life, Matter, and Time in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Oxford Studies in American Literary History)

Name: Vital Moments: Life, Matter, and Time in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Oxford Studies in American Literary History)
Brand: Oxford University Press
Price: 59.0 GBP
Availability: InStock

Literary Theory & Movements

Price Distribution

Price distribution over 68 days • 1 price levels

Days at Price

Price Analysis

Most common price: £59 (68 days, 100.0%)

Price range: £59 - £59

Price levels: 1 different prices over 68 days

Description

The environmental and political crises humanity faces today have given rise to influential new theories of life, matter, and time. Vitalism, a controversial term describing the ideas of philosophers from Lucretius to Bergson, provides a common intellectual foundation linking many of the contemporary efforts to reconstruct our understanding of nonhuman agency and the place of humanity in the world. Vital Moments argues that it is time to critically assess neovitalism's potential as a discourse of hope in light of the specific ways in which this potential has been shaped by the genealogy of vitalist perspectives. The emergence of modern vitalist representational forms in the nineteenth century was closely tied to colonialist projects of resource extraction and bioprospecting. Literary narratives linked political liberalism to a temporal structure in which life could be defined and controlled for the benefit of a privileged class. Romances of nonhuman agency idealized the democratic promise of life's plenitude even as chattel slavery and industrialization consigned many human beings to the status of things. Meanwhile, more subversive forms of vitalist narrative unsettled the hierarchy of animate and inanimate being. These errant vitalisms envision other modes of human being--or being human--that lend themselves to more just and equitable possibilities of existence within the world's matrix of matter and time. By tracing the transformations of vitalist representational forms from the early nineteenth century to the present, Vital Moments seeks to recuperate the potential of this important perspective to help us imagine more truly democratic practices of life.

Product Specifications

Brand: Oxford University Press
Format: hardcover
ASIN: 0197839304
Category: Books > Subjects > Poetry, Drama & Criticism > History & Criticism > Literary Theory & Movements
Domain: Amazon UK
Release Date: 02 June 2026
Listed Since: 21 October 2025

Barcode

No barcode data available

It has never been this cheap. We have no record of a lower price.

Oxford University Press Vital Moments: Life, Matter, and Time in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Oxford Studies in American Literary History)

Price Distribution

Price Analysis

Description

Product Specifications

Barcode

Similar Products You Might Like

Transamerican Sentimentalism and Nineteenth-Century US Literary History (Oxford Studies in American Literary History)

Literature's Social Lives: A Socio-Institutional History of Literary Value (Oxford Studies in American Literary History)

Life Writing and the Nineteenth-Century Market (Nineteenth-Century and Neo-Victorian Cultures)

Of Memory and Literary Form: Making the Early Modern English Nation

At the Crossroads of the Avant-Garde: Ivan Aksyonov and Russian Modernism (Studies in Russian Literature and Theory)

Exoteric Modernisms: Progressive Era Realism and the Aesthetics of Everyday Life (Modern American Literature and the New Twentieth Century)

The New Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies (Twenty-First-Century Critical Revisions)

Contemporary American Fiction and Cultures of Self-Help (Cambridge Studies in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Culture)

The Lyric in Victorian Memory: Poetic Remembering and Forgetting from Tennyson to Housman (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

Cultivating and Communicating Natural and Technical Knowledge around 1800: Devotees of Science (Studies in the History of Knowledge)

Dystopias in Nineteenth-Century Latin American Literature (Bucknell Studies in Latin American Literature and Theory)

Literary Representations of Precarious Work, 1840 to the Present (Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics)

Life, Death, and Consciousness in the Long Nineteenth Century (Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine)

Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

Literary Sociability in Early Modern England: The Epistolary Record

Secular Foundations of the Liberal State in Victorian Britain (Studies in the Eighteenth Century)

1865 to Present (Volume II) (American Ways: A History of American Culture)

Literature of the 1990s: Endings and Beginnings (The Edinburgh History of Twentieth-Century Literature in Britain)

Action, Embodied Mind, and Life World: Focusing at the Existential Level (SUNY series in American Philosophy and Cultural Thought)

Face Forms in Life-Writing of the Interwar Years (Palgrave Studies in Life Writing)

Face Forms in Life-Writing of the Interwar Years (Palgrave Studies in Life Writing)

Women's Wit on the Early Modern Stage (EARLY MODERN FEMINISMS)

Ages and Stages: Glimpses into the Lives of Women in the Academy (Women's Studies)

Literature, Intertextuality, and the American Revolution: From Common Sense to Rip Van Winkle

It has never been this cheap. We have no record of a lower price.

Oxford University Press Vital Moments: Life, Matter, and Time in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Oxford Studies in American Literary History)

Price History & Forecast

Price Distribution

Price Analysis

Description

Product Specifications

Barcode

Similar Products You Might Like

Transamerican Sentimentalism and Nineteenth-Century US Literary History (Oxford Studies in American Literary History)

Literature's Social Lives: A Socio-Institutional History of Literary Value (Oxford Studies in American Literary History)

Life Writing and the Nineteenth-Century Market (Nineteenth-Century and Neo-Victorian Cultures)

Of Memory and Literary Form: Making the Early Modern English Nation

At the Crossroads of the Avant-Garde: Ivan Aksyonov and Russian Modernism (Studies in Russian Literature and Theory)

Exoteric Modernisms: Progressive Era Realism and the Aesthetics of Everyday Life (Modern American Literature and the New Twentieth Century)

The New Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies (Twenty-First-Century Critical Revisions)

Contemporary American Fiction and Cultures of Self-Help (Cambridge Studies in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Culture)

The Lyric in Victorian Memory: Poetic Remembering and Forgetting from Tennyson to Housman (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

Cultivating and Communicating Natural and Technical Knowledge around 1800: Devotees of Science (Studies in the History of Knowledge)

Dystopias in Nineteenth-Century Latin American Literature (Bucknell Studies in Latin American Literature and Theory)

Literary Representations of Precarious Work, 1840 to the Present (Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics)

Life, Death, and Consciousness in the Long Nineteenth Century (Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine)

Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

Literary Sociability in Early Modern England: The Epistolary Record

Secular Foundations of the Liberal State in Victorian Britain (Studies in the Eighteenth Century)

1865 to Present (Volume II) (American Ways: A History of American Culture)

Literature of the 1990s: Endings and Beginnings (The Edinburgh History of Twentieth-Century Literature in Britain)

Action, Embodied Mind, and Life World: Focusing at the Existential Level (SUNY series in American Philosophy and Cultural Thought)

Face Forms in Life-Writing of the Interwar Years (Palgrave Studies in Life Writing)

Face Forms in Life-Writing of the Interwar Years (Palgrave Studies in Life Writing)

Women's Wit on the Early Modern Stage (EARLY MODERN FEMINISMS)

Ages and Stages: Glimpses into the Lives of Women in the Academy (Women's Studies)

Literature, Intertextuality, and the American Revolution: From Common Sense to Rip Van Winkle