Jennifer Anne Cooke

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Loughborough University

Cambridge Core - English Literature after 1945 - Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing - by Jennifer Cooke

The concept of the good life is explored here as a means of introducing and contextualising the radical grounds for rethinking our intimacies that the work collected in this issue undertakes. On the one hand, there has been a diminution in popular culture's imaginary engagement with forms of living otherwise, traceable through the shifting represen...

This paper posits that the writings of Hélène Cixous convey a remarkable intimacy, firstly in the representation of love, with its relationship to knowledge and time; and, secondly, in the relationship her texts create with the reader. Cixous’s use of her life, from the publication of her dreams to the life events which are the creative impetus for...

This book is an account of the history and continuation of plague as a potent metaphor since the disease ceased to be an epidemic threat in Western Europe, engaging with twentieth-century critiques of fascism, anti-Semitic rhetoric, the Oedipal legacy of psychoanalysis and its reception, and film spectatorship and the zombie genre.

Plague, epidemics and infectious diseases are no strangers to the cinema screen. The films which stage them fall broadly into three categories: firstly, those in which plague and the mass, mysterious, random and painful deaths it brings are utilised to raise questions about religious faith and belief in an afterlife, to explore the concept of redem...

The analogous bond between plague and psychoanalysis corroborated by Freud’s quip to Jung, as they entered New York Harbour, that the Americans ‘don’t realise we are bringing them the plague’, is accompanied and confirmed by the psychoanalytic inheritance of Sophocles’ plague play Oedipus the King, the contagion of taboos and the reception of Oedip...

Ever since 1720, when Western Europe’s last plague epidemic died out, plague’s place has been in fiction, with authors reworking and reim-agining its outbreaks in their narratives and novels. Two of the most well known and, therefore, influential plague texts are Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, published just two years after the 1720 o...

In the 1980s the world was gradually being alerted to the spreading AIDS virus; infection was high on the list of concerns. In 1988 Lars von Trier, the Danish film-maker who would become famous for his Dogme 95 movie-makers manifesto and for films such as Breaking the Waves (1996), Dancer in the Dark (2000) and Dogville (2003), made an experimental...

Thus writes Giovanni Boccaccio of the 1348 Florentine plague which sets the stage for the meeting of ten young people who are to tell the multiple stories of The Decameron. Boccaccio’s use of the word ‘spectacle’ intimates that the effects of plague have an inherent theatricality, a fact which has not gone unnoticed by twentieth-century playwrights...

In her small but influential book Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag observes how plague is perceived as a disease which afflicts a whole community not, like cancer or tuberculosis, as a force which isolates and sets the individual aside from society.1 This perception is rooted in plague’s historical and cultural legacy, as much as stemming from a s...

During the plague outbreak of 1530 in Geneva, a man named Jean Placet was accused of deliberately spreading the disease. It was claimed that he used the dressings of suppurating buboes to create a powder which could be administered deceptively under the guise of a palliative or spread upon handkerchiefs, door handles and even the walls of streets....