Bøger af Ben Parker

Misrecognitions mounts a vigorous defense of the labyrinthine plotting of Victorian novels, notorious for their implausible concluding revelations and coincidences. Critics have long decried Victorian recognition scenes--the reunions and retroactive discoveries of identity that too conveniently bring the story to a close--as regrettable contrivances. Ben Parker counters this view by showing how these recognition scenes offer a critique of the social and economic misrecognitions at work in nineteenth-century capitalism. Through a meticulous analysis of novels by Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, and Henry James, as well as Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, Misrecognitions tracks how the Victorian novel translates the financialized abstractions of capital into dramas of buried secrets and disguised relations. Drawing on Karl Marx's account of commodity fetishism and reification, Parker contends that, by configuring capital as an enigma to be unveiled, Victorian recognition scenes dramatize the inversions of agency and temporality that are repressed in capitalist production. In plotting capital as an agent of opacity and misdirection, Victorian novels and their characteristic dialectic of illusion and illumination reveal the plot hole in capitalism itself.

This outstanding series provides concise and lively introductions to countries and the major development issues they face. Packed full of factual information, photographs and maps, the guides also focus on ordinary people and the impact that historical, economic and environmental issues have on their lives.

Poetry. In this startling and energetic debut, Ben Parker explores real and imagined territories and reports back in poems that are both darkly funny and vividly descriptive. Combing conciseness with surreal lyricism, the worlds of THE AMAZING LOST MAN are at once strange and familiar, while the central sequence of Insomnia Postcards is a joyous clash of the quotidian and the bizarre. These poems have a subtle music and a confident voice.