Bargain Witch
An occult history that grounds the sacred yearning for magic in real life. In these essays by scholar and self-initiated witch Brooke Palmieri, occult history, the eternal now, and our magickal queer futures align, connecting us to an enchantment both contemporary and classic. Drawing upon the knowledge and influence of practitioners from Rachel Pollack to Tituba, Palmieri grounds the sacred yearning for magic in real life, whether exploring the gossip of feuding Salem witches, paying the rent by playing "wizard" for news cameras, or detailing the psychic ups and downs of working in an occult bookshop. Written in a voice electrified with love for the craft and its lineage of eccentrics, Bargain Witch shows us witch life in all its quotidian humor and splendor, taking its place amongst the magickal classics that inspired it, a literary ouroboros.
Quotable Austen
Celebrating Jane Austen's 250th birthday, this book is a charming collection of notable quotes from her most celebrated nineteenth-century novels. A fine collection of the wisest and wittiest quotes from one of the most beloved and prominent British writers of all time, this book is sure to win you over with Jane Austen's ability for turning typical people and mundane events into charming and relatable stories. With over 140 quotes from her completed novels - Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion - this book is the perfect opportunity for readers to immerse themselves in the refinement of the Regency era. Austen was well known for her astute social observation and keen insight into the lives of women in the early nineteenth century. This collection will urge you to: - Ardently admire and love - Feel the pangs of disappointed love - Find comfort in words of wisdom - Acquaint yourself with the refinements of polished society - Learn witty comebacks to leave your friends speechless After all, it is a truth universally acknowledged that this would be the ultimate gift for Janeites and Austenites.
Daughters in their Mothers' Gardens
The book explores the thematics of the mother-daughter relationships in selected texts by contemporary Chinese American women writers Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Fae Myenne Ng and Gish Jen. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts, The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God's Wife, Bone and Mona in the Promised Land altogether reflect an array of matrilineal traditions highly receptive to the conventional wisdom that daughters must separate from their mothers to become strong individuals. I argue that the considered narratives problematize the Western domestic storylines by hinging back to a complex mesh of racial histories, misogyny, rape, displacement, and enforced separation. The book emphasizes a universal impulse for perfection which dovetails with an endeavour to point out the diversity and complementarity of their challenging reactions to the dominant myths of female connection and disconnection. The selected texts relocate the universal romance of symbiosis-individuation at the intersection of a fluid but, nurturing positioning across different worlds and cultures. They demonstrate the crucial significance of storytelling in undercutting the unconscious essence of the mother-daughter rift. Hence, the purely psychological universal friction between every mother and daughter significantly shapes the examined matrilineal stories just as the characters᾽ positioning amid liminal hyphenated spaces do. The discussion contributes to reorienting the homophobic dimension in the mother-daughter attachment toward multicultural issues of consent and descent. The concerned plots create a tour de force in the mainstream matrilineal tradition, through narrative scenarios wherein the mothers and daughters foreground the impossibility of separation.
Dialogue with a Somnambulist
Renowned internationally for her lyrically unsettling novels, PEN/Faulkner Award winner Chloe Aridjis now offers readers her first collection of shorter works, with an introduction by Tom McCarthy Chloe Aridjis's stories and essays are known to transport readers into liminal, often dreamlike, realms. In this collection of works, we meet a woman guided only by a plastic bag drifting through the streets of Berlin who discovers a nonsense-named bar that is home to papier-m璽ch矇 monsters and one glass-encased somnambulist. Floating through space, cosmonauts are confronted not only with wonder and astonishment, but tedium and solitude. And in Mexico City, stray dogs animate public spaces, "infusing them with a noble life force." In her pen portraits, Aridjis turns her eye to expats and outsiders, including artists and writers such as Leonora Carrington, Mavis Gallant, and Beatrice Hastings. Exploring the complexity of exile and urban alienation, Dialogue with a Somnambulist showcases "the rare writer who reinvents herself in each book" (Garth Greenwell) and who is as imaginatively at home in the short form as in her longer fiction.
A River Dream
An anthology and tribute to a unique independent publisher, Clark City Press. In 1987, the painter and author and fly fisherman Russell Chatham, renowned for his stunning landscape paintings and his appetite for life, decided to take control of his own career by creating a publishing house in Livingston, Montana. As one does, at least if they are Russell Chatham. "Control" was probably the wrong concept--for the next five years, Clark City Press was the chaotic home of beautifully produced works by an eclectic, talented collection of writers and artists, many of them given a painting in lieu of a publishing advance. What began as an effort to publish Chatham's own work and that of his friends (a large and varied group) in elegant trade paperbacks morphed into something grander and more wayward. Chatham could talk almost anyone into anything, and before the press imploded, all sorts of people said yes: Barry Gifford signed on for A Good Man to Know, a fictionalized memoir about his gangster father, Jim Harrison traded paintings for The Theory & Practice of Rivers and Just Before Dark, and Rick Bass wrote about the first wolves to resettle the continental United States in The Ninemile Wolves. Clark City Press published Thomas McGuane on fishing and memory, Guy de la Valdene on hunting woodcock, Richard Hugo's only mystery, James Crumley's short stories, and Peter Stackpole's Life photos from the golden age of Hollywood. In A River Dream, Clark City's former editor, novelist Jamie Harrison, has collected some of the best of the press's prose, art, and poetry, in a glorious celebration of a small and lost world.
Ritsos in Parentheses
Winner of the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, Academy of American Poets A bilingual edition of three major poetry collections by one of the most important Greek poets of the twentieth century One of the most prolific and popular of modern Greek poets, Yannis Ritsos follows such eminent predecessors as Cavafy, Sikelianos, and Seferis in the dramatic and symbolic expression of a tragic sense of life. The three volumes of Ritsos's poetry translated here--Parentheses, 1946-47, Parentheses, 1950-61, and The Distant--document a three-decade poetic journey that reveals the evolution of the poet's sensibility. This bilingual edition also features an insightful introduction from translator Edmund Keeley, whom Paul Muldoon has called "the gold standard in translators of Greek poetry."
The Shakespeare Synopsis
I have written a synopsis of 24 Shakespeare plays.The idea is that students can read my synopsis before they tackle the play.Shakespeare is not an easy read, but by reading the one synopsis, students will understand what the play is about.
The Mysteries
To say that The Mysteries is merely a tour de force of writerly craft would be to underestimate Bill Considine's powers as a poet. I say this because Considine works impressively, even expertly, on the level of ideas. In his stunning verse play, the nuances of technique-metaphor, juxtaposition, enjambment, caesura, silence-are placed in the service of urgent philosophical and sociohistorical questions. Here is a dialogue between history and modernity that is as timeless as it is timely, as haunting as it is faultlessly crafted.
Other Traditions
"An entertaining and shrewd little book ... Ashbery is an accomplished raconteur." --Charles Simic, New York Review of Books The most influential American poet of his generation appraises the lesser-known writers who shaped his own confounding, infinitely inventive work. John Ashbery was the quintessential "difficult poet." When asked to explain his work, he typically responded by insisting that his poetry was its own explanation. Fittingly, then, when he was invited to deliver the Norton Lectures at Harvard in 1989, Ashbery declined to spell out what he put on the page. Instead, he offered rapt audiences a tour of his influences, the authors he turned to as a "jumpstart for times when the batteries have run down." The poets in Ashbery's personal canon--John Clare, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Raymond Roussel, John Wheelwright, Laura Riding, and David Schubert--were all tragic figures in their own way, plagued by mental illness or poverty, ridiculed or barely recognized in their own lives, and in some cases, all but forgotten today. More importantly for Ashbery, each wrote poetry that somehow defies the reader. Clare's sometimes-monotonous naturalism, Roussel's exhausting maze of parenthetical clauses, and Wheelwright's eccentric Anglican mysticism do not invite casual reading. But under Ashbery's tutelage, we experience the idiosyncratic brilliance of these "other traditions," discovering how they shaped not only Ashbery's poetics but also the broader trajectory of twentieth-century literature, from surrealism to New Criticism. With inimitable charm, wit, and erudition, the lectures collected in Other Traditions elevate the imperfect and peculiar, affirming the literary virtues of Ashbery's difficult predecessors. The result is a revealing self-portrait of one of the giants of American poetry, if only through a convex mirror.
Six Walks in the Fictional Woods
"Erudite, wide-ranging, and slyly humorous." --The Atlantic One of the great novelists and public intellectuals of our time gives a master class on the philosophy of fiction. Umberto Eco was fond of pointing out that all writing is narrative. He published his famed debut novel The Name of the Rose when he was forty-eight years old, yet he believed that everything he had written to that point--from treatises on semiotics to essays on mass culture--took the form of a story. To Eco, scholarship, much like fiction, was shaped by narrative. It was the stuff of life itself. Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, a collection of essays based on Eco's 1992-1993 Norton Lectures at Harvard, illuminates fiction's porous boundaries--in particular, the myriad ways that literary works conscript readers' experiences and expectations. Fiction, says Eco, can offer metaphysical comfort by appealing to our desire for a smaller, more legible world, one that gives a definitive answer to the question of "whodunnit?" But it also makes demands of us, presupposing a model reader who possesses the cultural knowledge necessary to interpret the text, as well as a willingness to follow the never-quite-specified rules of the literary game. Whether he is dissecting grammatical ambiguities in G矇rard de Nerval's nineteenth-century romantic masterpiece Sylvie, studying the rhythms of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, or tracing the web of fraud and misattribution that produced the antisemitic conspiracy theory of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, this is Eco at his very best: intellectually omnivorous, endlessly fascinated by hoaxes, and always an adept navigator of the narrative forests that surround us.
Narrative Songs of Dong Ethnic Group
Narrative Songs of Dong Ethnic Group: 'The Butterfly Lovers' of Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai was published by The Ethnic Publishing House in 2020, under the editorship of Long Yaohong et al., who tried to preserve the style and characteristics of the original songs, besides making IPA transcriptions to the work. The Dong ethnic group in Guizhou has a rich tradition of narrative songs, including a popular rendition of the story of Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai. The repertoire includes a range of genres such as grand songs, pipa songs, antiphonal songs, vernacular songs, folk songs, operas, wedding songs that express feelings of romantic love. What follows is a preliminary work on it, a try to conveying the meaning and the image, and a story of communication, exchanges, and integration of different ethnic groups in China.
Profiles in Hope
Fifteen Australians tell their stories of surviving suicide and finding the way back to a better life. Every day, nine Australians take their own lives. Nineteen years ago, John Brogden came very close to adding his name to these statistics. But John survived and, since his recovery, he has become a passionate voice for mental health and suicide prevention. Now he is the Honorary President of LifeLine International. Personally and professionally, John knows how urgent it is to talk openly about suicide, and to provide people in despair with a way back when they are at their lowest point. Giving hope to those who think there is no other answer is critical. John is living proof that it's possible to survive and thrive. Now, in Profiles in Hope, John has gathered together some incredible Australians to tell their stories. With contributions from people such as James Packer, Jacqui Lambie, Tom Boyd, Layne Beachley, Preston Campbell and Ian Thorpe, alongside powerful stories of ordinary Aussies, these deeply personal accounts of survival, recovery and lives of purpose are a balm for the vulnerable and a beacon of light to those struggling. This book is for those at risk and for the people who love them and don't know how to help. Searingly honest and ultimately life-affirming, these are stories of solace and hope, and a lifeline for dark times. All royalties earned from the sale of this book will go to Lifeline. 'Surprisingly hopeful' WEEKEND AUSTRALIAN
Comic Book Apocalypse!
From 1940 to 1955, American society and culture underwent dramatic changes, including the introduction of the Comics Code in October 1954, which heavily impacted comic books. The Code aimed to moderate comic content in response to public opinion, including such topics as juvenile delinquency, wartime sentiment, teenage sex, drugs, violent crime, and more. While compliance was technically voluntary, most publishers followed its strict rules. Those who didn't faced ruin when wholesalers and distributors refused to handle noncompliant comics, returning them unopened to publishers, who soon self-destructed. Comic Book Apocalypse! explores this downfall through 500 examples of pre-Code cover art, highlighting why some deemed the Code necessary. The book also examines who decided what content was acceptable, demonstrating how pre-Code comics reflect the larger story of 1950s America.
California Rewritten
Dive into the revelatory worlds of California's most exciting writers, and discover how their books uncover our history and can help us imagine our shared future.Percival Everett, Rebecca Solnit, Tommy Orange, Michael Connelly, Julie Otsuka: As John Freeman writes in California Rewritten, "Literature of so many kinds and so many genres from so many different types of people--at the highest level--has been coming out of California and from Californians for decades now." Freeman, one of the sharpest editors working today, has followed the evolution of California's literary life since his teenage years in Sacramento. In over fifty essays inspired by his hosting of Alta Journal's popular California Book Club, he offers an essential road map to California literature now. He shows us how the state's most exciting writers can unlock our understanding of the past, and how they can deepen our imaginations as we confront the most pressing issues that face our society: labor and inequality, migration and citizenship, technology and its limits, changing landscapes and climate catastrophe. Incisive and compulsively readable, California Rewritten will be a source of empowering discovery for any book lover who cares about the Golden State.
Paranoid Publics
Facts and established truths are regularly denied in contemporary life. This situation has brought paranoid politics into the mainstream, from conspiracy theories like QAnon, to sex panics and assaults on public health measures, to election denialism and the rise of vigilante militias. Paranoid Publics analyzes these phenomena as psychosocial realities enmeshed with emerging ways of determining truth. Today's paranoia cannot simply be blamed on the rise of social media or the recent surge of populist anger. Rather, as Chaudhary shows, both are fueled by preexisting psychosocial processes. Applying psychodynamics to analyze truth and politics, Paranoid Publics foregrounds unconscious demands, wishes, and compulsions. Against the hope that progressive economic policies might dispel widespread disorientation and disillusionment, Chaudhary reveals how psychic realities mark politics as deeply as do self-interest and class dynamics. Chaudhary takes up and reinvents psychoanalytic concepts to analyze how, for example, the personal liberty exercised through vaccine exemptions is paradoxically grounded in submission to the authority of the family and the state. Such politically consequential attitudes concerning truth emerge from a social order that they proceed to challenge. Making a case for psychosocial understandings of our current historical juncture, Paranoid Publics radically expands our notion of the political.
Seeing Through Abstraction
During the first half of the twentieth century, China saw sweeping changes in the material conditions and practices of communication, transforming the volume, velocity, variety, veracity, and value of information. Encountering the new abstract matter of information, a generation of Chinese writers faced a crisis of literary identity: What made literature distinct from other informational genres, such as newspaper columns, financial figures, and telegrams? How was the emergent information order reshaping individual and social knowledge? And where would literature stand within this new order? This book examines how writers of the Republican era (1912-1949) came to recognize and respond to "information." Anatoly Detwyler investigates a wide range of literary and graphic experiments that engaged with different forms of information management, including data visualization, financial statistics, and propaganda science. These works, he argues, collectively attest to a new perceptibility of abstraction and its epistemological implications for apprehending reality. Tracing this mode of perception across fiction, poetry, and woodcut art, Seeing Through Abstraction offers a revisionist account of the development of modern Chinese literature and repositions it within the global history of the information age.
Early Modern Performance Beyond the Public Stage
The first major work to explore and analyse the popular 'extra-theatrical' performances in late medieval and Renaissance England. This wider heterogeneous category of early modern performance included puppetry, fireworks shows, rope dancing, minstrelsy, performing animals, games, civic drama, court masques, university drama, morris dances, and ceremonial rituals, all taking place in a variety of venues. The volume reveals how these extra-theatrical productions shaped urban and rural life and conveyed a sense of spectacular excess, of exceeding traditional genres, conventional modes of performance and the typical bounds of theatrical space. The spaces where medieval and early modern drama flourished include pageant carts, convents, private homes, universities, waterways, and the streets of both urban and rural communities. Much like public theatres, these performance spaces also played a pivotal role in articulating individual, communal, and national aspirations. Spanning the medieval period to the late 17th century, this volume engages with questions of spatiality, gender, religion, transcontinental exchanges, and colonialism, presenting the latest research from scholars across the globe.
Neighbourly Relationships in Early Modern Drama
The book offers the first sustained examination of neighbourly relationships in early modern English drama, situating the close analyses of the selected plays within contemporary prescriptive literature (such as sermons and conduct books), letters, diaries, pamphlets, ballads, wills, proverbs, as well as the lived realities of early modern neighbourhoods as glimpsed in the historical and legal archives. The originality of the book lies in its topic, in the plays chosen for analysis, including Gammer Gurton's Needle, written in the 1550s and believed to be the first printed vernacular English comedy, and in the revisionist close readings on offer. The plays span the period between 1550s and 1620s, belong to different genres, and were aimed at different audiences and written for different kinds of playhouses, allowing for conclusions to be drawn about the way genre shapes the treatment of neighbourly relationships, as well as revealing continuities and changes in this treatment over the period under study.
Neighbor-Homes
Neighbor-Homes: Julia Alvarez and Edwidge Danticat Write Hispaniola and the Diaspora analyzes the work of two of the most acclaimed contemporary American and Caribbean authors for the first time in a single book. Extending beyond scholarly approaches to home as a theoretical construct, Neighbor-Homes considers how Alvarez and Danticat inaugurate multiple spaces of belonging for their off- and on-island fictional characters, for their diverse community of readers, and for themselves.Revealing a more complex and complete understanding of these Hispaniola-rooted authors, the project places Alvarez and Danticat into conversation at a time when the construction of a border wall and racist immigration laws confirm increasing anti-Haitian sentiment in the Dominican Republic. Neighbor-Homes incorporates correspondence between the two writers to extrapolate diverse narrative representations of Hispaniola and to highlight various themes central to their work and social justice platforms including family relationships, community building, neighbor aesthetics, statelessness, and border solidarity.Neighbor-Homes will help interdisciplinary audiences read Danticat and Alvarez with a more critical eye so that they can more adeptly and profoundly understand Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and their respective diasporas. This important study is an essential read for students and scholars of literature and social justice, cultural studies, history, and politics, as well as Caribbean, Latinx, and African diaspora literatures.The Open Access version of this book, available at http: //www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.
Three Dog Night
It's the coldest winter in memory as ex-convict Peter Boutrup moves to remote, rural Denmark to start a new life. But when a young woman goes missing on New Year's Eve and Peter discovers the body of Ramses, an old acquaintance from prison, things start to unravel.
Paranoid Publics
Facts and established truths are regularly denied in contemporary life. This situation has brought paranoid politics into the mainstream, from conspiracy theories like QAnon, to sex panics and assaults on public health measures, to election denialism and the rise of vigilante militias. Paranoid Publics analyzes these phenomena as psychosocial realities enmeshed with emerging ways of determining truth. Today's paranoia cannot simply be blamed on the rise of social media or the recent surge of populist anger. Rather, as Chaudhary shows, both are fueled by preexisting psychosocial processes. Applying psychodynamics to analyze truth and politics, Paranoid Publics foregrounds unconscious demands, wishes, and compulsions. Against the hope that progressive economic policies might dispel widespread disorientation and disillusionment, Chaudhary reveals how psychic realities mark politics as deeply as do self-interest and class dynamics. Chaudhary takes up and reinvents psychoanalytic concepts to analyze how, for example, the personal liberty exercised through vaccine exemptions is paradoxically grounded in submission to the authority of the family and the state. Such politically consequential attitudes concerning truth emerge from a social order that they proceed to challenge. Making a case for psychosocial understandings of our current historical juncture, Paranoid Publics radically expands our notion of the political.
The Afterlives of Frankenstein
An exploration of the treatment of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in popular art and culture, this book examines adaptations in film, comics, theatre, art, video-games and more, to illuminate how the novel's myth has evolved in the two centuries since its publication. Divided into four sections, The Afterlives of Frankenstein considers the cultural dialogues Mary Shelley's novel has engaged with in specific historical moments; the extraordinary examples of how Frankenstein has suffused our cultural consciousness; and how the Frankenstein myth has become something to play with, a locus for reinvention and imaginative interpretation. In the final part, artists respond to the Frankenstein legacy today, reintroducing it into cultural circulation in ways that speak creatively to current anxieties and concerns. Bringing together popular interventions that riff off Shelley's major themes, chapters survey such works as Frankenstein in Baghdad, Bob Dylan's recent "My Own Version of You", the graphic novel series Destroyer with its Black cast of characters, Jane Louden's The Mummy!, the first Japanese translation of Frankenstein, "The New Creator", the iconic Frankenstein mask and Kenneth Brannagh's Mary Shelley's Frankenstein film. A deep-dive into the crevasses of Frankenstein adaptation and lore, this volume offers compelling new directions for scholarship surrounding the novel through dynamic critical and creative responses to Shelley's original.
Seeing Through Abstraction
During the first half of the twentieth century, China saw sweeping changes in the material conditions and practices of communication, transforming the volume, velocity, variety, veracity, and value of information. Encountering the new abstract matter of information, a generation of Chinese writers faced a crisis of literary identity: What made literature distinct from other informational genres, such as newspaper columns, financial figures, and telegrams? How was the emergent information order reshaping individual and social knowledge? And where would literature stand within this new order? This book examines how writers of the Republican era (1912-1949) came to recognize and respond to "information." Anatoly Detwyler investigates a wide range of literary and graphic experiments that engaged with different forms of information management, including data visualization, financial statistics, and propaganda science. These works, he argues, collectively attest to a new perceptibility of abstraction and its epistemological implications for apprehending reality. Tracing this mode of perception across fiction, poetry, and woodcut art, Seeing Through Abstraction offers a revisionist account of the development of modern Chinese literature and repositions it within the global history of the information age.
Plautus
This volume is the first book-length introduction to Plautus' Cistellaria (The Jewelry Box), offering an incisive overview for both students and scholars coming to it for the first time. This play is a story of young lovers defying social norms and disapproving parents in order to be together, featuring a memorable cast of characters and moments of both high humor and drama. This classic mistaken-identity plot includes witty interchanges and a lively conflict of values and ideals. Drawing on performance and cultural studies, gender and sexuality, and philology and intertextuality, Ariana Traill combines a lucid exploration of Cistellaria's setting, characters, plot and themes, with detailed analyses of its literary and socio-cultural contexts. Readers are able to appreciate the play both as a literary artifact, with its attendant issues of generic conventions and variations, and language and imagery, and as a performance script written for a rich tradition of acting, singing and stage movement at Rome, with its conventional costumes, masks and venues. With its majority female line-up (seven of the twelve roles are female), Cistellaria offers an unusual focus on women's thoughts and feelings as they struggle for their economic and social existence, making it a fascinating source for the study of women and gender in ancient Rome. The play continues to cast a shadow in the western dramatic tradition through its history of reception and adaptation.
Amazons in the Digital Era
For more than 3,000 years, the Amazons have been a recognised symbol that transcends mythology and has influenced history itself. The image of the powerful warrior woman who defied the established patriarchal order proved so compelling that it became permanently enshrined in the collective imagination-first through oral tradition and later through texts and images. The contributions in this volume explore how this image has endured through the lens of classical reception. From Wonder Woman to the war in Ukraine, and across diverse genres such as video games, fashion, warfare and documentary film, the Amazonian archetype has evolved beyond anything once imagined. Today, however, we are witnessing a true transformation. No longer embodying the negative traits the Greeks once ascribed to them, the Amazons have become a symbol of strength, resilience and empowerment-a model for women's rights in a global society and an icon of feminism and the LGBTQIA+ community. Divided into three parts, this book analyses how the image of the Amazon has, at different times and in different contexts, been marginalised, put on a pedestal and globalised. For the first time, media case studies and lived histories are examined to compare and contrast modern frameworks with each other and with the 'original' Amazonian iconography. What emerges is a concept of the 'Amazon' as a modern paradigm that speaks as strongly to contemporary society as it did to the ancients, but with a very different meaning.
Maritime Relations
Detailing the lives of ordinary sailors, their families and the role of the sea in Britain's long nineteenth century, Maritime Relations presents a powerful literary history from below. It draws on archival memoirs and logbooks, children's fiction and social surveys, as well as the work of canonical writers such as Gaskell, Dickens, Conrad and Joyce. Maritime Relations highlights the workings of gender, the family, and emotions, with particular attention to the lives of women and girls. The result is an innovative reading of neglected kinship relations that spanned cities and oceans in the Victorian period and beyond. Working at the intersection of literary criticism, the blue humanities and life writing studies, Emily Cuming creatively redefines the relations between life, labour and literature at the waterly edge of the nineteenth century.
The Bloomsbury Handbook of Postcolonial Print Cultures
The texts that make up postcolonial print cultures are often found outside the archival catalogue, and in lesser-examined repositories such as personal collections, the streets, or appendages to established collections. This volume examines the published and unpublished writing, magazines, pamphlets, paratexts, advertisements, cartoons, radio, and street art that serve as the intellectual forces behind opposition to colonial orders, as meditations on the futures of embryonic nation states, and as visions of new forms of equality. The print cultures examined here are necessarily anti-institutional; they serve as a counterpoint to the colonial archive and, relatedly, to more traditional genres and text formats coming out of large-scale publishers. This means that much of the primary material analyzed in this book has not been scrutinized before. Many of these print productions articulate collective liberation projects with origins in the grassroots. They include debates around the shape of the postcolonial nation and the new state formation that necessarily draw on a diverse and contentious public sphere of opinion. Their rhetoric ranges from the reformist to the revolutionary. Reflecting the diversity, indeed the disorderliness, of postcolonial print cultures this book covers local, national, and transnational cultures from Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas. Its wide-ranging essays offer a nuanced and, taken together, a definitive (though that is not to say comprehensive or systematic) study of a global phenomenon: postcolonial print cultures as a distinct literary field. The chapters recover the efforts of writers, readers and publishers to produce a postcolonialism 'from below', and thereby offer a range of fresh perspectives on the meaning and history of postcolonialism.
The #BookTalk &#BookGram Fan's Pocket Journal
For readers who live between the shelves and the scroll.#Booktok and #Bookstagram have turned reading into a global conversation, full of shelves, sobs, tropes, and unforgettable vibes. Now you can capture your own bookish journey inside this pocket-sized keepsake.Inside you'll find: * 30 prompts across 10 themed chapters, from tropes you love to the cliffhangers that broke you* Spaces for your shelf aesthetics, annotation colour swatches, and dream unboxings* Creative boxes for doodles, rants, and community shout-outs* A fun, giftable format for every book loverWhether you're a lurker, a poster, or the one everyone tags for recommendations, this journal is your space to keep the highlights of your reading life.Not affiliated with or endorsed by TikTok, Instagram, or their parent companies.
Lovecraft Annual No. 19 (2025)
The nineteenth issue of the Lovecraft Annual provides an array of studies on the life, work, and thought of H. P. Lovecraft. Ken Faig, Jr. treats the delicate subject of Lovecraft's boyhood cat, while Dylan Henderson studies the array of adaptations of "The Call of Cthulhu," in graphic novels, films, and other media. Rebecca Kunkel assesses the influence of Lovecraft on the Italian director Lucio Fulci; Pietro Guarriello reveals the surprising inclusion of Lovecraftian elements in Disney comics; and Duncan Norris supplies a broad overview of Lovecraft in popular culture.Stephen Walker provides a detailed linguistic, literary, and philosophical analysis of Lovecraft's invented expostulation "I瓣!" Harley Carnell studies the relationship between Lovecraft and Nathaniel Hawthorne, while Felix John Taylor gauges Lovecraft's relations to Wales and Welsh culture. Thijmen Zuiderwijk contributes a trenchant analysis of the dissemination of Lovecraft's work into Dutch, and James Goho adds a profound dissection of "The Thing on the Doorstep." Additional articles by Peter Cannon, Martin Dempsey, Michael Uhall, and Steven J. Mariconda round out the issue, which also includes several previously unreprinted letters by Lovecraft to the Providence Journal.
Exile and Return in African and Caribbean Literature
Exile is often perceived as an irreversible rupture, a state of loss and estrangement. Yet, in African and Caribbean literature, exile and return form a dynamic interplay that reshapes personal, collective, and national identities. This book challenges traditional notions of exile as suffering and return as simple reconnection with homeland and loved ones, arguing that in many instances exile fosters deep introspection and transformation, while return serves as active engagement with the homeland's sociopolitical and cultural realities. Through close readings of works by transnational writers, namely Khadi Hane, Malika Mokeddem, Dany Laferri癡re, and Alain Mabanckou, this study explores how exile and return create new forms of belonging, political consciousness, and cultural renewal. It gives voice to exiles navigating the displacement, alienation, and contradictions of the return. At a time when migration remains a polarizing issue in political discourses across Europe and the United States, this book reconsiders exile beyond narrative despair, revealing its potential as a space of reinvention. By bridging exilic imagination and homeland realities, this book offers a fresh perspective on how African and Caribbean writers envision the return as an Afrotopian project, a participative endeavor that rethinks the future of Africa and the Caribbean as a space of possibilities.
American Dantes
American Dantes provides fresh perspectives on Dante's reception and cultural impact in the United States over the past two hundred years.American Dantes investigates the depth and breadth of Dante's American legacy from the early nineteenth century to the present. Showcasing an impressive array of approaches from renowned literary and Dante scholars, this book explores how Dante has influenced American poetry, fiction, memoir, painting, film, television, and political and religious discourse. This collection offers an in-depth look at the vibrant and ongoing scholarly traditions of research, editing, translation, and creative adaptation that have established Dante's Divine Comedy as a classic in American literary culture, influencing cultural movements from transcendentalism to jazz to the Black radical tradition and more.Contributors: David Wallace, Laura Dassow Walls, Joshua Matthews, Dennis Looney, Kathleen Boyle, Kathleen Verduin, Christian Y. Dupont, Kristina M. Olson, Henry Weinfield, Stephen Fredman, Joseph Elkanah Rosenberg, Arielle Saiber, and Peter S. Hawkins
Icy Magic
Rosella the Rockfish fairy's garnet shell is used to ensure the coral reefs are safe and protected. But when her magical shell goes missing, the corals start to bleach and are in danger of destruction. Alice and Christy must help Rosella find her shell to make things right before it's too late.
Publish Her Anthology
A Collection of Essays About the Special Bond Between Women and Their DogsOne hundred percent of the proceeds from the sale of this anthology benefit publishing services and program grants for underrepresented women authors."Dogs and humans have co-existed for thousands of years. We have been hard-wired over countless generations to bond with each other. Oxytocin, the 'love hormone' that's released when we fall in love or give birth or nurse a newborn baby, is also released in the brains of both humans and dogs when we gaze into each other's eyes and snuggle."In 'Dog Years, ' the authors explore how dogs provide comfort and bring solace during our most challenging times. The wise dogs featured are a balm for loneliness. They help their humans navigate grief and loss. They teach their humans caretaking and confidence, and what it means to show up every day and be present. These essays illustrate the deep wisdom of our canine companions, and how, if we listen and watch carefully, they can teach us empathy, which allows us to see other dogs, people and ourselves with more compassion."-Kate Hopper, editor, teacher and author of "Use Your Words" and "Ready for Air"
The Western Canon
The literary critic defends the importance of Western literature from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Kafka and Beckett in this acclaimed national bestseller."An impressive work...deeply, rightly passionate about the great books of the past."--Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Book World Harold Bloom's The Western Canon is more than a required reading list--it is a "heroically brave, formidably learned" defense of the great works of literature that comprise the traditional Western Canon. Infused with a love of learning, compelling in its arguments for a unifying written culture, it argues brilliantly against the politicization of literature and presents a guide to the essential writers of the western literary tradition (The New York Times Book Review).Placing William Shakespeare at the "center of the canon," Bloom examines the literary contributions of Dante Alighieri, John Milton, Jane Austen, Emily Dickenson, Leo Tolstoy, Sigmund Freud, James Joyce, Pablo Neruda, and many others. Bloom's book, much-discussed and praised in publications as diverse as The Economist and Entertainment Weekly, offers a dazzling display of erudition and passion.
I Write to Find Out What I Am Thinking
This second hardcover omnibus edition of Didion's collected nonfiction contains her final four books: Blue Nights, South and West, Let Me Tell You What I Mean, and her bestselling and most famous work, The Year of Magical Thinking. In her essay "Why I Write" (included in this volume), Joan Didion explained what lies behind her iconic nonfiction writing: "I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means." Across her long and prolific career, readers have been blessed time and again by her brilliance as a prose stylist and a social commentator. From her unforgettable reckonings with grief (for her husband in The Year of Magical Thinking and for her daughter in Blue Nights), to her exploration of two iconic regions of America in South and West, through the indelible pieces of reporting collected from across her career in Let Me Tell You What I Mean, the books collected here show Didion at her best: bearing witness to our history, illuminating our culture, and shedding light on the human condition. Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.
Inhabit the Poem: Last Essays
In 13 essays, the great poetry critic offers her final word on the poets who have meant the most to her, from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson to Wallace Stevens and Sylvia Plath Helen Vendler was our greatest reader of poetry, a scholar who illuminiated its inner mechanisms and emotional roots for a wide audience. Always attentive to the stylistic and imaginative features of a poem, Vendler addresses the work of a wide range of American, English, and Irish poets--both the canonical and the unexpected--in 13 essays: - Walt Whitman, author of the first PTSD poem- Sylvia Plath, and the lost poetry of motherhood- William Cowper, James Merrill, and A. R. Ammons on poetric charm- Emily Bront禱 and Emily Dickinson, linked by a poetic mystery- Ocean Vuong and the shaping imagination of poetry today- Wallace Stevens and the enigma of beauty. In these and other essays Vendler demonstrates once again why the Irish poet Seamus Heaney called her "the best close reader of poems to be found on the literary pages." The thirteen poignant essays gathered here were all published in the last three years of Vendler's life, in the journal Liberties, and intended as her final book. The author's preface was completed only three days before her death, at age ninety.
Latin American Sinographies
Within the world mappings of cultural representation, the transatlantic is the route that has monopolized our imaginaries about the self and the other. This book studies an alternative trajectory: the Latin American travel writing of the journey to China from the 19th century to the dawn of the Cultural Revolution (1843-1966). Through a wide constellation of texts, it offers an in-depth comparative analysis of how travelers from Colombia, Peru and Chile imagined, interpreted, and represented the different Chinas they witnessed. Intercepted mainly by literary criticism, the text is prioritized as the main point of departure to contextualize and identify the political as well as the poetical effects that this off-the-beaten-path encounter represented. Close attention is also paid to the transformation of the conditions that surrounded the Latin American production of meanings of China, as well as the change that "China" had as an idea throughout these decades. Through these pages, it is argued that from the voyage of the lettered Creole to the Qing empire, to the trip of the red tourist to Communist China, this encounter, and the writing of it became a space to reimagine and redraw Latin Americanness from other world coordinates.
Marie Neurath and Isotype Picturebooks
Marie Neurath (1898-1986) was an illustrator and graphic designer who, from the mid-1940s to the late 1960s, created innovative non-fiction books for children. Together with her husband, politician and philosopher Otto Neurath (1882-1945), and artist and designer Gerd Arntz (1900-1988), she developed a method of visual representation in 1920s Vienna that became known as Isotype (International System of Typographic Picture Education). Influenced by the progressive ideas of the Vienna Circle, Isotype was intended to contribute to the democratization of knowledge. To this end, the Neuraths and their team created a special form of pictorial statistics that meant to make complex scientific relationships accessible to the layperson. In the postwar period, Marie Neurath developed several series of informative picturebooks for children that incorporated and further developed the Isotype principles. Although these picturebooks were hugely successful in their time, international picturebook research has barely acknowledged Marie Neurath's legacy. This anthology is the first to elaborate Marie Neurath's achievement as a transformer of knowledge for children and to analyze her distinctive, groundbreaking graphic method.
Unveiling Structures in Colson Whitehead's Fiction
This book offers a comprehensive critical analysis of Colson Whitehead's fiction, positioning him as a key figure in both African American literature and the global "turn to genre". It explores how Whitehead employs conventions from popular genres--such as detective, zombie and caper stories--not merely for entertainment, but as tools for ideological critique and narrative innovation. Central to the study is the concept of "narratives of unveiling", in which information is revealed retrospectively, disrupting linear storytelling and reshaping ethical perspectives. These structures allow Whitehead to expose the systemic roots of racism and ideological conflict embedded in American society. The book situates his work within broader debates about canon formation, Afropessimist and postsoul aesthetics, and the politics of form. Through close readings of Whitehead's novels, it demonstrates how Whitehead challenges racial myths and signifies genre expectations, offering narratives that performatively enact cultural critique.
Navajo in Disharmony
Peter MacDonald was elected Chairman of the Navajo Nation for an unprecedented fourth term with Johnny R. Thompson as his chosen Vice-Chairman. MacDonald convinced the Tribal Council that the purchase of the Big Boquillas Ranch will help rejuvenate the Navajo Nation's economy. The Tribal Council agreed and approved the purchase in lopsided vote. It was purchased by the tribe for $33.4 million dollars, just minutes after Byron Brown, a Scottsdale developer and MacDonald friend and another associate paid a California company $26.2 million for the same ranch. The Tribal Council approved the sale with its members unaware of the double escrow of the fact that the tribe was paying $7 million more than the ranch was actually worth. Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs established a Special Committee on Investigations to uncover "fraud, corruption and mismanagement in American Indian Affairs, no matter where or to whom it led." As part of the committee's mandate, it also called to examine Indian tribal governments to ascertain the degree of corruption in those institutions. The committee paid attention to Peter MacDonald's leadership. The Senate Committee's investigation of political corruption in Peter MacDonald's administration, centered around the "Big Bo" land purchase and other deals to intense conflict in the Nation. A majority of the Tribal Council became dissatisfied with MacDonald's leadership and organized against him. MacDonald agreed to leave office peacefully if the Council will furnish him with a legal defense fund. The Council refused. The Council by a vote of 49 to 13 placed MacDonald on involuntary administrative leave without the defense fund he demanded. This led to a series of protests, confrontations and division culminating in a deadly confrontation which erupted in Window Rock; wherein, two Navajos were killed and ten were injured pitting supporters of MacDonald against the Tribal Council, tribal police, and others.
Reading the Environment
Reading the Environment: Olga Tokarczuk's Fiction aims at analysing the dynamics of reading fiction in the context of accelerating climate change. This volume proposes an environment-oriented model of reading and applies it to a well-defined corpus--all existing English translations of Olga Tokarczuk's fiction. These are: Primeval and Other Times, House of Day, House of Night, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Flights, The Books of Jacob and The Empusium, removed from the immediate cultural context of a single author, these novels give a representative sample of contemporary literature read by Anglophone people of diverse national backgrounds who live in different localities, but share one endangered planet, whether they realise it or not. The book charts five ways in which our reading protocols have shifted: the way of interconnectedness, the way of naturecultures, the way of sympoiesis, the way of Earth Island, and the way of the beginning of the Anthropocene. This book is written for an academic audience (postgraduates, researchers and academics) specialising in Environmental Humanities, Ecocriticism, World Literature, Postmodern Literature and Climate Fiction.
Beyond Sinocentrism
Cambria Sinophone World Series.This book offers the first sustained study of fictional encounters with ethnocultural others in early modern Chinese literature. Focusing on narratives from the seventeenth to the late nineteenth centuries, it examines how Chinese literati engaged with a changing world through imaginative depictions of the foreign-revealing cultural pride, anxiety, curiosity, and critique.Bringing together literary analysis, global history, postcolonial theory, and cultural anthropology, the book challenges the common portrayal of imperial China as isolated and inward-looking. Instead, it reveals a dynamic interplay of Sinocentric confidence and openness to global knowledge in texts such as Yesou puyan and Jinghua yuan.An important study for scholars of Chinese literature, history, and world literature, Beyond Sinocentrism sheds new light on how early modern Chinese narratives negotiated identity and power in a globalizing world. It offers a vital corrective to both Sinocentric and Eurocentric paradigms in the study of China's place in global history.
Miracles and Wonders in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period
Despite the assumption that we live today in a rather rationalist and mechanized world, there remain many aspects that neither medicine nor physics can fully explain. The Catholic Church continues to pronounce individuals as saints because scientifically confirmed miracles are associated with them. If we want to gain a solid understanding of the pre-modern history of mentality, emotions, and everyday culture, it proves to be highly revealing to examine what miracles and wonders had meant at that time, both in the theological and medical field, in the visual arts and literature. As a matter of fact, people both in the East and in the West have consistently flocked to pilgrimage sites all over the world in the hope that a miracle might happen and solve issues for them. The contributors to this volume, based on a symposium at the University of Arizona, May 2024, approach this critically important topic from many different perspectives, taking us from the early Middle Ages to the early modern age, examining hagiographical, medical, literary, and alchemical texts, discussing both miracles and wonders as relevant themes in the public discourses. Both the passage through Inferno and Purgatorio as the crucial pathway toward Paradiso and the experience of women's miraculous conception are identified as deeply impactful for the pre-modern world, and this both in Christian and Muslim cultures. Studying miracles and wonders through a kaleidoscope of different materials and concepts makes it possible to gain a closer understanding of people's mindsets, power structures, and the debate between medicine and religion. These topics were also greatly important in other cultures, as several papers on Arabic medieval literature indicate. Further, pursuing this global issue, we recognize easily that the separation line between the Middle Ages and the early modern period is only a modern construct and often not that helpful because the discourse on miracles and wonders has continued and influences even us today.
