Dystopia and Dispossession in the Hollywood Science Fiction
Offering a survey of Hollywood science fiction cinema from 1979 to 2017 (from Ridley Scott's Alien to Denis Villeneuve's Blade Runner 2049), Dystopia and Dispossessionin the Hollywood Science Fiction Film argues that the trajectory of Hollywood's dystopianism in that period is inextricable from the phenomenon of the 'new enclosures', the new dispossessions and privatisations sweeping across the United States since the 1970s. More precisely, it contends that the critiques of such dispossessions elaborated before the turn of the century - consider the satire of private policing in RoboCop (1987), the portrayal of commodified air in Total Recall (1990), and the nightmarish extrapolations of postmodern urbanism in Blade Runner (1982) and The Truman Show (1998) - begin to disappear in films such as The Matrix (1999), The Island (2005), District 9 (2009), Repo Men (2010), and The Purge (2013), the further commodification of land, forest, reservoir, ideas, even the human genome having diminished the contrast between capitalist and non-capitalist spaces on which the earlier critiques depended. Bringing close readings of blockbuster films into dialogue with historical and theoretical scholarship on dispossession, Dystopia and Dispossessionin the Hollywood Science Fiction Film proposes a new understanding of the politics of science fiction in particular and utopian thought in general.
Reimagining the Human in Contemporary French Science Fiction
The study of French science fiction - even in France - remains an underexploited field. Only recently have French literary scholars been able to gain recognition for the validity of studying SF, but their works are often literary histories. This is the first book-length study to take into account both French and Anglo-American intellectual trends, theories, and SF scholarship and apply them to a corpus of French works. It shows how contemporary French SF imagines two broad philosophical inquiries into the powerful, yet terrifying geological age of the Anthropocene: posthumanism and transhumanism. While the posthumanist perspective calls attention to the interdependence and co-evolution of humans and nonhumans within a complex ecosystem of life, the transhumanist view of coping with the Anthropocene offers more pragmatic, tool-based solutions, rather than a reworking of the human imagination. Given the history of philosophical thought's entanglement with literature in France, French SF can tell us a lot about this existential crisis of Anthropos as both destroyer and savior of worlds and bodies alike. With a focus on encounters between humans, nonhumans, and posthumans in selected works, this book investigates both the immaterial (the psychological state of the mind) and material (the body) stakes of posthumanist or transhumanist thinking in French SF.
Cahiers Tristan Corbiere
Pierre E. Richard, Une photographie inconnue de Tristan Corbiere ! - Yann Bernal, Femur porteur - Benoit Houze, Pale poete - Serge Meitinger, Le registre du "Sublime Bete". Corbiere artisan d'un sublime sans qualites
Island in the World
Island in the World: Singapore's Geopolitical DNA is a thoughtfully curated collection of Simon S C Tay's public commentaries, spanning from the mid-1990s to the present. Organised thematically, the book explores key issues shaping Singapore's engagement with the world and region in a time of geopolitical tension and tumult. While focused on the present and emerging events, he also considers the past and future.More than just a compilation, this work weaves together reflections that provide deeper context, tracing how Singapore has evolved while certain fundamental principles endure. Tay connects past insights with recent developments, offering a perspective that is both grounded in history and attuned to the challenges of today.Through these essays, Island in the World captures Singapore's journey in an ever-changing global landscape - while also charting the evolution of the author's own thinking over the decades.
Invisible Threads
On an island off the coast of Massachusetts, six miles across the cobalt blue waters of the Nantucket Sound, there is a place where hope flourishes.The island is Martha's Vineyard. The place is Camp Jabberwocky, a sleepover summer camp for people with a variety of disabilities. During Dr. Gardner's twenty-five years as a volunteer camp physician, he developed surprising ties to individuals with Down syndrome, autism, traumatic brain injuries, cerebral palsy, and manic depression. Instead of focusing on people's differences, he watched the campers and their helpers appreciate what we all have in common. What makes us laugh, cry, and sometimes argue. What makes us human, whatever our background. To borrow the iconic phrase of Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, he felt "invisible lines of connection" with the campers.Leaving Camp Jabberwocky at the end of those summers, he developed unlikely connections with people from different walks of life, sometimes in unexpected places, including a hospital in Haiti, a down-on-its-luck golf course in Florida, and The Boston Holocaust Memorial.At a time when people's differences are often used as tools to divide and vilify, Dr. Gardner spotlights our common humanity through the invisible but profound connections he forms with the individuals in these stories, who shared their life experiences with him and forever changed him as a human being.
Radical Realism, Autofictional Narratives and the Reinvention of the Novel
This monograph is concerned with what it sees as two complementary phenomena: that of contemporary writers of fiction who seem to have turned their backs on the traditional novel in favour of what might be termed a radical realism, alongside a more general movement towards and interest in auto/biography and memoir in the post-truth era. By reviewing the work of four authors whose trajectory to date represents engagement with novelistic as well as auto/biographical forms, it reconsiders differences between 'fiction' and 'non-fiction', as they pertain to both production and reception, including issues of generic categorization, the prevalence or exclusion of specific textual markers, and readerly expectations in navigating diverse and shifting literary cultures. The Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard's Min Kamp (My Struggle) series is considered in English translation in relation to its cross-cultural reception; it is also placed within the context of Knausgaard's oeuvre as a whole. Some parallels between the work of Knausgaard and that of Rachel Cusk are drawn, though in the case of the latter the focus is not so much on the memoirs but on the Outline trilogy that followed the trilogy of memoirs and the extent to which it represents both a departure from and a continuation of some of the concerns expressed in previous non-fictional works with a specific focus on Aftermath. Comparison of Jeanette Winterson's semi-autobiographical debut novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, with her memoir entitled Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? allows for close textual reading of scenes initially treated in novelistic form and revisited in the memoir permitting discussion of points of similarity and difference in their treatment in relation to the constraints and affordances of genre, where these apply. Discussion of Xiaolu Guo's memoir, Once Upon A Time in the East, focusses both on its cross-cultural reception and on the place of the memoir within the Guo corpus.In some ways all four writers are less concerned with traditional aspects of story and more concerned to deploy a range of forms, including narrative, to serve their interest in broader questions of truth, agency and self-understanding.
Negotiations
This book, by the eminent poetry critic Neil Corcoran, examines the ways in which the work of significant modern Irish, British and American poets interacts with or 'negotiates' different contexts - historical, social, political, artistic and aesthetic. In Part 1 important work by David Jones, Robert Graves, Seamus Heaney and Bob Dylan is shown to negotiate poetic methods - both traditional and modernist - and also the work of major earlier writers to produce strikingly original new forms; and Derek Mahon's prose is read in the light of these concerns. The books shows how, by negotiating in this way, their work engages profoundly with complex and sometimes terrible histories, including the First World War and the Northern Irish Troubles. Part 2 discusses the ways in which 'ekphrastic' work - poems which engage with visual art - by Elizabeth Bishop, W. S. Graham, John Ashbery, Sylvia Plath and Ciaran Carson negotiates comparable poetic and historical inheritances while also inventively responding to work by significant artists, notably Parmigianino, Poussin, de Chirico, Klee and members of the St Ives School. The book is a signal contribution to current critical debates about these poets, situating them in original or newly clarified contexts, and it offers exemplary close readings of noteworthy poems.
Subjectivity and Nationhood in Yeats, Joyce and Beckett
Subjectivity and Nationhood in Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett: Nietzschean Constellationsreconceptualises Friedrich Nietzsche's position in the intellectual history of modernism and substantively refigures our received ideas regarding his relationship to these Irish modernists. Building on recent developments in new modernist studies, the book demonstrates that Nietzsche is a modernist writer and a modernist philosopher by drawing new parallels between his engagement with established philosophical theories and the aesthetic practices that Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot identified as quintessentially modernist. With specific reference to key Nietzschean philosophemes - eternal recurrence, the ?bermensch, transnationalism, cultural paralysis, and ethical perspectivism - itchallenges the longstanding assumption that Yeats, who repeatedly acknowledged his admiration for Nietzsche, is the most 'Nietzschean' of these Irish modernists. While showing how both Joyce and Beckett are in many important ways more 'Nietzschean' than Yeats, this interdisciplinary study makes a number of significant and timely contributions to the fields of Irish studies and modernist studies.
Musical Wordsworth
In his Essay of 1815, Wordsworth asserts that 'a pure and refined scheme of harmony' must prevail in all 'higher poetry'. This idea of a structured and complex form of 'harmony' was similarly noted earlier in The Prelude (1805), where Wordsworth famously claimed that the human mind is 'framed even like the breath / And harmony of music'. Musical Wordsworth presents an original understanding of Wordsworthian harmony by examining an organised but dynamic sense of musicality that shapes his poetic theory and practice. This book is the first study to draw on music psychology and aesthetics to interpret the function and mechanism of Wordsworth's aural structure and movement. Engaging with scholarship from the fields of literature and music, it defines Wordsworth's poetry and the imagination through musical conceptions, and establishes various modes and forms of poetic listening as experiences of musical performance and appreciation. Each chapter explores a pair of musical abstractions - Lyricism and Musicality; Breath and Harmony; Repetition and Resonance; Expectation and Surprise; Rhythm and Dynamics; Rest and Silence. Musical Wordsworth will be of interest to students and researchers of Romantic poetry, long nineteenth-century literature, and music.
Ghosts and the Gothic
Ghosts have long been connected with the Gothic, but until now there has not been a book dedicated to the subject. This collection examines ghostly presences (and absences) in both classic and lesser-known Gothic texts from the beginning of the genre to the present in a global context. Arguing that the undead, in the form of ghosts, are intrinsic to the Gothic mode, essays in the collection question the place of manifested spirits. The Gothic has always been 'political', and essays in this collection examine some of the most relevant issues facing us today: from the destruction of the natural environment, to questions of 'freedom', to gender politics.
Contemporary Visual Poetry
This book examines contemporary visual poetry and how conceptual writing, poem-objects, and computational texts shape a posthumanist understanding that is "situated". First, the eye is theorised with respect to ethical understanding. When visual poets reclaim vision, visual poetics becomes a feminist praxis. In Paula Claire and Maggie O'Sullivan, visual poetry becomes an ecological practice concerned with connectivity in the entanglements of natureculture. In O'Sullivan, Campanello, Bergvall, and Philip, spatial and temporal sense (de)formation sustains radical forms of voicing and eyewitness. Finally, works by Mez Breeze and Stephanie Strickland expand our understanding of visual poetry in digital (electronic, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence) contexts in which technology and affect are intimately connected. These visual texts open up Braidotti's question with respect to how we are to "visualize the subject as a transversal entity encompassing the human, our genetic neighbours the animals and the earth as a whole, and to do so within an understandable language".
Neo-Victorian Lesbians on Screen
Neo-Victorian Lesbians on Screen, by Maier and Friars, argues that the on-screen portrayal of lesbians situated in the long nineteenth century across various countries is at the very least a dual task; the imperative project of revoicing lesbian silence and female companionship is complicated by the lack of and/or complex representation of such women in the past.
My Corpse Inside
A provocative and meticulously structured exploration of identity, language, and the body, My Corpse Inside exposes the thin and increasingly blurry line between the physical and the digital, between the living and the dead. Wes Jamison contends with the complex and disturbing relationship of sexuality and violence through a torrent of virtual horrors--shock sites, hookup apps, beheading videos, and creepshots--as well as through Jamison's own experiences of being surveilled and exploited online. Inspired by Kiyoshi Kurosawa's master horror film Kairo, which portrays ghosts overflowing into our reality through the internet, this fragmented book-length essay clarifies Julia Kristeva's infamously esoteric theory of abjection and subjectivity and updates it for today's constant virtuality. My Corpse Inside is a disquieting work that asks readers to confront the violence, fetish, horror, and loneliness inherent in our eternal connectivity.
Decolonial Deep Mapping
Deep maps capture complex relationships to place and help trace the relationship between the abstract spaces of traditional maps and the cultural and literary history of the places that they represent. Using early modern Ireland as a template, this Element explores how deep-mapping techniques and a decolonial data ethic can be used to assemble a more culturally and linguistically representative archive and create more inclusive literary histories. It shows how deep mapping can disrupt colonial teleology and counter the monophone (and, specifically, anglophone) colonial record by bringing the long-neglected voices of the colonised back into the conversation. In doing so, it recovers a pre-conquest cultural vibrancy which colonisation, the language shift from Irish to English, and scholarly inattention successively occluded. More broadly, it offers a model for engaging with decolonial literary deep maps by developing reading strategies for 'juxtapuntal' reading that has the potential to decolonise the canon.
Living on After Failure
In Living On After Failure, Irving Goh dwells with failure and all of its negative affects. Goh does not seek a theorization of failure as something to overcome or turn into a recuperative philosophy or progress narrative. Rather, he engages with the ontological condition of failure as a process of staying with the impasse that failure brings. Drawing on the thought of Berlant, Derrida, Foucault, and Nancy, Goh examines works by contemporary writers like Ottessa Moshfegh, Rachel Cusk, ?douard Lev矇, Yiyun Li, and Kate Zambreno. He guides readers through stages of reckoning with failure as an immersive impasse: flopping, drifting itself, a dark care of the self, melodrama, and postscripting. By unsettling the failure/success binary, Goh provides those who cannot shake off their sense of failure, or who refuse the narratives of progress or success and their ideologies of grit and resilience, with discursive and affective spaces in which to attend to their desire to be attached to their failures.
The English Modernist Novel as Political Theology
A 2024 CHOICE OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLE novels by Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, and Sylvia Townsend Warner as political theology - works that imagine a resistance to the fusion of Christianity and patriotism which fuelled and supported the First World War - this book shows how we can gain valuable insights from their works for anti-militarist, anti-statist, and anti-nationalist efforts today. While none of the four novelists in this study were committed Christians during the 1920s, Andrews explores how their fiction written in the wake of the First World War operates theologically when it challenges English civil religion - the rituals of the nation that elevate the state to a form of divinity. Bringing these novels into a dialogue with recent political theologies by theorists and theologians including Giorgio Agamben, William Cavanaugh, Simon Critchley, Michel Foucault, Stanley Hauerwas and J羹rgen Moltmann, this book shows the myriad ways that we can learn from the authors' theopolitical imaginations. Andrews demonstrates the many ways that these novelists issue a challenge to the problems with civil religion and the sacralized nation state and, in so doing, offer alternative visions to coordinate our inner lives with our public and collective actions.
Marvellous Vegetables in the English Renaissance
John Gerard's natural history of plants, The Herball (1597), is considered a failure in the history of science. Despite this reputation, it has endured as an aesthetic resource. Its illustrations were used as needlework patterns, and strewn across its pages are extracts of classical poetry, including Ovid's Metamorphoses, that delight and instruct. It is little wonder that early modern poets, like Shakespeare and Milton, gathered inspiration from this storehouse of plants.In Marvellous Vegetables in the English Renaissance, Vin Nardizzi offers a reparative reading of Gerard's "failed" text, particularly its chapters on leeks, laurels, tulips, and potatoes. Through a series of experiments in speculative natural history, which require an analysis of both word and image, Nardizzi distills The Herball's logic and poetics, its distinctions and infelicities, and demonstrates the entanglements of humans and plants at the core of Shakespeare's plays. Exploring these "cross-kingdom" encounters, Nardizzi contributes to the burgeoning field of queer ecologies by treating plant natural history as a serious intellectual resource for writing a counter-history of embodiment at the turn of the seventeenth century. All we need do, Nardizzi proposes, is smell the flowers.
The Rise of Sensationalism in American Literature and Culture
The Rise of Sensationalism in American Literature and Culture: 1620-1860 argues that the rise of the American tradition of sensationalism can be better understood in the transatlantic context. Early American writers were unquestionably influenced by various forms of European sensationalism. At the same time, they often felt compelled to distance themselves from their European counterparts whom they accused of promoting voyeuristic indulgence in the scandalous and demoralizing their readers. American writers typically claimed that they turned to the scandalous only to promote legitimate religious, political, and social causes. In this respect, their approach reflected the Puritan tradition of didactic sensationalism in which provocative themes (religious dissent, crime, and sex scandals) were routinely exploited in ostensibly well-intentioned publications (sermons, crime reports, and journalism). What is remarkable about the antebellum period is that it saw a dramatic transformation of American sensationalist literature as popular writers started to incorporate elements of European sensationalism while trying to preserve the didactic conventions of their predecessors.
Shakespeare and Phenomenology
This book considers how Shakespeare's theatre investigates and reveals "Being-in-the-world". Through the lens of phenomenology (the study of how the world shows itself to conscious experience) Johnston examines how Shakespeare's texts and dramaturgy reveal aspects of Being. This volume explores philosophical themes in Shakespeare's drama, including perceptions of stage space and fictional place, temporality, bodies, authenticity, and memory in early modern English staging. It examines how Shakespeare asks the question of the meaning of Being by playing with the distinction between "what is" and "what is not". The work offers practical performance tips and exercises to connect with modern audiences. Each chapter aims to inspire creative artists in production and rehearsal through a unique focus and provide a critical approach to performance. Through a phenomenological exploration of dramatic possibilities drawn from the key concepts of philosophers such as Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Edith Stein, Johnston investigates theatre as a practical form of philosophical investigation. Theatre-makers should not only consider the fictional world of the play, but also the historical context of Shakespeare's world and the contemporary context for connecting with audiences here, today, now.
What Has Been, A Novel by Eliza Kirkham Mathews
What Has Been, originally published in 1801, is an affecting, lively, and accessible read for scholars and students of the long eighteenth century. This volume will be of great interest to teachers and scholars of the long-eighteenth century and Romantic era.
Shaw - "The Chucker Out"
Originally published in 1969, Shaw - "The Chucker Out" quotes much entirely new and previously unpublished Shaw material (the fruits of six years' research at the British Museum and elsewhere) as the basis for his aim of assisting towards a better understanding of Shaw's controversial character and his paradoxical attitude to life.
Dimensions of the Impersonal in Clarice Lispector
This book explores Clarice Lispector's work through the lens of "affirmative biopolitics," highlighting the ontological and ethical deadlock between personality and impersonality. It analyzes her complex anthropological vision and its metaphysical implications, focusing on themes of mystical and messianic nature rooted in Jewish tradition.
Assembly and Its Other in German Romantic Literature and Thought
This collection of essays turns on a shift in Romantic studies from viewing wholeness as an absolute value to critiquing it as a limiting construction. Wholeness and its concomitant sense of harmony, rather than a natural given, is a construct that was assembled and disassembled, theorized and criticized, by diverse authors and artists in a wide variety of disciplines and socio-historical contexts, and instrumentalized for diverse purposes. The plurality of these constructions - that Goethe's Urpflanze, for example, is not synonymous with Friedrich Schlegel's universal progressive poetry - is but one manifestation of how "assembly" strives but fails to be absolute. The "other" of assembly referenced in the title suggests two divergent but inseparable tendencies: firstly, how a construction can take on the appearance of a natural given; and secondly, how assemblages of wholeness harbor within themselves their own principle of disarticulation. These two tendencies underlie the "inexhaustible" character of Romantic "gatherings". As a construction passes itself off as nature, the natural fails to account for itself as a whole. The scope of this volume encompasses the establishment, mapping, and interrogation of assembly and its other in German Romanticism through interdisciplinary studies on literature, aesthetics, philosophy, drama, music, synaesthesia, mathematics, science, and exploration.List of contributors: Beate Allert, Frederick Burwick, Alexis B. Smith, Margaret Strair, Christina Weiler, Joshua Wilner.
Walter de la Mare
This book aims to put Walter de la Mare back on the literary map. A writer beloved by many, he has nevertheless remained on the sidelines of literary history. Walter de la Mare: Critical Appraisals promises to restore his reputation as one of the most memorably haunting of poets, as well as a peculiarly unnerving writer of ghost stories. A collection of varied, wide-ranging essays on de la Mare's poetry, stories, novels, reviews and lectures, it puts his work beside that of many of his famous contemporaries, including Thomas Hardy, Robert Frost, W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot and Katherine Mansfield. It also contains an invaluable survey of his archive, much of it unpublished, and a number of newly commissioned poems reflecting on his legacy. This multifaceted volume will be of interest to students working on twentieth-century poetry, the short story, the nature and limits of modernism and British intellectual history, as well as on de la Mare himself. List of contributors: Catherine Charlwood, Guy Cuthbertson, Peter Davidson, Giles de la Mare, Andrew Doyle, Suzannah V. Evans, Adam Guy, Robin Holloway, Yui Kajita, Zaffar Kunial, Gregory Leadbetter, Angela Leighton, Erica McAlpine, Jenny McDonnell, Will May, Andrew Motion, Paul Muldoon, A. J. Nickerson, Seamus Perry, Adrian Poole, Camille Ralphs, Vidyan Ravinthiran, Peter Scupham, A. E. Stallings, Mark Valentine, Rory Waterman, Anne Welsh, David Wheatley, Rowan Williams, William Wootten.
Medieval Media
Traces the development of media concepts across scientific, legal, and devotional knowledge domains to offer a coherent theory of premodern media Were there media before the printing press? Although medieval culture lacked the machine technologies that we conventionally associate with the idea of media, medieval thinkers developed extensive scientific, legal, and devotional discourses of media and mediation. Ingrid Nelson draws on contemporary media theory to explain how premodern media--including not only easily recognizable media forms like books and paintings but also bodies and environmental elements that mediate perception--served as essential materials of communication between self and world. Tracing the development of medieval media from the rediscovery of Aristotle's work on sense perception to post-Magna Carta legal forms and Christian devotional practice, Medieval Media synthesizes these diffuse discourses to present a coherent theory of premodern media. Turning her focus to literature, Nelson shows how Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales draws on medieval media theory to express an aesthetic materialism that emphasizes relation and network over mimesis and representation. In exploring how literature shapes and is shaped by medieval media, The Canterbury Tales articulates a poetics of media that seeks to unite the perceptual, social, and spiritual capacities of human experience, even as it encodes emerging exclusions and restrictions of bodies marked by race and gender in medieval Western culture. Bringing medieval studies and media studies into conversation with one another, Medieval Media uncovers concepts and theories of premodern media that expand our understanding of media history and open new avenues for medieval literary studies.
Living on After Failure
In Living On After Failure, Irving Goh dwells with failure and all of its negative affects. Goh does not seek a theorization of failure as something to overcome or turn into a recuperative philosophy or progress narrative. Rather, he engages with the ontological condition of failure as a process of staying with the impasse that failure brings. Drawing on the thought of Berlant, Derrida, Foucault, and Nancy, Goh examines works by contemporary writers like Ottessa Moshfegh, Rachel Cusk, ?douard Lev矇, Yiyun Li, and Kate Zambreno. He guides readers through stages of reckoning with failure as an immersive impasse: flopping, drifting itself, a dark care of the self, melodrama, and postscripting. By unsettling the failure/success binary, Goh provides those who cannot shake off their sense of failure, or who refuse the narratives of progress or success and their ideologies of grit and resilience, with discursive and affective spaces in which to attend to their desire to be attached to their failures.
Decolonial Deep Mapping
Deep maps capture complex relationships to place and help trace the relationship between the abstract spaces of traditional maps and the cultural and literary history of the places that they represent. Using early modern Ireland as a template, this Element explores how deep-mapping techniques and a decolonial data ethic can be used to assemble a more culturally and linguistically representative archive and create more inclusive literary histories. It shows how deep mapping can disrupt colonial teleology and counter the monophone (and, specifically, anglophone) colonial record by bringing the long-neglected voices of the colonised back into the conversation. In doing so, it recovers a pre-conquest cultural vibrancy which colonisation, the language shift from Irish to English, and scholarly inattention successively occluded. More broadly, it offers a model for engaging with decolonial literary deep maps by developing reading strategies for 'juxtapuntal' reading that has the potential to decolonise the canon.
Nikolay Gogol and His Contemporary Critics
This is a print on demand edition of an important, hard-to-find publication.
Literature
Literature is so broad that it has an intimate relationship with all humans. Many authors have made it available, but only four or five have taken the initiative to establish a connection between literature and students.The main goal of this work is to make Professor Manindra Kumar Meher's philosophy and literary vision accessible to all people worldwide. This will undoubtedly change the way that literature and other sciences conduct research. All subjects will be taught and written like literature, but only their essentials will be covered. Universities will gain more respect as this access grows. War, poverty, violence, conceit and melancholy will become less prevalent in the world. The focus of all disciplines, including business, economics, politics and science will be on the well-being of people and the natural world. A book that has the capacity to alter the course of history is a potent literary representation of boundaries and limits. The book extends a warm invitation to the world's largest readership.
Narratives of Working Women in Early Modern London
Narratives of Working Women in Early Modern London: Gendering the City analyzes depictions of non-elite, working women in relation to specific London neighborhoods and sites in early modern drama and culture from primarily the late sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century. The women laborers explored in this book, who worked on the fringes of masculinized commerce, elicited anxious discursive responses to their ubiquitous public presence. This book investigates these discursive strategies, or gendered place narratives, in dramatic works such as Ben Jonson's Epicene, the unattributed play, The Fair Maid of the Exchange, Thomas Heywood's The Wise-woman of Hogsdon, and Shackerly Marmion's Holland's Leaguer, as well as a variety of early modern pamphlets, poems, ballads, and prose works. By rhetorically associating working women with contested urban commercial neighborhoods and locales, these works attempt to minimize, control, or delegitimize the agency of laboring women. An examination of these narratives exposes underlying social and economic inequities in early modern London, which affected the conditions of women's labor.
Māyājāla - Sūtra-A Unique Text of the Gilgit Dīrghāgama
The Māyājāla-sūtra is a unique Buddhist sūtra which is contained in the newly discovered manuscript of the Sanskrit Buddhist canonical collection called the Dīrgha-āgama (The Long Collection). The discovery of this Sanskrit manuscript in the 1990s was a major development in early Buddhist studies (only Pāli and Chinese versions were previously available). In the first part of this work Gleb Sharygin presented a transliteration, reconstruction and translation of the Māyājāla-sūtra, No. 18 in the Dīrgha-āgama manuscript, as well as an overview of its content. The text of the sūtra is in a seriously deteriorated state, but a great deal of repetition helped to reconstruct it safely. It is the meaning of the text that presented difficulties. The second part of this work grew from his attempts to understand it. The main result that the study brought is that the text likely constitutes an intermediate link that unites the older ways of canonical writing and thinking with the newer types of Buddhist literature and structures of thought. In particular, the study revealed that the Māyājāla-sūtra likely was the source of the first chapters of the Saṃdhinirmocana-sūtra, the first Yogācāra-Vij簽ānavāda text.
The New Holocaust Galleries at the Imperial War Museum London
In October 2021, Imperial War Museums (IWM) opened its new Holocaust Galleries in its London branch, replacing its first Holocaust Exhibition (from 2000) that had become a landmark in British Holocaust memory. Because of its comprehensive nature and intricate scenography, the new Holocaust Galleries are at the centre of almost all recent major narrative, political, and ethical debates about Holocaust representation in museums. The book provides an ideal global case-study understanding the possibilities and limitations of re-presenting trauma and violence in museums today and whether Holocaust exhibitions can promote democratic, civic, or human rights values, making it an important resource for museum practitioners, public history educators, and university researchers alike, interested in Historical, Museum, Memory, Holocaust, Genocide, or Cultural Studies. The volume brings together texts written by museum practitioners and academic scholars. It is divided in three parts: a long essay by James Bulgin, Head of Content for the new Holocaust Galleries, about the genesis and implementation of the exhibition, supplemented with briefer essays by educators and community members involved in the development of the exhibition, an extensive interview by Stephan Jaeger with IWM researchers James Bulgin and Suzanne Bardgett, and an extensive part with six critical essays by university scholars analysing the new Holocaust Galleries from numerous theoretical angles.
The American Open Road
WINNER OF THE ELIZABETH AGEE PRIZE IN AMERICAN LITERATURE The rearview mirror perspective of a road trip across the American "open road."The American Open Road: Narrative and Popular Imagination offers a rich exploration of how the mythos of the open road has shaped, and been shaped by, American culture. Beginning with the post-World War II boom that solidified car culture as central to American life, Melton reflects on how roads, automobiles, and landscapes have been represented in literature, film, and other cultural texts, highlighting the interplay between mobility and narrative.Drawing on a wide range of cultural texts, from traditional classic road novels and cinematic presentations, to advertisements, poetry, and prose, Melton examines how the open road functions as a symbol of autonomy, reinvention, and resistance. He highlights how road narratives have also exposed deeper tensions in American life--especially around race, gender, and power--and how historically marginalized voices have used the road to reclaim space and tell new stories.From the romanticism of Route 66 to the political edge of modern road films, The American Open Road offers a thoughtful, engaging analysis of the narratives that continue to define American identity and longing. For readers interested in cultural history, travel literature, or the enduring pull of the highway, this book offers a compelling view from the passenger seat of America's most iconic journeys.
Nonaligned Imagination
Recovering the literary and intellectual history of anticolonial collaborations Preoccupied with developing a multiethnic, postcolonial culture and seeking an alternative to Cold War-bloc politics, socialist Yugoslavia turned to the decolonizing countries of the Global South. It forged political, economic, and cultural links with postcolonial states and anticolonial liberation movements through the Non-Aligned Movement, of which it was a founding member in 1961. NAM spanned political and economic systems, uniting members in opposition to superpower politics and around policies of nuclear disarmament, active peaceful coexistence, anticolonialism, and respect for national sovereignty. Natasa Kovačevic reconstructs the forgotten literary and cultural history of this movement, tracing the development of new networks of intellectual engagement and cultural exchange between writers, journalists, and scholars who connected postwar Yugoslavia with 1950s India, 1960s Algeria and Guinea, 1970s Vietnam, and beyond. Nonaligned narratives attempted to reconfigure the understanding of the globe outside Eurocentric tropes and hegemonic political stratifications and to articulate Yugoslavs' own internationalist sensibility. With Cold War-era rhetoric intensifying again in the twenty-first century, Nonaligned Imagination assumes the urgent task of unearthing a history of engaged writing and cultural diplomacy that imagined alternatives to superpower conflicts and a bipolar vision of the world.
Play in Utopian and Dystopian Fiction
Play in Utopian and Dystopian Fiction is a wide-ranging and interdisciplinary study of the different forms of play to be found in depictions of radically better and radically worse societies across literary, filmic, and televisual texts. The book sets out to dismantle common myths about the role of play in such fiction by arguing that, far from being dull and static, utopias are primarily playful and dynamic. In contrast, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, dystopian fiction has been popularized by reader and audience expectations of spectacular and exciting action, but in this book such readings of dystopia are also challenged. Accompanying this is a discussion about labor and its role in relation to a future society that might privilege play over work. The book covers texts as diverse as Thomas More's originary 1516 travel narrative, Utopia, and South Korean Netflix dystopian hit Squid Game (2021-25). It consists of chapters detailing the nature of play in utopian fiction; the connection between utopia and stasis; dystopian forms of violent and deadly play; boring dystopias; the absurd in utopian and dystopian fiction; and, finally, the future of play promised by new digital utopias and made possible by videogame technologies.
Law and Literature: The Irish Case
Law and Literature: The Irish Case is a collection of fascinating essays by literary and legal scholars which explore the intersections between law and literature in Ireland from the eighteenth century to the present day. Sharing a concern for the cultural life of law and the legal life of culture, the contributors shine a light on the ways in which the legal and the literary have spoken to each other, of each other, and, at times, for each other, on the island of Ireland in the last three centuries. Several of the chapters discuss how texts and writers have found their ways into the law's chambers and contributed to the development of jurisprudence. The essays in the collection also reveal the juridical and jurisprudential forces that have shaped the production and reception of Irish literary culture, revealing the law's popular reception and its extra-legal afterlives. List of contributors: Rebecca Anne Barr, Max Barrett, Noreen Doody, Katherine Ebury, Adam Gearey, Tom Hickey, James Kelly, Colum Kenny, David Kenny, Heather Laird, Julie Morrissy, Gear籀id O'Flaherty, Virginie Roche-Tiengo, Barry Sheils.
Unlucky Thirteen
This is a collection of thirteen short stories from Dr. Mona Agnihotri who writes under the alias Monalisa. This collection is Part 1. Part 2 will also have a fresh collection of thirteen short stories. These stories are inspired and penned down taking reference from real life events in the Author's life and lives of her near & dear ones. These stories have unusual unexpected endings that will amuse, entertain and tickle the reader's mind! Hence, relax, and prepare to be UNNERVED! About the Author: Dr. Mona Agnihotri is a Faculty of Department of English and Modern European Languages at University of Allahabad located in the Sangam city of Prayagraj, Uttar Pradesh. She has a Ph.D from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She is a published author of an English Semi-autobiographical novel - "Falling in Love". She has edited her father's book on Chess, and also many other books. Writing is her passion, and she enjoys writing in English even though she learned English quite late in her life as she was brought up in Moscow, in the capital city of the erstwhile USSR. She had her primary schooling in a Russian-medium school. She is fluent in many languages including Russian, English, Hindi and Bangla which is her mother tongue.
Les Centres de Production Des Manuscrits Vernaculaires Au Moyen Age
This work brings together contributions from authors engaged in a systematic enquiry into the written transmission of fabliaux. At the heart of their investigations lie key questions concerning the sites and contexts of production for vernacular collections in the Middle Ages.
Crossovers Expanded Volume 3
Crossovers Expanded, Volume 3 is a huge chronology of crossover tales in which characters, situations, or universes from a wide variety of fictional works, are linked together in order to form a vast and diverse Crossover Universe. Compiled by crossover and Wold Newton expert Sean Lee Levin, this volume includes more than 1,000 crossover tales, as well as many timeline entries charting the wider history of the Crossover Universe. With a new Foreword by Keith Howell (pop culture expert and cover artist).. . . When Conan met Wonder Woman; Rocambole teamed up with Zatoichi in Japan; the Lone Ranger crossed paths with Paladin, the Cartwright boys, and more; Dracula's daughter married a Talbot; Phileas Fogg had an adventure in Ruritania; Sherlock Holmes matched wits with Dr. Caligari; Dr. Fu Manchu gave Dr. Herbert West some eggs from Skull Island; Bruce Hagin Rassendyll combated Dr. Meirschultz and his Lazarus Cabal; Irma Vep dueled with Filibus; Sexton Blake came to the aid of the Count of Monte Cristo's grandson; Professor Challenger time traveled alongside the Nyctalope; Secret Agent X fought off Murder Legendre's zombie gangsters; the rookie Green Lama worked with the Black Bat; Detective Sergeant Frederick Troy played cards with James Bond; the Rocketeer was helped out of a jam by Indiana Jones; the Avenger and the Domino Lady battled villains together on more than one occasion; Reed Richards investigated the Giant Rat of Sumatra; Batman and Robin teamed up with John Steed and Emma Peel; Maigret, Ellery Queen, Hercule Poirot, and Kogoro Akechi crossed paths with Ars癡ne Lupin; Doc Caliban and Doc Wildman had a cross-dimensional meeting; the Six Million Dollar Man fought COBRA alongside G.I. Joe; Sludge ran into Carl Kolchak's niece; Tabitha Lenox revealed her past relationship with Barnabas Collins; the Drood family went to war with the Nightside; Cassie Hack and Vlad encountered the Crow; Repairman Jack fought Madame de Medici and was introduced to a former agent of The Shadow; a Morley Cigarettes package was spotted in Twin Peaks, Washington; the Librarians crossed swords with the Phantom of the Opera's descendant in Paris; Jack Reacher and Will Trent shared an adventure; Charlie Chan's great-grandson had a run-in with the Cthulhu Mythos; Aym Geronimo visited Nero Wolfe's old brownstone; and Joe Ledger encountered Hap and Leonard, as well as Travis McGee's daughter . . .
Ecology of the Zombie
Ecology of the Zombie marks a significant intervention into the fields of world literature, film studies, ecocriticism, and Gothic Studies. Arguing that the zombie is a fundamentally ecological figure, the book offers original readings of a range of cultural texts from across the Caribbean and the U.S. In its various incarnations - from enslaved body toiling on fields, to vacant-eyed, light-skinned female imprisoned within patriarchal structures, to the cannibalistic mass zombie roaming apocalyptic scenarios - the zombie speaks powerfully to capitalism's systematic degradation of land and labour. Indeed, the figure gives expression to the metabolic rifts through which the modern world-system has unfolded. Boldly intervening in current debates around Gothic imaginaries, Ecology of the Zombie argues for the centrality of the Caribbean monstrous to understanding Gothic ecologies due to the region's pivotal role in the emergence of capitalist modernity. The book is distinguished by its striking comparative analyses, bringing the work of Ren矇 Depestre, for example, into conversation with that of Ralph Ellison, reading Erna Brodber's Myal in conjunction with George Romero's Dawn of the Dead, and examining The Stepford Wives alongside the fiction of Pedro Cabiya. In so doing, it provides an important new interpretation of the cultural history of the zombie.
Les Centres de Production Des Manuscrits Vernaculaires
This work brings together contributions from authors engaged in a systematic enquiry into the written transmission of fabliaux. At the heart of their investigations lie key questions concerning the sites and contexts of production for vernacular collections in the Middle Ages.
Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau is well known as a lyrical nature writer, environmental prophet, rebel against stifling convention, and theorist of strategic intervention to protest injustice. He was also a part-time surveyor and pencil maker, student of Native America, abolitionist, philosopher, and shrewd Transcendentalist. Whether living at Walden Pond or comfortably on Main Street in central Concord, Thoreau made deep inquiries into life and gave all to his craft. Drawing on the work of outstanding scholars and critics, this companion provides information on the full body of Thoreau's work, his life, and his world, connecting the factors that affected Thoreau's thought and writing and highlighting his impact, in his own time and since. This study brings these various aspects of Thoreau's life and writings into focus in over one hundred interconnected essays.
Experiencing Immersion in Antiquity and Modernity
This bookexamines the links between experiencing immersion in antiquity and modernity.Immersive experiences are big business within today's creative economy.Forms range from immersive museum exhibitions, theatrical performances, art installations and experiences facilitated through virtual and augmented reality technologies. Yet the idea of immersion is not new; paintings, sculpture and theatre have all been theorised historically in terms of illusion, realism and immersion. From antiquity to modernity, there has been an interest in theorising the relationship between reality and virtual realities, and in contemplating whether feeling present in an alternate universe is a sought-after experience or something problematic and dangerous. The chapters in this volume explore the warnings against immersion voiced by Plato and embodied in the figure of the Homeric sirens, contrasted with the pro-immersion perspectives championed by Aristotelian mimesis and embodied in the concept of enargeia. The volume also examines the integration of the ancient world into immersive novels, games, museum exhibitions and theatrical performances. Practice-as-Research contributions explore the benefits of this synergy from practitioner perspectives. Contributors from diverse fields - including classical reception studies, art history, game studies, heritage studies and theatre studies - approach the interplay between antiquity and modernity from varied standpoints. Together, they uncover previously unforeseen connections across disciplines and lay the groundwork for future research and additional classically inflected immersive experiences.
Uninhabited
Is it inhabited? This question makes the shared stakes of science fiction and colonialism obvious, wherein the wide imaginaries of empire and what counts as life - scientifically, ethically, politically - and the moral and technological possibilities of terraforming and the impulse for exploration are all fused. Science fiction, and the genres that preceded and grounded it, such as scientific romance and tales of lost civilizations, emerged alongside the birth of industrialized global trade and imperial rushes for new resources. If the scientific romance dramatized the effects of new technologies on history and forms of life, then lost civilization stories dealt with themes of the alien, the forgetting of history, and more explicitly, with episodes of war and oppression.
Radical Romanticism
Romanticism is often reduced to nostalgic pastoralism and solitary contemplation of the sublime. But a radical strand of Romantic writers and thinkers offered sweeping political, ecological, and religious critiques of capitalism, racism, settler colonialism, and environmental destruction. Interweaving canonical nineteenth-century authors with Black and Indigenous thinkers who transformed their work, this book is a bold new account of Romanticism for today's deeply entrenched crises. Mark S. Cladis examines the progressive democratic, religious, and environmental beliefs and practices that informed European Romantic literature and its sustained legacies in North America. His interpretation interweaves diverse voices such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, and Leslie Marmon Silko while also revealing the progressive visions of Romantic authors such as Rousseau, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Coleridge, Mary Shelley, Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller. Forging connections among literary and philosophical traditions while closely reading a wide range of texts, Radical Romanticism shows how storytelling is central to the pursuit of justice and flourishing for the human and the more-than-human worlds. Bringing together environmental humanities, literary theory, political theory, and religious studies, this book makes the case for a renewed radical Romanticism, offering urgent resources for a world beset by catastrophe, uncertainty, and despair.
Courtly and Queer
In Courtly and Queer, Charlie Samuelson casts queerness in medieval French texts about courtly love in a new light by bringing together for the first time two exemplary genres: high medieval verse romance, associated with the towering figure of Chr矇tien de Troyes, and late medieval dits, primarily associated with Guillaume de Machaut. In close readings informed by deconstruction and queer theory, Samuelson argues that the genres' juxtaposition opens up radical new perspectives on the deviant poetics and gender and sexual politics of both. Contrary to a critical tradition that locates the queer Middle Ages at the margins of these courtly genres, Courtly and Queer emphasizes an unflagging queerness that is inseparable from poetic indeterminacy and that inhabits the core of a literary tradition usually assumed to be conservative and patriarchal. Ultimately, Courtly and Queer contends that one facet of texts commonly referred to as their "courtliness"--namely, their literary sophistication--powerfully overlaps with modern conceptions of queerness.
